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<div>What do you think of sedevacantists’ claims that heretical anti-popes have invalidly reigned for decades?</div><div>One of the dangers of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/the-errors-of-sedevacantism">sedevacantism</a> is that it can become a kind of universal acid that eats through the entire papacy, not just recent modern popes. For example, sedevacantists who focus on moral scandals among cardinals and the curia in the last forty years as evidence that the papacy is vacant would also disqualify several medieval popes, especially those who reigned during the infamous pornocracy of the ninth and tenth centuries. This time period included the infamous cadaver synod of Pope Stephen VI, where he put the corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus on trial. If they focus on theological errors that allegedly invalidated past popes, then they are going to end up no different than Protestants who try to find similar errors in all the popes, not just modern ones. They would end up invalidating popes like Honorius, whom a later ecumenical council (Constantinople III) sought to condemn as a heretic for failing to stop the Monothelite heresy, although Pope Leo II, as head of the council, did not confirm the condemnation. By creating enough gaps in papal succession through these arguments, all of apostolic succession would be threatened. The examples can be multiplied but, once again, my big concern is that the logic of sedevacantism and its desire to unseat recent popes could be weaponized against the entire papacy.
Sedevacantism is basically Protestantism dressed up in a Catholic costume. It claims to be faithful to Tradition, but how can that be when prominent sedevacantists say that the faithful just have to stay home on Sunday and pray the rosary? How much more unfaithful can you be to Catholic Tradition than by saying that the Holy Eucharist, along with Christ’s visible Church, has disappeared from the face of the earth? At this point, there is no path for Christ’s Church to be restored from this alleged apostasy, which is why many of them say that we must be near Christ’s Second Coming and the end of the world. But what’s more likely: that this apocalyptic sect correctly discerns the end times even though Christ said that no man knows that, or that they are simply leading people away from the Church which has faithfully persevered for two thousand years?
</div>

Have heretical anti-popes invalidly reigned for decades?

They drink, they smoke, they make a popular show for Catholic men (<a href="https://thecatholicmanshow.com/">The Catholic Man Show</a>), so we ask Adam and David to justify Catholic teaching on the acceptability of drinking. Wouldn’t God prefer that we all just stay away from the sauce and stick with tea? That depends, it turns out.

Can a Christian Drink?

It doesn’t make sense to me why some people hear God in their prayers and others don’t?

How is it that Protestants seem to experience the fruits of the faith, but without the sacrifices that Catholics do?

As Catholics, we agree that we’ll probably be in Purgatory before going to Heaven. The Bible says that Jesus at the Second Coming will take everyone with him. Does that mean they’ll skip out on Purgatory?

A Protestant friend wonders if we’re defecating or disgracing the Eucharist when we receive it?

I want to know how does Dr. Broussard decides when his interpretation of scripture is a maybe/what if and how does he know when God’s Will is definitive?

Why Don’t You Think Catholicism Makes Sense?

Jimmy Akin delves into the complex interpretation of Jesus&#8217; words in John 6 about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Did His followers truly understand His meaning as a literal cannibalistic act, or was there a deeper theological implication they were struggling to grasp?
Transcript:
John 6 when the followers, some of his followers, Christ&#8217;s followers walk away, not being able to accept it. I know it&#8217;s kind of played in Catholic circles, like against people that think it&#8217;s metaphorically to show the literal, that it&#8217;s literal, that look, he meant this, but is that what the followers who walked away understood? Because it almost seems like a reading that that could be, they understood it to be something like cannibalism. And that was like, oh, that&#8217;s weird and gross or something. And they can&#8217;t accept that. And then Christ doubled down on that. Or is it there? That&#8217;s not what their understanding is. They&#8217;re not misunderstanding it. They&#8217;re understanding something correctly, maybe not what so much what he&#8217;s saying, but what that would entail, what that would imply, meaning something to his divinity or something. And they&#8217;re catching that kind of like a John 10 thing with the Jews understood as divinity. Is that what they&#8217;re not accepting?
Okay.
If I understand your question correctly, the individuals here who are from the city of Capernaum, and so this is sometimes called the Caffernaitic interpretation, do initially entertain the idea that Jesus is talking about cannibalism. And they say, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?
That doesn&#8217;t mean that they had settled on that as an interpretation of what he said. They may not be sure what he means. It just sounds ridiculous to them. And so the ones who walk away, walk away because what he says sounds ridiculous. And to them, it sounds like cannibalism, but they very well may have not been sure what he meant and thought, well, maybe he means something else. But Jesus doubled down and said, no, no, no, you really got to chew my flesh and drink my blood if you want to have life. And so he, even in the face of the cannibalistic understand, and he said, no, you really got to do this.

