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Trent Horn explains why it is important to come to the fullness of understanding on theological divisions between Catholics and Protestants, such as Marian and Eucharistic doctrines, and demonstrates why the mere fact that the two churches disagree does not mean that no definitive answer can be found.
Transcript

Host: We go now to Len in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, listening on Sirius satellite radio. Len, you are on with Trent Horn, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: Good evening, guys. So I&#8217;m a lifelong Catholic, but I&#8217;ve studied Protestant theology probably at least as much as I&#8217;ve studied Catholicism. I have the same objection into both churches, and that is the extent to which both churches tend to divide over issues as to which there is no definitive answer on this side of Heaven. And the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/isnt-consubstantiation-more-incarnational-than-transubstantiation">transubstantiation/consubstantiation</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/hail-mary-conceived-without-sin">whether Mary was born with Original Sin</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/justified-by-faith-or-works-or-both">whether we&#8217;re saved by works</a>, whether works have any salvific value, and it just seems like there&#8217;s divisions over points that just simply cannot be definitively answered. And it causes me, you know, great heartache because theology tends to divide people, whereas mission work, for example, tends to unite people. I just wonder what your thoughts are about that.
Trent: Okay Len, I guess my first question would be: you&#8217;re saying that these issues such as the nature of the Eucharist or Marian dogmas or the nature of salvation can&#8217;t be resolved. Why do you think they can&#8217;t be resolved? Is the only reason you think they can&#8217;t be resolved is because people disagree over them?
Caller: Well, the problem&#8217;s the proof. I guess the question is, where do you look to find the answers to such questions as, for example, whether Mary was born with Original Sin, or whether the Holy Eucharist is actually Christ&#8217;s body or whether it&#8217;s a symbol. Protestants and Catholics look at the same Bible, essentially, and come to different conclusions, and yet they divide over issues like that.
Trent: Okay, sure. Well, I would say that where you would look would be the sources of divine revelation, which as Catholics we believe would be Sacred Scripture&#8211;so God&#8217;s Word in its written form in Sacred Scripture, God&#8217;s Word that has been passed on to the Church and sacred tradition&#8211;and the Church that Christ founded, what the Church teaches on these subjects, because God didn&#8217;t simply leave us with a Bible, He left us with a Church endowed with His authority that could be passed on to successors. So I would say that it can be resolved, these issues can be and have been resolved, the Church does definitively teach on these issues.
There are other issues, I agree with you, that the Church has not definitively taught about, that our&#8211;we are separated by the veil, if you will, and so the Church has not definitively taught, for example, what the exact nature of Purgatory is, for example. Or even issues related to Mary&#8217;s virginity, the Church has not definitively taught who the Brethren of the Lord are. Whether it&#8217;s definitive that they are cousins, or half siblings, whatever it may be; so there are issues where the Church has not definitively defined a subject, but then there&#8217;s issues where it has. And just because there&#8217;s disagreement, I don&#8217;t think that takes away from&#8211;you know, there&#8217;s disagreement, just some people are right and others are wrong.
Because, Len, look at it this way: you say, &#8220;Well, Catholics and Protestants look at the same thing, they disagree, so let&#8217;s not focus on that.&#8221; Would you agree that Christians and atheists can look at the same evidence in the natural world, and they disagree about whether God exists?
Caller: Sure.
Trent: Okay, but would that mean there&#8217;s no definitive answer to the question of whether God exists?
Caller: No, I would say not, no.
Trent: But why is that? Atheists look at the same evidence and they don&#8217;t come to that conclusion.
Caller: Well, we come from a different worldview. Atheists, for example, don&#8217;t accept the Bible as the Word. If you&#8217;re going to ask the question, I think part of the question has to be, where do you find the answer? And if you&#8217;re going to ask the question, for example, about how we were created, the atheist worldview is not Biblical, and obviously the Christian&#8217;s is. So where you stand is where you sit.
Trent: I think I see what you&#8217;re saying here about presuppositions a little bit. Do you think, though, that a person could use reason to show God exists? That you don&#8217;t have to assume the Bible is true, that you could just make an argument based on nature that shows God exists? Do you think that&#8217;s possible?
Caller: Well sure, I know about the ontological arguments and all the arguments that are positive, but, you know, even those have weaknesses as well. I mean, at some point we can reason through, but at some point we can&#8217;t understand and we have to apprehend what we don&#8217;t really comprehend.
Trent: Sure, and Len, I think that this example would show that on important issues, like the existence of God or the deity of Christ, Christians and non-Christians, whether they&#8217;re atheists or Jews or Muslims, will disagree over evidence they look at, but you and I would agree that Christians are correct on this even though there&#8217;s disagreement, and we would agree there are still definitive answers.
And your your point about &#8220;Well, it&#8217;s about ultimately your own worldview,&#8221; I agree with you, so that same logic would carry over to the Catholics and Protestants. We look at the same evidence, we&#8217;re gonna be approaching it in different ways, and we come to our foundations of our worldviews in different ways; but there are still definitive answers there even if people don&#8217;t agree.
There&#8217;s one last point I&#8217;d like to address before we move on: you say &#8220;Well, theology divides, but things like mission work unites.&#8221; But I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s necessarily bad if something divides. For example, you would&#8211;would you agree that Jesus, during His earthly ministry, what He taught, He divided people. Wouldn&#8217;t you say?
Caller: Oh absolutely, no doubt about that.
Trent: Yeah, but that&#8217;s okay, because truth is ultimately going to divide people between those who accept the truth and those who reject the truth. So it&#8217;s okay to cause division; in fact Jesus Himself said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve come to bring division, to set father against son, brother against brother,&#8221; because the truth does divide people. That in itself isn&#8217;t bad; it&#8217;s necessary, so that we can help people who are in error come to the truth to pass over that dividing line, if you will.
So that&#8217;s probably how I would take a look at all that, and I still think theology would be important, and what the Church has defined on dogmatic issues related to the nature of the Eucharist, or Mary, I think that we have very good evidence for that from Scripture, from tradition, and from the teaching office of the Church. And if you would like more information about those subjects and their foundations in the deposit of faith and divine revelation, I&#8217;d recommend visiting our website Catholic.com and looking up those points, and I think you&#8217;ll get a lot more from there. So thanks very much for calling in.

Are Theological Divisions Pointless?

Karlo Broussard discusses the sacred tradition concerning who the first souls were to enter into the Beatific Vision with Christ when he ascended into Heaven.

Who Was the First Saint?

A caller asks Tim Staples why he believes in the bible when the writers make claims that science has disproved. The caller uses the global flood as an example, and Tim responds citing biblical references, church history, and church councils.
Transcript:
So, I wanted to ask, why do you believe the Bible, when the Bible makes accessible claims, disproven by modern science?
And there&#8217;s not&#8230; Yeah, the only problem is Gabe, there&#8217;s no claims made by the Bible that are disproven by modern science.
The global flood?
Okay, well Gabe, I don&#8217;t believe there was a global flood.
So why does the Bible trust it does? The Bible doesn&#8217;t say it does. See, Gabe, understand that when the ancient people&#8230; Now, by the way, I should say, Gabe, that as Catholics, we are permitted because there&#8217;s never been an infallible pronouncement from the church that declared there was a worldwide
flood in a strict literal sense. The church has never taught that. You can go through all 21 ecumenical councils, teachings of&#8230; you know, definitive teachings of popes, and it simply is not there. The fact is, the church permits us to believe that there was no universal flood. Understand that, Gabe, when the inspired scriptures were written,
they are&#8230; You know, a lot of people have a wrong idea of what that means.
Inspired scripture does not mean that God dictated everything to the inspired authors so that it is God himself that is using perfect grammar, perfect language, perfect even science. No, we believe that the inspired authors use their intellect, their will, their understanding of culture and language. In fact, this is why some books of the Bible, even in the New Testament, have better Greek than others. Some of them&#8230; I remember my Greek professor saying, you know, some of them, you know, a few of them, the grammar is not very good at times. And others like&#8230; I mean, Book of Hebrews is a very&#8230;
It&#8217;s written by somebody who really knew Greek really, really well, and it was in St. Paul. But we&#8217;re not exactly sure who. It may have been Apollos, may have been&#8230; It was probably someone, Pauline, who had contact with Paul, but it certainly wasn&#8217;t. It&#8217;s pretty certain today that it was not Paul. But anyway, here&#8217;s the point. Is that they will use also categories that were well known at the time to communicate truth. Let me&#8230; Gabe, I&#8217;ll give you an example.
A weatherman today in San Diego may say, &#8220;Sunrise tomorrow is&#8230;&#8221; What? &#8220;6 o&#8217;clock or 5.45, whenever it is.&#8221;
Would we say that, oh boy, that weatherman, he must be a geocentrist because he believes the sun rises. Oh my gosh, how can he be so stupid? But no, he doesn&#8217;t believe the sun actually rises and the earth stays still, but we use what we call phenomenological language. In fact, all languages employ phenomenological language to express realities as they are perceived. Like in Daniel chapter 12, when Daniel talks about the resurrection and says, &#8220;Those who are asleep in the dust will rise.&#8221; Now, he doesn&#8217;t literally mean that people are sleeping in the dust and they&#8217;re going to rise. But phenomenologically, if you look at a dead body and it comes to life, it looks like it&#8217;s sleeping and it comes to life and rises. And so that&#8217;s the way language develops over thousands and thousands of years, is we speak of things in the way that they appear. So, no, the weatherman is not saying he&#8217;s a geocentrist, he&#8217;s simply using language the way the language is employed at the time in which he is speaking in the same way. When you talk about the flood, the flood can be understood as, yes, the whole world was flooded, but it can be understood as the whole world as perceived by the ancient writer. The ancient writer had no idea that there was a continent on the other side of the planet. He had no idea Columbus wouldn&#8217;t come along for a long, long time. So, his whole world flooded, absolutely. So, in that sense, yes. And by the way, there is a lot of evidence, yes, scientific evidence, not for the entire world being flooded,
but for a massive flood or perhaps a series of floods. Most likely, at least it may well have been one massive flood that various different cultures comment on that are from that area. I mean, that&#8217;s one explanation. There could have been multiple massive floods, but most likely there was this massive flood in antiquity that was devastating,
took away entire peoples in particularly populated areas and so forth, and that&#8217;s the way it gets communicated down through the centuries. And of course, God used that and Noah and so forth as a, you know,
to kind of further God&#8217;s covenantal relationship with his people. So, the thing is, Gabe, and I know you and I have talked about this before, there&#8217;s a fundamental flaw with folks who want to employ the Bible as a scientific book, and it is not. It is a book about salvation. It uses real history, absolutely, and I believe the flood was a real historical event in order to communicate essential teachings concerning salvation. But we don&#8217;t want to, and I&#8217;ll toss out another idea here, Gabe. The book of Genesis is not about talking snakes.
You know, we don&#8217;t have to believe as Catholics there was a literal talking snake. The inspired author uses a story that was a popular story in the culture in which he lived. And in fact, there are similar stories told, for example, the Anuma Elish among the Babylonians, and we have other cosmological sorts of stories of beginnings in other cultures. They&#8217;re very different from what we find in Genesis in many ways, but in some ways, there are parallels, which seem to indicate that there was somewhat of a common story that was told way back when, but with the divergences of cultures and so forth, we have divergences of religions as well. And so, there you go.
Hey, thanks for watching. If you liked this Catholic Answer, be sure to like, subscribe, and check out our livestreams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 PM Pacific, or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or our Catholic Answers app.

Has Science Disproved Biblical Claims?

The belief that Mary is the mother of God is not unique to Catholicism. The vast majority of Christians (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutherans, and Anglicans) accept this dogma, with only a minority in the Protestant community objecting.
One text appealed to in support of this belief is Luke 1:43. There, Elizabeth, inspired by the Holy Spirit, exclaims to Mary, who just arrived in her presence, “Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Since Elizabeth was a good Jew, and Jews normally used the word Lord in the place of the tetragrammaton (God’s name), YHWH, Elizabeth is calling Mary the mother of God. Therefore, we have a possible biblical foundation for the dogma of Mary, mother of God (see also CCC 448, 495, 2677).
There are many comebacks that Protestants have to the belief in Mary as the mother of God. But there’s really only one counterargument to Luke 1:43. It targets the assumption that “Lord” is intended by Elizabeth to refer to Almighty God.
Protestant Bible scholar Walter L. Liefeld argues that we shouldn’t interpret this as a reference to Mary, “mother of God.” His alternative interpretation is that Elizabeth was referring to Jesus as <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Luke.html?id=0S4aDgAAQBAJ">the Messiah</a>:
<blockquote>Nowhere in the [New Testament] is Mary called “mother of God.” Deity is not confined to the person of Jesus (we may say, “Jesus is God,” but not all of “God is Jesus”). She was, however, the mother of Jesus the Messiah and Lord (834).</blockquote>
The evidence he gives is the fact that Luke frequently uses “Lord” as a title—95 out of 166 occurrences in the synoptics—and not every one is charged with a divine meaning. Moreover, Liefeld argues, Jesus is called “Lord” elsewhere in the Lukan birth narrative in a non-divine way (“For to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord”—Luke 2:11).
It’s not clear whether Luke uses “Lord,” in reference to Jesus, in 2:11 in a divine or non-divine way. There is nothing in the text that suggests either interpretation. Liefeld simply asserts its divine use without argumentation. Given such ambiguity, we can dismiss this text as evidence for Liefeld’s conclusion.
There’s no doubt, however, that the Greek word translated “Lord,” kurios, is used in a non-divine way in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:5), and even by Luke (e.g., 12:36, 37, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47). However, it’s not the word by itself that indicates that Mary is the mother of God. It’s how Luke sees Elizabeth using it.
There are several details that indicate that Luke is drawing a parallel between Mary and the Old Testament Ark of the Covenant. Take Elizabeth’s words themselves, for example. They almost perfectly mirror David’s in 2 Samuel 6:9, when he says in the presence of the ark, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” Other parallels include John the Baptist leaping for joy in the presence of Mary in Luke 1:44 and David “making merry” before the ark in 2 Samuel 6:5. According to Luke 1:39, Mary remains with Elizabeth for three months, similar to how the ark remained in the house of Obededom for the same amount of time according to 2 Samuel 6:11.
Since Luke is paralleling Elizabeth’s “mother of my Lord” with David’s “ark of the Lord,” it stands to reason that Luke intends for us to take Elizabeth’s cry as a reference to almighty God. “Lord” in the phrase “ark of the Lord” wasn’t a reference to the Messiah. The ark was the ark of almighty God. Therefore, we have good reason to interpret Luke 1:43 as a reference to Mary being the mother of God, contrary to Liefeld’s claim.
Now, a Protestant at this juncture might argue that if we take some parallels with the ark, then we need to take all of them. Protestant apologist James White <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL987171M/The_Roman_Catholic_controversy">poses this argument</a>:
<blockquote>Must Mary have been stolen by God’s enemies for a time, so that she could be brought back to the people of God with great rejoicing (2 Sam. 6:14-15)? Who was Mary&#8217;s Uzzah (2 Sam. 6:3-8)? [Catholic apologist Patrick] Madrid draws a further parallel between the three months the ark was with Obededom and the three months Mary was with Elizabeth. What, then, is the parallel with David’s action of sacrificing a bull and a fattened calf when those who were carrying the ark had taken six steps (2 Sam. 6:13) (205)?</blockquote>
White charges that the use of Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant is violating rules of scriptural interpretation, since he perceives it as picking and choosing “those aspects of Mary’s life [a Catholic] wishes to parallel in the ark and those which he does not.”
In response, there’s a hidden principle on which White seems to base his argument—namely, that some parallels requires all parallels. But this is simply false. That’s not how prophetic foreshadowing or intertextuality works. The New Testament authors themselves, for example, don’t honor the principle contained in White’s argument. Consider the first two verses of Hosea 11:
<blockquote>When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and burning incense to idols.</blockquote>
Matthew takes the phrase “out of Egypt I called my son” in the first statement as a prefigurement of the baby Jesus’ return from the flight to Egypt (Matt. 2:15). Yet Matthew does not intend the latter part of the passage to refer to Jesus: Jesus did not go away from God, sacrifice to the Baals, and burn incense to their images.
There are numerous examples of this in the New Testament’s use of the Old. Whenever prophetic foreshadowing is in play, some elements foreshadow, and some don’t. There are continuities and discontinuities. If the New Testament authors employ this type of hermeneutic when relating the Old Testament to the New, it’s legitimate for Catholics to do the same.
So neither of the above counterarguments undermines a Christian’s appeal to Luke 1:43 as biblical evidence for Mary as mother of God. This being the case, we have confirmation by the Holy Spirit himself, who inspired Elizabeth to utter the words “mother of my Lord,” that Mary is indeed the Theotokos, the God-bearer.

Protestants Against Mom

Using Fictional Writing to Glorify God

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DAY 365
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CHALLENGE
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“Why should I pay attention to the Bible at all? It’s an ancient book written by people of limited understanding. Besides, other religions have their own scriptures, too. Why are they any less important?”
DEFENSE
The Christian scriptures are unique and valuable.
The mere fact that the books of the Bible were written a long time ago is no reason to look down on or dismiss them. To do so would be chrono-logical snobbery. Just because a person wrote before you doesn’t mean that person was wrong. If it did, we would have to dismiss all works written in the past, obliterating our knowledge of history and prevent- ing knowledge from being passed from one generation to another.
The question is not when a work was written but whether it contains truth. Because of the growth of various fields of knowledge, we may expect more recently written works to contain more of certain types of truth—e.g., truths about math or science—but the information that we seek from Scripture isn’t on those topics. Instead, we are seeking truth of a religious nature—e.g., about God and his dealings with man—and this is an area that is largely beyond the powers of natural reason to investigate for itself.
Consequently, for us to have this information, God must take the initiative: He must reveal himself to man. If God does so and when God does so is entirely up to him. For it to happen at all, it must take place at some point in human history, and—unless God were to make contact with man for the very first time at the end of the world—future ages would look back on that time and view it as ancient. That’s not an indication it is false or that he didn’t do it. The question, therefore, is what evidence we have that God made contact with man and that the Bible preserves what he revealed to us.
Here apologetics becomes relevant. In particular, the arguments supporting God’s existence and the occurrence of miracles, especially the Resurrection of Jesus, play an important role. The first set of arguments support the proposition that there is a God who might choose to contact mankind, and the second support the Bible as the record of the resulting revelation. Other religions do not have comparable evidence.
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Ancient Scriptures

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to tackle one of the most common questions about the life of faith: If God already knows everything, including our needs, what&#8217;s the point of prayer? Joe explains how prayer isn’t about informing God, but about drawing closer to Him—cooperating with His will, growing in trust, and participating in the divine plan.
Transcript:
Caller: I&#8217;ve been recently just like, looking into religion in general as well as Catholicism. So my question was that if God&#8217;s will is always going to be done, what is the purpose of prayer?
Joe: Ah, that&#8217;s a great question. There&#8217;s a great bit in Matthew chapter 6 about this. Jesus has this kind of funny line where he tells us not to pray like the Gentiles. This is Matthew 6, verse 8, because he says, your Father knows what you need before you ask him. But then he says, pray then like this. And he gives us the Lord&#8217;s Prayer, the Our Father.
And you want to stop and say, hold on a second. Didn&#8217;t you just say God knows what we actually need before we ask him? Like, I&#8217;m not giving God any new information when I pray. All he&#8217;s getting are my worst ideas about what should happen. This is not improving at the level of, like, divine knowledge of reality.
What&#8217;s going to happen? So the reason is the will of God isn&#8217;t just for some external thing to happen. The will of God is for me to share in divine life. And that means praying. That means cooperating with God.
So you go all the way back to Genesis, and after God chooses Abraham, one of the first things that he does is tell him about his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Why? So that Abraham will intercede before God. And even though Sodom and Gomorrah is so corrupt, they still are destroyed. Abraham&#8217;s intervention works in saving the righteous and saving Lot and his family.
And we&#8217;re told that in the next chapter that God remembered Abraham and saved Lot. So if you want to think about it like this, there&#8217;s a logical way. If I tell my kids, eat your vegetables if you want to have dessert. Now, my will is accomplished if they eat their vegetables and then have dessert. My will is technically also accomplished if they don&#8217;t eat their vegetables and don&#8217;t have dessert. They didn&#8217;t meet the condition, and so the result didn&#8217;t happen.
So your prayers actually can change things. Not for the worse, for the better. Does that distinction make sense?
In both cases, the will would be achieved if you said, eat your vegetables if you want to have dessert.
Caller: Could you give me an example that is like a positive? So let&#8217;s say I prayed for, like, I don&#8217;t know, like a good test grade or something. How would that apply to your principle?
Joe: Yeah. That God wants your success more though he wants your prayers, your growth, and like your spiritual success, if you will. And so he will often reward prayer in various ways because the good of you praying is something that is to be encouraged.
And so in James chapter five, we get some concrete cases of this. Beginning in verse 16, he says, the prayer of a righteous man has great power and its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain. And for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit.
So prayer can actually change the outcome of things. And you say, why would God allow that? Because his plan is for our cooperation in divine life. And prayer is one of the ways we share in divine life. We are in union in relationship with God, and He rewards that relationship.
Caller:  So does that mean his will is not predetermined in that, like, my entire course of my life is not already seen by God because is he not omniscient?
Joe: So he already knows. He is omniscient. He knows what you&#8217;re going to do. But knowing what someone is going to do isn&#8217;t the same as forcing them to do it. You know, if you are up on a hill and you see like a train track and see that, like, the track is awry and two trains are going to collide with each other, you might see all of that happening. You&#8217;re not causing it to happen.
Now, divine foreknowledge doesn&#8217;t work just like that. I just give that as an example to say God knows how you will respond freely to the prompts that he gives you. And that&#8217;s another factor in this. When you&#8217;re praying, when you&#8217;re doing these things, and it&#8217;s having a result that&#8217;s not thwarting the divine will, that is the unfolding of the divine will.
Like, God&#8217;s plan involves your free cooperation, and he knew how you were going to freely cooperate, and he planned that into his plan from all eternity.
Caller: Okay, I think I understand what you&#8217;re getting at. Thank you so much for your help.
Joe: Absolutely. Please continue to call as you are on this exploration. It&#8217;s really beautiful, the thing you&#8217;re exploring, and you&#8217;re grappling with a very big question. And it&#8217;s okay if it&#8217;s daunting at first and if it seems kind of hard to put all the pieces together. That&#8217;s absolutely normal.
Cy: If you&#8217;d like, Laura, I would send you our big book of Catholic answers just for your interest in reading. As you have questions, there are 250 questions answered in there.

