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Does Scripture support relics of the Saints?

Why Are Holy Orders Necessary for Some Sacraments?

The doctrine of scriptural perspicuity, championed particularly during the Protestant Reformation, contends that the Bible <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-protestants-biggest-bible-problem">communicates clearly</a> such that an individual reading it should be able to understand the contents without an outside source. This belief should not be confused with the early Church’s statements on Scripture being clear, as those examples are often talking about a specific belief that is clear in Scripture, other beliefs notwithstanding.
The Protestant Revolution created a rather new idea: that Scripture is not only clear on some points, like that Jesus is God, but clear on every essential point. If this is the case, I am unsure why so many Protestants have <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/sola-scriptura-and-basic-illogic">differing views</a> on the essential points. This would seem to completely invalidate the point, but I digress.
Protestant apologist James White is a huge proponent of this belief. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/g0iiVcz425k">a debate this past weekend</a>, in the process of making his point, White employed a formal logical fallacy known as denying the antecedent to make his claim.
Before getting to the specific example, it would be beneficial for me to explain what this fallacy consists of. Denying the antecedent has this logical form:
<ol>
<li>If A, then B.</li>
<li>Not A.</li>
<li>Therefore, not B.</li>
</ol>
This logical form is invalid, because even though A leads to B, the negation of A would not necessarily lead to the negation of B. Real-world examples often make it much easier for someone untrained in philosophy to recognize this. In plain English, we could think of this example:
<ol>
<li>If it rained, then the ground is wet.</li>
<li>It did not rain.</li>
<li>Therefore, the ground is not wet.</li>
</ol>
This is clearly an invalid logic structure. If it rains, the ground will be wet, but just because it didn’t rain, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the ground is not wet. There could be other reasons why the ground might be wet, like someone’s sprinkler going off or someone watering some plants.
Another example may go like this:
<ol>
<li>If Person X is a doctor, then he studied medicine.</li>
<li>Person X is not a doctor.</li>
<li>Therefore, Person X did not study medicine.</li>
</ol>
This is also an invalid logic structure. Although doctors study medicine, so do other professionals, such as nurses, as well as former medical students who decided to change paths.
As obvious as this may seem, it is the exact fallacy James White made in his debate against Joe Heschmeyer in their debate on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/g0iiVcz425k?si=ldKFbEMtvS3PWiZC&amp;t=3050">Mass</a>.
The passage that White was quoting comes from 2 Peter 3:16. It reads, “There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.”
Specifically relating to the subordinate clause in this sentence, White used the phrase “which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” in the debate to argue that if ignorant and unstable men twist Scripture, then knowledgeable and stable men will be able to understand them. Here is White making his point:
<blockquote>Peter warns that untaught and unstable men distort Paul&#8217;s words. . . . If he says “untaught and unstable men,” would it not follow that a taught and stable man can understand Paul&#8217;s words and can accurately handle what he wrote?</blockquote>
This statement is a textbook denying the antecedent fallacy. The form goes like this:
<ol>
<li>If they are untaught, they will twist Scripture.</li>
<li>They are not untaught.</li>
<li>Therefore, they will not twist Scripture.</li>
</ol>
This argument holds the same form as the logical form originally given in the original examples. It does not follow.
It also seems unusual to quote a verse from Peter’s letter saying that some things in Paul’s letters are hard to understand while also attempting to argue that taught men will not have trouble. Putting aside the formal logical fallacy problem, if White is attempting to argue that taught men will understand Paul’s writings, why is Peter saying they are difficult to understand? Was Peter not taught? One may argue that Peter meant that these difficult passages would be difficult to understand “for some,” but Peter never makes such qualifications. Why read into the text?
In any case, despite not naming the fallacy, Joe did a good job of giving a counterexample on the spot to prove that the logical form is invalid: “If I said Gnostics misuse this text, that doesn&#8217;t mean that if you&#8217;re not a Gnostic, you&#8217;re going to use it correctly. That doesn&#8217;t follow at all. That&#8217;s not logical.”
This is absolutely correct. If I say A leads to B, the negation of A does not necessarily mean the negation of B.
In conclusion, White&#8217;s defense of scriptural perspicuity through 2 Peter 3:16 falters due to his use of the denying the antecedent fallacy. The absence of the antecedent would not necessarily mean that the consequent would not occur. Heschmeyer&#8217;s counterexample effectively exposes this flaw. When defenders of perspicuity must employ fallacious reasoning, perhaps the doctrine needs reconsideration.