Did the Disciples Take John 6 Literally? (Eat My Flesh)

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Did Pope Leo XIV deny Peter as the rock?

In the sacrament of Holy Orders, clergy progress through ranks—deacon, priest, and bishop—implying they receive the sacrament multiple times, each with additional spiritual authority. Does this mean they receive the full sacrament once, with additional...

Mt 7:13-14. Is it wrong for me to read this as a motivational passage instead of a somber one?

Will you do an episode of Mysterious World on our Lady of Champion?

What are your thoughts on the mystic Luisa Piccarreta?

How do we find a happy balance between taking responsibility for actions that lead to bad thing happening to us vs bad things just happening?

What are your thoughts on Exodus 4:24?

What is the best way to dispose of Catholic literature?

Why is it that Catholicism removes consent and stewardship from its moral philosophy?

How do I respectfully approach my pastor to bring back passing around the basket for the offertory? It was discontinued during COVID and never brought back.

AMA: Holy Orders Explained, Balancing Responsibility, and Approaching Parish Traditions

<div>Would the baptism of a person who knowingly rejects an official teaching of the Catholic Church be valid?</div><div>Yes. The baptisms by heretics and schismatics are considered perfectly valid (Council of Trent, session VII, canon IV). The minimum faith required for adult baptism would be a belief in the Trinity and a willingness to be a disciple of Jesus. They are not required to have a fully developed understanding of the Faith.
&#8220;The faith required for baptism is not a perfect and mature faith but a beginning that is called to develop&#8221; (Catechism 1253).
</div>

Is the Baptism of One Who Rejects a Teaching Valid?

Jesus’ teaching in John 6—“eat my flesh &#8230; drink my blood”—is often the go-to passage to give biblical support for the belief in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. But many Protestants think we’re wrong in our interpretation, and they have reasons why they think this. In this talk, Karlo will examine these Protestant counter-responses and show why they don’t succeed, allowing believers in the Real Presence to continue appealing to John 6 for evidence that Jesus intended us to actually eat his flesh and drink his blood in the Eucharist.

Are Catholics Wrong About John 6?

What did Peter and John see at the tomb? The burial cloths from the body of Jesus. John could have just told us that the tomb was empty and skipped to the part where they meet the risen Jesus later. But he gives us all these details.
The grave clothes are a clue—but to what? A robber would have no interest in leaving them neatly in place. Nor would they have been easy to remove, coated as they were with myrrh and aloes, sticky and fragrant substances that would make the shroud stiff. What lay there was likely a sort of collapsed husk, the death shroud strangely emptied of its content, left as a witness to some strange event.
Having run to the tomb and noticed the cloth, the disciples almost immediately run back.
John tells us that they did not yet understand. Perhaps that is why they run away, leaving Mary Magdalene wandering near the tomb. She is the one who meets Jesus first.
All of these pieces mean something to John. They lack the whiff of some made-up story, some wishful-thinking fantasy meant to promote this wild new institution called the Christian Church. They are too raw, too unflattering, if we’re honest, to the disciples. They have no agenda here aside from telling what they saw.
Some time later, in the sermon we read today in Acts, Peter says that they were “chosen witnesses,” but at this point they radiate confusion more than anything else. They don’t understand yet the Resurrection, much less the good news that Peter preaches in Acts: that “he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead.”
No wonder, we might say. It’s an odd way of summarizing what is good news about the Resurrection. For we can easily imagine other takes: praise God, our dear friend is alive again! Since Jesus is risen from the dead, we now have proof that death is not the end! Or: Now the true Messiah has given us supernatural power over our enemies, so we can drive out the Romans with the power of God on our side!
Instead, we get this claim about judgment.
But Jesus has prepped us, and the disciples, at least a bit. Back in John 12, he said, “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out.” Those are fighting words, just the sort that zealots in first-century Judea wanted to hear, but for Peter and the disciples, it seems that the evidence of this judgment and this casting out is clear only after the Lord’s death and resurrection.
For it turns out that the enemy wasn’t the Romans. It wasn’t even the Pharisees or the Sadducees or the Herodians or any of the other bad actors on the scene. The enemy was hell and death, sin and the devil. The enemy was the depravity and corruption of human nature.
As we sing in the Easter sequence:
Death and life have contended
In that combat stupendous: 
The Prince of Life, who died, 
reigns immortal.
Or, as St. Chrysostom puts it in his famous homily: “Hell took a body, and found God.”
For Peter, the good news is that Christ is the victor in this fight—have mercy, victor king!—and that he is therefore the judge—the authority—over life and death. This isn’t just some nice observation about life’s resilience, or spring, or good memories about the past. It is a politically dangerous claim that the true authority isn’t Caesar, or Herod, or the chief priests, but this God-Man who has conquered death itself.
“No wonder,” writes Tom Wright, that “the Herods, the Caesars, and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. . . . It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies . . . try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumors of resurrection, rumors that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and destruction, are not after all omnipotent.” Death is still around—much like that hollow burial shroud. But it has been robbed of its substance. This is the truth that the early Christians lived and died for; had they meant something merely spiritual, merely symbolic, they would have been no threat.
But again we have to insist that Resurrection alone doesn’t fully describe what Peter sees as the good news. The real good news is that the resurrected one, the judge vested with all authority over life and death, is our friend. He is one of us. He is not some distant, impartial figure. He is Mary’s boy from Nazareth. He is the man who healed the blind, the lame, the sick; the man who fed us, who cried with us, who bled with us, and who did it with love and joy, even when we were the ones making him bleed and cry, because he loved us so much. What else in the world really matters if we can really be friends with him?
We could read and fill many books thinking about how the Incarnation, the cross, and the Resurrection reconcile us to God, how they fix the problem of sin and death in battle stupendous. Yet the invitation to Easter isn’t first to understand as much as it is to wonder: to stand in amazement and joy at the offer of eternal friendship with God. Being so amazed, should we not also, like Peter and John, run with wild, childlike enthusiasm toward the Lord?