Why Pray If God Already Knows Everything?

When Did the Early Churches Recognize a Pope?

This has been <a href="https://www.usccb.org/topics/marriage-and-family-life-ministries/national-marriage-week">National Marriage Week</a>, and of course today is St. Valentine’s. A double reason, then, to honor one of the primordial forces of human nature: the inner drive of man and woman to seek out and cling to one another in a permanent, exclusive embrace, for their mutual aid and the bearing and raising of children.
This force, however, once as constant as gravity and as powerful as the sun, seems to be… slipping.
Not only have marriage rates been tumbling for a generation; now young adults in the West aren’t <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/02/14/gen-z-love-instagram-tiktok-dating/78336999007/">even coupling and fornicating like they used to</a>, either. Everyone has a theory as to why:
<ul>
<li>Effortless access to pornography is sating or dulling the desire for sex that used to motivate a young man to pair with a young woman (and ideally to marry her).</li>
<li>The nonstop entertainments and virtual relationships afforded by devices are disincentivizing both men and women to socialize in person.</li>
<li>Economic factors, real or perceived, are making those virtual relationships, and casual group hangouts, easier to fit into the budget than traditional dating (and certainly marriage and children).</li>
<li>Some ambient cultural or environmental pollutant is messing with young people’s minds and bodies: the sexual confusion wrought by pervasive gay and trans activism; stunting of social skills during the Covid years; residual hormones from sixty years of artificial contraception leeching into in our water supply; vaccines or seed oils or chemtrails or whatever your public-health soapbox is.</li>
</ul>
Whatever the reason or reasons, the West is <a href="https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-dramatic-declines-global-fertility-rates-set-transform">staring smack at a crisis</a> unprecedented in history: a systemic loss of desire for one generation to court, mate, form families, and create another generation.
In this context, we might take a fresh look at recent discussion over the state of Catholic marriage preparation. (I spent several years as a diocesan marriage &amp; family minister, preparing thousands of couples for matrimony, and the subject is of special interest to me.) In recent years, Pope Francis and some bishops have advocated for much longer and more-stringent marriage-prep programs than most dioceses currently require.
This has <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/cna/should-the-church-require-a-year-of-marriage-prep-catholic-formators-weigh-in">divided Catholic opinion</a> along unpredictable lines: some of the usual papal critics like it and some of the usual papal defenders are opposed—and everything in between.
Me? I see arguments for both sides, but I think I come down firmly on one of them.
The pro side for making marriage preparation longer and more involved boils down to one principle: more knowledge is better. Marriage is a “great mystery,” as St. Paul said, and great mysteries require deep and careful attention. How else are we going to reduce Catholic divorce rates and promote marital happiness, if not by a thorough and even demanding pre-marriage boot camp that gets couples truly ready for what lies ahead?
The con side says, yes, marriage is a deep and ineffable mystery. But it’s a mystery we slowly come to understand through living it. The basics of marriage are easy enough to teach and make people understand; after that, it’s on-the-job training.
You might have guessed that, since I put it second, I side with the con folks—and you’d be right. And I think today’s poll data about cratering attitudes toward dating and marrying throw the con arguments into sharp relief. How the heck are we going to encourage marriage by making it seem more complicated and making it harder to do?
Men and women have been marrying naturally for many millennia. Christian men and women have been uniting themselves to each other sacramentally for nearly two. Most of them have been illiterate, minimally catechized, without specialized resources. They had no problem forming exclusive unions, bearing and raising children, and usually staying together until death.
Sure, every age has its troubles, and the Church in every age should respond to them. Today, for instance, the best marriage and family ministry includes joyful apologetics for Catholic teaching on the marital goods of fecundity and indissolubility, because these two goods have been under special attack since the Sexual Revolution.
But, the basics of marriage are the same in every age. It doesn’t take a master’s degree or hundreds of hours of special seminars for couples to know what they’re signing up for and consent to it. You used to be two; now you are one. You can’t have anyone else. It can’t be undone. Now go make babies if you can.
All the rest—“getting to know each other” and improving communication and setting goals and managing finances and changing diapers and learning to say sorry and everything else—this is the work of a lifetime. The theological and spiritual mysteries of the sacrament and its saving graces are likewise the stuff of lifelong growth and reflection. Let’s not overwhelm our already-anxious younger generations by making them think they need to work out all of it before they say, “I do.”
Or, indeed, before they say, “Will you?” Or even, “Want to grab some coffee?”
&nbsp;
&nbsp;

Don’t Overcomplicate Marriage!

Christians have always considered the bodily remains of their heroic martyrs to be their greatest treasures. Many of them were killed in the sports arenas of the day. They were champions who fought and won—didn’t cave under the fear, the pressure, or the pain. Refusing to recant their faith in Christ, they willingly sacrificed their lives for him. They recalled that he had laid down his life for them on the cross. To be worthy, they needed to do the same for him—and they did it willingly.
<blockquote>Calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34-35).
</blockquote>
St. Ignatius of Antioch boldly proclaimed his faith in Christ, and his willingness to be devoured by lions in the Colosseum in Rome, in the year 107. The holy bishop wrote, “Please let me be thrown to the wild beasts; through them I can reach God.” An eyewitness said,
<blockquote>Only the more solid parts of his holy relics [bones] were left, which were carried to Antioch and wrapped in linen—a priceless treasure bequeathed to the Holy Church.</blockquote>
In the year 155, eyewitnesses to the martyrdom of the aged bishop Polycarp of Smyrna recalled that
<blockquote>the centurion put [Polycarp’s] body in the middle . . . and burned it. And so, afterwards, we took up his bones, more valuable than precious stones and finer than gold, and put them in a proper place. There, as far as we were able, the Lord will permit us to meet together in gladness and joy and to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom, both in memory of those who fought the fight and for the training and preparation of those who will fight.</blockquote>
The apostles suffered similar gruesome deaths for their Lord. Their memories are preserved in words, but even more so in their bones. St. Paul was beheaded outside the walls of Rome, and his bones were recently rediscovered wrapped in purple cloth, the sign of royalty.
Bones were also recently discovered under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. They were wrapped in purple-dyed cloth with golden thread. Testing concluded that they were the bones of an average-height, robust first-century man between 60 and 70 years of age. Based on reliable ancient writings and tradition, Peter, the chief of the apostles, was imprisoned in the dank and dark Mamertine Prison by Emperor Nero along with Paul. One misty morning, he and Paul were drawn up from the miserable cistern. Paul was beheaded outside the walls of Rome on the Via Ostia.
The Ager Vaticanus was a swampy area across the Tiber River from the city of Rome. The obelisk towering above St. Peter’s Square today was in the center of Nero’s Circus. In chains, Peter was marched over the bridge to the Ager Vaticanus as a spectacle for the jeering crowds. Not being a Roman citizen, he was prepared for crucifixion. He claimed he was not worthy to die like his Lord and insisted on being crucified upside-down. After Peter expired in the shadow of the obelisk, his limp body was ignominiously buried in the hillside. Nero hoped he was gone and forgotten.
Nero had no idea what he had started when he buried Peter in the necropolis—the “City of the Dead.” Peter was <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/st-peter-ceo-of-the-catholic-church">not just a fisherman</a> from Galilee; Jesus had chosen him to be the head of his Church, and now he became a martyr and a hero. The early Christians wrapped his bones in purple cloth sewn with golden thread. The believers flocked to pray at his rustic burial site, which soon became a shrine. Others who died wanted to be buried near his bones. No one forgot where his precious relics were preserved.
After the Protestant “Reformation,” many tried to deny the primacy of Peter by claiming he was never in Rome. “Show us in the Bible where it says he was in Rome!” One can ask this question only if he insists on “Bible alone” and fails to find any explicit verses. But a careful study of Scripture and the historical record leaves no doubt. Peter arrived in Rome after years of leading the Church in Jerusalem (Acts 15:4, 7) and as bishop of Antioch, as affirmed by the early Church Fathers. It appears he evangelized much of Asia Minor (1 Peter 1:1) before arriving in Rome. In my book <a href="https://www.steveraysstore.com/upon-this-rock-signed-by-author/">Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church</a>, I provide forty-seven pages of documented archaeological and historical evidence, and the matter is put to rest.
In Rome, Peter exercised the authority of the keys that Jesus had delegated to him. Rome was established as the See of Peter, the mother church of the world, and the circular medallions on the façade of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/st-john-lateran-pray-for-us">St. John Lateran</a> still declare that fact today.
<img class="size-full wp-image-150139 alignright" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/lateran-medallion.jpg" alt="St. Peter Necropolis lateran" width="332" height="208" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/lateran-medallion.jpg 332w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/lateran-medallion-300x188.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 332px) 100vw, 332px"/>Though he was murdered and buried, Peter’s fame and authority long outlasted Nero. In 313, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, and to honor “the Rock” upon which the Church was built, he undertook one of the most significant earth-moving projects of ancient times, moving Vatican Hill over the tomb of Peter, upon which he built the first magnificent church—the Old St. Peter’s Basilica. Everyone remembered that one sarcophagus containing the remains of Peter. This shrine in his honor secured and protected the knowledge of the site for future generations.
In the 1500s, the new and grand St. Peter&#8217;s Basilica was built over Peter&#8217;s tomb. If you dropped a plumb line from the center of the main dome, it would pass through the papal altar and right down to the bones of Peter.
In the 1940s, while shoring up the foundation of the church, archaeologists discovered a well preserved necropolis, a city of the dead, containing burial places, paintings, sarcophagi, and urns from the first century. They found the marble sarcophagus of Peter with some bones still intact and wrapped in purple fabric. Pope Paul VI announced that the bones of Peter had been rediscovered.
Several excellent books have been written on this subject, and the subterranean necropolis can be visited today under the basilica, with reservations made in advance.
In 2026, we will all be invited on a cinematic tour, spearheaded by <a href="https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2025-12/a-documentary-film-about-peter-s-tomb-guided-by-chris-pratt.html">actor Chris Pratt</a>, of the archaeological discoveries under St. Peter’s Basilica. We will experience this ancient wonder. This film will doubtless demonstrate definitively how the Church has proved and documented Peter’s presence, martyrdom, and burial in Rome.

Yes, Peter Was Really There

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Does the Bible actually allow abortion?

There’s a scene in the 1979 comedy The Jerk in which a madman has randomly targeted dim-witted gas station attendant Navin Johnson (Steve Martin) for assassination. The madman’s aim is off, and he ends up shooting the oil cans directly behind Navin, prompting his memorable line, “He hates these cans! Stay away from the cans!”
Navin persists in this confusion until his boss Harry (Jackie Mason) corrects him: “He doesn’t want to put holes in the cans, he wants to put holes in you!” Until that point, Navin couldn’t see past the cans to understand what was going on. The cans were just an inadvertent symbol of the madman’s rage.
I’m reminded of that scene in reading the 1927 talk (and later, essay) <a href="https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/whynot.html">Why I Am Not a Christian</a>, in which the British philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that Jesus was not, in fact, “the best and the wisest of men.” To be sure, Russell accepted certain of Christ’s teachings, even claiming to ”agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do” on teachings such as not judging, turning the other cheek, and so forth. But in particular areas, Russell found Jesus’ morals lacking. To wit:
<blockquote>Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. “He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, he came if haply he might find anything thereon; and when he came to it he found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter forever” . . . and Peter . . . saith unto him: “Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away.” This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above him in those respects.</blockquote>
In other words: “He hates this fig tree! Stay away from the fig tree!”
I cannot help but wonder how Russell would have approached a passage like 1 Kings 11:26-40, in which the prophet Ahijah tears a garment into twelve pieces and instructs the king to pick up ten of them, foreshadowing the division of the Israelites into the ten northern tribes (Israel) and the two southern tribes (Judah). Reading this, would he seek to understand why the prophet was mad at a garment and object that the garment had done nothing wrong? Or would he understand (as he apparently failed to in his objection to Jesus’ conduct with the fig tree) that the action here is symbolic?
In the case of Jesus and the fig tree, the symbolism of Jesus’ action should have made immediate sense, for before cursing the fig tree Jesus gave the Parable of the Fig Tree, making the symbolic meaning clear (Luke 13:6-9):
<blockquote>And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Lo, these three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down; why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Let it alone, sir, this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure. And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”</blockquote>
This imagery is nothing new. As the prophet Isaiah declared, “[T]he vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” (Isa. 5:7).
Jesus gave the parable of the fig tree “on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem” (Luke 13:22), and it’s at the culmination of this journey that we see him cursing the fig tree. Here’s how St. Mark describes the scene:
<blockquote>On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it. [&#8230;.] As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Master, look! The fig tree which you cursed has withered” (Mark 11:12-14, 20-21).</blockquote>
The fig tree isn’t a moral agent. It’s not self-aware. And it’s not being punished. Rather, the fig tree is an obvious reference to Israel’s spiritual sterility. You may have noticed an ellipsis in the above passage: that’s because between Jesus cursing the fig tree and Peter remarking on it the next day, Jesus went into Jerusalem and drove the money-changers out of the temple while saying “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17). Rather than interrupting the cursing of the fig tree, this action draws out its meaning more clearly: judgment is being visited upon Israel, and particularly Jerusalem.
It would be easy to view this simply as judgment upon fruitless Israel, but Jesus makes clear that the lesson also applies to each one of us. At the Last Supper, he put it in these terms:
<blockquote>I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned (John 14:1-6).</blockquote>
Spiritual fruitfulness is required in the Christian life. Like a bicycle that either moves forward or falls over, there’s no place for stagnant spirituality. In the parable of the talents, the spiritually sterile Christian is depicted as an unprofitable “worthless servant” and cast out of paradise (Matt. 25:30). We are called to abide in Christ, and through him, to bear much fruit.
This leaves one mystery. Mark specifies that Jesus “found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13). But if that’s the case, why curse the fig tree? <a href="http://www.escrivaworks.org/book/the_way-chapter-15.htm">St. Josemaría Escrivá</a> understood it this way: “Don’t tell me you have excuses. It availed the fig tree little, relates the Evangelist, that it was not the season for figs when our Lord came to it to look for them.” By way of further explanation, <a href="http://www.escrivaworks.org/book/friends_of_god-point-51.htm">he said</a>:
<blockquote>Our Lord comes to pick [figs], knowing full well that he won’t find any at this time of year. However, when the tree proves to be barren in spite of its apparent fertility and luxuriant leaves, Jesus commands, “Let no man ever eat fruit of yours hereafter.”
Hard words, indeed! May you never more bear fruit! How must the disciples have felt, especially if they considered that it was the Wisdom of God who had thus spoken? Jesus curses the fig tree because in it he has found only the appearance of fruitfulness — many leaves. Let this be a lesson to us. There is no excuse for being unproductive. Some might say “I don’t know enough&#8230;” But that is no excuse. Or else, “I am unwell, I haven’t much talent, the conditions are not right, my surroundings&#8230;” These aren’t excuses either. How pitiful the man who adorns himself with the foliage of a false apostolate, who has all the outward appearance of leading a fruitful life, but is not sincerely attempting to yield fruit!</blockquote>
Everyone who neglects to bear spiritual fruit can point to some excuse: I’m not a priest or religious; I don’t know the Faith well enough; I’m not a good enough person; my friends don’t want to hear about the faith; I’m too busy right now, etc. Each of us can find some reason why it’s not our season to flourish, why we should wait until later. In cursing a tree that also seemed to have an “excuse” for not flourishing, Jesus is showing us what he thinks of this excuse-making.
This also explains why both Matthew and Mark specify that the tree was a fig tree with “nothing on it but leaves only” (Matt. 21:19). The first mention of fig leaves in Scripture is back in the Garden of Eden. At the moment of the Fall, “the eyes of both [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons” (Gen. 3:7). This is where we get the English idiom <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fig%20leaf">fig leaf</a>, referring to “something that conceals or camouflages, usually inadequately or dishonestly.”
When Jesus arrives at the tree, he finds no fruitfulness, just fig leaves. Let the same not be said of each of us on Judgment Day.

Why Does Jesus Curse the Fig Tree?

