Manage Account

Get more Shameless Popery on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/ShamelessPopery

Listen to Shameless Popery on Catholic.com:
https://www.catholic.com/audio/sp

Our view of Heaven is too small... and that's a problem.

Was Jesus just speaking in parables during the bread of life discourse?

What graces are received when a Catholic receives communion and are they necessary for salvation?

How would I convince a protestant that the eucharist was not considered a symbol for the 1500 years before the reformation?

I can’t find a parish that will offer the precious blood, is it ok for me to bring a small bottle of wine and drink it during communion?

Every time I receive holy communion I always feel better after being ill for so long.

Does the Eucharist take away temporal sin?

How do I avoid not receiving the eucharist unworthily?

At what point does the presence of Christ leave the Eucharist and enter us?

Jesus in the Eucharist

Why do Catholics have Jesus on the cross instead of just a cross. Also, are tattoos immoral?

My wife and I were married in a Lutheran church. She is Catholic. She was told by her priest that she is not allowed to take the sacraments. Is this true?

Often I hear complicated ideas when explaining Catholic doctrines. I find it hard to follow, and imagine others do as well. Do you have to understand these things to be Catholic?

I’m considering Catholicism. I’m struggling with some Marian doctrines. Is it enough for me to become Catholic to assent to the Church’s doctrines, while not really being sure if I believe in them?

What is the Catholic view on dispensationalism?

Ask Me Anything

I’m close to coming to faith but hell doesn’t seem to fit with an all-loving God. Can you explain?

Can you give a summary on the Catholic Moral life?

If you start worshiping Buddha, Is that a big sin?

<div>Can you explain in more detail the scripture verse Mark 5:30 Specifically how and why power left Jesus? What actually happened? </div><div><p>The woman’s touching Jesus is significant. Her healing occurs because of her physical contact with Jesus, not in spite of it. Normally, according to Old Covenant prescriptions in force at the time, such a flow of blood would not only make the woman legally unclean, but anyone else she touches as well (see Lev.15:25-30). However, because he is the God-man, Jesus is not only not made unclean by the woman’s touching him, he manifests his divinity to heal her. Jesus calls attention to what takes place to illustrate he has the power to fulfill the Old Covenant law (Matt. 5:17-18).</p>
<p>Because of the woman’s faith, Jesus allows his divine power to go forth to heal her. And while he appears to not know who touched him by virtue of his human nature alone, he certainly knew by virtue of his being a divine person. In other words, what took place wasn’t a surprise for Jesus as a divine person.</p>
</div>

Mark 5:30: Why and How Did Power Leave Jesus?

