Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

All right, 100,000 subscribers. Here we are, whoo, whoo, whoo. Laura’s better at getting super excited. That’s why I married her. She handles all the super excitement in the family. I get excited but for things that are really niche or weird or quasi lame. There’s this cover band I really like that’s going to be playing here in Dallas soon. If you go, maybe you’ll see me there. They’re called The Windbreakers. I talked about them free for all Friday. They do yacht rock. That’ll be in a few weeks. Maybe you can catch me there live if you don’t go to an event or anything like that.

Welcome to the 100,000 subscribers special. Last time, we did this was at 50,000. And thank you guys so much for all of your support. I’m very grateful, everyone who watches and shares the channel, and I’m very excited for the growth. I went back and I checked, when I hit 100,000, how the growth was, and I’ve had the channel, I guess, up since, I don’t know, 2012 or something like that, but I never added videos to it. Then I think it was very low, 100 subscribers, and I started doing YouTube stuff here on the channel in January of 2020 thinking, “Oh, this would be a great time to start a project.” And when that started, I’d already been doing the podcast, I think, for about a year. It was just audio only.

And then I would do my podcast episodes. I remember when I first started the podcast, I tried to do five episodes a week. That nearly killed me. So I was doing, I think, three episodes a week, two episodes a week, I was doing that on the podcast. And every now and then, I upload the rebuttal videos. I started doing those rebuttal videos. I started with Mike Winger. Gosh, that was like five years ago. I need to revisit those because that’s been so long. I could definitely tighten those up because that was back when I did the rebuttals just live. I just recorded them, stopped the tape, comment on it, start going. I like where I’ve been going now. So I started that in 2020 and I’ll get to your questions soon. So definitely, we’ll put them in the comments. I think we have super chat enabled. I don’t know, Kyle did that for me.

So I was starting that and I noticed we had a growth there. But what’s interesting, so that was in 2020, we got 50,000 subscribers, I think, in 2023. So we’ve doubled in the last year. So it took three years to get to 50,000 subscribers and then a year to double that to add another 50 to get to 100. So it’s reaching a lot of people. I’m super excited about that. And I think it really grew once I made the decision. It’s been neat reflecting back on the podcast to see how it’s grown and what I’ve wanted to do with it because I always want the podcast to maintain … It’s like how we have development of doctrine in the church. I want the substance of the Counsel of Trent to always remain the same, to not have a hermeneutic of discontinuity. If you turn on the channel and it just becomes, here’s how bad this bishop is or the pope is, nonstop over and over again, you’ll realize this is not the true Counsel of Trent. It’s a shadow of Counsel of Trent. It is a hermeneutic of discontinuity. That’s not development where I want the channel to go. I always want the channel to have the same feel, which is apologetics, theology, explaining the faith, defending it, rebutting arguments against the faith.

But the way of doing that has changed a lot over the past four years. So we really saw more growth when we had the episodes. I synced them up. So if it was audio on podcasts, it was also video on YouTube. Shortening the episodes. I think what I want to focus on moving forward … And then I’m going to jump into some of your questions here, and you can write in the questions what you think of this. I guess here’s my plan going … Oh, the other thing where we had a big change up was about a year ago, eight months ago, I started scripting all of the episodes, all of them, not just the rebuttals. I scripted the rebuttals to make them tighter, but I’ve scripted all the episodes because I want to be a good steward of your time. I want to give you really good content.

And there’s so much out there, right? There’s so much you can be watching on YouTube or listening on podcasts. There’s so much competing for attention. So I want to be respectful of your time. Everybody’s busy. Here is the essential elements. So you notice I’m covering the same content, but what’s changing is the manner of the delivery. And so I just want to make it more efficient, more YouTube friendly, without sacrificing podcasters. So I don’t want to make it so that you can only watch on YouTube to make sense. Podcasters would make sense of this. But I just want to make the presentation of the material as efficient, easy to digest, and learn, and fun to take that in, and I think we’re growing. So my goal moving forward will be still two episodes on Monday and Wednesday. My goal for those would be around 15 to 20 minutes or so, 10 to 20 minutes, 15, the median or the average, just because I don’t know if I have to do … Maybe I’ll do some longer rebuttal videos, but I think what I can do is focus on rebutting a very specific topic and just go from that and just people have that.

Dialogues and debates. Absolutely. That’s what I really want to focus on is doing a lot more of those. Those have been very enjoyable. I can’t but too much out there. I am in talks to try to go back on the Whatever podcast to do another debate on a different topic than abortion. That’s all I’m going to say about it for now. All I’m going to say. We’re in talks. We’re getting all the chess pieces together. It would be two on two. It’s all I’m going to say, no more details, but I am excited for that.

