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Tim Staples answers two objections against the licitness of the Novus Ordo Mass: first, that Pope Paul VI had not the authority to remove &#8220;Mysterium fidei&#8221; from the words of institution; and second, that Mass must be said ad orientem instead of versus populum.

How to Explain Why the Novus Ordo Mass is Licit

Tim Ryland, editor of Catholic Answers Magazine helps us close 2020 with a reflection on the state of journalism. Specifically, given the parlous state of journalism, how can anyone know the truth about what the heck is going on?

Journalism and Truth

Defending the Faith can take an emotional toll. Rather than turn to bitterness, the person who engages with those who attack the Faith will be most effective with some distance and calm. Psychologist Dr. Ray Guarendi offers tips on how to gain this distance and calm.

Anger Management in Apologetics

What resources can you recommend on the veneration of relics?

What would be the best way to expose our fellow Catholics to the eastern rites?

What are your thoughts on so-called Catholics evangelizing but who preach heresy?

I’m a protestant considering Catholicism. Are there 2 judgements?

Were the Greek Orthodox and the Catholic Church ever together? Who came first?

Do you see your debate with Pearl as a result of the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction as a result of radical feminism?

Will people still wear clothes in heaven since shame would no longer be a thing?

Which other denominations pray the Apostles’ creed? Do they also say that they believe in the Catholic Church?

Ask Me Anything

We have data showing how American attitudes on the Bible have shifted over the past forty years. First, <a href="https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2014/12/gallop-poll-21-say-bible-is-ancient.html">here’s a graphic</a> from atheist John Loftus’s blog, posted back in 2014. It shows three choices from a Gallup poll regarding what someone thinks the Bible is and compares the results from the poll in 1984, 2004, and 2014. Here are the choices:
<ol>
<li>The Bible is the ACTUAL word of God and should be taken literally, word for word.</li>
<li>The Bible is the INSPIRED word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word.</li>
<li>The Bible is an ancient book of FABLES, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.</li>
</ol>
None of these is a great option, but if I had to pick one, I’d go with option two.
Option three denies or at least downplays the Bible’s divine inspiration, but option one denies the Bible’s human composition. It suggests that the Bible is only a record of God’s words spoken to human secretaries. But that’s not what the church teaches, as can be seen in this excerpt from the Second Vatican Council:
<blockquote>In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which he wanted (Dei Verbum 11).</blockquote>
The Bible is the word of God, but its human authors didn’t just blindly transcribe God’s voice. If they did, how do we explain Paul’s lack of knowledge in 1 Corinthians 1:16, where he says, “I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.”
The human authors were true authors, which means God allowed their personalities and worldview to be present in the words they wrote. This means that in their writings, we see a worldview that is less advanced—not just scientifically, but also theologically. That’s why Dei Verbum notes that the books of the Old Testament “also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, nevertheless show[ing] us true divine pedagogy.”
Pope Benedict XVI recognized that the Bible is not just a sterile collection of God’s explicit commands and descriptions. It is a story of human redemption told over centuries. He wrote the following in his 2010 apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini: “It must be remembered first and foremost that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance. God chose a people and patiently worked to guide and educate them” (42).
For example, since the ancient Israelites were often tempted to worship false, pagan gods, the true God did not explicitly reveal to them that he is a trinity. Doing so early in Israel’s history might have confused them and led to false worship of a triad of separate divine beings instead of true knowledge of the Trinity. Instead, God first taught that he is the God to be worshiped above all other gods, without explicitly saying those gods are false. Later, he revealed that he is the only uncreated Creator, and then, later still, he revealed his triune nature.
So, just because the biblical text says something, that doesn’t mean God is saying that exact same thing to us today. That’s why the Second Vatican Council taught that “since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”
The key phrase in this passage is “asserted by the inspired authors.”
The fact that something is said in Scripture does not mean it should be taken in an uncompromising literal way—like when the Psalmist says we take refuge under God’s wings (91:4). The Bible is the inerrant word of God, but it comes to us through human words in a variety of genres. There is history, but there are also poetry and other non-literal ways of expressing truth, like when the Bible describes God the Father having physical body parts like a strong right arm.
Consequently, an overly literal approach to Scripture produces many more difficulties for atheists to marshal as evidence that the Bible isn’t divinely inspired. For example, some alleged “Bible contradictions” related to genealogies arise only when one falsely assumes genealogies were exact records and not approximations that often skipped generations. As a result, the biblical fundamentalist may create a contorted explanation for the difficulty, whereas the atheist sees a difficulty that doesn’t actually exist.
So let’s go back to this Gallup poll and notice the change over thirty years.
Loftus takes this to mean that Christian fundamentalists are losing. In one sense, they are, but in another sense, they are just, as my friend Randal Rauser says, <a href="https://randalrauser.com/2014/12/fundamentalists-arent-losing-the-battle-theyre-merely-changing-sides/">switching sides</a>. Biblical fundamentalists who have an overly literal approach to Scripture have become “fundamentalists” or “new atheists” who reject the Bible based on an overly literal reading of it. The percentage of those who see the Bible as the literal but not the actual word of God has remained constant and even increased in recent years. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx">When Gallup asked this same question in 2022</a>, here were the results:
<ol>
<li>The Bible is the ACTUAL word of God and should be taken literally, word for word (20%).</li>
<li>The Bible is the INSPIRED word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word (49%).</li>
<li>The Bible is an ancient book of FABLES, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man (29%).</li>
</ol>
Once again, the middle ground position picked up points. As for the other two options, more people are ditching one extreme view of the Bible—it’s all God and has no truly human elements—in favor of another extreme view: the Bible is all human and has no truly divine elements.
In many cases, this “side-switching” happens because a person pits what the Bible says against what the facts of science, history, and ethical reasoning say. He thinks only one can be right, and so if the Bible is right, then science, history, and philosophical approaches to ethics must be wrong. But if this person accepts modern views of science, history, and ethics, then the Bible has to be wrong. He doesn’t step back and say that maybe it isn’t the Bible that’s wrong, but his overly literal reading of it.