<p>When Catholic Answers started in 1979, learning how to express the faith to your Protestant friends or family depended on what you could get your hands on: printed materials, radio/television programs, or local guidance from Catholics who already knew the sources. Today, the general ability to do apologetics research has expanded enormously. With search engines, web indexing, YouTube, social media, and now artificial intelligence, vast libraries—often freely accessible—are available to the general public. That means more Catholics can readily engage relevant apologetics resources, but it also means many more non-Catholic inquirers, opponents, and skeptics can do the same. And as reach expands, so do expectations: people expect immediate answers, citations, and rebuttals to keep the ball rolling.</p>
<p>The “old world” of apologetics was heavily print-based. Today, apologetics is feed-driven. Everyone technically has access to the relevant sources, but few have the theological formation to weigh and interpret them. The core disputes have not fundamentally changed, but the conditions for receiving the truth have.</p>
<h2>Are things really so different?</h2>
<p>The shift from tract-focused apologetics to an ever-expanding digital landscape produces information overload. Since access has exploded, there are almost too many resources, too many opportunities, and too much to read to “be in the know.” For some, apologetics becomes a contest over who knows more rather than what it should be: evangelization. Argumentation and information are treated as an end—entertainment, a feeling of superiority—rather than a means to an end: the transformation of the person and firm integration into the sheepfold of Christ, the Church.</p>
<p>These new media for interaction reward speed, spectacle, and confidence over careful research, because the algorithm is driven by what grabs attention and keeps it, not what is most accurate. Scandals and inflammatory rhetoric get more attention than calm, patient explanation. It’s “What is trending?” vs. “What is truth?”</p>
<p>Pope Francis was right to say, “The speed with which information is communicated exceeds our capacity for reflection and judgement” (48<sup>th</sup> World Communications Day). The immediate publicization of everything turns online communication into a race: whoever speaks first often sets the frame for reception. In practice, this can push Catholics into a reactive posture—answering clips and headlines produced by overzealous, careless, or click-minded social media personalities. With controversies always developing, dialogue is largely reduced to something political and tribalistic.</p>
<p>Many non-Catholics now encounter Catholicism through shallow clips: either highlighting positive aesthetics (beauty, tradition, “being based”) or a demonized caricature (scandal highlights, straw men, selective history). In a feed-driven world, what spreads fastest is often the most distorted. And because platforms rewards engagement, two temptations arise:</p>
<ol>
<li>Reduce the Faith to what performs: softening doctrine so it feels more palatable (“if we can reach them by saying <em>this</em>, it’s better than not reaching them at all”).</li>
<li>Weaponize the Faith: use inflammatory rhetoric language that <em>can technically be correct</em> but, in popular usage, produces misunderstandings.</li>
</ol>
<p>The Church cautions against both errors. Deep explanations—rooted in theology, philosophy, Scripture, and history—are certainly available, but they are usually found by those already wanting to go beyond surface-level portrayals. Yet evangelization isn&#8217;t only about supplying information to those who are actively searching; it&#8217;s about reaching those who are far off and meeting them where they are, without being absorbed by worldly incentives.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that modern communication is bad in itself. In fact, every year during World Communications Day, the reigning pontiff reflects on how new developments can serve the Church’s mission. Long before social media, Pope St. Paul VI already recognized that modern media would be indispensable for evangelization: the “first proclamation, catechesis, [and] the further deepening of faith” cannot do without these means, because they can “increase almost indefinitely the area in which the Word of God is heard,” such that the Church “would feel guilt before the Lord if she did not utilize these powerful means” (<em>Evangelii Nuntiandi </em>45).</p>
<p>Speaking from experience—having gone through OCIA as a Protestant convert and now teaching OCIA at my local parish—the online apologetics culture has become almost a replacement for the pre-catechumenate. That’s encouraging insofar as learning the Catholic faith can happen so easily. But it’s also sobering: access to information doesn’t equal formation. Pope St. John Paul II warned that the Church’s “culture of wisdom” can save a media “culture of information” from becoming a “meaningless accumulation of facts” (Message for the 33<sup>rd</sup> World Communications Day, 1999).  The remedy is not retreat from information, but formation within the Church, so that knowledge becomes wisdom.</p>