Let’s see here. I wanted to grab a few questions in here, see if there were any super chats. So as I talked about debates, somebody … Let’s see. When will you debate Allie Beth Stuckey? So that’s the other thing. I want to do a lot more debates, dialogues. It wouldn’t be a debate, it’d probably be more of a dialogue. The last I heard from her people, and actually her studio is here in Dallas, so that’s nice, I can just drive on over there, probably a few weeks. I don’t know if it’s going to be live or it’s going to be posted a week or two later, but the calendar, what I have on there is, middle of November. I’m supposed to go and we’re going to dialogue. I don’t know the exact thing we’re going to dialogue about. I imagine it was going to be about Catholicism. So I’m looking forward to a good-natured chat about that.

But let’s see. Kevin, the Nontradicath. I want to go back up here. What is on the horizon for Counsel of Trent? This is good. This gets me back to what I was talking about before. What is on the horizon for Counsel of Trent? Any changes resulting from 100,000? What on the horizon are you looking forward to the most? Can we expect more peer reviewed stuff like your abortion paper? Yeah, this is hard. This is difficult to focus on what I want to be doing.

I have one peer reviewed paper. It was actually my final paper that I submitted for my program. One of the papers I wrote getting my master’s in Science in Bioethics, I wrote a paper on bodily rights arguments for abortion. This was through the National Catholic Bioethics Center and then it got cleared by them. It was put in National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. I thought about maybe doing other papers. It is really hard. The time … Right now, I think the most time I have would be to doing three, if you count free for all Friday. The two podcast episodes. And then I’m also focusing on personal study and writing. So the book I’m working on now is … I’m not going to give the title. Should I give the title away? Should I give the title away? I don’t know. Well, ultimately, the press decides what the title is going to be.

It’s going to be on Protestantism and the Church Fathers. Well, I’ll just tell you. I want to call the book Protestantism at the Bar of History. So if you’re an apologetics nerd, you may remember back in 1995 the Protestant apologist, William Webster, wrote a book called The Church of Rome at the Bar of History. I’d show it to you, but I left it at my house. So I was reading it and other books last night for research for a chapter I was writing. He wrote Church of Rome at the Bar of History to argue that Catholic doctrine is not really as historical as Catholic’s claim. So you know the quote from Newman, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” I think Catholics have to be careful when you bandy that quote around because it can come off very triumphalist. It can also be misunderstood.

To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant is not the same as saying to be deep in history is to be Catholic. I do think history ultimately testifies to the truths of the Catholic faith, what the Church Fathers taught, that ancient councils taught. But more so what I think is obvious when you look through the fathers is many of the bulwark claims of Protestantism. Sola scriptura, sola fide, especially Protestantism that is not Magisterial Protestantism. So evangelical nondenominational is simply not rooted in history. When we see the attestations of baptismal regeneration, the ability to lose salvation, infant baptism, the propitiatory sacrifice of the mass.

But there are Protestants. This goes all the way back to Calvin and Luther who said … There was a book, I think it was Barrett, Barrett published a book. Matthew Barrett. Reformation Rome. It was a new book. The Reformation as Renewal. I want to say it’s by Barrett. He also wrote a book, Defending Sola Scriptura. Yeah, Matthew Barrett. The Reformation as Renewal” Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. It’s not an apologetic book. It is a historical book on the reformation saying that Calvin and Luther and others were trying to say, “No, the fathers actually support us, not you.” We have 19th century Anglicans who also argue this way. It fell out a favor for a bit in the early Catholic Protestant wars of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Karl Keating, Pat Madrid, James White, others who are in that scuffle. But we’re seeing more resurgence of it. Protestants who are trying to retrieve the fathers. So you have long before Luther, which is a book trying to show the history of sola fide in the fathers allegedly. Gavin has been doing, obviously, a lot of this kind of work in his videos in his channel. I’ve responded to a lot of those. A little bit of that in Collins and Walls’ book, Roman but Not Catholic. So that’s the big thing I’m going to be focusing on.

So I don’t see myself writing peer reviewed. Maybe some of the chapters I could adapt for peer reviewed. There’s some ideas I’ve had. I don’t know if I have the time for it. I think for me, I’m not really a strict academic, so I see myself wanting to engage a broader audience. And for me, that would probably be YouTube, books, a mixture of casual books with a casual reader, and slightly more advanced books, but not super academic, but slightly more advanced, something like Case for Catholicism. But Kevin, thank you for your question there. We’ve got a few super chats here. Let’s see if I can find these here.

How do I … I see it. I see the super chat. I’ve clicked on it. But how do I … Oh, I think here we go. Hey, this works. This is fun. All right, let’s see. Super chat from King Galidier, Your Majesty. Thank you for being here. I’m sorry if that is your name. I made fun of you. I don’t want to make fun of people. I know you don’t like getting into church drama politics. What are your thoughts on the recent synod and/or dubia responses? Dubia responses.