When Protestants say that they have a “<a href="https://youtu.be/rRMgYS1Taes?si=2BX51uJzZfeEjKTF">fallible list of infallible books</a>,” they run into disaster. How so?
If the canon list of Protestants is “fallible” or “potentially wrong,” then it’s also technically possible that Protestants have books in their canon that God didn’t inspire. Thus, they can’t even say that they have “a fallible list of infallible books,” as that would be presumptive. They should instead say, “We hope to only have infallible books in this fallible list.”
This is a disaster. Many protestants, for example, use 1 Timothy 2:12 against women being pastors: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Most biblical scholars today, however, do not think Paul wrote 1 Timothy and the other two Pastoral Epistles (2 Timothy and Titus).
Philip H. Towner, who spent his academic career responding to the arguments of the scholarly majority, ultimately <a href="https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467423663/the-letters-to-timothy-and-titus/">admitted</a> that “it is not possible to prove the authenticity of the letters to Timothy and Titus.” To be clear, Towner did not deny Pauline authorship. He just stressed that the case against the skeptical side isn’t a knockout. In other words, the available evidence allows for valid and reasonable disagreement among Protestants.
But a Protestant might respond that I’ve misrepresented them. They too affirm that the Church has an important, albeit fallible, role in giving us the canon. A Protestant might argue that the general consensus of the Church or God’s people throughout history has affirmed the canonicity of the Pastoral Epistles, and so the matter is basically settled.
This won’t work. Since the Church’s process for determining the canon of Scripture is still fallible, according to <a href="https://youtu.be/06ItjoHCp28?si=fPnqMqz2JGcE-PC5&amp;t=46">Protestants</a>, it can be questioned on evidential grounds. In other words, the consensus is only as good as its reasons. This is in fact how some Protestants argue against the consensus of Christians before the Reformation on matters like the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/jews-and-the-saints">veneration</a> of Mary and the saints.
Consider 2 Peter. There are even conservative Protestant scholars today, like <a href="https://www.logos.com/product/1316/jude-2-peter">Richard Bauckham</a>, who don’t think Peter wrote 2 Peter. If the historical consensus on the canonicity of 2 Peter rested on the assumption that Peter wrote the text, then that consensus can be dismissed if that core assumption is debunked.
So why should Protestants keep 2 Peter in their canon? They might try to appeal to Christian consensus, but why treat consensus as though it were infallible when Protestants affirm that consensus is fallible? Adding that God guided the process doesn’t really help their side when they still admit that the process is potentially wrong.
There is a better Protestant alternative: God guided the Church to the canon without error, but we just have fallible knowledge that this is true. This is almost indistinguishable from Catholicism. Although we are fallible as human beings, Catholics nonetheless affirm through faith that God has protected the Church from error in, for example, ex cathedra statements from the pope. Protestants would just distinguish their position by saying that infallibility isn’t something the Church can invoke on command. or even regularly.
This is still a massive concession, because it reveals that Protestants need the Church to be infallible through divine protection on certain matters. Catholics happily agree! Strictly speaking, then, sola scriptura is wrong, or at least it needs to be significantly nuanced: Scripture is the only infallible authority for Christians, except when the Church gave us the canon.
If a Protestant chooses this alternative, then he needs to stop saying that the canonization process is fallible. The humans involved in that process were fallible, but God providentially protected them from error when they presented us the canon. It is God who ultimately made the process’s conclusion infallible. Similarly, the pope in his ordinary life is fallible, but Catholics believe that God providentially protects him from error when he irreversibly settles a matter.
At this point, Catholics can press on when exactly Protestants think the Church “gave us” the canon. Protestants can’t just assume their own canon and then cherry-pick moments where it appeared. But they’ll eventually have to admit that the Church “invoked infallibility on command” at least one time. They can’t say that the Church “gave us” the canon and then never specify when.
Catholics can also begin pressing Protestants to accept more instances where God protected the Church. It would make good sense for God to do so. Thus, the debate is no longer whether the Church can be infallibly protected, but how many times this has happened.

A Bible Disaster!

One hundred years ago, on July 21, a Tennessee jury convicted John Scopes of violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution. That case—especially as memorialized in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind”—is taken as a symbol of religiously fundamentalist ignorance allayed by “science.”
A century after Scopes, what lessons should Catholics draw?
Religion and science are not opposed. The Scopes trial helped cement a caricature of religion as opposed to “science,” a bastion of obscurantism. That may have been true of the biblical literalists in Dayton, Tennessee—but not of the Catholic Church.
It’s not just that the Church founded universities and hospitals—two places where science is rather active. It’s that Catholicism birthed science. In order to have a “scientific method,” you have to believe that
<ol>
<li>the universe functions according to certain laws, which make it</li>
<li>intelligible and</li>
<li>repetitious—i.e., under similar conditions, similar things happen.</li>
</ol>
Without those presuppositions, you can have no science. That’s why you should pick up books by Fr. Stanley Jaki (Science and Creation, The Road of Science and the Ways of God, The Savior of Science) and read about Catholicism’s hand in science as we know it.
Allied to this was the Church’s rejection of the so-called “double truth” theory—i.e., something could be true for science but false for religion (or vice versa). That might work for Protestantism, with its <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-protestant-roots-of-the-pronoun-wars">nominalist roots</a> (right and wrong are what they are because God said so, not because they are inherently good or evil), where everything’s a label. But if there’s one God, he doesn’t teach X here and lie over there. If there’s a supposed contradiction, it’s a challenge to dig deeper to find the underlining unity (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).
The Bible teaches that God created, not how he did it. Genesis is a theological text. It makes theological points. It is not the textbook for Biology 101.
The idea that God created establishes certain basic theological truths that are beyond science’s capacity to refute. Among the truths we hold is that the world is personal and designed and that God remains active in it.
Catholicism does not regard creation as some impersonal and maybe even accidentally serendipitous confluence of events that just so happened to produce the relatively orderly cosmos we know and love. Science may propose a Big Bang, but it cannot—one way or another—say anything about the one who made the Big Bang. Creation didn’t just happen—it happened out of love.
Those who grew up in the Anglophone thought world are perennially at risk of some form of deism—i.e., the idea of splitting the loaf by saying, “Yes, God created, but then—on the seventh day (or sometime thereafter) just disappeared.” Deists usually portray God as a clockmaker. He made the clock, wound it up (so well that it never needs subsequent rewinding or adjusting the time), and left to let it run by itself.
What’s wrong with this picture? Four things:
<ol>
<li>The world is not self-sustaining. Catholic teaching on creation is that God created and continually sustains Without God’s sustainment, everything would fall back into nothing, because nothing is self-caused, is self-sufficient, or can give itself life. So God is not out of the picture.</li>
<li>God created man to be his “co-creator,” to have dominion in his image over the world (Gen. 1:26-28). I like to say God made the world like IKEA: assembly required. God didn’t build houses. He gave man a brain and trees: figure it out! Responsible co-creation—fiduciary care of our common home—is man’s duty.</li>
<li>When parents let their child venture out independently, they usually don’t do it as “sink or swim.” While preserving a degree of autonomy, they also remain in the background to step in as needed. The same can be said—against the deists who denied the possibility of divine intervention—regarding God. Christianity is a faith that recognizes that God was and is active in history. That’s called <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/do-you-believe-in-providence">Providence</a>. His is not the Real Absence.</li>
<li>Man’s co-creatorship in God’s image and likeness makes a value judgment about man that pure biology cannot (and which I suspect haunted the background of the Scopes trial): the uniqueness of man. Man is part of the created world, but not just a part. He is part of the “circle of life,” but not just one species among many. Whether that “flattening” of human distinctiveness is a function of caricatures about evolution (man as overgrown monkey) or now about <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/baptize-the-environmentalist">environmentalism</a> (man is an ecologically hazardous species), the result is the same: in the name of “science” (which trespasses beyond its domain), man is treated as just another living thing.</li>
</ol>
Those who thought they were doing “God’s work” in prosecuting John Scopes may have wrongly believed that we have to read Genesis literally. The trial’s consequence has been to disparage the whole idea of creation, including ideas that “science” itself is incompetent to address. Those ideas include the distinctive nature and value of man and the supposed “closedness” of creation to ongoing divine intervention. I suspect that no small number of Catholics take a schizophrenic approach here, imagining God having an active role in history maybe up until the Acts of the Apostles (or more nebulous “ages of faith”) but certainly not being so gauche in our own “scientific” times. But the Catholic truth is that man is distinctive—even if he has one foot in a material world and developed according to steps—and Providence is real.
With the anniversary of the Scopes trial this week, let’s adopt a more nuanced approach to the issues it raised.
Want to read more? Two suggestions: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 282-301, and a short book by Joseph Ratzinger, <a href="https://ignatius.com/the-divine-project-dvpp/?searchid=2595375&amp;search_query=divine+project">The Divine Project</a>.

IKEA and the Monkey Trial

<div>Doesn’t the precious blood make the chalice pure? Why does it get "purified"?</div><div>“Purification” refers to making sure no eucharistic elements remain in the sacred vessels, whether under the appearances of bread or wine. This is done out of great reverence for Christ’s sacred body and precious blood.
After the Communion rite, a priest or deacon gathers and consumes any fragments remaining from the consecrated hosts. Then, using his hand, a priest or deacon transfers to the chalice any small particles of the hosts remaining in the ciborium or on a paten.
Water is then added to the remaining eucharistic elements in the chalice, typically with the assistance of an altar server, purifying in the process the priest or deacon’s fingers that have handled the consecrated hosts. A priest or deacon then consumes the remaining eucharistic elements in the chalice.
Then the priest or deacon uses a purificator to remove any eucharistic elements that remain in the chalice. The purificator is cleansed after Mass, often by a sacristan, and the diluted elements, which no longer contain the Real Presence, are poured down a sacrarium that takes the solution directly into the ground rather than the local sewage system, a further homage to the substantial Real Presence that once existed under the appearances of bread and wine. 
For more information on the purification of the sacred vessels, see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/purification-of-the-vessels-after-mass">this answer</a> by Fr. Charles Grondin.
</div>

Why ‘Purify’ the Chalice?

Overcoming the Struggle with Impurity

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Is Halloween Pagan?

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Is the Church hiding Scripture?

One size doesn’t fit all Protestants.

<div>Should I avoid patronizing a business if I know it supports Planned Parenthood?</div><div>It’s certainly laudable, if possible, to avoid patronizing businesses that contribute to Planned Parenthood (PP), support same-sex “marriage,” and promote other intrinsic moral evils. But typically it’s not morally obligatory.
In the case of a company that donated to PP, you’d be materially supporting PP in a remote way but not formally cooperating with them as you would if you made a direct contribution to PP. Formal cooperation with morally evil endeavors is never morally justified. Unfortunately, you will likely find boycotting businesses with any supportive connection to same-sex “marriages” rather difficult, because many secular businesses accommodate such relationships in their benefit plans.
Typically, material cooperation isn’t prohibited because of the remote nature of it. And it’s often very hard to avoid, e.g., paying taxes and not being able to control how your tax monies are used by the government for “family planning” that includes contraceptives and abortions, including for Third World countries. Also, you may end up “majoring in the minors” by becoming preoccupied with self-imposed boycotts that aren’t morally necessary.
Further, it’s often hard to avoid some businesses with problematic philanthropy. For example, it’s hard these days to find a grocery store that doesn’t sell condoms and possibly abortifacient contraceptives (if they have a pharmacy), whereas it’s typically easier to avoid a particular coffee shop. If you do choose to boycott, charitably let the business owners know why you’re doing so and that you’d loved to patronize them anew.
For more information on the Church’s perspective on formal and material cooperation, see these <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/explaining-ratzingers-proportionate-reasons">two</a> <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/moral-investing">articles</a> by Jimmy Akin, as well as a related question I answered <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/no-need-to-boycott-google">regarding the boycotting of Google</a>.
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Material and Formal Cooperation with Evil

Learn To Spot This Common Logical Fallacy...

Catholic teaching on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/faith-and-works-0">faith and works</a>, and the role they play in salvation, is misunderstood by many Protestants and even some Catholics. Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin gives an overview on what the Bible and the Church actually teach about salvation.

Are We Saved by Works?

One alternative, purely natural explanation for the disciples’ claim to have seen Jesus after his death is grief-induced hallucinations. In these cases, a person misses his deceased loved one so much that he imagines that the person has come back from the dead to visit him. Maybe the disciples had similar hallucinations of the risen Jesus?
Besides this not explaining things like St. Paul seeing the risen Jesus, this explanation still doesn’t work for a variety of reasons.
Studies on grief-induced hallucinations show that true hallucinations are not common. The Hayes and Leudar 2016 study found <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26183119/">only one case</a> of grief-induced hallucination involving a non-family member of the deceased. Moreover, most of these cases involved only feeling the presence of a deceased person. Just 2 percent involved a tactile hallucination of touching the dead person, which would parallel the claims of having prolonged encounters with an embodied Jesus as described in Luke’s and John’s Gospels. Grief hallucinations also tend to persist for many years after death, but the claims that Jesus appeared to his disciples stop just a few weeks after his crucifixion.
In 2015, Gary Habermas and medical doctor Joseph Bergeron <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021140014564555">surveyed thousands</a> of cases in the medical literature and could not find a single case of a group grief hallucination comparable to the group appearances described in the New Testament. One psychologist cited in their paper <a href="https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1407&amp;context=lts_fac_pubs">said</a>,
<blockquote>I have surveyed the professional literature (peer­reviewed [sic] journal articles and books) written by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other relevant healthcare professionals during the past two decades and have yet to find a single documented case of a group hallucination, that is, an event for which more than one person purportedly shared in a visual or other sensory perception where there was clearly no external referent.</blockquote>
Even some critics of the Resurrection admit that there are no other examples of a group hallucination the way it’s proposed to have happened to the apostles. Kris Komarnitsky in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Doubting-Jesus-Resurrection-Happened-Black/dp/0982552890">Doubting Jesus’ Resurrection</a> writes,
<blockquote>If the group appearance traditions in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 are the result of people simultaneously hallucinating Jesus, there is no comparable example anywhere in history that I am aware of.</blockquote>
Other skeptics, however, claim that there are analogous cases of group hallucinations, and these could explain what happened to Christ’s disciples. But when you look at the examples closely, you see that they are too different from the Resurrection to be an adequate explanation. Here are some examples skeptics offer:
Alien Abductions. Nearly all abduction stories can be explained as culturally conditioned, private hallucinations involving only one person . . . or they are outright hoaxes. People who report these encounters often receive positive attention, and they’ve only become more widespread after science fiction tales about aliens became popular in the 1950s and television shows began to report on alleged abduction stories. And as I said, they almost always happen to individuals at night, who awaken and suffer from “sleep paralysis.” In this condition, your mind has woken up, but you are unable to move your body. People in this condition often see things that aren’t real.
The handful of cases where multiple people say they were abducted by aliens are probably hoaxes or come from hypnotic suggestion. Most experts believe that Betty and Barney Hill, for example, suffered from sleep deprivation and misinterpreted an aircraft warning beacon as a UFO. More importantly, the particular aspects of the alien encounter were recovered under hypnosis three years later and bear a striking similarity to an episode from the sci-fi series The Outer Limits that aired two weeks before their hypnosis session.
Bigfoot Sightings. There are no cases of a group of people having an extended encounter with Bigfoot similar to what the Gospels portray the disciples having with Jesus. At best, these encounters involve a group of people misidentifying an animal in the woods or a hoaxer as Bigfoot. But the disciples intimately knew Jesus and would have been able to tell if the person they encountered was actually he. And if they really weren’t sure, they could check Christ’s empty tomb to dispel any doubt about who had appeared before them.
Mass Hysteria. This happens when a phenomenon transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear. It also includes cases of seemingly infectious bizarre behavior, like medieval dancing outbreaks or the 1962 Tanzania laughing epidemic. But none of these cases involves a group of people all seeing the same impossible thing, like a dead man who came back to life.
Finally, one of the most common examples skeptics offer, at least to Protestant apologists, is Marian apparitions. Atheist biblical scholar Hector Avalos <a href="https://archive.org/details/endofbiblicalstu00aval">says</a> Marian apparitions “form the closest parallel to the Jesus apparition stories. . . . Marian apparitions have been reportedly witnessed simultaneously by millions of people, but most evangelical apologists do not see that as proof that Mary is alive” (193). And atheist Richard Dawkins <a href="https://archive.org/details/goddelusion0000dawk_j9i4">has said</a>, “It is not easy to explain how 70,000 people could share the same hallucination” (91).
Although not all Marian apparitions are authentic, or they could be malevolent supernatural encounters, Catholics have no problem accepting that many of the cases skeptics cite, like the incident at Fatima in 1917, are legitimate miracles. Although Protestants might perform miracles that vindicate the power of the gospel (like healing someone in the name of Jesus), there seem to be many more cases in Catholicism of miracles whose message is not just a vindication of the gospel, but a vindication of distinctly Catholic doctrines, like the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist being seen in hosts that turn into human flesh; relics that heal people; and Marian apparitions in which Mary says she is the Immaculate Conception, like the apparition at Lourdes. For a measured use of miracles to prove Catholicism, I recommend Tyler McNabb’s and Joseph Blado’s <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/MCNMAF-3">article</a> “Mary and Fátima: A Modest C-Inductive Argument for Catholicism.”
So let’s pull all this together. Skeptics often try to explain groups of people seeing the risen Jesus as cases of group hallucinations, yet they can’t offer other similar examples of groups of people having a grief-induced hallucination. In fact, the closest examples they do offer are groups of people seeing the Virgin Mary after the end of her earthly life . . . which isn’t a problem for Catholic defenders of the Resurrection.

‘The Disciples Just Hallucinated!’

<div>Is practicing Reiki or other healing energy practices a sin?</div><div>For various reasons, as we noted in this <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-dangers-of-reiki">Catholic Answers Magazine article</a>, Reiki is bad news. Stay away from it, and encourage others to do the same. Some may engage in Reiki unwittingly. That may mitigate their culpability early on, but it won’t insulate them from potentially serious spiritual harm.
</div>

Stay Away from Reiki

If Sola Scriptura is Wrong, Then what does our authority structure look like?

How do Catholics refute protestant understanding of 2 Tim, All scripture is profitable.

1 Tim 3:15 says the Church is the pillar and foundation. How do protestants get around that scripture?

I think another evidence for being against sola scriptura is Satan using scripture to tempt Jesus. What are your thoughts on that?

What exactly is Tradition?

How do you deal with the objection from protestants about wisdom and not being in their canon but only accept Sola Scriptura?

&#8220;What is our authority structure?&#8221; This question leads to a discussion on the implications of Sola Scriptura and how Catholics understand authority through both Tradition and Scripture. Other topics include how Catholics respond to 2 Timothy&#8217;s assertion about Scripture&#8217;s profitability and the significance of 1 Timothy 3:15 regarding the Church as the pillar and foundation of truth.
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What Is Our Authority Structure? Tradition and Scripture

In this episode, Cy Kellett sits down with Tim Staples to explore the fascinating and lesser-known history of papal elections—before locked rooms, white smoke, and the College of Cardinals. Who chose the pope in the early Church? What led to the creation of the conclave? And how has the process evolved over 2,000 years?
Transcript:
Caller: If you could kind of give me a brief history of how the Church elected popes from the earliest centuries to the development of the current conclave. Because I&#8217;ve been asked about this quite a bit recently, and I&#8217;m always dumbfounded about how to answer it, because it&#8217;s not something I&#8217;m asked a whole lot.
Tim: Sure. Very cool. Yeah. It always comes up, you know, around the time of a conclave. Well, basically from their earliest days, it was simply the Roman clergy and the people of Rome who elected their bishop. And so it would be the Roman clergy, of course, and the people very early on would have a say as well, but ultimately it would be the Roman clergyman and such.
As time went on, you would have multiple bishops involved as well. As the Church in Rome grew, you would have more than one bishop there as well. So in order, obviously, in order to ordain a bishop, you have to have a bishop even from day one. But just a thumbnail sketch here, it was a combination of the Roman clergy and the people.
But you would also have, because of the role of the Church of Rome, you would have influential bishops, patriarchs, even from other areas that would be involved as well because of the importance of the election of the Bishop of Rome. But it was from the very earliest days, very much a local event, even though it had universal implications. And that would basically continue.
But with the advent of Christendom, once Constantine comes on the scene and the Church grows, of course, through the tribulation of the first 300 years, the Church grew enormously, and the Church of Rome, being the central Church, grew enormously. And like I said, you had multiple bishops involved in administrating the diocese because it was so large and influential.
And then once the Emperor comes on board, you had the perennial problem of emperors interfering with elections. And that would be the spearhead that would sort of&#8230; You know, I&#8217;m just thinking about this, Cy. This is not unlike how all doctrine develops in the Church.
You know, in the early first century, first 200 years, you didn&#8217;t have Trinitarian theology per se. Even the term Trinity would first be used by Saint Theophilus of Antioch. Remember, we looked that one up a few weeks ago because I couldn&#8217;t remember. Saint Theophilus of Antioch in 181 AD was the first, at least on record, of writing the term Trinity, even though the fact that the Father&#8217;s God, the Son&#8217;s God, the Holy Spirit&#8217;s God, is clearly taught in St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, really good in St. Irenaeus and such.
But it would be the divisions that come in and the heresies that would kind of move the Church to clarify. And then, of course, exercising the authority of the magisterium would bring about the clarified doctrine of the Trinity that all Christians believe today.
Well, similarly here, when it comes to papal elections, what started on that local level, with some influence from outside, as I said, became much more of that. Because once the emperors and then the kings, Christian kings got involved and were sometimes trying to usurp authority, there was a battle going back and forth, and that&#8217;s what would lead to the development of the electors that we know as cardinals.
And the creation of the College of Cardinals didn&#8217;t happen until 1059, but it wasn&#8217;t like the creation happened immediately right there. There was already a movement in the Church of, you know, certain men who were close to the Holy Father that had authority. These guys were the ones. And of course, the patriarchs and the bishops of what we would call large metropolitans today who had influence.
And really, the College of Cardinals really just kind of grew out of necessity. And so when the College of Cardinals was created in 1059 by a papal bull, this really clarified things for the world that the pope would elect, and the pope alone could elect cardinals and establish the rules.
Now, it had already all the way back to the Book of Acts. In Acts Chapter one, of course, by divine authority, it was Peter who had the authority, for example, and Peter alone to determine how Matthias would be chosen as the successor or replacement for Judas. If you notice, in Acts Chapter one, it was Peter who laid out the rules. He quotes, you know, Psalm 69 and Psalm 109, lays out those texts that say, hey, this was prophesied to happen. Judas is no longer. He established the rules, how the election would happen.
And it happened. And they chose Matthias by lot. The pope made the rules, and back then it was by lot, which kind of seems weird. You&#8217;re going to roll the dice. Well, that was the belief back then. Of course, it was done in the Old Testament. The idea was you give it into the hands of God and God moves those lots.
But over time, it would be the bishops of Rome who would continue to make the rules. But generally speaking, again, it was done the way that bishops were elected all around the world. But once you had the creation of the cardinals, there would be developments over the centuries.
In the 13th century is when you really had the development concerning the conclave, conclave being a Latin term, which means &#8220;with key,&#8221; where these cardinals would be, you know, age, rules and all of that would really start to be developed, much like we have it today in the 13th century and down the centuries it would go.
But a key point is only the popes have the authority to change those rules, as Pope St. John Paul the Great did not too many years ago.
Ryan, thank you. Right back with more Ask Me Anything with Tim Staples on Catholic Answers Live.

