Manage Account

<div>What happens to my loved ones’ souls (and resurrected bodies) if their ashes were scattered after cremation rather than buried?</div><div>The practice of cremation is not a very good way to symbolize our faith in the future resurrection and even less the practice of scattering the ashes. Even so, this disposition of the ashes has no effect on the soul of the deceased, so there is no need to worry about that. A real disadvantage is that since the ashes are not kept in one place, the person is less likely to be remembered in prayer, by, for example, visits to the cemetery.
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Cremation Doesn’t Affect Resurrection

<div>Are there fast-food-type meals you can eat on Fridays in Lent that do not included fish or shrimp?</div><div>Anything that doesn’t involve meat is fair game, pun intended, including french fries, although some choices are healthier—including fruit cups and vegetable-oriented items—than others.
Abstaining from meat is not required on Fridays outside of Lent, excluding Good Friday, although Church law strongly recommends making some sort of sacrifice, including abstaining from meat or engaging in a special act of charity.
St. Augustine is well-known for saying, “Love and do what you will.” In that light, we can say, “Avoid meat and do what we will” on Lenten Fridays, with the added disclaimer that true love entails not eating gluttonously.
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Any Fast-Food Meatless Alternatives?

The bible says that if you evangelize the Holy Spirit will give you the words but why wont the Holy Spirit give you the words when talking to your children?

Romans 8:28 How does it work for the physical world today?

Should we consume the Eucharist when there is a miracle?

There seems to be a divide between the Church teaching on marriage vs what Jesus and Paul taught. Can you explain where they come together?

Where is the lineage of apostolic succession?

What ranking is St. Michael in? Do demons also have rankings?

Is the mark of the beast a future financial payment system?

Did Constantine found the Catholic Church?

Was there infallibility during the Old Testament period?

Ask Me Anything

Was St. Thomas Aquinas excommunicated? Why?

What is your opinion on the ethical framework of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son?

I heard Jimmy say it is better to exist even if you end up in Hell. How can I compare this to Jesus saying, “The one who betrays me it was better for him not to be born”?

What is your opinion on Dousing?

Who did Jacob wrestle within the Old Testament?

How do blessings work with lay people versus priest?

For many, the mercy of God seems incompatible with the doctrine of hell. If God is all-merciful, then wouldn’t he have mercy on the damned and give them the grace they need to repent? Although the damned wouldn’t be able to reorient their wills to God naturally, given the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-blackfriars/article/abs/aquinas-on-the-fixity-of-the-will-after-death/7694E049B34DEB149D311D54A40C3072">irrevocability of the will after death</a>, perhaps God could give such a grace that would enable them to change their wills supernaturally. Since God doesn’t give this grace, then he isn’t all-merciful.
Even if we assume for argument’s sake that God could give a grace of repentance to the damned despite the natural irrevocability of the will after death, the major problem with the objection is that it assumes that God must give the grace of repentance to be merciful. But this assumption is false. And the reason it’s false is that it entails a contradiction.
Mercy, by definition, is an act of giving that which a person doesn’t have to give. For example, if you have a debt and owe me money, I could easily require in justice that you pay the debt. But I could also just as easily exercise mercy and remit the debt. The reason it would be an act of mercy is that I didn’t have to remit the debt, yet I did, gratuitously.
So to say that God must give the grace of repentance to be merciful—whether to the damned or us in this life—is to say that giving the grace of repentance is an act of mercy and not an act of mercy at the same time and in the same respect. It would be an act of mercy simply by virtue of saying that God is merciful. And it would not be an act of mercy insofar as the objection assumes that God must give the grace. That’s a contradiction.
Since the fundamental assumption of the objection—namely, that God must give the grace of repentance to be merciful—entails a contradiction, we can conclude that the objection from God’s mercy has no persuasive force against affirming the reality of hell.

God Owes Us a Ticket Out of Hell!