Peter Too ’Untaught’ for Paul?

Cy Kellett welcomes Catholic apologist Trent Horn as they dive into a thought-provoking discussion about the use of sacred images in worship. Addressing a question from an evangelical listener, Trent clarifies the Catholic perspective on images, drawing from Scripture and the early Church&#8217;s practices to explain how these elements enhance rather than detract from worship.
Transcript:
Caller: I&#8217;m an evangelical Christian, and I grew up in a tradition where the use of images was always seen as something that was idolatrous. I think back to, I believe it&#8217;s Acts 22, when the apostle Paul sees all the worship that the Greeks are partaking in and all the idolatry that&#8217;s going on, and he&#8217;s disturbed in his spirit.
And, you know, my question is essentially, I don&#8217;t see any indication that the Apostle Paul would be okay or condone or encourage the use of sacred images of Christ or of saints in our worship services and liturgies. And I&#8217;m wondering if you can speak into that question.
Trent: Sure. I&#8217;m not sure what you&#8217;re referring to here. In Acts 22, I know that at one point Paul does say that maybe, maybe it&#8217;s here. No, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s in Acts 22. He says that the Lord does not dwell in houses made with human hands. So you&#8217;re right, of course, that Paul is, I mean, First Corinthians is Paul&#8217;s very clear about his denunciation of idol worship. He says that an idol has no real existence because these gods do not exist. These idols lead people away from God.
But I don&#8217;t think it would follow from that that Paul would oppose any use of an image in relation to worshiping God. For example, the Book of Acts also records how a handkerchief was taken from Paul&#8217;s workshop that was on his body and it was used to heal other people. So here we have an image. We have a tactile object that is associated with a holy individual that is used for healing others. And Paul never rebukes that. He never says, &#8220;Hey, just stop doing that. Stop taking rags out of my workshop and using them to heal people.&#8221;
People understand that similar to the bones of Elijah in the Book of Ezekiel, that relics related to holy people contain God&#8217;s ability to work through these to effect various good ends. Now, that&#8217;s different, but we&#8217;re on a similar track here. Relics are, of course, different than images, but we&#8217;re both dealing with God making himself known in the world through different material means.
So I agree with you that you shouldn&#8217;t worship an image as if that were God right in front of you. But if you have it to remind you of something that&#8217;s holy, I don&#8217;t see the problem here, because we see Josephus talks about, and the Old Testament talks about how there were images that adorned the temple in Jerusalem. Or in Numbers, chapter 21, God told Moses to make a golden serpent for the people to look at, to be healed from the plague of serpents that had attacked their encampment.
So I think it&#8217;s the context, not just the image in and of itself. Do you see what I&#8217;m saying?
Caller: Yeah, I think I do. And I think I messed up the scripture reference. I think I was thinking, if I may just really quick tag on this, the situation where they have the situation with Diana where Paul offends the sensibilities of the Greeks.
Trent: Well, I know that some people, like in Acts 19 and others, that when Paul was preaching the worship of Jesus to Greeks, they were abandoning their worship of idols. And that enraged the idol makers because obviously now they couldn&#8217;t sell their product to customers.
And so there, once again, we&#8217;re talking about idols to other gods that are receiving worship that belongs to God alone. But the church has long held that an image&#8230; And I attend a Byzantine Rite church. And so the church that I attend is filled, filled from floor to ceiling with images from the Gospels. I love it actually for my 4-year-old because, you know, sometimes Byzantine services can be, you know, an hour and 20 minutes long or something like that, an hour 40 in Lent.
But honestly, he just looks at it; it&#8217;s like a comic book inside the church and he just looks at the stories of Jesus. My favorite comment of his is he asks, &#8220;Why was there a bat giving Jesus a banana?&#8221; And that was where the devil&#8217;s giving a&#8230; asking Jesus to make a loaf of bread. That&#8217;s neither here nor there; that&#8217;s just a personal observation.
But I think that when we use our intuitions when it comes to the use of images, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a problem. So for example, do you think that it&#8217;s wrong for a non-denominational Protestant church to have a Nativity display outside during Christmas?
Caller: To be completely frank with you, the tradition, or I guess the tradition that I&#8217;ve been raised in, there have been people that have had disagreements about that, which is why I think&#8230;
Trent: What do you think about it? What do you think?
Caller: I personally am conflicted because I definitely see the point of&#8230; It&#8217;s a reminder of something that God has done. And I am not offering worship to the Nativity set or to the baby Jesus in the Nativity set. So I frankly, I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s an idol.
Trent: Yeah, and I would agree with you. Now, if somebody thought that baby Jesus was right there in their little town&#8217;s nativity set, that&#8217;s going to get problematic. So I think that that same logic, we can extend it to the use of imagery or statues in Catholic worship.
Another example might be wearing a necklace with a cross on it, just wearing a simple cross on a necklace. Or in a church, like, what do you think about a church that has just a single cross at the front of the assembly? I mean, that is an image, right?
Caller: Yeah, I&#8217;ve always interpreted that as a reminder.
Trent: Okay, great. Well, then I think that we&#8217;ve got a lot of room here. I tell you what, if you give your email to our call screener, so stay on the line, give your email to our call screener, I&#8217;ll send you my book, *The Case for Catholicism*. I can email it to you. I have a whole chapter on the intercession of the saints and includes a subsection on venerating images and the debate about images you may find to be helpful.
So I would enjoy sending that to you if you could give your email to our call screener.