When the Protestant Switches Sides

Joe Heschmeyer addresses theological claims about Trump&#8217;s assassination attempt and survival.
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Donald Trump nearly was assassinated and it&#8217;s only because he turned his head at the last second that he ended up having the bullet nick his ear instead of ending his life. Does that odds defying survival prove that the hand of the Lord is upon him, the hand of providence is with him, and Christians should get aboard backing Donald Trump? That&#8217;s what I want to explore today, and I want to say at the outset a few things. Number one, this isn&#8217;t really an episode about politics, meaning I&#8217;m not going to tell you here whether you should vote for or against Donald Trump. I&#8217;m not going to tell you what you should do in the election. I&#8217;m simply going to tell you about the theology and the way I find being misused by Christians right now because my ultimate allegiance here is not to Donald Trump or to Joe Biden or to a political party or even to the United States of America.
My ultimate authority and allegiance is God, and I want to protest what I see as a bastardization of Christian theology in the service of politics. Now, this ranges from the fairly benign. You have people putting memes of guardian angels protecting Trump. Fair enough, you can make a theological case for that to the really extreme. For instance, there&#8217;s right now a meme circulating, suggesting that Trump is anointed because in the Bible, in places like Leviticus eight, in Leviticus 14, verse 28, we find the concept of blood on the right ear as a visible mark of consecration. Now, that is an incredible distortion of the biblical evidence. For one, Leviticus eight talks about ordaining Jewish priests, which I think even the most incredible Trump supporter would admit. He is not and Trump does not claim to be. But moreover, for the anointing of priest, you kill a ram and you don&#8217;t just put the blood on the right ear, but on the right ear, the right thumb and the right big toe, and then you put the rest of the blood on the altar.
This is only if you squint and look at 20,000 foot view even remotely similar, but even more radical is the fact that they&#8217;re quoting Leviticus 1428, which says that the priest shall put some of the oil that is in his hand on the tip of the right ear as well, again as the thumb and the right hand and the big toe of the right foot on the one who is to be cleansed and you might say cleansed. Cleansed from what? Yeah, they took part of a sentence fragment in a passage about the purification of lepers. Now, Donald Trump is no more a leper than he is a high priest, so it stands to reason that we are misusing scripture here in trying to apply these passages to show something that the passages don&#8217;t actually show whatsoever. Now, I find that being shared more by Protestants, probably Catholics, I find sharing more a weird AI generated image of the Virgin Mary moving the bullet with her middle finger.
Now, there&#8217;s a lot of things wrong with the image. For starters, the bullet is still in the casing. That&#8217;s not really how bullets work, but I get nevertheless, the theology behind it, and it probably is meant to evoke the fact that the assassination attempt happened on the 13th, which if you&#8217;re familiar, is the feast of our Lady Fatima. And on February 13th, Pope John Paul II was nearly assassinated and it was only by a hare&#8217;s width that his life was spared, and he famously is credited as saying that one hand pulled the trigger, another guided the bullet. In other words, he accredited Mary&#8217;s intercession with his life being spared. So much so that he even put the assassin&#8217;s bullet in the crown of our Lady of Fatima in Fatima Portugal. Fair enough. What&#8217;s the problem with using it here? Well, in saying Mary guided the bullets here, what are you actually saying?
That she spared the life of Donald Trump and ended the life of a firefighter named Corey Kapito who&#8217;s just there in the crowd like Mary really wanted this random bystander killed not Donald Trump. What theology is really going on here? But we can go even beyond this. Now, I want to be really careful in the next part that I say, because I&#8217;m going to make a Hitler comparison and I want to be really clear. I&#8217;m not saying Donald Trump is Hitler. I find those comparisons really unhelpful, really problematic. There&#8217;s a really famous thing Hitler did, and if you think Donald Trump is like him without him doing that one thing, I think you&#8217;re not qualified to talk about politics. Nevertheless, one thing he does have in common when Donald Trump and Hitler is both we&#8217;re nearly assassinated and in an odds defying move, avoided getting killed. So in this case, we have what&#8217;s called the 20th of July assassination plot.