Fighting Words for Easter

Why Do Catholics Accept the Deuterocanonical Scriptures?

Jimmy Akin explains to a caller why Jesus&#8217;s words in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them,&#8221; do not contradict the doctrine of free will, and clarifies the sense in which it does limit the actions we are able to choose.
Transcript:
Host: Ryan in Michigan, listening on AM 990, you are on with Jimmy Akin. It&#8217;s open forum, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: My question has to do with the doctrine of total depravity. So in the Fifth Canon of the Council of Trent it says, &#8220;If any man says that after the sin of Adam, man&#8217;s free will was extinguished, let him be anathema.&#8221; And also in the Council of Trent it affirms prevenient grace. John 6:44, &#8220;No man can come to the Son unless the Father who sent him draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.&#8221; And so I was a little confused, because if I can&#8217;t come to the son unless the father draws me, then it seems like my free will is extinguished, so it seems like the Council of Trent&#8217;s Fifth Canon is both contradicting itself and John 6:44, so I was wondering why that&#8217;s not a contradiction.
Jimmy: Okay, there are several ways of looking at this, and one of them is to recognize that when when Trent says that man&#8217;s free will was not extinguished by the fall, it doesn&#8217;t mean that it wasn&#8217;t damaged by the fall. Something can be damaged but not extinguished, and in the case of the Council of Trent, what they were dealing with were some viewpoints that were being entertained in various circles, particularly in the Protestant community, that either denied that man had ever had any kind of free will&#8211;that just everything we do is, we&#8217;re like robots, you know, we&#8217;re God&#8217;s windup toys and never had free will of any kind&#8211; and then there was a kind of mitigated form that said, &#8220;Well okay, maybe we had free will before the fall of man, but then when Adam sinned we completely lost it, and now our wills are wholly bound to sin, so that we don&#8217;t have any freedom, and the only way we can do anything good at all, if we can do anything good at all, is if God causes us to do it, so we don&#8217;t have free will.&#8221;
And that&#8217;s what Trent is reacting against. So it&#8217;s not reacting against the idea that our free will wasn&#8217;t damaged. Trent&#8217;s perfectly happy to say that our free will was damaged, but we still actually retain freedom. We don&#8217;t have a complete lack of freedom. So that&#8217;s one way of reconciling these two things. You could say, well, so maybe our free will was damaged in such a way that we couldn&#8217;t come to God unless he gives us prevenient grace, which is the grace that enables us to respond positively to God&#8217;s message, so we couldn&#8217;t come to him in that sense unless God gives us this grace to compensate for the damage that was done to our free will by the fall.
But there&#8217;s another way of looking at it too, which would be to say this: Man doesn&#8217;t automatically have what theologians call a supernatural vocation, that is, a vocation to be with God and in spiritual union with him. God could have created man in what theologians refer to as a state of pure nature. In a state of pure nature we wouldn&#8217;t have sin, but we also wouldn&#8217;t have the grace of being spiritually united with God. We might know certain things about God that we could tell by natural reason, like the fact that He exists, but we wouldn&#8217;t have the supernatural desire in our hearts to be in union with Him.
And so that&#8217;s another way of looking at this. You could say, well, in order for us to have that desire for spiritual union with God, it requires a gift from God. It requires that, just like He gave us free will in the beginning, He also needs to give us the gift, which is a kind of free will, to desire union with him spiritually, and that&#8217;s an elevated thing above simply natural freewill, it&#8217;s a kind of supernatural-ized freedom where we have the desire and the ability to pursue those desires to have union with God, which is something he didn&#8217;t have to offer us. It&#8217;s a grace. He could have created us in a paradisaical environment with no sin and no suffering, but He just didn&#8217;t bring us into full spiritual union with Himself. That&#8217;s a gift. And so that&#8217;s another way that you could look at how the the existence of freewill squares with the fact that we need God&#8217;s grace in order to come to Him.
Caller: Okay, I&#8217;m still wondering about that the specific ability to to come to the Father without Him drawing you. I mean, you don&#8217;t have the free will to do that, you know?
Jimmy: Correct, but there are a lot of things that I don&#8217;t have the ability&#8230;when we talk about free will, I think you may be thinking of some kind of unlimited freedom. And that&#8217;s not what&#8217;s meant by saying we have free will. There are lots of things I can&#8217;t choose. Not being Spider-Man, I can&#8217;t choose to crawl on the walls, you know? Not being Superman, I can&#8217;t choose to fly. But there are a lot of things that are within the scope of things that I can choose. And so I have freewill with respect to those things that I can choose, I&#8217;m not just a puppet. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s meant when we say someone has free will. We don&#8217;t mean there aren&#8217;t things that they&#8217;re incapable of choosing; we mean that they do have freedom within whatever scope of freedom they have. And so that&#8217;s one of the things that applies here in terms of the ability to choose God.
There&#8217;s also the fact that God ensures that everybody has the grace needed to come to him. This is something the Second Vatican Council teaches, that even if it&#8217;s in a mysterious way, in ways known to God, He can make it possible, and does make it possible, for everybody to come to Him. So it&#8217;s by His grace that that happens, but He ensures that that grace is given to everybody.