The Statues Are Why I Can’t Be Catholic…

When it comes to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (Scripture as the only rule of faith), Catholics must remember: the first Christians did not have a Bible to call their only rule of faith!
The last book of the New Testament, Revelation, was not written until about the year A.D. 68. That leaves a thirty-five-year gap between Jesus’ ascension and the completion of the Bible as we know it. Can an incomplete Bible be the sole rule of faith?
Furthermore, if the doctrine of sola scriptura were true, then the Church would have existed for a time without its sole infallible rule of faith. During this time, there would have been controversies, doctrinal disputes, and other difficulties that could not be resolved. On the individual level, believers would have lacked the fullness of divine revelation. Both of these facts demonstrate a fatal flaw in the doctrine of sola scriptura.
[A note on Gospel dating: Some modern scholars assign a date of A.D. 90-100 for the Book of Revelation. But in the informed opinion of this author, the earlier dates given by Jimmy Akin and other Bible scholars are more trustworthy. Moreover, if the later date is accurate, it would mean that the Church existed even longer without the New Testament as the final authority, thus weakening the Protestant position even further.]
The first few decades of the Church’s existence were turbulent. Persecutions had already begun, and more were imminent (Matt. 10:16-18, Luke 21:12, John 15:20-21, 2 Tim. 3:11-12, Rev. 2:10). Believers were being martyred (Acts 7:54-60, 12:1-2). The apostolic teaching was met with resistance (Acts 5:17-18, 27-28; 17:5-6, 13), and false teachings had already appeared (Acts 20:29-30, Gal. 1:6-9, 1 John 4:1). If the Bible was the Christian’s only rule of faith at that time, and if the Bible was not fully written, by the earliest reckoning, until decades after Christ’s ascension, how did early Christians deal with immediate threats to the new faith?
The New Testament answers this question. In Acts 15, we read about the Council of Jerusalem. The issue at hand was whether a believer had to be circumcised according to the Mosaic Law in order to be saved (v. 1). Luke tells us that “Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them”—that is, those who were insisting on circumcision—but since the issue was still not settled, these two men were sent to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and presbyters to put it to rest. “After there had been much debate,” Peter stands up and delivers his ruling on the matter (vv. 7-11), after which “all the assembly kept silence.”
This is a telling account, because conspicuously present is Peter’s teaching authority, and conspicuously absent is an appeal to Scripture. In fact, those in favor of circumcision were the ones appealing to Scripture (vv. 1, 5), but Peter overruled them on the basis of his own power to teach on matters of faith. The Magisterium functioned exactly as Jesus had designed it to.
At this point in the life of the Church, none of the New Testament had been written yet. But there were still Christians who wanted authoritative Christian truth, who wanted to be saved. God didn’t abandon them as casualties of a sola scriptura system that wouldn’t be functional until long after they were dead. It doesn’t seem reasonable, therefore, to think that even after Jesus revealed the fullness of the Father’s plan, imparted his teachings to the apostles, and established his Church to be the means by which those teachings were brought to the world, there would be one group of people who lacked a rule of faith (no New Testament) and another group, much later, who had it once the New Testament was complete.
A Protestant might object: “Christians necessarily had to wait until the completion of the New Testament. The apostles may have been the authority during that time, but once the New Testament was written and the Bible was complete, it replaced the apostles as the only rule of faith for believers.”
And here is how a Catholic can respond: “This claim is pure supposition and has no support in the New Testament. Aren’t the important teachings of Scripture—like what transpires in the Council of Jerusalem, where the apostles demonstrate their binding authority—sufficiently clear, as Protestants claim? If sola scriptura is a central doctrine, why would it be based on inference at best and supposition at worst rather than being explicitly stated in Scripture?”
Faced with the time gap between the Ascension and the completion of the New Testament, Protestants are left with three possibilities regarding temporary sources of Christian authority for that period: (1) nothing, (2) the Old Testament, or (3) the apostles.
Of course, having nothing as a rule of faith for Christians is untenable. It contradicts the passages where Jesus clearly gives his authority to the apostles, it leaves the Church vulnerable to the kinds of difficulties mentioned above, and it leaves no court of final appeal to settle the Church’s internal and disciplinary matters.
The Old Testament by itself cannot serve as the rule of faith because it needs to be interpreted, as evidenced by the scenario just mentioned in Acts 15—or Luke 24, where Jesus has to explain to the two disciples walking to Emmaus “the things concerning himself” in “all the [Old Testament] scriptures” (v. 27) as well as to the disciples in Jerusalem (vv. 44-45). It functioned alongside the Jews’ tradition and the seat of Moses, showing that in practice, it was not a sole authority. And if it were sufficient for Christians, then the New Testament would not have needed to be written.
That leaves us with apostolic authority. Nowhere does the Bible indicate that it would be temporary—still less that it would give way to the authority of Scripture alone. On the contrary, we see that the apostles chose successors, who, in turn, possessed the same authority to “bind and loose” (render authoritative decisions) that they had. This is why Matthias was elected as a replacement for Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:15-26) and why Paul passed on his apostolic authority to Timothy and Titus (2 Tim. 1:6, Titus 1:5). If anything, pointing to the apostles to solve the authority gap supports the Catholic position: since Jesus intended his Church to exist until his return, he intended apostolic authority (the Church’s Magisterium) to exist, as clearly evidenced by the selection of successors to their office.