How Were Popes Chosen 2000 Years Ago?

Introduction and Chris knows about Spongebob

Australia bans social media for kids

No dating, no spouse, no…

Flannel Panel

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to tackle a thought-provoking question from a listener who grew up in Mormonism and is curious about why he should consider becoming Catholic.
Transcript:
Caller: I left the Mormon Church when I was 8. I left because I didn&#8217;t think it was true. I also left because I think my friend oversold it for me when I was baptized in the Mormon Church. When I was baptized, he said that I would feel the love of God. I came from a broken family, and I just wanted my family back together.
Joe: Oh, man, I&#8217;m so sorry. That&#8217;s tragic.
Cy: That&#8217;s awful.
Joe: And I want to apologize. I know we&#8217;re not Mormons, but I want to apologize on behalf of your friend, because that&#8217;s such a rough thing to do to a kid, to promise, like, hey, you know, this terrible tragedy you&#8217;re experiencing. Just undergo this ritual, and then you won&#8217;t feel that tragedy. You&#8217;ll feel the love of God instead. That&#8217;s a terrible thing to do to a person. I&#8217;m sure he meant well, but that&#8217;s awful. I&#8217;m so sorry about that. You know, you were right to not go where the truth wasn&#8217;t. In other words, not being Mormon because it isn&#8217;t true. That&#8217;s enough of a reason not to be Mormon.
And the flip side to that is, I think the best reason to be Catholic is that it&#8217;s true if you are someone who loves Jesus Christ, and if you take him seriously in Matthew 16, when he says he&#8217;s building the Church and that the gates of hell won&#8217;t overcome the Church.
And if you take&#8230; You know, I mentioned in Acts 5 earlier that Gamaliel the Pharisee lays out this challenge, that there&#8217;ve been all these failed messianic movements that splinter and fracture and all of that and kind of peter out when the leader of the movement dies. It&#8217;s one of the ways we know they&#8217;re not real, that the Catholic claim is that for 2,000 years, the Church has stood here, and it can make that historical claim.
Mormonism, of course, can&#8217;t. You know, it&#8217;s claiming, no, the Church actually failed and had to be rebooted by a prophet in the 19th century in America. Now, there are times when being Catholic feels totally amazing, and there are times where it really does not. So I don&#8217;t want to oversell it to you. Being Catholic is the beginning of a journey, and it&#8217;s by no means a completion of it, but the completion of it is that this hunger you have for truth and goodness and beauty will one day be satisfied by a God who loves you infinitely, who loves you more than anyone&#8217;s ever loved anyone. I think that&#8217;s the best reason to be Catholic.
Cy: What do you think, Adam?
Caller: Well, I definitely am curious. So that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m calling in because, yeah, I was hoping you can help me get directed towards the truth and clarification.
Joe: Yeah, let me give you a very brief 5,000-year sketch. I know I&#8217;m not going to do this justice. There is a longing in the human heart to see God. Even when God reveals himself just a little bit to Abraham and then a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, he&#8217;s fulfilling something that&#8217;s always been in the human heart. We want to know, love, and serve God. We want to be known by God, and we want to be loved by God, and we want to spend eternity with God.
You read the writings of pagans like Aristotle and Plato when he&#8217;s recounting the Symposium of Socrates; this is baked into us. We want union with God. It&#8217;s why religion exists. We don&#8217;t feel that in the way that we all know we should, and we can&#8217;t do anything on our end to close that gap in any meaningful sense. Every religion in the world has tried and has failed, has come up short.
The radical difference between those religions and Judaism and Christianity is that the Judeo-Christian message is that God is going to close the gap. God comes to us because we can&#8217;t actually go to Him. Like the Tower of Babel is us trying to reach up to God. Pentecost is God coming down to us. The incarnation is God coming down to us. These things are&#8230; God&#8217;s search for man is what it&#8217;s sometimes called, because our search for God without his help is totally fruitless.
God ultimately enters history not just through revelation, not just by telling us things, but from the second person of the Holy Trinity taking on a human nature. That entrance into history isn&#8217;t just a one-and-done kind of thing, but that endures. In the Church, we see the manifestation of the incarnation lived out. That&#8217;s why the Church, which is, if you know anything about the Catholic Church, you know it&#8217;s very often incompetent and corrupt and can&#8217;t seem to get anything done, and yet it&#8217;s the oldest government in the world.
It has survived all of the odds; all of these much stronger, better human enterprises have failed and collapsed and crumbled. This strange little Church has continued to grow and endure. That&#8217;s all a sign that God is in control. That&#8217;s all a sign that in the midst of our ineptitude and our sin and our evil, God is still active and working among us for our good and out of love for each of us. So that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m Catholic, and that&#8217;s why I think you should be Catholic.
Caller: Well, I definitely am curious, and I&#8217;m definitely going to pay a visit to my local church.
Cy: God bless you, Adam.
Joe: Excellent. Why don&#8217;t we send you Trent Horn&#8217;s book?
Cy: Our colleague Trent Horn wrote a book called *Why We&#8217;re Catholic*, and it just goes through bit by bit why we&#8217;re, you know, various explanations of why we&#8217;re Catholic and why we believe the specific things we believe. I&#8217;d love it if you call back maybe when Joe&#8217;s on, and we can continue this conversation, because it&#8217;s about the most inspiring thing in the world that can happen to people like me and Joe. For someone to say, I&#8217;m seriously considering it, because it is. And by it, I mean the person of Jesus as given to us in the Catholic Church, is worth considering. It&#8217;s worth taking the time to consider. And we&#8217;re so grateful and moved by the fact that you are.
So you want to hang on the line, and we&#8217;ll send you a couple of books?
Caller: Okay.
Cy: Call us back when Joe&#8217;s on.
Caller: Okay.
Joe: All right. Can I ask something for everybody else listening just to offer up a prayer right now while we&#8217;re doing the boring part in between now and the next caller just for Adam&#8217;s journey?
Cy: Yes, please do that. It&#8217;s not the&#8230; When I&#8217;m talking, it&#8217;s not the boring part between callers.
Joe: That&#8217;s what everybody&#8230; That&#8217;s what we call it.
Cy: No.
Joe: Can you pick up the line with Adam and make sure he gets those books before Adam&#8217;s attitude turns him off to the whole Catholic thing?
Cy: This is not boring right now.
Joe: This is what people look forward to. You&#8217;re distracting people praying right now.
Cy: Oh, I&#8217;m sorry. Stop saying horrible things, Joe.
Joe: All right.

If God Never Made Me Happy, Why Be Catholic?

“‘Soberish’ can mean drinking more mindfully, drinking less or avoiding alcohol altogether but not other drugs.”
—Emily Schmall, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/well/alcohol-soberish-health.html">Not Drunk, Not Dry</a>: What It Means to Be ‘Soberish,’” New York Times, January 15, 2025
Periodic abstinence is one of the key ways to maintain a healthy relationship with alcohol, and many Catholics use Lent as the occasion for such a dry spell. The Soberish Septuagesima program builds upon this practice as well as another hallowed tradition.
The Sunday of Septuagesima (pronounced sep-two-a-JAY-see-mah) is the roughly seventieth day before Easter and the beginning of Pre-Lent, a period of gradual voluntary food abstinence that took place in preparation for the Great Fast of Lent. Eastern-rite Christians begin abstaining from meat on the penultimate Sunday before Lent and from dairy products on the Sunday immediately before Lent. Roman-rite Christians, on the other hand, used to abstain from meat on the Sunday before Lent, which they called Domenica Carnevala because it was the time to remove (levare) meat (caro) from one’s diet. It is from carnem levare that our word carnival <a href="https://italoamericano.org/sicily-and-its-carnevale/">originates</a>.
The Soberish Septuagesima Sodality charts a similar course, starting with a gradual change in alcohol consumption and ending with a booze-free, mocktail-rich Lent. The idea is to change yourself both in body and in soul: your body with a regenerated liver,better health, and a new tolerance level, your soul with strong new virtuous habits.
The program consists of:
1) A Menu Schedule for the weeks prior to Easter (see below),
2) Tips for Completing the Program successfully (see <a href="https://drinkingwiththesaints.com/soberish-septuagesima/">here</a>), and
3) Tips for Reentry after completion of the program.
“Soberish Septuagesima Sodality” is a mouthful, but we chose it for a reason. A sodality is not a mere club, but a companionship of believers united in a common cause. That means, among other things, that despite not being in the same place at the same time, we pray for one another. Join the Soberish Septuagesima Sodality, and wherever you are, there are others praying for you. All you have to do is pray for them in return. As for the schedule:
Septuagesima Week
Septuagesima Sunday was on February 16 this year, but no matter; it is not too late to jump in. Your goal this weekend is to abstain from your favorite alcoholic beverage and replace it with something for which you are less enthusiastic. It does not have to be a drink that you find abhorrent. I, for instance, will drink Jägermeister only as an extreme form of penance. Instead, during Septuagesima week, I have abstained from hard liquor in general and limited myself to beer or wine.
But tastes and temperaments differ. If you drink only beer or wine, perhaps your form of mortification is hard liquor. The point is to step outside your comfort zone but without losing the comfort of the bottle—for now. And the goal is to reduce the amount of alcohol you consume.
Finally, use the time we have left to plan. Next week, we will be enjoying mood-enhancing non-alcoholic spirits and spritzes. Take a gander at the recommendations for Sexagesima Week and plan accordingly. You can find this list on our <a href="https://drinkingwiththesaints.com/soberish-septuagesima/">website</a>.
Sexagesima Week
Congratulations! You have already broken some bad habits by refraining from your favorite intoxicating beverage. Now it is time to assert your independence from C2H6O, the active ingredient in alcohol. Providentially, the no- and low-alcoholic spirit industry is teeming with alternatives. Many a producer promises a buzz without the hangover or any of the other side effects of alcohol. Their secret is to use other ingredients that create a relaxing effect on the soul called adaptogens: lion’s mane mushroom, ashwagandha, L-theanine, elderflower, passionflower, kava, etc. We have tested these products, and to our surprise, they work—especially after having toned down prior alcohol consumption.
Shrovetide 
The three days before Ash Wednesday—Quinquagesima Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday—were known as Shrovetide because it was a good time to get “shriven,” that is, receive absolution through the sacrament of confession. We concur, and it is also a good time to continue enjoying mood-enhancing nonalcoholic spirits.
Lent
The Great Fast of Lent, as it was once called, extends from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. You can continue with your mood-enhancing beverages if you like, or you can try something new. Nonalcoholic spirits, wine, and beer have reached new heights in recent years. Here are some options. Athletic Brewing Company, for example, sells almost half of nonalcoholic craft beer in the country, and for good reason: their beers are outstanding. And some distillers have done an impressive job mimicking the flavor profiles of gin, bourbon, scotch, tequila, etc. We provide a list of options on our website.
Since you no longer need to have a full stomach (since you’re not drinking), we also recommend observing the traditional Lenten fast, which is one full meal per day at which meat can be consumed (unless it is a Friday or Ash Wednesday), and two other meatless meals that together cannot equal one full meal. (Some rubrics included Saturdays as days of total abstinence from meat as well.) According to today’s Church law, this fast is mandatory only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but when Pope St. Paul VI ended the mandatory fast in 1966, he did so with the hope that all Catholics would continue the fast voluntarily and thus be even more meritorious. As it turns out, he badly misread his flock, and the Great Fast became a thing of the past, but we can still take his advice and observe this worthy practice.
Fasting has numerous health benefits for both body and soul. Regarding the soul, we recall the words of Our Lord: that some demons can only be cast out by prayer and fasting (Matt. 17:20). That may include the demons of drunkenness and addiction.
(The Soberish Septuagesima Sodality can be found on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dwsaints">Meta</a> and Instagram [drinkingsaints], including updates and encouragement.)

Sanctify Your Drinking in Pre-Lent!

In classical theology, the “image and likeness of God” in man is identified with the rational soul—the spiritual dimension that sets the human race apart from all else that exists in material creation. The soul is where certain particularly human faculties exist—namely, human intellect and will. The intellect is given so that the human person may seek the truth.
In other words, God sets up a relationship between the human mind and what is objectively real according to the way he made the world. “For the human intellect is measured by things since an opinion is true or false according as it answers to reality,” says St. Thomas. “But the divine intellect is the measure of things: since each thing has so far truth in it, as it represents the divine intellect” (ST-I-II, Q. 93, a. 1 ad. 3). God gave the will so that mankind may seek the good, enabling the human person to freely choose what is objectively right.
The image of God in man expresses itself in the fact that the human being, endowed with rational thought and will, like God, has a kingship in relation to the world of nature. Unlike the degraded status of a slave, forced to tend the world fashioned from the body of a defeated goddess, humans are masters of the world they inhabit.  Since humans are made in the image and likeness of God, Genesis 1 can declare boldly, “Let them have dominion.”
We must have a proper understanding of this term, dominion. God creates the world as a gift, a world imbued with meaning according to the eternal law of the divine mind. The gift character of the earth is expressed in Genesis 1:29-30: “God also said, ‘See, I give you every seed-bearing plant over all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food’” (1:29-30). The word give has the sense of a gratuitous donation to which there should be a proper response. Mankind should first recognize the Giver by treating his gift with respect; thus, the earth should not be abused or destroyed by human action.
Dominion thus means that the human person, who possesses intellect and will, can, like God, know what a thing is for and guide it to its perfection. The world indeed can be altered, as Genesis 2:15 teaches. Humanity has the honorable duty to “cultivate” the earth—to make something of it, to advance it toward its fulfillment. Like God, human beings can, with intellect and will, determine their environment. But that is not all; the human being is also called to “care for it.”
Dominion, then, does not mean that the earth is at the mere disposal of the human race, as if it were ours to dispose of according to our whim. To abuse the planet for human profit is a perversion of the biblical meaning of “dominion,” and indeed the human race stands accused of exploiting the earth and ruining God’s good creation. A false idea exists that, since the human person is, according to Scripture, superior to the rest of creation, the planet is simply at mankind’s disposal. This is not the true biblical meaning of dominion. If the world as a suitable place for man to inhabit is a gift, then that gift must be honored and respected.
The Catholic Church cautions against what it refers to as a “reductionist” view of nature in which nature
<blockquote>appears as an instrument in the hands of man, a reality that he must constantly manipulate, especially by means of technology. . . . The reductionist conception views the natural world in mechanistic terms and sees development in terms of consumerism. Primacy is given to doing and having rather than to being and this causes serious forms of human alienation (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 28).</blockquote>
Exploitation of the earth is no more a Christian view than the idea that the world is so sacred that it should not be cultivated. It takes God’s gift and hoards it greedily, rejecting the purpose for which it was given (see Centissimus Annus 37).
This movement in our world today denies that the human being is special in any spiritual sense and accuses those who believe this of speciesism—the social, political, and cultural sin of seeing a hierarchy of value in the animal world—with the human being occupying the position of highest rank—daring to believe that the human being is separate from the rest of living species and of more value. It is a movement that seeks to equalize all of nature, in the process eliminating man’s special dignity. It may be summed up by the slogan, “This we know, the earth does not belong to man—man belongs to the earth.”
The radical environmentalists who identify with this expression have wishfully attributed it to Chief Seattle, the Native American leader who was influential in the settling of what is now the state of Washington. It comes, however, not from a native chief with deep innate wisdom about nature, but from a Hollywood screenwriter named Ted Perry, for a 1972 ecology film. Nonetheless, the statement is a very good articulation of a worldview opposite that of Genesis.
Genesis doesn’t teach that the earth is man’s own possession. God created the earth to be a gift to the human race; thus, as Genesis 2 states, human beings must “cultivate and care for it.” Nonetheless, man does not belong to the earth.
The human race lives in the world of nature. As corporeal creatures, humans are even intimately bound to the world of nature, since what is physical is constitutive of man’s very being. Yet the human person is not merely another part of the world. Like God, a human being cannot simply be collapsed into nature, as if the earth itself took priority over humanity. Genesis teaches that man, made in God’s image, is set apart: different, unique, special and like God, the human person may properly exercise certain prerogatives in relation to the world: shape it, alter it, perfect it. The earth is not to dominate humanity any more than the world is to dominate God.
The modern contradiction of the dominion laid out in Genesis, placing nature on equal footing with man, is a kind of reversion back to the pagan notion that the earth has a certain quasi-divine status. Therefore, humanity has no right to interfere with nature; to change it, probe it, manipulate it as if we were superior to it. We must simply leave it alone, coexisting as its equal—and in a sense be submerged into it as “the earth does not belong to man, but man belongs to the earth.” Some fringe elements of the modern anti-natalist movement even advocate that, for the sake of saving the planet, the human race should cease procreating even to the point of <a href="https://utopia.org/guide/what-is-anti-natalism-the-ethical-and-ecological-motivations/">its own extinction</a>!
Scripture affirms that God wills the cultivation of the earth and that such proper alteration of the environment is actually a sign of his union with humanity—a sign of the covenant. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a cultivated vineyard planted on a fertile hillside, and the vineyard owner is described as a friend—God himself, who “spaded it, cleared it of stones, and planted the choicest vines. Within it he built a watchtower, and hewed out a winepress.” However, when the vineyard owner looked for his crop of grapes, all that was yielded were “wild grapes” (Isa. 5:1-2). God laments, “Why when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?” (v. 4).
Here we have an allegory: the vineyard is Israel, cultivated tenderly by God, yet his people, brought into a covenant with him, did not live up to that covenant, as Israel failed to produce fruit that should have come from such attentive care. The cultivated land, the land deliberately altered to produce fruit, stands for human unity and cooperation with God. Whereas land that is left to the wild, producing only wild fruits, is the opposite of human unity with God. Such land and such fruits are the consequence of failure to live within God’s covenant—it is a neglected land that returns to the wild, the reversal of the cultivated land, a land that stands for a people who are now cast out (see Isa. 5:5-7).
Allowing nature to return to the wild is a sign of God’s disfavor, whereas making something of the earth is a sign of divine blessing—but a blessing that rests on the human being acting in justice. Far from being something human beings should be ashamed of, dominion over creation is a way human beings imitate God—and it is an essential characteristic of human dignity.