Does John 6:44 Contradict Free Will?

In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Karlo Broussard to discuss the reasons behind Thomas&#8217;s departure from Catholicism to Coptic Orthodoxy. Karlo dives into the complexities of papal doctrine and the implications of the Council of Chalcedon, challenging the foundations of faith and understanding. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that questions the very essence of Christian belief!
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: I have to tell you something, Thomas. We don&#8217;t get very many people who call up and say, I used to be Catholic, but the Council of Chalcedon is the one that threw me off. I&#8217;m just curious, how did that happen? How did you come to study that council and decide that the Catholic position was wrong?
Caller: Yeah, good question. So it really came to. I had interacted with Oriental Orthodox, and I tried to. I tried to essentially show, okay, I can accept that your Christology is Orthodox, but you were at fault for not accepting the Council of Chalcedon because of either the papacy being the end all, be all, or because our Christology is Orthodox too. And both of those ended up failing in the end. Okay.
Karlo Broussard: All right. Yeah. So, Thomas, this is an interesting position you stated at the outset. So we have two issues here. So one that&#8217;s more fundamental, namely the papacy and the role that the papacy is going to play, which, from the Catholic point of view, as you know, Thomas, would be the guiding rule in order to discern what is authentic Christology and what is the appropriate understanding of Christ. So let me ask you this, Thomas. On whose testimony do you rely, definitively speaking, in order to know that the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures united into one person of Christ is false? What infallible testimony do you rely on to make that judgment?
Caller: I believe that our. This is an epistemological question. I believe that epistemologically, we answer these questions by reception. What might be called reception theory. And you see this in the. And the seven councils that the Eastern Orthodox hold as ecumenical, where the. The approach to determining what is true doctrine is what the Church Fathers taught and what has passed down from them. Okay. And if the way we can know that some view is false is if a previous ecumenical council, or the consensus of the Fathers, or the consensus patrum, if it contradicts what is being proposed, then, well, we know which one is right and which one is wrong.
Karlo Broussard: All right? But by looking to prior ecumenical councils, that would assume that those ecumenical councils and the judgments that they make are valid and have infallible weight behind them in order to judge for us what is divine revelation. But that just kicks the problem back one step, kicking the can down the road. Because then we&#8217;re faced with the question, again, in virtue of what authority or in virtue of what principle does this synod of successors to the apostles have in order to make that judgment? Because often you have within these synods a disagreement among those who participate. So what is the principle in virtue of which There can be unity for the church as a whole whenever there&#8217;s a disagreement, even among the Council Fathers. So I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;re familiar with the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. There was a theological disagreement there, and we have to ask the question, well, in virtue of which principle do we rely on in order to know what is going to be the judgment or the truth concerning divine revelation, whether circumcision saves or not? And at the Council of 15, Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, it seems to me that Peter makes that decision and exercises that authority in order to determine the truth of that revelation. And so we have a principal source of unity there in order to justify the belief that this is true. And that&#8217;s the testimony we rely on. Whereas on your model, if there&#8217;s no single voice to speak on behalf of God in order to unify those who participate in a gathering of successors to the apostles, then we&#8217;re just faced with the same problem as me and you when we&#8217;re faced with theological discussion. I mean, granted, we&#8217;re not successors to the apostles, but if you&#8217;re looking at successors to the apostles and valid bishops, they&#8217;re still going to be in disagreement and you&#8217;re going to need at least a final arbiter to settle the matter.
Caller: Right? Well, I would say the first thing I think that&#8217;s important is that you brought up Acts chapter 15. It&#8217;s scripture, so we both have to believe it. But when you look at what the Church Fathers say about it, especially St. John Chrysostom, he says, he makes three times, says that St. James was in charge and that St. Peter was actually in lesser authority. He says this in three remarks within the same, like, two paragraphs. Okay. And then with regards to synodality and having this final voice, well, Catholics, our Catholic brothers and sisters would say that you have this papal infallibility and the center, visible center of unity. And we would say you don&#8217;t have to have that much epistemological certainty to know that, to know which side is the side which the Church rules on. And we would also, though, accept an infallibility, but a collegial infallibility where there will always be a clear majority, so to speak, at the rise of an issue. So we see that clearly with the Council of Ephesus, with the Council of Nicaea. But this whole idea of a, of the consensus patrum is really central to orthodox ecclesiology and also the synodal infallibility. And so I would say we do believe in infallibility, just not that it is Papal infallibility. It&#8217;s rather a synodal infallibility. And I would argue, if you are making it this idea of papal infallibility, where you do have this one man who is able to be very definitive, you then run into the epistemological problem of how we know the person who is claiming to be pope is the pope. And this was dealt with in the, like, 17th century when Anglicans brought up a bunch of bad popes, and they essentially said that when the Church receives a valid pope, that we epistemologically are certain that he is a valid pope. But that&#8217;s the same thing we say just with regard to ecumenical councils and controversies. So we&#8217;re saying the same thing, just yours is one step removed.