Christians with No Bible!

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<h3>Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter
Lectionary: 283</h3>
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&nbsp;
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<h4>Reading 1    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/acts/13:26">ACTS 13:26-33</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">
When Paul came to Antioch in Pisidia, he said in the synagogue: 
“My brothers, children of the family of Abraham, 
and those others among you who are God-fearing, 
to us this word of salvation has been sent. 
The inhabitants of Jerusalem and their leaders failed to recognize him, 
and by condemning him they fulfilled the oracles of the prophets 
that are read sabbath after sabbath. 
For even though they found no grounds for a death sentence, 
they asked Pilate to have him put to death, 
and when they had accomplished all that was written about him, 
they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb. 
But God raised him from the dead, 
and for many days he appeared to those 
who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. 
These are now his witnesses before the people. 
We ourselves are proclaiming this good news to you 
that what God promised our fathers 
he has brought to fulfillment for us, their children, by raising up Jesus, 
as it is written in the second psalm, 
You are my Son; this day I have begotten you.”
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<h4>Responsorial Psalm    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/psalms/2:6">2:6-7, 8-9, 10-11AB</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">
R.    (7bc)  You are my Son; this day I have begotten you. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
“I myself have set up my king 
on Zion, my holy mountain.” 
I will proclaim the decree of the LORD: 
The LORD said to me, “You are my Son; 
this day I have begotten you.” 
R.    You are my Son; this day I have begotten you. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
“Ask of me and I will give you 
the nations for an inheritance 
and the ends of the earth for your possession. 
You shall rule them with an iron rod; 
you shall shatter them like an earthen dish.” 
R.    You are my Son; this day I have begotten you. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
And now, O kings, give heed; 
take warning, you rulers of the earth. 
Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice before him; 
with trembling rejoice. 
R.    You are my Son; this day I have begotten you. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia.
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<h4>Alleluia    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/14:6">JN 14:6</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">
R. Alleluia, alleluia. 
I am the way and the truth and the life, says the Lord; 
no one comes to the Father except through me. 
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
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<h4>Gospel    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/14:1">JN 14:1-6</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">
Jesus said to his disciples: 
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. 
You have faith in God; have faith also in me. 
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. 
If there were not, 
would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? 
And if I go and prepare a place for you, 
I will come back again and take you to myself, 
so that where I am you also may be. 
Where I am going you know the way.” 
Thomas said to him, 
“Master, we do not know where you are going; 
how can we know the way?” 
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. 
No one comes to the Father except through me.”
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Source: <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings">cms.usccb.org</a>
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Daily Holy Mass: Friday, May 8, 2020