The Earth Is Made for Man

On the kids-only edition of Catholic Answers Live, Fr. Hugh Barbour explains how God is made, and how &#8220;made&#8221; means something different with God than it does with everything else.

Kids’ Show: How Was God Made?

<div>How do I explain that Jesus is God?</div><div>A good place to start in explaining Jesus’ divinity would be <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-divinity-of-christ">our tract</a>, the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/is-jesus-truly-god">witness of the early Church Father on the subject</a>, our <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-jesus-claim-to-be-god">article on Jesus’ claims recorded in the Gospels</a>, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-jesus-became-god-a-critical-review">our critical analysis regarding the naysayers</a>.
</div>

How Do I Explain that Jesus Is God?

Have you ever heard something like this before?
If pro-lifers really cared about ending abortion, they’d give out contraception to prevent unintended pregnancies. But they don&#8217;t really want to do anything practical to help end abortion—they just want to punish women who have sex!
Of course, even if pro-lifers were hypocrites, their argument that abortion kills an innocent human being would still be correct. But are pro-life advocates hypocrites if they don’t promote contraception? No, and here’s why.
The goal of the pro-life movement is to restore the right to life of unborn human beings. Does promoting contraception help or hinder that goal?
I think it’s safe to say contraception doesn’t help that goal. Birth control pills and condoms don’t teach people that unborn children are biological human beings who are entitled to the same basic rights you and I possess. To many people, contraception just prevents “pregnancy,” or it prevents a “potential person” (who will one day become a baby) from being created inside a woman. There’s nothing hypocritical about pro-life advocates&#8217; not promoting contraception, because it doesn’t do anything to help our ultimate goal of changing both public opinion and public policy to protect unborn children from harm.
But critics might respond by saying that using contraception could prevent some abortions from happening, and don’t pro-lifers still care about accomplishing that goal? Yes, but that doesn’t mean every way to accomplish that goal should be used. Contraception teaches couples that unborn children are objects who are valuable only if the couple &#8220;wants&#8221; a child. Pope John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae,
<blockquote>It may be that many people use contraception with a view to excluding the subsequent temptation of abortion. But the negative values inherent in the &#8220;contraceptive mentality&#8221;-which is very different from responsible parenthood, lived in respect for the full truth of the conjugal act-are such that they in fact strengthen this temptation when an unwanted life is conceived (emphasis added). Indeed, the pro- abortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church&#8217;s teaching on contraception is rejected (13).</blockquote>
Unborn children have not only a right to life, but also a right to be created by parents who love them and are willing to make sacrifices for the child’s good. However, contraception use creates a mentality that views children as a “negative side effect” of sex, or even a disease, whose interests are superseded by their parents&#8217; desire for sexual union just for its own sake. This attitude is especially common among the <a href="http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/US-Abortion-Patients.pdf">85 percent of unmarried couples</a> who seek abortions.
It shouldn&#8217;t be surprising, then, that the Supreme Court once even affirmed that one reason abortion must stay legal is because women rely on it when contraception fails. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court said that Roe v. Wade
<blockquote>could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.</blockquote>
I’m all in favor of teaching people how to <a href="http://ccli.org/nfp/">responsibly </a><a href="http://ccli.org/nfp/">plan their families</a>, but if contraception fosters an attitude that unborn children are disposable (and in some forms <a href="http://www.abort73.com/abortion_facts/which_birth_control_methods_cause_abortion/">could be abortifacient</a>), then it shouldn’t be promoted as the way to achieve the goals of the pro-life movement.
Promoting contraception may also reinforce attitudes towards sex and pregnancy that conflict with the goal of creating a culture of life. On one university campus, a group of students chastised me for not passing out condoms. I told them I didn’t have to, because the campus health center gave condoms away for free. One man responded, “But the center is all the way on the other side of campus. I don’t want to have to walk all the way over there just for condoms. You guys should be passing them out here.” If this man were too lazy to walk a few hundred yards for condoms, why in the world would we expect him to work hard to provide for a child should the condom fail and his partner become pregnant?
Pro-life advocates should not be suckered into thinking that abortion is a public health problem that we have to help alleviate by dispensing contraceptives as “the cure.” We must continue to teach our culture that abortion is a moral problem and that the unborn deserve cultural recognition and legal protection as a remedy.
Granted, it will be easier to pass laws against abortion when fewer people seek abortion services, so there is value in developing strategies to reduce unintended pregnancies. But pro-life advocates should not have to compromise their belief that the unborn are human beings just so that everyone can “play nice together.” Instead, we must refocus our strategy and find better ways to achieve the goal of restoring legal protection for unborn human beings.

Pro-Lifers Should Question Contraception

The Catholic practice of invoking the intercession of the saints assumes that the souls in heaven can know our interior thoughts. But for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Huldrych-Zwingli-Writings-Vol-One/dp/0915138581">some Protestants</a>, this is a problem, because it attributes to the saints a power that the Bible says belongs to God alone. In 2 Chronicles, we read the following:
<blockquote>Then hear thou from heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive, and render to each whose heart thou knowest, according to all his ways (for thou, thou only, knowest the hearts of the children of men (6:30).</blockquote>
If the Bible says that only God knows the hearts of men, so the argument goes, then the invocation of the saints’ intercession would be a doctrine that contradicts the Bible.
Let’s see how we can meet this challenge.
First, there is nothing contrary to reason in the idea that God can reveal his knowledge of the interior thoughts of men to those whose intellects he also created. Here is how St. Thomas Aquinas responds to the above challenge in his Summa Theologiae:
<blockquote>God alone of himself knows the thoughts of the heart: yet others know them, in so far as these are revealed to them, either by their vision of the Word or by any other means (Suppl. 72:1, ad 5).</blockquote>
Notice how Aquinas articulates the difference between how God knows the thoughts of men and how the saints in heaven know the thoughts of men. God alone knows “of himself,” and the saints know “by their vision of the Word or by any other means.”
That God knows “of himself” means that the knowledge God has of the interior movements of man’s heart and mind belongs to him by nature. In other words, he has this knowledge by virtue of being God, the uncaused Creator and sustainer of all being, including the thoughts of men. Consequently, he doesn’t have to receive it from a cause outside himself. Only an infinite being can know the interior thoughts of men in this way.
But it’s not a problem for God to reveal this knowledge to the saints in heaven (by whatever means) any more than it is for him to reveal to mankind’s knowledge of himself as a Trinity of persons. Knowledge of God as a Trinity is something that God alone has by nature. Human beings, on the other hand, know God as Trinity only because God willed to reveal that knowledge to mankind. Our knowledge of the Trinity is caused. God’s knowledge of himself as Trinity is uncaused.
Similarly, because God knows the thoughts of men “of himself,” God’s knowledge of man’s thoughts is uncaused. But this doesn’t mean that he couldn’t reveal this knowledge to the saints in heaven, in which case their knowledge of the interior hearts of men would be caused. And because God would cause this knowledge, we could still affirm that God alone knows the hearts of men—that’s to say, he knows them in an uncaused way.
A Protestant might counter, “But what if every person on earth, within his own heart, prays to Mary or one of the saints at the same time? Wouldn’t knowledge of those prayers require omniscience? And if so, then it follows that God couldn’t communicate this sort of knowledge to a created intellect.”
Even though the Church doesn’t claim that God ordinarily gives the saints in heaven the ability to know the thoughts of every living person, it’s not impossible for God to do so. Of course, knowing the thoughts of all men at the same time is something that goes beyond the natural powers of a created intellect. But this kind of knowledge doesn’t require full comprehension of the divine essence, which is characteristic of omniscience. Knowing a finite number of thoughts is not the same as knowing all that can be known about the divine essence, and thus knowing all possible ways that the divine essence can be imitated in the created order.
Since full comprehension of the divine essence is not involved in knowing a finite number of thoughts at the same time, it’s not necessary for the saints in heaven to be omniscient to know simultaneously the interior prayer requests of Christians on earth. From this, it follows that God can communicate this kind of knowledge to rational creatures. And according to Aquinas, God does this by giving a “created light of glory” that is “received into [the] created intellect” (ST I:12:7).
This “created light of glory” demands infinite power inasmuch as infinite power is needed to create and give it to the human or angelic intellect. But infinite power is not necessary for the human or angelic intellect to passively receive this light. As <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/are-catholics-god-makers">Tim Staples argues</a>,
<blockquote>As long as what is received is not infinite by nature or does not require infinite power to comprehend or to be able to act upon, it would not be beyond men&#8217;s or angels’ ability to receive.</blockquote>
Because the light that God gives the created intellect is created, it’s not infinite by nature, nor does it require infinite power to comprehend or act upon. Therefore, it’s not contrary to reason to say that God gives this “created light of glory” to a human or angelic intellect to know simultaneously a finite number of interior thoughts and respond to them.
A second way to meet the above challenge is to show the evidence that God in fact reveals his knowledge of the interior thoughts of men to created intellects.
The Old Testament story in Daniel 2 involving his interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is one example. If God can reveal knowledge of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream to Daniel, then surely, he can reveal to the saints in heaven the interior prayer requests of Christians on earth.
Another example is the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. We’re told that after selling his property, Ananias, with his wife’s knowledge, gave only a part of the proceeds to the apostles, which prompted Peter’s response: “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land?” (v. 3).
Although Ananias’s sin of dishonesty had an external dimension (there were some proceeds that he held back), the sin itself wasn’t subject to normal observation. Knowledge of this evil would have to be obtained in a way that transcends human nature.
Peter receives this knowledge by way of infusion. But it’s not merely knowledge of the external act. It’s knowledge of the interior movements in Ananias’s heart: “How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.”
Revelation 5:8 serves as another example. John sees “twenty-four elders,” along with the “four living creatures,” prostrating themselves “before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” If they are offering the prayers of the Christians on earth, then it’s reasonable to infer that they have knowledge of those prayers.
Even if these prayers aren’t interior prayers, but merely verbal prayers, the souls in heaven don’t have physical ears. So whatever knowledge of prayers God gives to the created intellects in heaven is knowledge of interior thoughts, which the verbal prayers express.
In light of the above examples, we can see that both the Old and the New Testaments affirm that God does in fact communicate his knowledge of the interior thoughts of men to created intellects—interior thoughts that also involve prayers.
The bottom line is that God’s knowledge of the interior thoughts of men is not the kind of knowledge that belongs to omniscience alone. It can be communicated to created intellects, and we have biblical evidence that God in fact does reveal this kind of knowledge to created intellects.

How Can the Saints Hear a Million Prayers?

Was St. Patrick a Baptist?

Do Catholics believe Mary created God?

John 3:5—Jesus’ words about being “born of water and Spirit”—is one of the strongest biblical proofs for baptismal regeneration. But not everyone agrees that he’s talking about baptism here. Some Christians push back with a familiar objection: if salvation is a free gift of God, not based on anything we do, and baptism is something we do, then it can’t possibly be the way God gives salvation.
Protestant author Todd Baker makes this argument in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Rome-Biblical-Historical-Catholicism/dp/1491724706/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1EWWVDZK84W0Z&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.K8a96IlUbwcWMMBfq4LaPDdKVN7aKBMa6_hO0U9CbkR7kF-BGBKPUw62OuzuThvPlvutR6RYt57YHWusbAI4mRxfO_Qw23NyV4Ccwi2ryW2Ssmy3_5kYSdlXmQUkcavtBF9qT1qRHTaMe4iJBCVBYA2zJtjJ4zTGIDNH9ll6ATHzPGsqnGjEbdyzUi9bEyGpSYRlZ4LZZY1uv7NdksJxpuNn6Bi1qmqPgolVW4HrpZQ.rOKdNNS8-K1nXDtMn-xcpaJupvwgbtvGnJFH-Xw5dJA&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=exodus+from+rome&amp;qid=1755207926&amp;sprefix=exodus+from+rom%2Caps%2C135&amp;sr=8-1">Exodus from Rome</a> (Vol. I). For Baker, the idea that baptism saves “contradicts every passage in the Bible where the reader is plainly informed that salvation is a gift of God’s unmerited grace, not of works, or anything the sinner does to earn it (e.g., John 3:16; Rom. 10:9-10; Eph. 2:8-9).”
Baker makes his argument based on the assumption that Catholics (and all believers in baptismal regeneration) believe that baptism is a work that merits the gift of initial salvation—which, of course, does contradict Ephesians 2:8-9: “You have been saved by grace and not of works.”
But this assumption is false. Catholics don’t believe that baptism merits the gift of salvation. Rather, we believe that baptism is the means stipulated by Christ by which he intends to give us the gift of salvation, not a work that merits the gift. The stipulation of a means doesn’t entail an act that merits.
For example, Cy Kellett, the host of Catholic Answers Live, often tells those who call in to the show, “We want to give you a book as a gift. Just hang on the line, give us your mailing address, and we’ll send it to you.” Does the caller’s act of giving the call screener his mailing address, receiving the gift in the mail, and opening the package merit the gift? No. The gift is a gift, even if there is a specific way that the recipient must receive it.
Protestants even teach that a person is saved, or justified, on account of a profession of faith—a profession that is often verbalized at an altar call. Yet they don’t think such a profession of faith “merits” the gift of salvation, or justification. Rather, they teach that faith is the instrument of justification.
Thus, the Catholic view of baptism being the instrument of salvation is no more a meritorious work than a Protestant’s view of faith being the instrument of salvation.
Moreover, the interior regeneration that we believe takes place in baptism—the transference from a state of unrighteousness to a state of righteousness—is nothing of our own doing. It is entirely an act of God. Only he can bring about such a change within us. Therefore, according to a Catholic understanding, baptism is a not a work in the way that Baker thinks it is. And given that Baker’s argument here is based on a flawed assumption, it has no force against the baptismal interpretation of the second birth.
Baker, however, has another counterargument that latches on to what was said above—namely, that spiritual rebirth is something that only God can bring about. He <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Rome-Biblical-Historical-Catholicism/dp/1491724706/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1EWWVDZK84W0Z&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.K8a96IlUbwcWMMBfq4LaPDdKVN7aKBMa6_hO0U9CbkR7kF-BGBKPUw62OuzuThvPlvutR6RYt57YHWusbAI4mRxfO_Qw23NyV4Ccwi2ryW2Ssmy3_5kYSdlXmQUkcavtBF9qT1qRHTaMe4iJBCVBYA2zJtjJ4zTGIDNH9ll6ATHzPGsqnGjEbdyzUi9bEyGpSYRlZ4LZZY1uv7NdksJxpuNn6Bi1qmqPgolVW4HrpZQ.rOKdNNS8-K1nXDtMn-xcpaJupvwgbtvGnJFH-Xw5dJA&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=exodus+from+rome&amp;qid=1755207926&amp;sprefix=exodus+from+rom%2Caps%2C135&amp;sr=8-1">writes</a>,
<blockquote>Nothing in this world can generate the power of spiritual rebirth; flesh can produce only flesh. Although things in nature, like water, wind, and physical birth, are symbols to picture and describe how spiritual rebirth from God occurs, and the particular effects it has on the person who believes in Jesus Christ for salvation.
Even in the beginning of John’s Gospel, the reader is told that the power of spiritual rebirth, whereby the believer in Christ becomes a child of God, is not an act that can be exercised by human act of will, or physical generation, or performance of any kind—the act of sacramental baptism included—but is a supernatural, sovereign act of God alone, bestowed upon those who believe in Jesus Christ. Those who are baptized do so by an act of their own will. The new birth is altogether different from this; it is an act of God! . . .
So then, “born of water” in John 3:5 cannot mean the physical rite of baptism as the agent for spiritual rebirth; it must mean something else.</blockquote>
So, for Baker, since the spiritual rebirth is an act of God, it cannot involve any human act. And since the ritual of water baptism involves a human act, it follows that the spiritual rebirth can’t be a reference to ritual water baptism.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it would preclude humans being involved in several things that the Bible affirms humans are involved in when God exercises his sovereignty.
Consider, for example, the healing of the lame beggar that Peter performs in Acts 3:1-10. The effect of the miracle can be brought about only by God. Yet that doesn’t mean Peter’s action isn’t involved. God used Peter as an instrumental cause to bring about the miraculous effect.
Consider also Paul’s teaching that we are justified by “faith.” Faith is a gift that God alone can give. Yet the act of faith itself, which God moves us to engage in, involves the act of our intellect, moved by the will, to assent to what God reveals and the act of directing our hearts and minds to God as our ultimate supernatural end. That’s human action, actualized within us by God.
More examples abound. In John 16:8, we’re told that the Spirit will convict the world of sin and righteousness. However, we know that the Spirit uses preachers to establish that conviction. Life itself is from God, yet God uses the actions of a human mother and father to be participants in giving that life to us.
One more example, which perhaps relates best to our topic at hand: Jesus in John 9:1-7 heals a blind man. And he intentionally involves the blind man’s action—namely, Jesus commands him to go and wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam. Once the blind man does that human act, Jesus heals him.
So just because an effect is brought about by God alone, like the spiritual rebirth, that doesn’t necessarily exclude human action, like ritual water baptism. It’s God’s prerogative to will ritual water baptism to be the means or instrument through which he communicates the blessing.
In the end, Baker’s reasoning falters because it assumes that God’s sovereign action excludes any human involvement. Scripture repeatedly shows that God often brings about supernatural effects through human instruments—whether it’s healing the sick, proclaiming the gospel, or even giving physical life itself. Baptism, in the Catholic view, fits this same biblical pattern: it’s not a human work that earns salvation, but the divinely chosen means by which God imparts it.
Thus, “born of water and Spirit” in John 3:5 can rightly be understood as baptism without undermining God’s grace or sovereignty.

When Baptism Is Too Manly for Protestants

Easter Morning Mass celebrated by Fr. Paul Check at St. John Fisher Seminary.

Easter Morning Mass: April 12, 2020

Are We Saved by Faith Alone?

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DAY 248
CHALLENGE
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“The Bible contains many passages that say something close to the truth but are still not quite accurate.”
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DEFENSE
This confuses truth with precision.
Perhaps you’ve seen the Star Trek episode “Errand of Mercy,” where the following exchange occurs:
Kirk: What would you say the odds are on our getting out of here?
Spock: Difficult to be precise, Captain. I should say, approximately 7,824.7 to 1.
Kirk: Difficult to be precise? 7,824 to 1?
Spock: 7,824.7 to 1.
Kirk: That’s a pretty close approximation.
Spock: I endeavor to be accurate.
This illustrates the different levels of precision expected by humans and vulcans. Something similar occurs when modern audiences read ancient texts. We live in an age in which things are rigorously measured and recorded. But the ancient world was very different. There were few and imprecise measuring tools, no audio or video recorders, and most people could not read or write.
Consequently, the ancients expected a lesser degree of precision than we do. They would have rolled their eyes at us the way we roll our eyes at Mr. Spock and his absurd overprecision.
This has implications for how we read the Bible. We can’t hold its authors to a higher level of precision than they used. They expressed truths according to the level of precision expected in their day, not ours.
Statements of truth regularly involve approximation. When we say the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second or that pi is 3.14, we are expressing truths, but in an approximate manner. Approximation is so common that scientists even speak of the different “orders of approximation” they use in their work. At some point, it becomes foolish to try to be more precise, and this judgment must be made based on the situation in which we find ourselves.
We must thus respect the circumstances in which the biblical authors wrote and not expect more precision of them than their situation alone. If we want to charge them with error, then we need to show that they weren’t using the degree of precision expected in the ancient world.
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Truth versus Precision

Could life have come about naturalistically?