Karlo Broussard: Yeah. I think in response, I would say that still with synodal infallibility, there would have to be some criteria by which you judge that synod is infallible in its statements. And once again, we face the problem, well, what if there is disagreement amongst those who are participating? You mentioned a majority, but what is the specific number that constitutes the majority? And if you have a specific number, where do we find that specific criteria that determines the majority, which in turn determines infallibility? That would be rooted in Scripture given to us by the apostles. So I think you have a problem there. In order to determine those criteria, in virtue of which you&#8217;re going to be able to judge, these statements are infallible, whereas on the Catholic model, you have a single testimony and a single voice who has the invested authority to determine the matter. And the criterion for that is because he&#8217;s the successor to St. Peter, whom we would say was the first individual leader who had that authority given to him by Christ. So the infallibility of the synod seems to me, and to us as Catholics still, to be dependent upon some more fundamental source of unity and voice for infallibility. So I think we&#8217;re going to be arguing back and forth as to whether we&#8217;re able to have that infallible knowledge based upon a judgment made by a collective group of people that has no principle, that cannot in principle be unified, because there is no single source of unity for that collective group.
Cy Kellett: Thomas, I feel very grateful for that. It&#8217;s fascinating to me that the Christological problem of the identity of Christ is actually rooted in a question that you use the word epistemology several times and a question of, well, how do we know what is the real teaching of the church? And that is all centered around a problem around the papacy. So it Seems to me that resolving the papal problem is the fundamental thing there. We have a book called Pope Peter. It&#8217;s by our good friend and colleague Joe Heschmeier. About what really essentially about why you should accept the Pope. If you&#8217;d like a copy of it. Hang on the line. Did you want to say something else, Carla, before we went?
Karlo Broussard: Yeah, I was just, you know, you mentioned how the papal issue will help us discern the Christology. And I think the christological issue about the precise nature of Christ and the two natures in the one person of Christ, which is where Thomas and I would be going back and forth on, that&#8217;s a case in point of disagreements concerning theological issues. I mean, these are successors to the apostles saying one thing, other successors to the apostles saying another thing. And so, once again, we&#8217;re faced with that fundamental problem. How do we discern the truth from error, where you have a collective group of bishops contradicting each other concerning the very nature of Christ himself. And if we did not have a single testimony, infallible voice on this earth to speak on behalf of Christ, then we would be simply left with educated guesses and what we might think is the more persuasive position, but we could not have that infallible knowledge because there would be no infallible testimony to base our judgments on.
Cy Kellett: Yeah. And it&#8217;s interesting to me that you could sit here and Thomas is such a wonderfully well educated person.
Caller: Indeed he is. Yeah. You could have a respect. I&#8217;m very appreciative of his cordial spirit there. But the two of you could have a long and ongoing conversation about does
Cy Kellett: Christ have one nature or two natures? You know? Right. And that might be convincing or not convincing, more convincing, less convincing to one or both of you, but fundamentally, one of you is saying, I accept what the Church teaches in union with the Pope. And one of you is saying, no, I don&#8217;t.
Karlo Broussard: That is correct. And what&#8217;s distinct about that question is versus the papacy question is that the former, the question about Christ, has to do with supernatural revelation. That has to do with what is revealed to us from God, which we cannot have access to or know by reason alone. The papacy question, we&#8217;re able to start from reason, from history. Right. And establish the historical grounds for the conclusion that there is a papacy, that there is an individual leader that Christ appointed to lead his flock here on earth. And once we have those historical grounds, then we can look to the judgments of the successors to St Peter concerning the supernatural truths of divine revelation. Once again, without that testimony, we&#8217;re left simply with our own educated guesses about what this supernatural revelation is. But also to psy, we would be also left with simply educated guesses concerning what is supernatural revelation, what are the sources of supernatural revelation? In order to have infallible knowledge about that, we would have to have an infallible testimony on which we could rely, which would be the apostles and their successors.
Caller: Again, Peter, thank you very much, Thomas. I hope you will get the book, and I hope we&#8217;ll get to talk again and maybe move beyond the question of the papacy into the nature of and the two natures and the one person of Jesus Christ, because that&#8217;s a good one, too. But there are lots of other folks on the line, and we have to take a break. Now. We&#8217;re asking you, why aren&#8217;t you Catholic.