<div>Is my medal still a miraculous medal if the prayer has been omitted from the side of the medal with the image of Our Lady?</div><div>Sounds like an accidental defect in the manufacturing process. At this point, we advise you to replace it with a correctly made Miraculous Medal and have that new one blessed. As to your defective medal, if it’s been blessed, you can just bury it in the ground per usual norms for blessed objects.
</div>

Defective Miraculous Medal?

<div>Is it only the pope who is infallible? Are the bishops also infallible? What about priests? </div><div>For an overview of the Church’s teaching on infallibility, see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/papal-infallibility">our tract on the subject</a>.
</div>

Is Only the Pope Infallible?

<div>is there biblical evidence of individual judgement and a judgement at the second coming?</div><div>The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) covers the particular judgment in CCC 1021-22. The Catechism cites several biblical passages that affirm each person will have a particular judgment with God, including Matthew 16:26; 2 Corinthians 5:10; and Hebrews 9:27.
The Catechism covers the Final or Last Judgment in CCC 1038-41. Two classic biblical passages that support this teaching are Jesus’ words in John 5:28-29 and Matthew 25:31-46.
</div>

Biblical Basis of Particular and Final Judgments

“Pulling an all-nighter” is, in our cultural memory, a kind of academic rite of passage. Maybe they have a new term for it now, but surely the idea will remain as long as there are assignments to do and people prone to procrastination. Despite the fact that you’ve known about the paper for a few weeks, you just haven’t found the time to work on it, so you stay up deep into the night while everyone else sleeps, staring at the computer screen and keeping yourself awake with candy or energy drinks or whatever.
I know how often this happened in my teaching days, both high school and college, because I’d see the time stamp of paper submissions at 3 A.M., 4 A.M., etc. Every time that happened, I’d ask: why didn’t you just ask for an extension? Or, at the very least, why didn’t you just take the lower grade for turning it in a day late? Chances are pretty good that what you produce at 3 A.M. isn’t going to justify the sacrifice of a night’s sleep.
As a preacher, I’ve had to learn this, too: burning the midnight oil on Saturday trying to produce some kind of homiletical magnum opus is rarely as edifying for my soul, or yours, as good rest.
We see these kinds of sacrifices elsewhere. Sometimes, maybe, they’re worth it, sometimes not. We’ve all met the person who basically sacrifices every single free moment for a sport or a hobby or some other good thing. Maybe it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice if it’s what you really love. But in other cases, there’s a conscious sacrifice—I’m giving up this time, or freedom, or money I could spend elsewhere—to invest in this business, or to have a chance at playing college football or whatever. But there’s no guarantee—in fact sometimes the odds aren’t all that good—that such sacrifices will bring clear results.
Those examples are making sacrifices for good things. I’m sure we can all think about the sacrifices for things a little farther down the hierarchy of goodness. Sacrificing time with your family so that you can get ahead at work. Sacrificing your grades so that you can watch more YouTube videos. Sacrificing your sanity so that you can be right in a comment war.
All three of our readings today talked about sacrifice and suffering—and they all point to the sacrifice and the suffering of one person: the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
So here’s the problem. We hear all the time that we ought to imitate Jesus. And we hear all this stuff about sacrifice and suffering and serving others and so on, and this is all good, but often this idea morphs, in our imagination, into the assumption that Christian sacrifice means that it is noble to give up things that we need for things that we don’t need. For that is normally how we talk about and think about sacrifice in the world. People make “sacrifices” so that they can go on a cruise, or go to Disney, or buy a new car. On this deep, subconscious level, I think that many of us feel justified in making sacrifices for things that don’t matter because we’ve been told over and over again that sacrifice is good, period, and so we never move beyond that to the question of what we’re making sacrifices for, and whether the sacrifice we’re making is actually worth something.
It&#8217;s interesting how this language of sacrifice has permeated our vocabulary. In the old world, sacrifice was what you did for a god. So sacrifice for something else would be what the biblical tradition has always called idolatry. We may not claim to worship things like our good looks, our résumé, our voting record, or our bank account, but the sacrifices we make for them may suggest otherwise.
The picture we get in Scripture is different. It’s not just a celebration of sacrifice and suffering; it’s a celebration of a particular sacrifice and suffering that takes away sin. The sacrifice of Jesus is wonderful not just because it’s a sacrifice. It’s wonderful not even because he gives his life for other people. It’s wonderful because it works. It fixes things. It resets the world. It starts everything in a new direction. And that has everything to do with who Jesus is—God and man in one. In other words, not you or me.
So here’s the point: do not imagine that you are following Jesus just because you occasionally give up one thing for another thing. It’s tempting to be like James and John in their casual insistence that they can “drink the cup” of the Lord’s sacrifice. I’m not sure if they really grasp the meaning, or if they’re as clueless as the modern Catholic who can’t even bother to give up meat on a Friday. Either way, the Lord’s rebuke centers on the fact that they’re focused on the wrong goal; being willing to pay the cost is meaningless when you’re aiming for the wrong thing. The sacrifice entailed with following Jesus means offering our life in service to the good that he revealed.
So if you’re making sacrifices to do what is good, beautiful, and true, you’re on the right track. If you’re making sacrifices so that you can spend more time with the poor, or better support the Church, or pursue the beauty of holiness and virtue, you’re on the right track. On the other hand, if you’re making sacrifices just to do what you enjoy, or to maintain your personal image, you’re probably not on the right track.
To find the right track, the right path, is hard. It requires us to pay attention not to ourselves, and not even just not to ourselves, but to one specific person—Jesus—who alone can direct us to the source and meaning of all things. Only in looking to him, and to his sacrifice, can we learn what it means to be human, what it means to be God’s children, and what it means to suffer through the changes and circumstances of this world. Amen.