My wife is agnostic. How do I reply to the questions, why should she care, and why should she believe that it’s the Christian God that exists?

My convert friend is asking how do you know when something is dogma vs doctrine?

Within the holy family, did Joseph have the spiritual authority of Mary and Jesus?

What is the rule of the magisterium in regard to translation of the bible and why should we heed to those translations?

How specific does my confession have to be for it to be valid?

How do we know that St. Ignatius of Antioch’s letters are reliable?

Can an unbaptized person receive the sacrament of confession?

Has the use of extraordinary ministers of holy communion been abused?

There are verses in the bible that say that miracles are signs, but it also says the devil will use them. How can the Church confidently say that the miracles it approved of are from God and not the devil?

Ask Me Anything

How is Onan responsible for a sin that wasn’t given until Deuteronomy?

How could have Mary said no if God had the plan since the beginning of time?

Which Gospel passages on John are indicative of him filling in the gaps on Luke?

Where does the Church get the belief that Peter was crucified upside down?

How do you get Protestants to stop dismissing the Church Fathers?

How do we know that Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp were disciples of John the Apostle?

Why are Ed and Lorraine Warren problematic since they were Catholic?

What are the consequences of being re-baptized?

If Jews get a new temple they would begin animal sacrifices, but Christ was the final sacrifice. Is this why God has allowed enemies to control the temple mount?

What exactly constitutes full consent of the will in regard to mortal sin?

The Church teaches that baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime sacrament—but what are the consequences of being re-baptized? We break down the theological and spiritual implications, and also explore topics like Peter’s crucifixion, the authority of the Church Fathers, and what makes a sin truly mortal.
Join The CA Live Club Newsletter: <a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/radioclub?email">Click Here</a>

Why Is Being Re-Baptized Spiritually Problematic? And More Questions

If we know that angelic beings can assume physical bodies, why don’t we just say they have physical bodies?

Why didn’t Jesus acknowledge a scenario where He and the demon were putting on a play verses saying Satan doesn’t allow conflict?

Why should we have trust in the Papacy based on the historic aspect of having good and bad Popes?

To what degree are we expected to defend the Eucharist physically?

When we say there is no salvation outside the Catholic church, do we mean the institution or the body of Christ?

Is the Immaculate conception a Holy day of Obligation on this year’s Calendar?

How do we pray for the repose of the souls of still born babies?

Can you explain buying blessed items?

Is it okay to have relations with an ex-spouse prior to being remarried? Does this second marriage need to be in a church?

Why are Holy days of Obligation different in the United States and Canada?

<div>We just had our first child, and we want him baptized right away. However, when we went to the office to request baptism, we were told that before we could have him baptized, they need to see three months of offering envelopes as proof of our weekly attendance, and after that we would take a mandatory class on baptism. We are fine with taking the baptism preparation class, but is the requirement to show proof of tithing an appropriate practice?</div><div>Canon law states that parents are obligated to see that their infants are <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/baptism">baptized</a> early. It does not say that parents are required to show three months of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/tithes">tithing</a> envelopes before their child is baptized:
<blockquote>Parents are obliged to see that their infants are baptized within the first few weeks. As soon as possible after the birth, indeed even before it, they are to approach the parish priest to ask for the sacrament for their child and to be themselves duly prepared for it (can. 867 §1).</blockquote>
Perhaps the required offering envelopes is to ensure that the parents bringing their child to baptism will be a part of parish life, thus demonstrating a well-founded hope that the child will be brought up in the Catholic faith. However, making tithing a prerequisite to infant baptism is not a law of the Church, it’s a parish rule.
I recommend you speak with your priest about your situation. Ask him to waive the offering envelope requirement with a promise to use church envelopes in the future.
</div>

Baptism Contingent on Tithing?

In the name of LBGT rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center has begun labeling Catholic and other Christian-leaning institutions as “hate groups.” We talk with Family Research Council Senior Fellow, Chris Gacek, and Communications Director and Legal Counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, Kerri Kupec, about the serious consequences of such labeling.

Slander from the South (Part 1)

Tik Tok seems pretty sure that the God of the ancient Hebrews had a wife, an idea that perhaps would debunk the Jewish story of covenant with the One Lord God. We asked Jimmy Akin, author of The Bible Is a Catholic Book to evaluate the merits of the whole “God had a wife” idea.

Was God’s Wife REMOVED From the Bible?

<div>St. Paul says to the Greeks in Athens, “God . . . does not live in shrines made by man” (Acts 17:24). Doesn’t the Catholic belief that God dwells in the tabernacle via the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist contradict this passage?</div><div>The short answer is “No, it doesn’t!” Consider that what Paul meant—and what his audience would have understood by a deity living within a shrine—is the Greek understanding of divine-temple indwelling. For the Greeks, their deities dwelt within the walls of Greek temples and nowhere else, especially because they believed their deities dwelt within the carved statues located within their temples.
Such a pagan understanding of divinity stands in stark contrast to the Christian understanding of God, who is omnipresent—existing in all places. It’s this contrast that Paul is drawing out for the Greeks in Athens.
Paul intends to target the Greeks’ view of divinity and their worship that they give to such divinities, and he says that such belief and worship are false. And he offers Christian belief and worship in their place.
With this in mind, it becomes clear that Paul is not rejecting the idea of divine-temple indwelling absolutely speaking. Rather, he’s rejecting the Greek view of divine-temple indwelling.
So, Paul’s teaching in Acts 17:24 doesn’t conflict with the belief of God dwelling in churches via Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist.
</div>

Does the Catholic belief that God dwells in the tabernacle via the Real Presence contradict Acts 17:24?

Why do Christians need a pope? How do we know Jesus built his Church on Peter? Trent sits down with Steve Ray, author of two books on the papacy, to get the answers.

Understanding the Papacy, Part 1 (with Steve Ray)

In this episode Trent tells the story behind the &#8220;other&#8221; empty tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem.

Why are There TWO Empty Tombs of Jesus?

Cy&#8217;s Wishes you all a Merry Christmas and shares some updates at Catholic Answers.

Cy’s Christmas Message

Can Christians use AI / ChatGPT to evangelize?

<div>Is being a good person selfish if I am doing it in fear of being sent to hell?</div><div><a href="http://www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson18.htm">The Baltimore Catechism</a>:
<blockquote>Q. 767. What is imperfect contrition?
A. Imperfect contrition is that by which we hate what offends God because by it we lose heaven and deserve hell; or because sin is so hateful in itself.
Q. 768. What other name is given to imperfect contrition and why is it called imperfect?
A. Imperfect contrition is called attrition. It is called imperfect only because it is less perfect than the highest grade of contrition by which we are sorry for sin out of pure love of God&#8217;s own goodness and without any consideration of what befalls ourselves.
Q. 769. Is imperfect contrition sufficient for a worthy confession?
A. Imperfect contrition is sufficient for a worthy confession, but we should endeavor to have perfect contrition.</blockquote>
It is obviously better to be sorry for sin solely because it is wrong and is an offense against God&#8217;s love but being sorry primarily because we are afraid of hell is still a good thing.  It shows that we trust what Jesus has taught us about the effects of sin and that we respect his judgment.  Imperfect contrition is a good starting point to help us focus on why sin separates us from God and one another and deepening our relationship to God.
</div>

Am I Selfish If I Fear Being Sent To Hell?

<div>Can the priest ask the congregation to leave the pew to welcome others after the homily?</div><div><blockquote>Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority. (<a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html">Sacrosanctum Concilium</a> 22,3).</blockquote>
I&#8217;m not sure what justification a priest would use to defend such a request. There is nothing in the rubrics for Mass that would permit such an action.
</div>

Welcoming Others After the Homily?

God isn’t just good — God is goodness itself.

<div>May a person who is not physically ill (but is mentally or spiritually ill or suffering from addiction, etc.) receive the anointing of the sick?</div><div>This is a great question! The fact is that anyone who is baptized and of the age where he can go to confession is able to receive the sacrament of the anointing of the sick validly.
However, the discipline of the Roman rite Church restricts the reception of this sacrament to those who on account of age or infirmity are in some grave danger. They do not have to be dying, but their condition should be supposed serious. In the Byzantine rite of the Catholic Church, everyone is allowed to receive this sacrament once a year on Holy Wednesday of Holy Week. The tendency in the Roman rite nowadays is to be rather permissive in giving this sacrament, as one can see with the various Masses that are celebrated for the sick generally. Everyone is allowed to come forward who wants to, and there is no questioning of whether persons are seriously ill or not.
The fact is that the effect of the anointing of the sick is precisely the removal of the remains of sin (the fomes, or &#8220;kindling&#8221; ) in the soul in view of death and judgment, so it is a kind of &#8220;confirmation&#8221; complementing the sacrament of penance that removes sin itself. This sacrament is a kind of strengthening of the effects of sacramental confession, as confirmation strengthens the effect of baptism.
So, I think the practical solution is to seek this sacrament according to your best judgment when you attend a general Mass for the communal anointing of the sick but to limit requests for an individual appointment for times of obvious serious illness. You can also visit a Byzantine Catholic church on Holy Wednesday each year, which would be an enriching experience.
</div>

Who May Receive the Anointing of the Sick

<div>What’s the Catholic view of the Westboro Baptist Church?</div><div>Well, it might be better to ask what their fellow radical Calvinists think of Westboro Baptist, not to mention their fellow Baptists! Their church is a sect that demonizes all who do not profess a strict and very shallow version of Calvinism. Nothing they do or say should be used to blame any other Protestants, since they are so far removed from even the most earnest and devout reformed religion that it would be unfair to bring them forward as an example of Calvinist or Protestant errors. Better to pray for those whose errors have led them to such extremes so contrary to the clear sentiments of the Savior in the holy Gospels, he who prayed &#8220;Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.&#8221;
</div>

What About the Westboro Baptist Church?

<div>How were the rebels who were next to Jesus at the crucifixion die?</div><div>The only Gospel that relates anything about the fate of the two criminals crucified with Jesus is the Gospel of John. The other three Gospels simply remark that Jesus was crucified with two criminals and do not elaborate.
<blockquote>Now, since it was preparation day, in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath, for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one, the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken and they be taken down. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus. (John 19:32-33)</blockquote>
With their arms outstretched and their body slumped, breathing would have been very difficult, and so they would have used their legs to push themselves up to breathe. Once their legs were broken, they would no longer be able to do so. As the weight of their hanging bodies was transferred to their chest, breathing would become impossible fairly quickly. Death would come soon due to either suffocation or their heart would give out.
</div>

How Did the Men Crucified with Jesus Die?

Everyone Who Goes To Purgatory Ends Up in Heaven

Angela Franks explores the profound teachings of John Paul II&#8217;s Theology of the Body. Discover how our bodies are not just physical vessels, but rather, powerful expressions of our personhood and a means of self-gift. Learn how to navigate the challenges of a fallen world and embrace the graced way forward offered by Christ.

Theology of the Body 101

A special Christmas Day episode of Focus with Catholic Answers President Christopher Check.

Christmas Day with President Chris Check

Featured Guests: Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem, Tim Staples, Trent Horn, Christopher Check 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqumVqX_T8&amp;t=35s">00:35</a> How does someone awaiting RCIA live a Catholic life? – Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqumVqX_T8&amp;t=278s">04:38</a> Are Catholics obligated to vote? – Tim Staples 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqumVqX_T8&amp;t=871s">14:31</a> “I reject the Church’s authority to teach on definitive morality” – Trent Horn 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqumVqX_T8&amp;t=1225s">20:25</a> Catholic authors you should read – Christopher Check

Catholic Answers | Season 4 | Episode 11

<div>So what if a fetus is alive and human? Every cell in my body is alive and human. Is every cell in my body a human being? Are sperm and eggs human beings too?</div><div>Sperm, egg, fetuses, and toddlers are all human in the adjective sense of the word, since they possess human DNA. Unlike sperm and egg, however, fetuses and toddlers are also human in the noun sense of the word. Specifically, they are human organisms, or individual members of the human species. But what do we mean when we say the unborn is an organism?
An organism is a collection of biological parts, or organs, that function together to sustain the existence of a whole being that possesses the qualities of life. If I can give a living thing time, nutrition, and a proper environment, and it is able to develop toward becoming a mature member of its species, then it is an organism and not a mere body part.
Because body cells such as skin, sperm, and egg can never—even given time, nutrition, and a proper environment—develop into an adult human, they are not organisms. In contrast, you and I are <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/when-does-a-fetus-become-a-person-0">organisms</a>, because if we are given time, food, and the proper environment (i.e., not on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean), we will continue to develop into mature members of the human species.
Likewise, an unborn child, when given time, nutrition, and a proper environment (i.e., not outside the uterus) will develop into a mature human being if he does not die prematurely. Embryologist E.L. Potter points out, “Every time a sperm cell and ovum unite, a new being is created which is alive and will continue to live unless its death is brought about by some specific condition” (Pathology of the Fetus and the Infant, 7).
The fact that some <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/an-embryo-is-a-living-being">embryos</a> and even other born children die before they become adult humans does not negate the fact that they are human beings. They still are human beings because they have the intrinsic capacity to develop into a mature human being even if their development is cut short.
</div>

So What if a Fetus is Alive and Human?

Is there a place for faith in the workplace? Professional baseball pitcher Trevor Williams stops by to talk about pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates and living as a Catholic.

Professionalism and Faith

DIALOGUE: Would Heaven Be Hellish?

American racism was given the power of religious fervor by those who thought the Bible alone provided the rule of faith. Don Johnson, author of &#8220;Twisted Unto Destruction: How &#8216;Bible Alone&#8217; Theology Made the World a Worse Place,&#8221; explains.

Racism and Sola Scriptura

<div>How can I stay out of hell?</div><div>The short answer is to stay in right relationship with Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church and to repent and receive the sacrament of reconciliation if you stray into mortal sin (cf. CCC 1854-64).
Indeed, our free-will choices make a difference. As St. James makes clear, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19, emphasis added). So it’s not simply enough to believe in God’s existence. We have to respond and accept his free gift of salvation. We do this by our choices, our “good works.” As the word gift implies, we don’t—we can’t—earn our salvation, but we must freely cooperate with God in being saved, and we do so through our everyday choices.
That’s why James could add, “Some one will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. . . . [So] you see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:18, 24).
James was only concurring with Christ:
<blockquote>“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers’” (Matt. 7:21-23).</blockquote>
For more on the issue of salvation and our cooperation, see CCC 846-48.
</div>

How Can I Stay Out of Hell?

Where does the doctrine of Purgatory come from?

This is one of those Sundays when I cannot resist commenting on a distinctive aspect of our liturgy. So if this is too nerdy for you, I invite you to quietly pray a decade of the rosary and tune back in at the end.
Did you notice our collect of the day? In the Mass of Paul VI, this collect—in a very different translation—appears on the twenty-first Sunday of ordinary time. But we get it here in the middle of Eastertide:
<blockquote>O Almighty God, who alone makest the minds of the faithful to be of one will: grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.</blockquote>
This is a very old prayer, probably well established by the middle of the first millennium. Our liturgy retains it in the place where it was used for most of the last two thousand years. The Pauline rite moves it to early fall; the more recent Anglicans pushed it into Lent, but they also further revised it a hundred years after it was first translated, in light of the English civil war. Rather than “who alone makest the minds of the faithful to be one will,” the 1662 prayer book has “who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men.”
That’s the version a lot of us from the Anglican tradition will remember. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that content, but it makes sense that in our missal, Holy Mother Church has restored the original version.
As I say, the collect is very old, and it’s possible that it riffs on a line of St. Augustine of Hippo—or perhaps he is riffing on the collect, it’s hard to say—in his Confessions, where he says, “Give what you command, command what you will.”
As that great saint knew in the fifth century, so we know today: knowing a commandment is not the same as wanting to do it. Knowing God’s promises is not the same as wanting them.
Human desires are . . . complicated. At times simple. At times unaccountable. Why we want what we want when we want it—well, if we knew that, we would master the universe. Or not, because knowing about it isn’t enough; knowledge and desire remain distinct. Maybe I want to eat lunch at the local deli; maybe I want to make myself a salad at home; maybe I want not to make a decision; maybe I want to be alone, or to see a certain someone. And I know all sorts of things about these scenarios, and whether or not they are good or bad or neutral, but this doesn’t change the fundamental structure of desire and will. Desire, knowledge, and will can be friends, or enemies, or frenemies, but they simply are the structure of human thought and action.
All these human things are part of the “sundry and manifold changes of the world.” Because we are part of the world. Creation is, by definition, changeable. It didn’t exist. Now it does. To exist in time is to change. So where in the weirdness of human knowledge and will and desire is there any sense of stability if not in the one human being who is also eternal: the man who is both changeable and not changeable, who can suffer and also not suffer, who can be born and is yet eternal? The “joy” to be found in him is precisely in this paradox: that Jesus Christ is the one who knows our temporality, our changeability, our crazy unpredictable desires, and who is at the same time the one who knows (and is) absolute goodness and truth and beauty. He is where our hearts can be fixed—because he is exactly that link between the unchanging reality of God and the changing fluidity of human nature.
In other words, he is the vine. That is the image our Lord gives in John. Our connection with him—through baptism, and the Eucharist, as Jesus says—is the only way to have real life.
But what if we’re not sure if we want that life? What if we wonder about other forms of life that seem appealing, cut off from the vine, which is Christ and his Church? Here’s where St. John’s epistle from today comes in: “Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.”
Let’s be clear: John isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what we say or what we think. He’s saying that words and knowledge are never separate from action and feeling. If we want to feel a certain way and desire certain things, we have to do things. Belief and desire—those mysterious parts of human consciousness—largely follow from what we do. How we act, what we do, changes what we think and feel and believe.
So maybe there’s that occasional Sunday when we wake up thinking, You know, I don’t feel like going to Mass today. Or there’s that moment when you really want to do something, but you know it’s immoral. Guess what: go to Mass anyway. Flee from immorality. Your feelings and desire can catch up with your actions much faster than your actions can catch up with your feelings and desires.
Regular, habitual confession can be like this. If you just go to confession regularly, whether or not you feel like it, you may eventually start to want it, and that desire for penance and holiness can have huge consequences for how you actually live in the meantime.
Think of the vine and the branches. Does the branch want to remain connected to the vine? It’s a ridiculous question, because plants do not want things in the way that we want things. They simply do what they do. And that is exactly the power of this analogy. We are never going to love doing the right thing until we start doing the right thing.
And the first right thing, the most important and basic right thing, is to stay connected with Jesus. Maybe we don’t love him as we ought. Maybe we know that; maybe we don’t. But amid the sundry and manifold changes of this world, he is the place where joy can be found. All other joys, all other goods, follow from this good, from this joy: to be nourished on the vine of the Lord. In receiving him, we become what we are, and we become more capable of being what we are: of knowing and loving and living the fruitful life that God has given us.

Train Yourself to Want What’s Right

<div>How do we know what sin is if the law has been done away with? Isn’t sin transgression of the law?</div><div>Jesus came to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/a-primer-on-atonement">atone for our sins</a>, not abolish all moral prohibitions so that we wouldn’t have any idea what sin is. He tells that he didn’t come to abrogate the law but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17-18). In fulfilling it, though, he made the Old Covenant “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/what-are-works-of-the-law">works of the law</a>,” i.e., primarily the ritual and liturgical commandments that Moses prescribed for Old Covenant life, no longer binding us on in the New Covenant.
Why? Because these laws cannot make a man righteous before God, including because they are performed ‘‘apart from the grace of Christ.’’ St. Paul affirms, “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law’’ (Romans 3:28). And he adds elsewhere:
<blockquote>We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified (Gal. 2:15-16).</blockquote>
Yes, in Old Covenant days, violating these laws was sinful, at the very least because doing so was done in disobedience to God and the leaders of his people. In addition, these Old Covenant laws are still “on the books,” as they’re noted in the Old Testament and elsewhere, and Orthodox Jews continue to observe them to the present day, excluding those that involve the Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in A.D. 70.
Further, as indicated above, the immutable moral law, as classically presented in the Ten Commandments and their corollaries, remains in effect. Besides the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7), see in particular Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man (Matt. 19:16-26) and also his teaching on what truly defiles (Matt. 15:10-20).
</div>

What Is Sin in the New Covenant?