Eastern Orthodoxy’s UNSOLVABLE Problem

As enlightened as we think we are in the twenty-first century West, we must speak of what is observable: that as a civilization, we have backslid into more-developed versions of former paganism and barbarity.
Our technological and scientific successes have created a façade of development, an illusion of advancement. We think we are so progressive and advanced, when in fact we are actually regressing as a human civilization. We have constructed a house of cards but have convinced ourselves (and forced the rest of the world to believe) that our foundation is steady and our current trajectory noble and beneficial to humanity.
We are at such a level of delusion and confusion that the singularity of God and his Son, Jesus Christ, is overshadowed by a subjective collection of personal deities. Regressing back to the times of pagan myths, we have placed Jesus Christ into a peculiar pantheon of false gods of our own devising. The Lord Jesus is trivialized and made to be one more personal god.
When humanity abandons God’s own revelation of himself, then anything is justified. Anything can become a god. And even Jesus Christ can be turned into anything a person wants. This also means that the Lord Jesus cannot be fully known, loved, or followed. For when the God who is Love has been deformed and turned into something other than what he truly is, then love itself becomes deformed. When the Creator is abandoned, the creature diminishes. As Love is abandoned, our ability to love shrinks. Only in the full truth of the living God, and through his Son, Jesus Christ, can we fully know love.
Pope St. John Paul II taught in his encyclical, Redemptor Hominis:
<blockquote>Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself.” If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity, and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly “expressed” and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! (10).</blockquote>
If the true God is abandoned for personal deities animated by the world’s fads, not only are we unable to know what love is, but we also cannot truly know ourselves. Full self-knowledge, too, is possible only through the mystery of Jesus Christ. John Paul II continues:
<blockquote>The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly—and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being—he must with his unrest, uncertainty, and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself.</blockquote>
On one occasion early in my priesthood, I was venting to a mentor about the lack of knowledge or gratitude many people show toward the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. It was discouraging for me to see so much indifference to the loving kindness the Lord Jesus has for us, and I was giving voice to this frustration.
This particular mentor was a senior priest who in his decades of priestly ministry had seen pretty much everything. As I moved from point to point, he gently and kindly nodded his head. After a while, I finished my diatribe, and he gave me a good stare. Then he said to me, “We tell people, ‘Jesus loves you,’ and we think they understand. We get frustrated when they don’t respond to the love of Jesus Christ, which we think is so clear.”
He cleared his throat and continued with a stronger pitch: “But we take so much for granted today. We say, ‘Jesus loves you,’ but people don’t understand Jesus, love, or even themselves. We have to start with the basics, with an initial proclamation of Jesus, of love, and of ourselves before God. We have to learn from the early Church and proclaim the gospel anew to a generation of unbelievers. Only after we give this core teaching to those around us can we truly say that people have dismissed the invitation Jesus Christ offers to us of his saving love. Otherwise, people are only rejecting what they do not understand.”
We all have to learn these truths. I’ve had to learn (and re-learn) them as a disciple and as a priest. The truths of God are so different from the lies of our fallen world that we need the constant help of grace and the witness of others to know God, to love him and others, and even to love ourselves. Either we choose this path, or another path will be thrust upon us.
And so, as a neo-secular form of paganism takes over the Western heart, all the world’s preoccupations—pleasure, power, comfort, autonomy, human affection, the market, political parties and ideologies—come to form a broken pantheon in the cosmos of fallen humanity, devoid of grace and marked by a raw restlessness that cannot be filled and only compels ever-greater expressions of self-worship and a will to power.
The early Church announced the oneness of God alongside the coming of the Messiah, the long-awaited anointed Savior. This announcement lent itself to the proclamation:
<blockquote>Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us (1 John 4:7–12).</blockquote>
The gospel inspired the early Church to present the one God as merciful and kind, slow to anger and abounding in goodness. They showed that he was not cruel, nor barbarous, nor petty. They showed the way of God to be a way guided by reason and love, part of a binding covenant that makes us the children of God. The early Christians’ faith, way of life, and message modeled for the fallen world the tenderness, affection, and loving affection of God.
As believers, we need to examine our own hearts. Have we fallen prey to the tendency to create our own gods, or to change the one true God so that he is merely a reflection of ourselves or our own beliefs and desires? Do we understand the radical singularity of Jesus Christ and abandon all notions that run contrary to his teachings and revelations? When we speak of God’s oneness, do we also speak of his love and kindness for all?