Yeah, that’s the other thing. I mean, I think it’s okay for me to have opinions here and there about this. This is a livestream. Why not have a few opinions about it? But I definitely don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of just talking about this stuff nonstop because there’s so many people online who do this on blogs or YouTube and I just don’t see it being very helpful. But if you want to know my opinions, and people are free to have whatever opinions they want, I think one hard thing I had with the dubia was that, I mean, some of the questions that were asked, it’s not like a strict yes or no answer. Some of the questions seemed a bit open-ended and so you really couldn’t answer them yes or no. So I think dubia responses are best when it’s like, is this allowed or is that allowed? Can you do a hysterectomy for a uterus that is no longer capable of maintaining a pregnancy? The CDF handled that dubia a few years ago.

Oh, here would be a very germane one. Are Mormon baptisms valid? That was something that had to be … That was addressed with the dubia recently. Answered in the negative. Mormon baptisms are not valid and there was a commentary on it in L’Osservatore Romano. Here’s why. But some of the questions, it’s like you couldn’t really get a yes or no out of them. I don’t want to get into it, but I just feel like, “Oh,” I think it’s fine to ask these questions, but people are like, “Oh, Pope Francis was owned,” or, “Oh, the dubia cardinals were owned.” It’s like, “Let’s try to better understand everybody here.” The synod. Yeah, what I wanted … You know what’s funny, I wanted to do a video about how mad trads and liberals have the same thing a lot of times, but I didn’t end up doing it. I was like, “Laura, you should do a video on this.” And she’s like, “That’s a great idea.” And so Laura made a super funny video about that. And so I’m like, “Oh, she can do that.”

Here’s my funny thing with the synod, honestly. The funniest thing to me are seeing people like Father James Martin and others who, back in July, were crowing to critics of the synod on synodality saying, “You don’t trust the spirit? Oh, it’s so sad to see these radical traditionalists not trusting the spirit and how the spirit will guide the synod. It’s very sad, tat, tat, tat.” And then after this, you hear them saying, “I’m very disappointed in what came about from the synod.” I think Father Martin said this. It’s not unexpected that LGBT wouldn’t show up in the document or the working document this or that. Well, wait a minute, father, what is that? Are you not trusting in the spirit to lead the synod? That was the thing that I thought was rich.

All righty, let’s go through here a few more. This will be an easy and disappointing one for super chat, Newgloff. What are your thoughts on Byung-Chul Han, a German-Korean Catholic philosopher, who talks in culture theory postmodernity? Empty set. Never heard of him, but I’ll look it up, German-Korean Byung-Chul Han. I’m going to check him up after this.

Let’s see here. Let’s see. Are you aware of the recent trend of textual criticism where folks like Dan McClellan are starting to generate a fan base? His motto is data over dogma. I’ve seen a few of his videos. I was … Interesting he did a video where he basically reached a similar conclusion on the word theopneustos as I did that the word, while the word has come to mean, inspired in a unique way. So it’s used in a unique sense today. In the first few centuries, it was not considered a unique word relating to how God gives something infallible authority. Because in the early church, early Christians would talk about the church being theopneustos. They would describe the writings of the church fathers as being theopneustos. And, of course, saying things are theopneustos you have in the first two centuries, you don’t have until the time of Irenaeus when Christians begin to see universally of the New Testament is scripture.

And I did a whole video about this, where you look at the earliest apostolic fathers, they quote primarily from the Old Testament, not the New Testament, because the faith had been given to them primarily through the sacred tradition, lived out in things like the church’s liturgy. The written scripture was not the … It was not the sola of rule of faith, definitely. It wasn’t even the primary vehicle for the transmission of the faith. So there’s an interesting agreement there, but it doesn’t mean I agree with everything McClellan says. I think he has stuff that’s pretty squishy on homosexuality in scripture. But I agree with him that a lot of times when people will read scripture, they will take a tradition, however as meaningful it can be, and read that into the text instead of letting the text speak for itself, like trying to deny the existence of henotheism, the belief in many gods, but only one God that ought to be worshiped in the early part of the Old Testament, trying to create elaborate explanations for alleged contradictions when there are simpler explanations that can be given like that what did the father say at Jesus’ baptism, you are my blessed son or this is my blessed son.