Dad’s WILD reaction to son’s vocation | @FatherDavidMichael

If you’ve been following the news coverage of Pope Francis’s health, you might have noticed something: there are no photos of the holy father in his hospital bed. Or, more accurately, there are no real photos: <a href="https://spotlight.ebu.ch/p/wave-of-content-purporting-to-show">viral pictures</a> currently circulating on Catholic social media, purporting to be of Pope Francis in a hospital bed, on a respirator, are AI-generated fakes. (As are the “videos” that show <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47aMPfaiDig">Jesus and Mary are visiting him in the hospital</a>, but I assume you knew that!)
But you might be wondering why we’re not seeing photos of the sick pontiff. Is there some kind of coverup? Nope. The simple answer is that photos of the pope on his deathbed are actually forbidden, according to a 1996 apostolic constitution promulgated by Pope John Paul II. “No one is permitted to use any means whatsoever,” it reads, “in order to photograph or film the Supreme Pontiff either on his sickbed or after death, or to record his words for subsequent reproduction” (Universi Dominici Gregis 30).
Why, you might ask? Likely to avoid sensational exploitation of the pope’s condition. That motive may have stemmed back to 1958, when Pope Pius XII&#8217;s doctor, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, tried to sell photos of the dying Pius XII to the papa-razzi. For such a violation of his role as the papal physician, he was forced to resign and was barred from the Vatican.
There are photos of JPII recovering in his hospital bed after he was shot by Mehmet Ali Ağca in 1981, as well as photos of his sitting in his hospital room (in papal garb, including red shoes!) near the end of his life. But to protect the tiny bit of privacy the pope has, and out of respect for the high dignity of his office, we have no photos of him (or any other pope) in a hospital gown, connected to medical machinery, or unconscious near or at the moment of death.
And it’s for this same reason that Pope Francis has been (and, hopefully, will continue to be) treated with the same dignity. It’s a reminder that Francis is not only the Roman pontiff, but also a man like us, facing all of the same weaknesses—including mortality—that we all face. And it’s in these moments that we all need the prayers of the other members of the Body of Christ. So let us pray not only for the holy father, Pope Francis, but for our ailing brother Jorge.

Don’t Fall for Fake Pope Photos

How do you compare Ephesians 2:8-9 to James 2:17?

What is the church’s social teaching on immigration and treatment of immigrants?

Why do we presume a valid Baptism for Protestants coming into the Catholic church?

What is Opus Dei?

It seems Mary’s condition of the Immaculate Conception helped her be sinless. Does this mean that children conceived sinfully are more prone to sin?

What is the difference between presence and substance?

How should we discern God’s wants you to use words, action, or prayer?

Why at Mass do we say “until you come again” right after the consecration?

Recently, the news cycle erupted over Pope Leo XIV blessing a block of ice from Greenland. Social media were predictably quick to scoff, with jokes ranging from “Will this ice become holy water?” to “Next, the pope will bless my freezer.”
At first glance, the idea of blessing a frozen chunk of water—or a field of wheat, or the ocean, or, for that matter, the entire universe—may seem absurd. Why would a priest, a bishop, or the pope extend a prayer of blessing to something that can’t hear it, respond, or even feel cold? To answer that question, we need to step back and understand what a blessing is in the Catholic tradition.
<h2>The Nature of Blessing</h2>
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, blessings are sacramentals, which are “sacred signs instituted by the Church. They prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (1667). It goes on: “Every blessing praises God and prays for his gifts. In Christ, Christians are blessed by God the Father ‘with every spiritual blessing.’ This is why the Church imparts blessings by invoking the name of Jesus, usually while making the holy sign of the cross of Christ” (1671).
Although sacramentals like holy water and medals do not confer sanctifying grace in themselves, as the sacraments do, they sanctify ordinary reality and orient our minds and hearts toward God. In short, blessings are a way of saying, “God made this. God is present here. Let this object (or place) participate in his goodness.” God blesses things not for their own sake, since creatures cannot benefit in the way humans do, but to manifest his power and goodness and to give humans a tangible point of encounter with the divine. Blessings, therefore, have a twofold effect: they honor God and invite us to holiness.
Yet that invitation is not only symbolic. The Church teaches that blessings, as sacramentals, truly sanctify the circumstances of life and call down real spiritual benefit through the Church’s prayer (CCC 1670). St. Thomas Aquinas explains that prayers and blessings can even restrain the power of the devil “from hindering the sacramental effect” (Summa Theologiae, III, q.66, a.10). In other words, blessings are not magical, but they are genuinely efficacious, because God acts through the intercession of his Church. When holy water or blessed salt is used with faith, the believer receives divine help that strengthens and protects.
<h2>Ice, Fire, and Everything in Between</h2>
Just as Jesus walked on the water, calmed storms, and pointed to lilies and sparrows to teach about God’s providence, blessing natural phenomena is a sacramental acknowledgment of God’s presence in creation. The pope’s recent ice blessing might raise eyebrows, but it fits naturally within this tradition.
Blessing nature isn’t a new idea. Consider the paschal fire in the pre-1955 Easter liturgy, a tradition preserved in many communities today. The fire is blessed before the Easter vigil and lights the paschal candle, which symbolizes Christ as the light of the world. Here, the blessing is not just a ceremonial formality; it transforms ordinary fire into a sign of divine light, preparing the faithful to enter the great celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
Animals, too, have a long history of being blessed. The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi includes the blessing of animals, a charming and meaningful ritual that reminds us that God loves all creatures and that humans are stewards of the earth. Although the dogs, cats, and parrots in attendance may not understand the Latin or hear the bells, the blessing sanctifies human care of animals and reinforces the spiritual reality that all creation belongs to God.
Other blessings might seem more outlandish. In these cases, the Church is teaching a profound truth: everything in creation is good and comes from God (Gen. 1:31). A blessing is a visible, ritualized acknowledgment of that goodness, pointing human hearts toward gratitude, reverence, and responsible stewardship.
<h2>Blessings Are Not Self-Serving for Creation</h2>
A common objection is natural: “If these things can’t pray or understand, what good does a blessing do?” The answer lies in understanding that blessings are primarily for human benefit, even when directed at objects or natural phenomena. By blessing, the Church sanctifies the human intention and interaction with creation. Holy water, for example, sanctifies the person using it because it reminds him of baptism, purification, and the presence of God. The ice, the fire, the wheat—they serve as points of encounter that help humans recognize God’s handiwork.
But blessings also have real spiritual power. When the Church blesses an object, it sets that object apart for divine purposes and calls God’s protection over those who use it devoutly. This is why blessed objects are treated with reverence and, when worn or displayed, remind the faithful of God’s nearness. The power at work is not the object’s, but God’s, mediated through the prayer of the Church.
In this way, blessings serve as expressions of the Church’s mission to bring the sacred into ordinary life. By blessing a glacier, the pope connects faith to global responsibility. By blessing animals, the Church fosters compassion and stewardship. By blessing the universe, the Church reminds us that God is Lord of all creation, not just of humanity.
<h2>Blessings as Public Witness</h2>
Blessings also serve a public, communal purpose. When a priest blesses a parish, a school, or even a single loaf of bread, he is making visible the Church’s intercession and God’s protective care. The Catechism notes that sacramentals “prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (1671). In other words, blessings draw attention to God’s presence and invite participation in his grace.
This explains why the Church blesses objects in liturgy and life. Holy water at the entrance of a church reminds us of baptism. Candles, salt, bells, and incense all signify God’s holiness and invite reverence. Extending this logic to natural phenomena is simply an extension of sanctifying reality in view of eternal truths.
<h2>Blessing Is an Invitation</h2>
Yes, blessing ice might sound funny to some. But what is foolish to the world can be a doorway to understanding. When someone laughs at the pope blessing a glacier, the Church isn’t offended; it’s an opportunity to explain that blessings are about God, not about the thing itself.
Not everything should be blessed. The Church reserves blessings for persons, places, and things that elevate the human heart toward God. To bless an object is to dedicate it to divine service or protection, and to do so lightly risks trivializing the sacred. Blessing a machine might make sense if it serves human labor or community (as when the Church blesses tools, ships, or fields), but not if it’s done as a joke. When blessings lose their intentionality, they risk becoming performance rather than prayer. It is also worth saying that blessings should not be given in the spirit of memorializing a thing or topic of emphasis: the blessing should truly be for the thing and Christian good, not to make a statement.
In the end, blessings invite us to see God’s hand in the ordinary and extraordinary alike. They are a ritualized affirmation of faith, a preparation for grace, and a public witness to God’s goodness. As Thomas Aquinas reminds us, God works through the Church’s prayers to restrain evil and to sanctify the faithful.
So the next time you hear about the Pope blessing a glacier, a field of wheat, or anything else that seems curious, remember: it’s not about the ice or the wheat. It’s about us. Blessings are God’s way of inviting humanity to participate in the holiness of creation, to recognize the sacred in the everyday, and to live with gratitude, reverence, and responsibility.
After all, if God cares enough to bless the universe, surely we can spare a little gratitude for our own little corner of it.

A Blessing for a Block of Ice?

<div>Is playing Magic: The Gathering likened to believing in the occult?</div><div>“Magic: The Gathering” is a game that has gone through different editions since its debut in the 1990s. Because some of its characters had demonic names, there was public backlash against the manufacturers out of concern the game might be promoting—or at least making light of—the occult.
As a result, “both the creature type and the word ‘Demonic’ disappeared from the game” in 1995. When the public controversy subsided over the ensuing years, a new edition debuted in 2002 and included “Grinning Demon.” <a href="https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/where-have-all-demons-gone-2004-07-05">Other characters with demonic connections have followed in successive years</a>.
So does the game necessarily involve dabbling in the occult, as does the Ouija Board? Not necessarily, but we can’t recommend participation in the game. What’s the purpose of the game? As The Washington Post noted in its “Weekend” section in 1995, “The players, representing sorcerers, use the cards to “kill the other guy before he kills you, with spells, enchantments and creatures like Chaos, Orb. . . Bad Moon and Animate Dead. . . (May 27, 1995).
Devotees of the games, including Christians, will counter that the game is harmless fun and that—as with bad things on television—you can deliberately avoid the darker characters, including “Liliana the Necromancer,” an immodestly dressed female character who, as her name conveys, conjures the dead.
Others might argue that characters like Liliana are okay since the actual purpose of the game is to match wits with your opponent, not actually seek to have a séance or kill another person.
We disagree with that sentiment. Though make-believe, such games can open the door to participation in the occult, and at least encourage make-believe activities that are not edifying, including necromancy and nefarious sorcery. For example, when one uses the “Infernal Spawn of Evil” card, the game’s instructions direct:
<blockquote>Reveal Infernal Spawn of Evil from your hand, Say “It’s coming”: Infernal Spawn of Evil deals 1 damage to target opponent. . . .</blockquote>
In summary, there are many edifying activities in which Christians can participate. This game, with its various drawbacks, is not one of them.
</div>

Is “Magic: The Gathering” Dabbling in the Occult?

Catholic school doesn't automatically make you a theologian...

Most Christians consider the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus to be a powerful reminder of how God’s grace can move the greatest of sinners to seek Jesus in humble repentance. But for <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/when-loving-the-sinner-means-saying-no">Fr. James Martin</a>, the story of the diminutive tax collector is really about how the Church creates unnecessary obstacles that place LGBTQ+ people on the outs and how the Church must be more “welcoming” instead.
Let’s follow Fr. Martin’s exegesis and see if it adds up.
Martin invites the reader to “see Zacchaeus as an emblem of the LGBTQ person.” This isn’t because some LGBTQ persons should repent of sexual immorality in the same way Zacchaeus is traditionally seen to have repented from defrauding people. No, dear reader, Fr. Martin assures his most loyal fans that “I’m not saying LGBTQ people are any more sinful than anyone else—we’re all sinners in one way or another.”
Instead, Zacchaeus is short in stature, and LGBTQ people have “little stature” in the Church. Both are “on the outs” and are kept from Jesus by a grumbling crowd who is indignant that Jesus would offer them mercy. Martin asks how often the Church acts like “the crowd” that keeps LGBTQ people from Jesus.
When Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from the tree, Martin rapturously remarks, “How joyful it is to be welcomed into the community! Many LGBTQ people know the joy of finally feeling welcomed.”
You’d think at this point that Martin would say that just as Zacchaeus repented of the sin of defrauding others, LGBTQ people who engage in sexual immorality should repent of those sins as well. Instead, Martin says the Greek text of the narrative reveals something completely new about Zacchaeus that most people misunderstand. Instead of Zacchaeus promising he will give half his possessions to anyone he has defrauded, Zacchaeus is actually speaking in the present tense: he already is giving away his possessions to those who feel defrauded. According to Martin:
<blockquote>The English translation that we use at Mass, from the New American Bible, is this: “Half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor.” But the original Greek is in the present tense: “I give (or am giving) half of my possessions to the poor.” Zacchaeus seems to be already doing that. In other words, the conversion that is occurring may be not only Zacchaeus’s conversion, but the crowd’s conversion as well, as Jesus reveals to them that the one who was on the “outside” is more generous than they had ever imagined. How often is that the case with LGBTQ people, after people in the church come to know them!</blockquote>
There is an issue in how we are to understand Zacchaeus’s response in Luke 19:8.
Most formal translations that seek to follow the original wording preserve the Greek present tense. The Catholic RSV has Zacchaeus saying, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.” But dynamic translations that seek to highlight the original meaning of the text that modern readers might miss usually render it in the future tense. That’s why the NAB has Zacchaeus saying, “I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over” based on the context of the passage.”
There is a fair amount of scholarly debate over the meaning of this encounter with Jesus. Was Zacchaeus a repentant sinner who will restore those he harmed now that he has had an encounter with Christ? That’s the traditional view of the passage. Or was Zacchaeus a misjudged innocent person who has vindicated himself by declaring to Jesus in the presence of the crowd that he already practices radical generosity? That’s the view proposed by some modern exegetes.
I’m not going to settle that debate in this article. Instead, I will just point out that Martin’s reflection misses the point of the story, regardless of which interpretation of Zacchaeus’s declaration is correct.
If the traditional view is correct, then Martin has failed to exhort his LGBTQ audience to repent of any sinful behavior that may be a part of their identity. Salvation came “today” to Zacchaeus’s house because he had repented of sinful behavior that is often associated with his identity. (It’s interesting that Martin doesn’t mention Jesus’ declaration about salvation coming “today” after Zacchaeus’s declaration.) This would be paralleled among the LGBTQ people who engage in sinful behavior associated with their identity who can find salvation by repenting of that behavior, just like Zacchaeus.
But even if the alternative view is correct, that also doesn’t help Martin’s argument.
According to that view, Zacchaeus is unfairly maligned as a cheat merely because he has the annoying job of being a tax collector. Jesus’ point to the crowd is that there is nothing inherently sinful about this occupation, even if others often misuse it. Jesus didn’t demand that Zacchaeus stop being a tax collector just as John the Baptist didn’t demand the same from tax collectors who sought baptism from him. John simply told them to “collect no more than is appointed you” (Luke 3:13).
The point of the narrative with Zacchaeus, then, is that the crowd has assumed that Zacchaeus must be a sinner because of his job. However, his encounter with Jesus shows that Zacchaeus is still a “Son of Abraham” in spite of his occupation. He can be a faithful Jew while being employed for Roman tax authorities, even if many of his colleagues were not as upstanding.
When it comes to LGBTQ persons in the Church, just as Zacchaeus was stereotyped as a sinner because of his occupation, many LGBTQ persons are stereotyped as sinners because of their orientations. They can still be faithful, chaste Catholics in spite of these disordered desires, and the “crowd” should not grumble at them seeking out Jesus even though many other people with these same orientations flagrantly reject Christ and his teachings.
And those people who still persist in grave sins like sodomy should be encouraged in the same way one would encourage a sinful Jewish tax collector in Jesus’ time: show him the example of Zacchaeus. He rejected the immoral license ancient society gave him in virtue of his identity (“he’s a tax collector; of course he makes extra money off the poor”) in favor of finding his identity in Jesus Christ. And LGBTQ Catholics should reject the immoral license modern society gives them in virtue of their identity (he’s LGBT; of course he sees nothing wrong with same-sex relationships) in favor of finding their true identity in Jesus Christ.
Martin is correct that Christians can sometimes fail in welcoming all people to salvation in Christ. But his message is anemic if it is concerned only about the feelings of those who feel excluded and not about celebrating those whose sanctity refutes common stereotypes and calling those entrenched in sin to repentance so that salvation can come to their house “today.”

Fr. Martin and LGBTQ Zacchaeus

Does it matter what the image we pray to is since we don’t pray to the actual image?

What’s the point of Marian Consecration?

What’s the point of the repetitive nature of the rosary and the hail holy queen prayer?

How would you clear up a misconception that Mary is competing with our natural mothers?

If the bible is not scientific then can’t we say that Mary’s virginity is not scientific? Wouldn’t Marian consecration be a validation of that?

Relationship with Mary

As a leader in New Age thought, Deepak Chopra has taken it upon himself to explain the real meaning of Jesus. But does he shed light on the real Jesus or invent a new Jesus of his own? We asked Trent Horn.