Wrong Jesus, Right Jesus

Tim Staples answers some criticisms of the legitimacy of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/fifty-years-of-vatican-ii">Vatican II</a>, such as its lack of condemned heresy or infallible doctrine, the scandal and poor liturgical practices that have followed, and its teaching that the fullness of Christianity subsists in the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Host: We have several questions typed in there, and one from Donald I wanted to share with you and get your response. Donald writes the following: &#8220;When will Catholic Answers admit Vatican II is neither Catholic nor a council? No defined dogma, no condemned heresy, and fifty years of scandal, Modernism, and rotten fruit of scandal afterwards. Catholicism is Christianity and does not subsist in it. Protestants are not Christians because they deny the True Presence. How obvious can this be?!&#8221;
Tim: And great questions, really. I appreciate you writing those in, but a couple of misconceptions:
Number one: a council is not a valid council because it defines something infallibly. In fact, there are numerous councils, if you go back to the four Lateran&#8211;well there&#8217;s actually five Lateran Councils&#8211;but of the five Lateran Councils, only two of them defined anything infallibly. The first three Lateran Councils didn&#8217;t define anything. They were disciplinary, you know, dealing even with clerical dress and all sorts of things like that. And there were a couple of other councils that did not define anything infallibly, so that&#8217;s simply incorrect from a Catholic perspective. A council doesn&#8217;t have to define anything infallibly in order to be a council, number one.
Number two, you have to be very careful before you start saying, &#8220;Well, there&#8217;s scandals and stuff that have happened after this council, so obviously that&#8217;s a bad council.&#8221; That would eliminate just about every one of our ecumenical councils, because if you look at the history of our Catholic Church, you know, we have ebbs and flows, but we&#8217;re sinners. You know? We&#8217;re good at it. We don&#8217;t deny that there have been centuries in the Church that have been very very corrupt, even up to and including Popes that have been corrupt, and so forth, especially leading up, for example, to the Council of Trent, we have&#8211; I mean we could go to various centuries in history and there&#8217;s lots of corruption.
But see, my brother, I would point out that that&#8217;s the reason why we have the Church. The grace of the Sacraments, Jesus gave it to us. Why? Because we&#8217;re in need. We&#8217;re not, as my good friend Jesse Romero often says, you know, the Church is not a museum of saints, it&#8217;s a hospital for sinners. So you don&#8217;t want to look at &#8220;Oh my goodness, look at this scandal,&#8221; because you might end up even rejecting our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. &#8220;Look at the scandal here! He ordained Judas!&#8221; Right? Jesus Himself ordained Judas, and look at the scandal here, and we could go down the list.
Now as, you know, as far as&#8230;what was the other point he made? The, uh&#8230;
Host: Well, Modernism, and scandal, and, well, let me look, Tim.
Tim:Yeah, I think there was one more.
Host: Somebody&#8211;oh, it got moved to the top, all right. Gimme a sec here, Tim.
Tim: Yeah, there was one other point, I think.
Host: And I cannot get to it. So it was&#8230;can you get to it Tim?
Tim: I&#8217;m gonna try. Okay, there you go. Donald, there we go. &#8220;No defined dogma, no condemned heresy, 50 years of scandal, Modernism, rotten fruit of scandal. Catholicism is Christianity and does not subsist in&#8211;&#8221; okay, that was another point.
That&#8217;s a little jab at the Council&#8217;s teaching that the fullness of Christianity subsists in the Catholic Church, and the argument is made, &#8220;Well then that means that Vatican II denies that the Catholic Church is the church that Jesus Christ established.&#8221; And that&#8217;s simply not true. The same language is used of the divine and human natures of Christ subsisting in the one person of Jesus Christ, for example, at the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century. Are we going to say, then, &#8220;That means somehow that&#8217;s a heresy, because then you&#8217;re saying that not all of the human and divine nature of Christ subsists in the one person.&#8221; No, actually, the teaching that the the fullness of Christianity subsists in the Catholic Church is a very profound way of saying that the Catholic Church is in fact the Church that Jesus Christ established. There&#8217;s no essential change in dogma from that.