<h2>A Surprising Benefit</h2>
<p>The same circumstances that create noise also create genuine opportunity. The Church Fathers and the acts of the ecumenical councils are no longer functionally restricted to specialized libraries; they are now available to everyone with an internet connection. Likewise, important Catholic-Protestant apologetical works, dogmatic handbooks, and doctrinal treatises are increasingly available in English, whereas only a few decades ago, access was often gated by language, cost, and access to academic libraries. This retrieval means we can learn from the best of our tradition instead of reinventing arguments from scratch.</p>
<p>At its best, this revolution enables popular-level retrieval of the most important works of Catholic theology and nudges apologetics toward serious engagement rather than isolated quotations. Clarity like this is the soil in which authentic ecumenicism grows.</p>
<h2>Ecumenical Principles to Guide Us</h2>
<p>The Church gives us two guardrails for engaging separated brethren:</p>
<ol>
<li>we must present the Catholic faith in its entirety without reductionism or compromise, and</li>
<li>we must present it in a way that can be truly understood—so that the <em>accidental </em>features of articulating the truth don’t become an obstacle to unity.</li>
</ol>
<p>Vatican II’s decree on ecumenism, <em>Unitatis Redintegratio</em>, delineates both guardrails. It insists that doctrine must be presented “clearly . . . in its entirety,” warning against “false irenicism, in which the purity of Catholic doctrines suffer loss, and its genuine and certain meaning is clouded.” At the same time, it commands that the Faith be explained “more profoundly and precisely . . . in such terms as our separated brethren can really understand” (11). This is not a call to dilute the Faith; it’s a call to translate it faithfully.</p>
<p>John Paul II reiterates that the “unity willed by God” requires adherence to revealed truth “in its entirety” (<em>Ut Unum Sint </em>18), yet we can explain this truth in a way that is attentive to the other party’s “way of thinking” and “historical experience” (36). It isn’t enough to make the Catholic faith <em>seem appealing </em>to those who don’t wish to assent to the Church’s claims. Rather, the uncompromising presentation of the whole Faith must be made intelligible to those who speak with different terms and categories.</p>
<p>Paul VI summarizes this with particular relevance for modern communication. Evangelization loses force if it doesn’t consider “the actual people to whom it is addressed,” but evangelization also “risks losing its power . . . if one empties or adulterates its content under the pretext of translating it” (<em>Evangelli Nuntiandi</em> 63). The Church calls us to adapt without adulterating—to speak so people can understand without surrendering what must be believed.</p>
<p>This is the spirit of authentic evangelization: not demanding that others first learn the way we speak so that we might evangelize them, but translating the Church’s living faith into accessible speech without distorting its substance—an approach modeled, for example, by the missionary efforts of Ss. Cyril and Methodius. The goal isn’t victory in vocabulary, but unity in the truth.</p>
<h2>Living in the New Landscape</h2>
<p>So how do we live faithfully and evangelize effectively within this new landscape?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px">1. <strong>Pair information with formation and connection. </strong></p>
<p>Pure information cannot replace real-life formation. Research performed in solitude cannot bring about the full effect of evangelization, because God gathers his people into a living communion. The Faith is much more than a collection of propositions to prove.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px">2. <strong>Don’t renounce online social connection.</strong></p>
<p>The tools that we have at our disposal for learning about the Faith can be used for good: growing in knowledge and love for the truth to prepare ourselves to “always be ready to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that it is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px">3. <strong>Keep the end goal in mind.</strong></p>
<p>The purpose of online communication and study is not to exalt ourselves as more knowledgeable than others, nor to resort to reductionism or distortion to “win.” Unity in the truth involves a fervent desire for others to share in all of the blessings found in the Church’s embrace, which is why we must adapt our language for effective (and empathetic) translation of the Faith.</p>
<p>It’s with these principles in mind that we can avoid tribalism and personality cults—emphasizing our common identity in Christ. By the Church’s motherly care, we can refuse to be driven by algorithm and scandal. In a world that can deliver an endless stream of information but can’t replace formation, our evangelistic approach must reunite true doctrine with worship, discipleship, and the living communion of the Catholic Church.</p>