Deepak Chopra’s Jesus

The Exodus didn’t happen. Paul didn’t know about the Virgin Birth. Jesus didn’t exist. And  the papacy isn’t mentioned in the New Testament.
Skeptics try to support each of these claims using arguments from silence, but such arguments are notoriously weak. In this episode, Jimmy reveals why arguments from silence are so problematic and why the arguments used to support these claims just don’t work.
&nbsp;
Transcript:
Consider the following arguments:
<ul>
<li>The Exodus never happened. There’s no evidence that it did.</li>
<li>Paul doesn’t know about the Virgin Birth, for he never mentions it.</li>
<li>Jesus is just a Christian myth. He’s never mentioned by any first century non-Christian authors.</li>
<li>If the papacy were true, it would be mentioned in the New Testament, but it’s not.</li>
</ul>
These are arguments from silence. They appeal to a “silence”—or absence of evidence—regarding a particular claim.
Arguments from silence are common, but they are notoriously weak. Works on critical thinking regularly warn about their dangers and misuse.
There’s even a saying used to combat them: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In other words, just because you don’t know about something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
&nbsp;
What’s Your Source?
Arguments from silence rely on the silence of a source, which may be broad or narrow.
Our first argument—about the Exodus—did not specify a source and simply said there is “no evidence” for the event, but presumably this means that there is no archaeological or ancient literary evidence.
Our remaining arguments do specify the sources that are supposed to be silent: St. Paul, first century non-Christian authors, and the New Testament, respectively.
It’s important to realize what source is under discussion in an argument from silence, because the source may or may not be relevant to the claim being made.
&nbsp;
The Arguments’ Basic Form
Arguments from silence can be put in a basic logical form:
Premise 1: If claim C were true, then it would be mentioned in source S.
Premise 2: C is not mentioned in S.
Conclusion: Therefore, C is not true.
There is nothing wrong with this type of argument in principle. It’s a valid form of argument (known to logicians as modus tollens), so its conclusion will be true if its premises are true.
So why are arguments from silence considered weak? Because one or both of the premises is often doubtful or untrue. This means we can classify problems with such arguments by which premise is problematic.
&nbsp;
First Premise Problems
The problem may be that the first premise is false: It really isn’t the case that a particular source would mention something.
Why should it? That’s the question that needs to be asked.
There is a chain of things that must to happen for an event to be mentioned in a source we have, whether the source is a single document or a collection by multiple authors, though here we will speak in terms of a single author to keep it simple.
First, the author of the source had to learn of the thing in question. If he didn’t know about it, he can’t mention it.
Second, the author has to want to discuss it. The author needs a motive to mention what we’re interested in.
Third, there needs to be nothing preventing the author from recording it. Yet there often is. A subject might be embarrassing. It might be irrelevant to or distract from the point he is trying to make. He may have limited room to write. Many things may stop an author from mentioning something, even if he had some desire to talk about it.
Fourth, the source has to survive and be accessible to us. Yet the vast majority of ancient sources have been lost.
Numerous things can prevent information about the past from getting to us, and it can’t simply be assumed that an author would mention it.
To establish that he would have mentioned something, we need to first establish that (1) he would have been aware of the thing in question, (2) he would have wanted to mention it, (3) nothing would have deterred him from doing so, and (4) we still have the relevant part of his writings.
It often can be impossible to satisfy these conditions, and if you’re not 100% sure of the truth of the first premise, the best you can do is make a probabilistic argument, with the probability of the conclusion going down as confidence in the first premise does so.
&nbsp;
Sola Scriptura
A central teaching in the Protestant community is that Christian doctrine needs to be formed sola scriptura (Latin, “by Scripture alone).
This teaching holds that Scripture is sufficient to give us all the data we need for the doctrines we are supposed to believe, and so every Christian doctrine must be stated or implied in the Bible.
Protestants commonly assume that God—as the ultimate author of Scripture—had the intention of providing us with the complete set of data needed for Christian doctrine in the Bible.
As a result, arguments from silence are extremely common in Protestant theological and apologetic discussions: If a doctrine isn’t mentioned in Scripture, it is either false or something God doesn’t want us to believe.
It is difficult to underestimate the role that arguments from silence play in Protestant discussions. They may be applied in disputes with Catholics (e.g., where are the papacy, purgatory, or praying to the saints in the Bible?) or in intra-Protestant disputes (e.g., where is infant baptism, the Rapture, or perseverance of the saints in the Bible?).
All such arguments depend crucially on the initial premise of sola scriptura. But if God did not mean sacred Scripture to be sufficient to tell us everything we need to know about doctrine and instead intended it to be supplemented by apostolic Tradition, then these arguments from silence do not work.
It is important that people not assuming the Protestant viewpoint remember this when evaluating a doctrinal matter. The subject in question may not be mentioned in Scripture—or Scripture may not contain all of the needed data. Instead, this data may be found in Tradition.
&nbsp;
First Premise Evaluations
How well do the arguments from silence we’ve considered fare in terms of their first premise?
When it comes to the Exodus, two reasons Egyptian literary sources might not mention it immediately spring to mind. First, the vast majority of Egyptian literature has been lost. Even in Egypt, papyrus can decay over time.
Second, when it comes to stone monuments, the pharaohs weren’t in the habit of recording everything that happened. They wrote about their victories on monuments to thank the gods and to announce their personal greatness, but they never record defeats. They would scarcely be likely to write about a successful slave rebellion on a monument!
On St. Paul’s knowledge of the Virgin Birth, we know he wrote letters that no longer survive (he mentions some), so it’s possible that he wrote about it in those.
However, in none of Paul’s letters is he trying to give a biography of Jesus. Instead, he is dealing with doctrinal and pastoral problems in local churches. From the evidence at hand, it appears none had a problem with the Virgin Birth, so Paul had no occasion to mention it. We thus can’t infer that Paul didn’t know about it from the fact he never explicitly mentions it.
When it comes to first century non-Christian sources mentioning Jesus, the Christian movement only began partway through the century, and it was so small that most non-Christian authors either hadn’t heard of it or knew very little about it, giving them little reason to mention it. By the end of the first century, there were only a few tens of thousands of Christians out of the 60-75 million people in the Roman empire.
Further, most literature from this period has been lost, and Jesus could have been mentioned in numerous non-Christian sources that we no longer have. To the extent he isn’t mentioned in the surviving works, the silence is not surprising.
And on the papacy not being mentioned in the New Testament—to the extent that it’s not—the argument lacks force if sola scriptura is not true.
&nbsp;
Second Premise Problems
Arguments from silence also can go wrong due to problems with their second premises—the idea that a source doesn’t mention something.
First, we must deal with the issue of terminology. Language changes over time, and arguments from silence can go wrong when this fact isn’t recognized.
When evaluating what a source says, we must understand the language and concepts in use at the time. We cannot insist that it use the terms we are familiar with.
For example, terms like papacy, purgatory, sola scriptura, and total depravity are post-biblical, and it would be a mistake to insist on seeing these terms use in Scripture. Even if we were to assume sola scriptura, the question would not be whether these terms are found in the Bible but whether they reflect concepts that are.
Second, we must ask whether a source really is silent, and there are a range of possibilities.
It may be that the source actually does mention what we are investigating—even multiple times—yet the person mounting the argument from silence has not recognized it. In this case, the source is not silent at all.
On the other hand, there may not be an explicit mention of our topic, but it may be implied by one or more passages. In this case, the source’s silence is apparent rather than actual.
For example, the Trinity is not explicitly discussed in Scripture. There is no passage that says, “God is one Being in three Persons,” but there are multiple passages that—taken together—imply this.
Finally, it may turn out that the source does not state or imply what we are after, but it may contain information that is consistent with or suggestive of it. In this case, the source is only partially silent.
&nbsp;
Second Premise Evaluations
Our four initial arguments each encounter problems with their second premises.
While Egyptian records don’t explicitly mention the Exodus, a monument known as the Merneptah Stele records a successful military encounter between Egyptian and Israelite forces, and it describes Israel as a nomadic people—as they were during the Exodus. Further, the stele dates from the right time frame for the Exodus, and so Egyptian literature contains information consistent with and suggestive of the Exodus.
Paul does not mention the Virgin Birth, but he does describe Jesus as “born of woman” (Gal. 4:4). This isn’t conclusive, because the phrase could simply refer to a human being, but it is consistent with and possibly suggestive of a virgin birth.
The idea first century non-Christian sources don’t mention Jesus is simply false. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus twice, though one of the passages hasn’t been preserved in its original form.
And not only does the New Testament contain numerous passages illustrating Peter had a special leadership role, but three of the four Gospels contain passages in which Jesus gives Peter a special commission with respect to the other apostles and thus the Church (Matt. 16:17-19, Luke 22:24-32, John 21:15-17).
&nbsp;
Silence-by-Exclusion
Arguments from silence also may exclude relevant sources that aren’t silent.
Why focus just on Egyptian sources for the Exodus? There are good reasons pharaohs wouldn’t record it, but the Israelites would be very interested in discussing it, and they did! The Exodus is mentioned all over the place in the Old Testament! It’s a regularly recurring theme.
Concerning whether Paul knew about the Virgin Birth, we shouldn’t just look at Paul’s writings. The event is discussed prominently in two independent sources—Matthew and Luke—establishing that it was a common first century Christian belief, and thus one Paul likely would have known about.
When it comes to mentions of Jesus, why draw an arbitrary line at A.D. 100 and dismiss sources after that? Jesus is mentioned by three Roman authors (Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger), all writing around A.D. 120.
Further, why ask for non-Christian sources at all? The people most interested in Jesus were Christians, so their writings would be the most relevant ones for learning about him and his life. Others would scarcely have any interest in writing about him—at least as long as Christianity was small.
In each case, non-silent sources are being ignored, and often the most relevant sources. It is difficult to avoid the impression that those using these arguments have deliberately excluded the most relevant sources for purposes of making their argument seem stronger than it is.
Thus another problem with arguments from silence is that they may consider the wrong sources.
&nbsp;
Partitioned Arguments from Silence
A special case of this occurs in what we may call partitioned arguments from silence.
These happen when a person acknowledges that a source plausibly does mention a topic in one or more passages but then wants to partition these from consideration. He insists that there would be more passages mentioning the topic if it were true.
This is typically done by an appeal to the supposed importance of the topic. For example, a Protestant may argue, “Yes, Matthew 16:17-19 can be read as establishing Peter as pope, but the papacy is so important that we would expect it to be mentioned elsewhere.”
If one then points out that Luke 22:24-32 and John 21:15-17 also support the idea, these may be partitioned as well. In fact, no matter how many passages are brought forward, more may always be demanded.
From a psychological perspective, it is understandable that a person who is not convinced of a position will want more evidence than has been presented—especially if he is already committed to a contrary position.
However, from an objective perspective, this kind of partitioning seriously undermines the argument from silence.
In the first place, the tactic admits that the source plausibly is not silent at all!
In the second place, the assessment “But there should be more!” is entirely subjective and in the heat of a discussion, the topic may take on an exaggerated importance in the person’s mind. It may seem highly important in the moment, but it may not be in the overall scheme of things.
Further, the tactic can be applied in any discussion—for one may always demand more evidence than one has been shown.
This is the case even when we are agreed that we have non-silent sources. A skeptic may say, “I don’t care that Matthew and Luke explicitly state that Jesus was born of a virgin. I want to see more evidence for this!” In fact, that’s the usual reason people want to see Paul mentioning the Virgin Birth in the first place, as Paul is allegedly writing earlier than Matthew and Luke.
Whether one partitions entire sources (Israelite literature, Christian literature, or Matthew and Luke) or just parts of sources (Josephus’s mentions of Jesus or Matthew 16:17-19) the tactic of silence-by-exclusion is yet one more reason why arguments from silence are notoriously weak and must be carefully evaluated.
* * *
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God bless you always!

Arguments from Silence

As a father of three young children, I enjoy reading and listening to fairy tales with my kids. But I can’t help but notice that in addition to all of the strange and supernatural features of these tales, there are a striking number of canonical irregularities . . . particularly in how the characters approach the sacraments of baptism and holy matrimony.
Let’s start with one of the most famous fairy tales: the story of Cinderella. Versions of this story have existed for millennia, dating back at least to the ancient Greek story of Rhodopis, from about the time of Christ. Charles Perrault’s 1697 version is the most famous, serving as the basis for the 1950 Disney film. It’s a charming story, but it’s hard not to be alarmed at the canonical irregularities. To wit:
<blockquote>At last the happy day came; they went to Court, and Cinderella followed them with her eyes as long as she could, and when she had lost sight of them, she fell a-crying.
Her godmother, who saw her all in tears, asked her what was the matter.
&#8220;I wish I could—I wish I could—&#8221; but she could not finish for sobbing.
Her godmother, who was a fairy, said to her, “You wish you could go to the ball; is it not so?”</blockquote>
Hold on a moment. Her godmother is a fairy?
The first canonical problem this raises is the whole idea of having a non-human godmother. A godparent (technically called a sponsor in canon law) must “be a Catholic who has been confirmed and has already received the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist and who leads a life of faith in keeping with the function to be taken on” (874 §1.3). Are we to believe that this fairy has been baptized and confirmed, and has received her first Communion?
But the second canonical problem is that fairies are notorious dabblers in magic. Lest you think this an uncharitable stereotype, I’ll point you to the text:
<blockquote>Cinderella went at once to gather the finest she could get, and brought it to her godmother, not being able to imagine how this pumpkin could help her to go to the ball. Her godmother scooped out all the inside of it, leaving nothing but the rind. Then she struck it with her wand, and the pumpkin was instantly turned into a fine gilded coach.</blockquote>
Magic wands? Sorcery? What kind of godmother doesn’t realize that “all practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one&#8217;s service and have a supernatural power over others—even if this were for the sake of restoring their health—are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion” (CCC 2117)? This hardly sounds like someone “who leads a life of faith in keeping with” her role as Cinderella’s godmother.
Whatever canonical problems apply to Cinderella, they apply sevenfold to Sleeping Beauty. I don’t mean that hyperbolically, either. Read for yourself:
<blockquote>At last, however, the queen had a daughter. There was a very fine christening; and the princess had for her godmothers all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom (there were seven of them), so that every one of them might confer a gift upon her, as was the custom of fairies in those days. By this means the princess had all the perfections imaginable.</blockquote>
This is quite contrary to canon 873, which specifies that “there is to be only one male sponsor or one female sponsor or one of each.”
Admittedly, canon law acknowledges the proper place of local customs (23-28), such that a reasonable “custom contrary to or beyond canon law” (24 §1) may nevertheless carry the force of law in a particular community of the faithful. Still, it’s hard to defend the “custom of fairies in those days” on any kind of moral or canonical grounds. After all, “no custom which is contrary to divine law can obtain the force of law” (24 §1), and a custom of occultic rituals performed by inhuman godmothers would certainly seem to fit that bill.
As is so often the case, the most egregious canonical problems come from Germany . . . in this case, from the story <a href="https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm108.html">Hans-My-Hedgehog</a> by the Brothers Grimm. The story begins with a peasant couple unable to conceive, such that the frustrated husband finally declares to his wife, “I will have a child, even if it is a hedgehog.” The story only get weirder from here:
<blockquote>Then his wife had a baby, and the top half was a hedgehog and the bottom half a boy. When she saw the baby, she was horrified and said, “Now see what you have wished upon us!”
The man said, “It cannot be helped. The boy must be baptized, but we cannot ask anyone to be his godfather.”
The woman said, “And the only name that we can give him is Hans-My-Hedgehog.”</blockquote>
Although the text doesn’t tell us whether any human woman, hedgehog, or fairy was asked to be godmother, it appears that Hans-My-Hedgehog (why not just Hans?)’s parents have decided to deprive him of a godparent of any kind for . . . unknown and vaguely malicious reasons. This is contrary to both Christian charity and canon law, which says,
<blockquote>Insofar as possible, a person to be baptized is to be given a sponsor who assists an adult in Christian initiation or together with the parents presents an infant for baptism. A sponsor also helps the baptized person to lead a Christian life in keeping with baptism and to fulfill faithfully the obligations inherent in it (872).</blockquote>
There’s good reason for this. As the earlier (1917) Code of Canon Law points out, “from baptism a spiritual relationship is contracted only between the one baptizing, the one being baptized, and the sponsor.” So seriously does the Church take this spiritual relationship that it was previously required (although this is no longer the liturgical norm) that the sponsor “himself or through another physically hold or touch the one to be baptized in the act of baptism or immediately lift him up or receive him from the sacred font or from the hands of the one baptizing.”
We could perhaps excuse the misguided actions of Hans-My-Hedgehog’s parents, as they may not have been particularly educated and were almost certainly feeling overwhelmed by both the usual stresses of becoming new parents and the unusual stresses of your child being half-man and half-hedgehog. This is a place where both the priest and the Rite of Baptism can help. The Order of Baptism of Children explains the role of the brief homily provided by the celebrant:
<blockquote>After the Reading, the celebrant preaches a brief homily in which light is shed on what has been read, and those present are led to a deeper understanding of the mystery of baptism and to a more eager fulfillment of the responsibility that arises from it, especially for parents and godparents.</blockquote>
So this would be a great opportunity for Mr. and Mrs. -My-Hedgehog to be led into a “deeper understanding of the mystery of baptism,” and to realize that perhaps their child does need godparents after all to help him through life’s many challenges. But alas, the pastor in this story fails dramatically in his duties:
<blockquote>When he was baptized, the pastor said, “Because of his quills he cannot be given an ordinary bed.” So they put a little straw behind the stove and laid him in it. And he could not drink from his mother, for he would have stuck her with his quills. He lay there behind the stove for eight years, and his father grew tired of him, and thought, “if only he would die.” But he did not die, but just lay there.</blockquote>
The behavior of both pastor and parents is alarming in this account. Hans-My-Hedgehog’s parents would perhaps have benefited from a brief homily explaining that “parents’ respect and affection are expressed by the care and attention they devote to bringing up their young children and providing for their physical and spiritual needs” (CCC 2228). But instead of focusing on this, or the sacramental richness of baptism, the pastor’s homily seemed indifferent toward (or even fearful of) baby Hans-My-Hedgehog, choosing to focus on the dangers that quills can pose to ordinary beds.
The pastor here would do well to remember that the Christian faithful have their own mission “in the Church and in the world” (can. 275 §2), which he should be promoting rather than micromanaging. Admittedly, he’s probably right that quills aren’t going to go well in a bed, and the parents don’t seem to be doing a great job, but that’s why they need support!
Lest you think I’m being nitpicky about the canonical irregularities of various fairy tales, let me point out that I’ve been focusing on only the irregularities around baptism. Do you want to talk about marriage? In Sleeping Beauty, after the Prince awakens Sleeping Beauty, they eat dinner, and “after supper, without losing any time, the lord almoner married them in the chapel of the castle.”
This appears to have been a secret wedding. Ordinarily, that would be forbidden (the Council of Trent forbade the general practice of clandestine marriage), but in this case, the Prince’s motivation was that his mother “was of the race of the Ogres, and the King married her for her vast riches alone.” More specifically, the Prince had a fear (which later proved well founded) that if his mother learned that he was married, she would try to eat his children. Fortunately, canon law provides that “for a grave and urgent cause, the local ordinary can permit a marriage to be celebrated secretly” (1130).
So the clandestine nature of the wedding isn’t the canonical problem this time. The canonical problem is that “before a marriage is celebrated, it must be evident that nothing stands in the way of its valid and licit celebration” (1066). Even in the case of a clandestine marriage, there are certain “investigations necessary before marriage” which must first take to ensure that the couple is free to marry (1067, 1131.1). Since there’s no imminent danger of death for the couple (see can. 1068), the lord almoner should have made the couple wait until appropriate preparations and investigations could occur.
Unsurprisingly, the weirdest fairy tale wedding is in Hans-My-Hedgehog. First, a king promises Hans-My-Hedgehog his daughter’s hand in marriage and then breaks the promise. Hans-My-Hedgehog responds by invading the king’s castle and shouting to the king to “give him what he had promised, or it would cost him and his daughter their lives.” This is quite specifically forbidden in canon law, as “a marriage is invalid if entered into because of force or grave fear from without, even if unintentionally inflicted, so that a person is compelled to choose marriage in order to be free from it” (1103). This first marriage is in fact a ruse: Hans-My-Hedgehog attacks the woman, sticking her “with his quills until she was bloody all over” and then sending her home bloodied and accursed.
After this, Hans-My-Hedgehog attempts marriage with a second princess. This time, “when the princess saw him she was horrified, because he looked so strange, but she thought that nothing could be done about it, because she had promised her father to go with him. She welcomed Hans-My-Hedgehog, and they were married.” Nothing about this seems obviously irregular, other than the groom being half-hedgehog. But that evening, Hans-My-Hedgehog is cured of his half-hedgehogness and is transformed into “a handsome young gentleman.” And then we’re told that “when the princess saw what had happened, she was overjoyed, and they got up and ate and drank. Now their wedding was celebrated for real, and Hans-My-Hedgehog inherited the old king&#8217;s kingdom.”
It’s not just the fact that we’re still calling him Hans-My-Hedgehog even now that he’s not a hedgehog anymore that’s confusing. It’s also the throwaway reference to the wedding now being “celebrated for real”? Are we to take from this that the earlier wedding was a sham for some reason? Perhaps this was a convalidation of some sort (cans. 1156-60). That might be appropriate here, as the idea of marrying half-hedgehogs appears canonically dubious.
Don’t worry: I’m not unpacking the canonical implications of these different fairy tales to my children while we read these stories (nor am I letting them anywhere near Hans-My-Hedgehog until they’re older). But it’s a pleasant diversion to ponder the bizarre worlds of these fairy tales, if for no other reason than to think more clearly about the irregular sacramental situations we sometimes find ourselves in in this one.

Canonical Problems in Fairy Tales

<div>I am a candidate in RCIA and I have recently been diagnosed with bronchitis. Am I obligated to attend Mass with this condition?</div><div>No. If you are sick, especially with an illness that is contagious, then you may stay home. Illness is a just reason to miss Mass on a Sunday or a holy day of obligation. For more information, please our <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/mass-obligation-and-caring-for-the-sick">related response</a>.
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