Not too long ago, I found myself sitting in the stands at an NHL game with <a href="https://www.catholic.com/profile/don-johnson">Don Johnson.</a> Since he’s not only a puckhead and an <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/twisted-unto-destruction-how-bible-alone-theology-made-the-world-a-worse-place/#product-reviews">author</a> but also the documentary auteur behind <a href="https://dysconnectedmovie.com/">Dysconnected,</a> after a whistle on the ice I asked him why aggressive transgender ideology just seemed to spring up overnight. There was no warning, no easing into it—just an apparent decision by the sexual-progressive hive mind to change the programming to all-transgender, all the time.
“Because that’s what it was,” he told me. When you research it, he said, you find the same handful of parties initiating and driving the narrative.
One of the big players has been the Pritzker family, billionaire scions of the Hyatt hotel empire and fixtures in government and big-dollar philanthropy. An<a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers"> excellent new feature piece at the Tablet</a> traces the dense web of the Pritzkers’ efforts to raze the cultural, scientific, and educational edifice of human sexual dimorphism and replace it with what the author calls Synthetic Sexual Identity (SSI). Through “investments in the techno-medical complex” both philanthropic and for-profit, and by funding legal and educational efforts to “induce institutions and individuals to normalize” the idea of an infinite spectrum of sexes, the Pritzkers (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Pritzker">one of whom</a> went from James to Jennifer a decade ago, conveniently avoiding having to change the monogram on his luggage) are hell-bent on making “male and female he made them” as intolerable as racism and as risible as phrenology.
“Hell-bent” might be a lazy cliché in other contexts, but in this one I think it’s quite literally accurate. This is bent, and it’s from hell.
I was a teenager when Whitley Strieber’s Communion—featuring on its cover the “gray” alien that would become a sci-fi staple—sparked a frenzy of interest in alien abduction. That was also around the time that I first heard the “aliens = demons” theory that I’m told still chugs along. One wrinkle to the version I heard was that, since sexual experimentation was a commonly reported element of abduction accounts, it had to be fallen angels who, lacking the ability to generate more of themselves, were looking for the “secret of reproduction.”
Now, angelic intelligence apprehends things all at once; demons don’t do experimental research. And I think it more likely that sexual details are found in many abduction accounts because the poor, confused people who report them have suffered sexual traumas. So I’m not sold on “aliens = demons.”
But I do think there’s something to the idea that Satan and his angels have a special hatred for human sexuality. It must be an intolerable insult to a prideful being of pure spirit to see God extend the divine spark of life-creating power to us dirty flesh-spirit hybrids, to exercise as we will.
This may not explain alien abductions, but it does explain the demonic drive to spread confusion in the sexual sphere. To tempt humans to lust. To drive a wedge into the full meaning of the marital act. To have us breed embryonic bodies for raw material to inch us closer to technological immortality. To sow disorder in human sexual attraction—and get as many people as possible to celebrate lies as truth (the devil’s most satisfying trick). And perhaps the master work: to bring the temptation in the garden to its diabolical climax by getting men and woman to deny that they are men and women—or indeed that there’s any such thing at all.
Modern man’s project of disintegrating and re-inventing human nature, of which SSI is such a stark and unveiled example, is an earthly extension of what Satan and the demons have done to themselves for eternity. They rejected the created order and with it the Creator, and now they want us to do it, too.

Why Satan Hates Sex

Aura farming @TheCounselofTrent

<div>How do you explain to a Protestant that you can pray to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary?</div><div>In a nutshell, we’re asking Mary to intercede for us to Jesus, similar to how Protestants ask their Christian friends on Earth to join them in praying for a particular matter—except Mary and the other saints in heaven are definitely in a better position to intercede for us with Jesus, precisely because they’re in heaven. In addition, when we speak of uniting our prayers with Mary’s Immaculate Heart, we’re asking for the Blessed Mother’s intercession in another way.
For more on intercessory prayer, including scriptural citations to share with your Protestant friends, see our tracts on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/praying-to-the-saints">“Praying to the Saints”</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-intercession-of-the-saints">“The Intercession of the Saints.”</a>
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How Do I Explain Praying to Jesus through Mary?

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent examines popular devices and inventions in science fiction media and shows why they are physically impossible or why you’d simply regret creating them.

FFAF: 6 Useless Sci-fi Technologies

In this episode Trent offers some ways to respond to critics who say sophisticated arguments for the Faith are nothing but “word salad.”