How to Bring Gen Z to Christ

Did Peter know he was the first Pope?

What is the morality of using VPNs to bypass geo-restrictions on content?

Would my mother-in-law who passed prior have met my recently born daughter in heaven?

Anything that cannot be backed up book, chapter, and verse in the New Testament did not come from God, it came from the men trying to instruct God”

Wouldn’t it have been better for God the Father to lay down his own life rather than his son’s?

What is the Catholic church’s teaching on being a Soldier?

How can I explain the Cherubim and Seraphim hierarchy to a Jehovah witness?

Luke 9:49-50 there is someone other than Apostles exorcizing demons, does this mean that people other than priests can drive out demons?

Did the altars in the Old Testament become unsanitary with the amount of blood from sacrifice?  &nbsp;

<p>The first baby I lost was unceremoniously flushed down the toilet at the doctor’s office by a well-meaning nurse. At the time,I was still Protestant, and I remember the jarring feeling that my body was giving a sacrifice against my will. It all seemed so earthy, so literally bloody, and I didn’t know how to reconcile it with a materialist worldview.</p>
<p>I recently miscarried the baby who would have been my fifth on earth. This time, I bled everything out at home, saved the dismantled tissue, and buried it in the garden under a statue of St. Francis. I was open to life, and my body became a house of death, but at least the life I had borne wasn’t flushed down a toilet.</p>
<p><strong>I</strong><strong>’</strong><strong>m not alone in my feeling that the experiences of womanhood</strong> seem sometimes to line up with ancient pre-Christian beliefs. A glance at social media trends such as WitchTok and #modernwitch reveal many women with a shockingly active belief in Wicca, worship of the “old gods,” and a variety of other occult practices that are <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/where-to-go-to-explore-pagan-culture#:~:text=After%20centuries%20of%20persecution,%20Paganism,interest%20in%20the%20spiritual%20movement.">on the rise</a>. To have a body that is intimately connected with the rhythms of life makes you naturally long to understand their true meaning. In the words of Karl Stern, from his work <em>The Flight from Woman</em>, “the four-week cycle of ovulation, the rhythmically altering tides of fertility and barrenness, the nine months of gestation which can be neither prolonged nor hurried—all this ties women deeply to the life of nature, to the pulse beat of the cosmos.”</p>
<p>Since the spawning of the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s, women in <a href="https://pluralism.org/sacred-bodies">increasing numbers</a> have craved the control promised by pagan or quasi-pagan rituals. The movement has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/mar/20/making-dreams-come-true-inside-the-new-age-world-of-manifesting">rapidly increased in Gen Z</a> since the 2020 lockdowns. For generations, we tried to take control by making ourselves into men, and now, exhausted, we manifest like earth goddesses and hand-crush herbs to brew grounding teas.</p>
<p>Like many lies of the devil, pagan practices draw a following because they reflect the truths of our historic faith. Paganism is, in many ways, a childish attempt at discovering a sacramental worldview. Women are naturally more drawn to this than men. Men pierce, plant, attack, and enforce change. Women open, receive, nurture, and bring forth, almost entirely out of their own control. Experiences of the female make it virtually impossible to ignore the spiritual, in a particular way that men can’t help but have difficulty understanding.</p>
<p>We, as Catholics, can delight in our gilded churches, but we should not forget our faith’s strong ties to the garden. We can tell those women lost in paganism about the woman who was the bridge between human and divine and how she gave birth to God in a stable. We can tell them about living the rhythms of the Church year and embracing the cycles of feasting and fasting. We can explain that participation in the Mass is a re-presentation of the only eternal sacrifice to the one true God and how, in the Eucharist, he tears his own body and gives it to us. We can tell them they aren’t crazy for wanting to be pagan, because the truth is really much closer to those ancient practices than it is to our postmodern world, which spends more time online than with feet on the bare earth.</p>
<p><strong>In the months following my recent miscarriage, I regressed </strong>to my own version of materialism. I wept, bought new clothes, drank too much alcohol, ran a half-marathon, got Botox, and firmly closed myself off to the risk of fertility. I did everything possible to live autonomously in my body and ignore my own femininity. But one can’t linger on that state, so here I am again, extending myself to the possibility of life and desperately praying that I won’t house another death.</p>
<p>That’s what it is to be a woman. Mary’s <em>fiat </em>caused her to bear a sword in her own soul. As her daughters we open ourselves to bear sorrow after sorrow even as we bear joy after joy. The sun rises and sets, the moon cycles around the earth, and women give themselves again and again to receive the future generations. It is the greatest privilege and the heaviest burden.</p>

When Womanhood Feels Pagan

<div>Did the Catholic Church ever persecute Jews?</div><div><p>It depends on what you mean by <em>persecute</em>. There is no doubt that in the high Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, Church authorities, both local and in Rome, backed the segregation and limitation of action of the Jewish population of the cities. This was a legal situation that came out of the legislation of the Roman Empire, even before Christianity, so aspects of it were not directly related to the Christian but rather to the Roman character of political life in Europe.</p>
<p>Like most people, the ancient Christians tended to conform to the legal system to which they were accustomed unless it required them directly to deny their Faith. One can see in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of the New Testament how mild is the attitude of the first Christian writers to the Roman system, even as it was poised to persecute them. The Jews, however, were eager in the beginning to present the Christians to the Roman civil authorities as outlaw followers of a superstition, and so the first large persecutions of the Christians in certain local areas were instigated by the Jewish authorities. St. Paul is a clear example before his conversion, and if you read the acts of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, the disciple of St. John the beloved disciple, you can see how things went in those days.</p>
<p>Even so, it is very true that all rash judgment that leads to injustice solely on the basis of ethnic stereotypes is immoral because it is against the highest law of our religion, which is charity. History is sometimes a dismal affair!</p>
</div>

Did the Church Persecute Jews?

<div class="page" title="Page 252">
<div class="section">
<div class="layoutArea">
<div class="column">
<p><strong>DAY 242</strong></p>
<p><strong>CHALLENGE</strong></p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="layoutArea">
<div class="column">
<p>“We shouldn’t believe anything that can’t be verified by science.”</p>
<p><strong>DEFENSE</strong></p>
<p>Authentic science does not maintain this.</p>
<p>Science involves the use of a particular method (i.e., “scientific method”), the principal steps of which are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Observing some aspect of the world</li>
<li>Formulating hypotheses to explain the observed data</li>
<li>Making predictions about further observations based on the hypotheses</li>
<li>Performing experiments to test the predictions (particularly by trying to falsify them).</li>
</ol>
<p>This general method has proved useful for investigating many subjects, but, as we cover elsewhere (see Day 333), there are limits to what can be investigated by science.</p>
<p>Sometimes the reason is practical, as when an experiment cannot be performed without affecting the behavior of the phenomenon to be observed. This situation is frequently encountered in studying the behavior of subatomic particles, leading to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (according to which we cannot measure both the position and the momentum of a particle).</p>
<p>Other times the limit is due to a matter of principle. Science—like every other field—cannot get off the ground without using truths of logic that are fundamental to all reasoning. Yet these principles cannot be verified by the scientific method. Instead, they are assumed.</p>
<p>Science also presupposes other principles that it cannot demonstrate, such as the lawlike behavior of natural phenomena and the extension of those laws into the past and future. It also must assume that the data that has been observed is representative of the way things are and not just a misleading set of fluke observations. Repeating experiments to gain more data is good, but the new experiments also could involve fluke observations, so there must remain an assumption that the observed data is representative of the way things really are.</p>
<p>Most fundamentally, the claim that we should not accept anything that cannot be verified by science does not meet its own test. In view of the limits of science we have covered, the hypothesis proposed in the challenge does not fit the observed data. It is a bad hypothesis and therefore something that authentic science does not support. Authentic science recognizes its own limits and does not claim to be the single tool needed to prove every type of proposition.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Nothing but Science?