This is from 1944 and high ranking German military officers, most famous, the Lieutenant Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, but others as well, made several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Adolf Hitler between 1943 and 1944. And so we mostly remember the July 20th attempt, but there were others and they were often thwarted at the last minute in strange ways. For instance, on July 14th, Salberg shows up for a meeting with Hitler with a bomb in a brief case and wants to take out the three top leaders of the Nazi party, but one of them himler doesn&#8217;t show up to the meeting unexpectedly and the plan is forwarded. Meanwhile, the Ss knows there are people trying to kill Hitler because there have been numerous assassination attempts and they&#8217;re closing in, and this leads to this ultimate attempt to just go ahead and they put a bomb in the briefcase bringing it to the July 20th meeting, and it would&#8217;ve killed Hitler because he places the briefcase next to Adolf Hitler.
But then seemingly randomly, a colonel by the name of Heinz Braun moves the briefcase to one side inadvertently saving Adolf Hitler&#8217;s life at the cost of his own life. This then leads to a horrible and brutal crackdown of both those who plotted the assassination of Hitler, but really any critics, particularly throughout the German army, the most famous of those killed in the wake of this is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian. But it&#8217;s worth remembering that after these assassination attempts failed, this is what was called Operation Valkyrie. This was the attempt to overthrow Hitler. Hitler uses this as an excuse to murder even more people in German society. Now, Don Allen Gregory, in his book after Valkyrie military and civilian consequences of the attempt to assassinate Hitler points out that Hitler was believed to have been dead. Von Hoffenberg thought he did the job.
He thought he was actually dead. If you&#8217;ve ever seen the movie Valkyrie, you can see this played out in a dramatic sort of way, and Adolf Hitler goes on the radio that night, so it&#8217;s really about one in the morning the next day, and he announces to the German people that he&#8217;s alive and he says this, he says, my comrades men and women of the German people. By now, I do not know how many times an assassination has been planned and attempted against me. I speak to you today first in order that you should hear my voice and know I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history. So he&#8217;s announcing to the world that he&#8217;s still alive and he says, a very small click of ambitious, irresponsible, and the same time, senseless and stupid officers concocted a plot to eliminate me and with me.
The staff of the high command of the bear mocked the bomb planted by Colonel Count Stauffenberg exploded two meters to the right of me. It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators. I believe he says one of whom died, I believe two end up dying. I myself am entirely unhurt, aside from some minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this. He says, as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by providence, now call a flag on the play. This is not a theology. As a Christian, you want to get behind. Hey, Hitler in an ossifying move survives assassination, and therefore he must be God&#8217;s guy for the job, obviously bad theology, right? So don&#8217;t use that same bad theology in saying Donald Trump moves and only his ear gets hurt and therefore he&#8217;s God&#8217;s man on the ground. Hitler goes on to say, probably only a few can imagine what fate would&#8217;ve befall in Germany if the plot had succeeded.
I thank Providence and my creator, not because he has preserved me. My life is solely devoted to worry to working for my people. I thank him rather because he has made it possible for me to continue to shoulder these worries and to pursue my work to the best of my abilities and according to my conscience, this should cause you to shudder because he is claiming God spared me so I can continue the Holocaust. That&#8217;s the work he&#8217;s doing. That&#8217;s the stuff he&#8217;s worrying about, and that is an abominable misuse of the Christian theology of providence and of the idea that someone nearly escapes death. But we are warned about this in scripture as well. If Hitler isn&#8217;t bad enough, let&#8217;s talk about the beast from Revelation. In Revelation chapter 13, one of the reasons people start worshiping the beast, this hellacious creature is because it appears to die and doesn&#8217;t.