What Are Your Sacrifices For?

How do I start a conversation with a member of the satanic temple? Their biggest hang up is the problem of evil

Are American Catholics deserting Israel?

Why is the Catholic God ok with ritualistic cannibalism? How did the miracle of Lanciano go from bread to flesh?

Wasn’t Papal infallibility a 19th century invention? If so, can you really backdate it 2,000 years?

How do I get off a double minded mindset? I’m tired of church hopping.

How available is contemplation for lay people?

Ask Me Anything

Episode 106: Year C &#8211; 1st Sunday of Advent
In this episode, we focus on four details in the second reading and Gospel reading for this upcoming first Sunday of Advent, Year C. The second reading is taken from 1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2 and the details there, so we argue, relate to the nature of justification as interior righteousness versus the forensic model. The two details in the Gospel reading, taken from Luke 21:25-28, 34-36, gives opportunity to reflect on Jesus’ reliability as a prophet and the Protestant notion of “once saved, always saved.”
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120124.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Justification and Once Saved, Always Saved

What evidence do we truly have for a human soul?

Can you point to evidence or the deuterocanonical books in the New Testament or the early church?

Why didn’t Psalm 151, Maccabees 3 & 4, Book of Susana make the cut?

What do the different colors of the scapular mean?

Can you disagree with the Church if you don’t promulgate it?

When did the Church start baptizing by sprinkling?

What is grace? How is it imparted?

How do we justify killing non-combatant innocent civilians in a war? How does that fit into Just War Theory?

Has everything before Rev. 20:7 have already taken place?

Imagine if someone with a decent platform got on Youtube or Twitter and said, “I think we’re overly focused on a rational approach to COVID-19 issues and vaccines. We should pay more attention to our emotions about these things.”
What sort of response would there be? “Anti-science!” is what you’d hear, and rightfully so. We heard this ad nauseum when people disagreed over COVID-19 issues with scientists who, in the <a href="https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/06/18/politics/anthony-fauci-coronavirus-anti-science-bias/index.html">words</a> of Dr. Anthony Fauci, had “an air of authority.”
Well, the appeal to emotions over rational thinking is the very MO of a new high school <a href="https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Foercommons.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fmedia%2Fcourseware%2Frelatedresource%2Ffile%2FModule_2_Climate_ChangePregnancy_j4yPypY.pptx%3FResponseContentDisposition%3Dattachment%253Bfilename%253D%2522Module_2_Climate_ChangePregnancy_j4yPypY.pptx%2522&amp;wdOrigin=BROWSELINK">curriculum</a> adopted by the State of Washington. Module 2 of the curriculum entitled Climate Change &amp; Pregnancy: Exploring Risks &amp; Impacts states that we have a problem in science education: “For too long, science and science education have prioritized my rational thinking.” Imagine that! Rational thinking is a problem in science education.
What’s the solution? The curriculum states, “we must learn to pay attention to our own emotions and those of other people” (emphasis added). Why? Because they “can signal alignment or discord between cultural values and technical assertions.”
Wow! An advocation for emotions to replace rational thinking in the driver&#8217;s seat of science? That, my friends, is real “anti-science!” Appealing to scientists who disagree with other scientists is not anti-science. But letting emotions drive scientific research is.
So much for the &#8220;Thou shalt not be Anti-science&#8221; command.
For other ways in which that command has been violated by those who are fond of touting it, see my new book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/the-new-relativism-unmasking-the-philosophy-of-todays-woke-moralists/">The New Relativism: Unmasking the Philosophy of Today’s Woke Moralists</a>.