<div>Would God for some reason rescind a person's salvation? </div><div><p>To be clear, if someone falls out of grace and ultimately goes to hell, it’s the person’s fault, not God’s. God will judge us accordingly for such unrepentant mortal sin, but we will have refused God’s gift of salvation:</p>
<blockquote><p>We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: &#8220;He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.&#8221;<sup>612</sup> Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren.<sup>613</sup></p>
<blockquote><p><em>To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God&#8217;s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice</em>. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called &#8220;hell&#8221; (<a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p123a12.htm">CCC 1033</a>, emphasis added).</p></blockquote>
<p>&nbsp;</p></blockquote>
<p>For more on this subject, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/search?q=salvation">please see our various online resources</a>.</p>
</div>

Losing My Religion (and Salvation)

<p>Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers has an apparently unpopular answer to the scourge of racism—imitating Jesus. Our society refuses this path, preferring a culture of constant critique and revolution. It is time that the revolutionaries heard the hard truth—their cure is no cure at all. Real healing requires us to take up the Gospel with courage and humility.</p>

Catholicism and Race

Why isn’t there an instance in the bible where a child is adopted into faith?

What is the Catholic view of Matthew 16:28? Is it an unfulfilled prophecy?

Is it sinful to work on Sunday?

Today in class they were talking about schizophrenia and my teacher asked if anyone was religious, to make a comparison between the two. I didn’t raise my hand. Did I do something wrong by not speaking up?

I just found out that one of my friends is a Freemason. Am I still allowed to associate with him?

Would a land value tax be better than an income tax in light of Catholic Social teaching on just taxation?

What does the mark of the beast mean? Are we all born with it? What was Jesus doing after the Resurrection but before the Ascension?

Is killing an intrinsically evil act?

Can a Catholic date a divorced person that was not married in the Catholic Church?

I’m Catholic and was just married in a non-denominational church. Is my marriage valid? If not, how do I make it valid?

If a person discovered that their partner was homosexual, would it be an impediment to receiving an annulment?

How can the Church claim that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church?

I was asked by my pastor to no longer kneel for communion. What advice do you have for me?

Why did God appear so cruel, angry and petty in the Old Testament?

I had candles blessed during Candlemas. If the holy water didn’t touch my candle, is it still blessed?

How can I learn to love God when my fear for him is much bigger?

<p>Is killing always intrinsically evil? Fr. Paul Keller, OP, explores the Catholic Church’s teaching on the morality of killing and when, if ever, it can be justified. He also answers pressing faith questions, including whether Catholics can date a divorced non-Catholic and many more.</p>

Is Killing Always Intrinsically Evil? And More Questions

<div>Is the penitent bound by the seal of confession?</div><div><p>No, a penitent is not bound by the seal of confession. One should be prudent when discussing one&#8217;s sins, but it’s possible another person might benefit from the advice a penitent received in confession. A priest who celebrates the sacrament or anyone who deliberately or inadvertently hears a confession is bound to uphold the seal (<a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P3G.HTM"><em>Code of Canon Law</em>, can. 983</a>).</p>
<p>In addition, while a priest may not break the seal, if a penitent brings up the same subject outside of confession, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/can-i-give-a-priest-permission-to-talk-about-my-confession">then the priest could prudently talk about <em>that</em> conversation</a>. But the seal remains even after a penitent&#8217;s death.</p>
</div>

Is a Penitent Bound by the Seal of Confession?

<p>In this free-for-all-Friday Trent examines strange disappearances and asks if it was a terrible mishap or if something more sinister happened.</p>

Mishap or Murder?