Well, the evangelist, they chose different language to emphasize things is not verbatim what the father said. So I think that there’s always a spectrum that you have a fundamentalism that is really, really rigid that is ultimately untenable because the facts don’t support it. And you have a modernism that will just be led by the nose by critical scholarship and take an extremely skeptical, pessimistic view of the data and rush to the worst conclusions instead of allowing the rule of faith to guide our interpretation of things. So I do believe it is a balancing act. I don’t know what you mean by textual criticism. Maybe it’s deconstruction. Textual criticism has been around for a long time. We need that to figure out what were the original manuscripts of the Bible, especially the New Testament, because we don’t have those anymore, but we can reconstruct them to a high degree of accuracy. So it’s meaning more critical scholarship, even Pope Benedict the XVI has talked about responsible uses of the historical critical method. And I’ll have to … Maybe I could share more resources on that later in a future episode.

Let’s see. Would you be willing to dialogue debate Dr. Peter Kwasniewski on the viability of liturgical reform of the reform? Love you, man. Trad here. Oh, thank you, Joseph. Probably not. I have gotten some debate invites on what might be prudential or intramural Catholic questions. So, for example, there’s more than one person actually who wants to debate me on the old Joseph, young Joseph theory, right? Was Saint Joseph a young man who had never been married before who was espoused to the Virgin Mary? Or was Joseph an old man who was a widower, who had grown children, who was chosen as a protector of Mary, who is a virgin serving in the temple? And I hold to the old Joseph view, but I find it easier to … Well, I hold it because not just that it’s easier, I find it to be the best. When I look at the biblical and historical data, it makes the most sense to me was the view … I think it was the view that was held in the church until the time of Saint Jerome.

The other views are comparably later, but I’m not going to get into a big hissy fit about Catholics holding the Jerome theory or the hieronymian view, the young Joseph theory. Fine, if that makes sense to you, go ahead. Believe that. Do your apologetics and engage people. I don’t want to have unnecessary fights. I think it’s bad if people take their pet theories on things where you’re allowed to disagree and fight one another. I’m fine with a good-natured discussion, fine. But if I’m going to be spending time working on debates, if it’s a question that’s like the viability of the liturgical reform of the reform, which is the idea, was the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium? Is it viable? Is it good? Is it bad? I mean, people have a whole lot of different views on that. Stephen Bullivant has a good book … There are two good books on Vatican II. Bullivant has a good book on Vatican II.

There’s Vatican II, a very short introduction, but he had another one that was weighing it saying that, “You know what, look …” Oh, I think Mass Exodus. Yeah, it’s this, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II by Stephen Bullivant. And he talks about how Second Vatican Council didn’t start this mass religious exodus from the Catholic Church, but he said it also helped it along, basically.

Let’s see here. I want to make sure, by the way. Oh, check the comments. Make sure … Oh my goodness, there’s so many. Okay, good. I just want to make sure everybody can hear me.

Let’s see here. And go back to … Oh my gosh, you guys, so many questions, but this is good. Let’s see.

Let’s see. Well, I’ll go back to this. So whether things are good or bad ideas or what I think about this or things that we can disagree on, it’s not subjects I want to spend a lot of time. If I’m going to be spending a lot of time learning about material and engaging others, there’s so much in the areas of philosophy and history to engage Atheism, Islam, Protestantism, maybe do more in Eastern Orthodoxy, I haven’t done really a lot of debates in that area, but there’s a lot just in these other areas where there’s not as many people engaging them. So I want to be able to do that.

Let’s see here. Here’s the next one. Aren’t apologists more like attorneys than scientists in their relation to truth? Doesn’t apologetics lead to confirmation bias and related fallacies? Well, what I would say here is that confirmation bias, which is a psychological bias that you tune out data that disagrees with you and only accept what you do agree with, that’s not a vice of apologists. That is a human vice. All people have that, including scientists. Scientists are not 100% objective. They can … Especially like social scientists. Scientists can subtly, even without knowing it, manipulate data and have biases involved in it to reach particular conclusions. So there’s not like this objective scientists and you’ve got the apologist that will just twist the facts however which way they want to go. But I do think that when you argue for a position, rather than having a disinterested investigation of it, you’re more susceptible to bias.

So, for example, an atheist who is investigating the question, did Saint Paul believe in justification by faith alone? If an atheist investigates that or an atheist investigates other questions of the faith, they’re a bit more removed so they might be a bit more unbiased, doesn’t mean that their word is perfect, obviously, than a Catholic or a Protestant who has a theological bone to pick with the fight. That’s why in a lot of my works, I will reference atheists and critical scholars to say, “Look, they don’t have” … Especially atheistic scholars, they don’t have a bone to pick with this. I remember once, actually, I cited Richard Carrier, who is an atheist, he denies Jesus existed, but he wrote an art essay way back in the ’90s on an examination of 1st Timothy 2, talking about whether the Calvinistic interpretation of 1st Timothy 2 is correct, that God desires salvation. Does he desire the sa... Read more on Catholic.com