In fact, the Vatican Council reaffirmed in Lumen Gentium paragraph 14, for example, that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church. However, we understand that people outside of the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church&#8211;and by the way, this is nothing new to Vatican II, this was taught by Pope St. Pius IX, for example, long before Vatican II. In fact, you can go all the way back to St. Justin Martyr in the second century, and I would argue Jesus Christ as well in John 15:22, He himself talks about, concerning the Jews that were rejecting Him, He said, &#8220;If I had not spoken to them, they would have no sin; now I have spoken to them, their sin remains,&#8221; which indicates to us that you&#8217;re not responsible for that which you do not know. Jesus himself taught that. And we could go to Romans 2:14 and other examples of that as well.
But the the bottom line is, we understand that for a Protestant, or anyone outside of the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church to be saved, they must be either joined or related to the Catholic Church, because all salvation comes through Jesus Christ in his Church. There has to be a relationship, but that relationship can come in mysterious ways known to God alone, through the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/does-indifference-equal-invincible-ignorance">invincible ignorance</a> of the person who is not responsible for for being where he is, if he&#8217;s never rejected the fullness of the truth as he knew it, then there&#8217;s that possibility of salvation. But that&#8217;s, none of that is heretical, Donald. That is simply a development from an understanding that goes all the way back to Jesus Christ.
And then as far as Protestants not being Christians because they deny the True Presence, that is simply denying the infallible teaching of our Catholic faith. In fact, the Council of Trent, we could go to, you know, the teaching of the Church perennially all the way back to the third century, this argument was had: &#8220;Whether the baptisms of heretics are valid?&#8221; That was a big argument in the third century, but it&#8217;s not any longer, all right? Pope Stephen, in the third century, and then you have, all the way forward, St. Agustine and forward, teach that as long as one has valid matter and form, as determined by the Church, a heretic&#8217;s baptism would be valid.
And Protestants in general&#8211;now there are some &#8220;Protestants,&#8221; though, I think my Protestant friends would say they&#8217;re not really Protestants, whose baptisms are questionable at times, because they&#8217;ve become so liberal. You know, like I remember reading recently, the United Church of Christ, they&#8217;ve become so liberal in denying essential teachings that you have to be careful which United Church of Christ you&#8217;re in, because some of the pastors don&#8217;t even believe, you know, possibly Jesus is God, or in the Trinity, and may not even have valid baptismal form, whereas some pastors you do. But generally speaking, Protestant baptisms are valid because they have valid matter and form, Donald, and that is an infallible teaching of the Church.
Host: Thank you very much for that question, Donald.

Defending Vatican II

For the Protestant Reformers, and for many Protestants today, justification by faith alone (sola fide) isn&#8217;t just the biggest issue separating Protestants from Catholics. It is &#8220;the central, chief article by which the Christian doctrine and the Christian Church stands and falls,&#8221; and without this teaching, Luther claimed that &#8220;the church of God cannot subsist one hour.&#8221; But is any of that true? Or did the Church subsist for 1500 years before the Reformers invented sola fide? Here&#8217;s what the finest Protestant scholars have to say about early Christianity&#8230; And what those early Christians had to say for themselves!