Anti-Science for Thee but Not for Me

Are Catholics actually IDOLATORS?! The simple answer is no. But let's talk about it.

My wife and I lived in Beijing for eight months right after we were married in 2016. Our experience was typical of most Westerners. We were allowed to worship and do Catholic things with limited interference, because we were not viewed as a threat.
Chinese Catholics, on the other hand, face surveillance, bullying, and intimidation. Two Masses we attended and a hidden church we visited stand out as testimonies of faith in the midst of opposition—valuable for us Western Christians, who might take our freedoms and opportunities for granted.
The first Mass was on a wet and cold late fall evening. We hurried to make it in time to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, also called “The South Cathedral,” or “Nantang” in Mandarin, after a long day of touring the city. When we arrived, we were mostly just grateful to sit down to rest our feet. But then my attention was drawn to the inordinate number of security cameras. Pillar after pillar had one, creating an odd contrast with the seventeenth-century architecture. There was hardly any gold to steal; it had already been taken in previous persecutions. I was confused as to why they were on such high alert until a friend explained, “They are government cameras. They can watch everyone who comes in here.”
The homily was all in Mandarin and lasted for an obscenely long thirty, possibly forty minutes. I was exhausted, ravenous, and grumpy. But afterward, I learned that it was illegal for the priest to instruct the children of the parish in the Faith or give them any materials to read. The homily was his only chance to reach them, and he wasn’t going to waste it.
While we lived in Beijing, we were fortunate to visit many other parts of China. My wife had been adopted as an infant from Wuhan (of COVID fame). She had always wanted to visit her native city. Through a series of providential events, we went to Mass Christmas Eve in a church right next door to the orphanage she was adopted from.
Outside, there was a collection of dozens of nativity sets from around the world on display. Inside, the Church was packed, and the indoor creche brought to life that moment in Bethlehem where God turned the tide of human history and gave to us our Savior.
All of this was familiar, and comforting, to any American or Westerner. What was also familiar—but more surprising—was the other characters ready to welcome the newborn King: Frosty the Snowman, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Santa Claus were all there alongside the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, and the Wise Men.
Why were these secular figures taking up what should be space for sacred art? We learned that many Chinese Catholics see Frosty, Santa, etc. as a part of how free people fully rejoice in the joy of the God-Man coming to Earth. They can’t fathom something being “Christmassy” but not religious.
Our culturally acceptable but rationally bizarre celebrations in America of Christmas without Christ don’t make sense to those who risk the ire of the government to celebrate it. We heard that a year or so before, the police had shown up at another church right before Mass began and barricaded the doors. They informed the distressed families who had not yet gotten inside that “enough people are going to Church today. Go home.”
And thus it was that one of the most beautiful Christmas Masses of my life was in the company of not just the angels, shepherds, and wise men, but also the whole cast of “commercial Christmas” characters. At their best, these figures help heighten our sense of excitement, wonder, and mystery as we prepare for the Nativity. In Wuhan that year, they lived up to that calling in a way I would never have guessed.
The final church experience that particularly struck me was again in Beijing. In the heart of the capital city, there is a district called Wangfujing. It is a bustling hive of traffic and activity. At what looks like the end of one of the main plazas, there is a gargantuan rectangle of an office building. If you walk all the way up to it, however, you realize that the street continues, wrapping awkwardly around and resuming its course on the other side. There you find St. Joseph’s, a Romanesque edifice from the early 1900s, and one of four historic Catholic churches in Beijing. They all suffered the loss of many of their material treasures in the decades that the Chinese Communist Party has run the show, but they are still beautiful and culturally significant. Relatively recently, government officials decided that it was too easy for passersby to see the beautiful, cross tipped spires. In an act of petty vindictiveness, they built a massive block to hide the Church from view unless you deliberately seek it out.
Chinese Catholics are always under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party, or secretly practicing their faith under the radar. The division is not as cut and dried as “underground” being the faithful and “aboveground” being sellouts to the government. The situation—including how Pope Francis had tried to address it—is too complicated to discuss in full here. What is more important to take away is that we Catholics in the United States of America and the West have more freedom, resources, and opportunity than most any people have ever had on the face of this earth. If we fully took advantage of these and used them to spread the gospel, how many souls would we bring to Jesus?
If we were half as willing to face the social media mobs and snickers behind our back as those in China are to face government intimidation, surveillance, and bullying, how much holier would our nation be?
My heart is filled with gratitude for the many ways God has blessed us in the West. I am also grateful for how he has provided for the many wonderful Chinese Catholics who do far more with far less under persecution. I am so grateful for the joyful and persistent brothers and sisters in Christ who remain faithful in the midst of so much uncertainty and opposition. May their witness be a way God inspires us to take up our crosses and follow him.