It has an apparently fatal wound and recovers, and so people fall down in adoration and say, who is like the beast and who can fight against it? All of that&#8217;s to say if you&#8217;re making that kind of argument right now for Donald Trump, the kind of argument that could just as easily be made for Adolf Hitler or the beast, you&#8217;re making a bad argument, what then is a Christian way of thinking about these things? Because the truth is there are times where you say, wow, it doesn&#8217;t seem like that person should have survived that, and they did. Few things to think about. First, there&#8217;s a recurring theme in scripture that you can&#8217;t look at success and failure in an earthly sense as a marker of someone&#8217;s holiness or un holiness, rather, you see, for instance, in the prophet Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 12, he cries out to God, why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all who are treacherous thrive, right? The fact is here below bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It doesn&#8217;t automatically follow. So there&#8217;s this recurring thing Christians fall into where they say, oh, there was an earthquake in Haiti. That&#8217;s because Haitians are really bad people. It&#8217;s like, no, that&#8217;s not how this works, and you live in the most prosperous country in the world. That doesn&#8217;t mean you&#8217;re a good person or you country is being blessed. Sometimes the wave of wicked prosperous. In fact, this is one of the recurring themes throughout scripture, the psalmist cries out about how he nearly stumbled because he was envious of the arrogant when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, not of the just. Jesus addresses this directly in Luke chapter 13 because he&#8217;s confronted with the fact at this point, not the prosperity of the wicked, but the death of innocent people.
There are some Galileans who die in this horrific way and punches. Pilate has their blood mingled with pagan sacrifices, and Jesus says, don&#8217;t think that they are worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered. Thus, no, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. And then he gives the example of 18 Other people who die in a tower crash and say, don&#8217;t think that they&#8217;re worse offenders than those who dwell in Jerusalem. No, but unless you repent, you&#8217;ll all likewise perish. So when you look around at a bad thing happening to somebody and you get up on your high horse and say, I must be better than them because a bad thing didn&#8217;t befall me, Jesus says, wrong. That&#8217;s not how this works. The flip side is if something doesn&#8217;t happen to somebody, that doesn&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re a good person any more than a bad thing.
Befalling them means they&#8217;re a bad person. I want to end with looking back at the prophet Jeremiah in which in Jeremiah five, God says, wicked men are found among my people. They lurk like Fowlers lying in Wait, and he says like a basket full of birds. Their houses are full of treachery, therefore, they&#8217;ve become great and rich. They&#8217;ve grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds and deeds of wickedness. They judge not with justice, the cause of the fatherless to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. That&#8217;s the standard. If you want to know, is Donald Trump the person I should be voting for this fall? Don&#8217;t be trying to divine signs on whether or not the bullet should have hit him in the head or in the ear, or not at all. Instead say, okay, does he do the deeds of righteousness or the deeds of wickedness?
How does he take care of the fatherless? How does he take care of the unborn, the immigrant, the poor, the weak and defenseless, whoever and wherever they may be? That&#8217;s the standard. And if you think Donald Trump does that, well great make that case, but don&#8217;t make the case that we all have to vote for Donald Trump because he almost got shot in the head by a bullet, and instead it nicked his right ear and that somehow means he&#8217;s a leper high priest in the Judeo-Christian amalgamation you&#8217;ve invented for Shameless Pop, I&#8217;m Joe. He, God bless you.
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Does Trump’s survival prove his Divine Appointment?

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent talks about his past work as a videographer and shares ten tips for how you can take amazing pictures.