A Hidden Church in China

There’s no getting around the pretty obvious theme in today’s lectionary. Man and woman. Marriage.
In Genesis 2, we see that beautiful, poetic description of Eve coming from the rib of Adam. When speaking of the Incarnation, St. Anselm says that there had been, in human history, three kinds of conception: a human with no human parent—that is, Adam; a human from a man alone—that is, Eve; and, of course, many humans with both a father and a mother. It was therefore supremely fitting that the savior complete the pattern by being born from only a human mother with no human father.
Others like to contrast this in terms of the first and second Adam and the first and second Eve. The first Eve came out of Adam. The second Adam came out of the new Eve.
These aren’t the primary emphases of the readings, but they are key resonances. History has meaning; history has a relationship with the present. Redemption, salvation, the life of grace—these are never an escape from history, a release from creation, but its healing. That is important. So much of modern life is focused on the idea of the new, on getting rid of the past and moving on, starting with a blank slate. For Christianity, that is a delusion. History is what it is. We are where and who we are, and finding salvation, finding the end point and purpose of this life, has to start from this reality. As T.S. Eliot puts it in his Four Quartets, “only through time time is conquered.”
This concept of the redemption of time and history is surely relevant to what Jesus says in Mark about marriage and divorce.
The modern view of marriage and divorce is, as we know, very flexible. In civil law, marriage is merely a contract between individuals that can be formed or dissolved at will. The idea is that, effectively, you can hit pause, or stop, and restart life whenever it is convenient. Of course, no one really believes this to be the case, practically. But on paper, that is how our culture views things. And so the Christian tradition—quite clear here in today’s Gospel—that marriage is a fundamental, indissoluble reality between a man and a woman—is just very strange to many people.
This is not the time or place to say exactly why that is or what we might do about it. But we can spend a moment reflecting on our Lord’s words about marriage. It’s an interesting conversation. People ask about the allowance for divorce in Jewish law, and Jesus gives this subtle response: “For your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.” “He” is Moses. Then he says, “But from the beginning of creation . . .,” and then he quotes Genesis. Matthew’s version of this is a little clearer and more memorable. There, Jesus says, “From the beginning it was not so.” That one phrase is the starting point for a whole group of Pope St. John Paul II’s talks on the “Theology of the Body.”
Again, we can’t do a thorough exegesis in a homily, but we can say this: the Lord’s words here are potentially explosive to his immediate audience. How so? He suggests that Moses should not be 100 percent and exclusively identified with the law of God. It’s difficult to overemphasize the importance of this one line in the Christian tradition. Here we get the implication that there are distinctions to be made in the Old Law. Some things are built into creation. Some things were directly instituted by God. Some things were instituted by Moses as a concession to hardness of heart.
So what’s happening here is not all that different from what happens in the Sermon on the Mount. Although it has always been popular for people to imagine that Jesus somehow tosses aside the Old Covenant law for the sake of some vague comments about love, in fact he radicalizes the law, deepens it, and clarifies it. Classic instance: It’s not good enough not to commit adultery; you should not consent to adultery even in your heart. The law becomes not less stringent, but more.
So when it comes to marriage, the primordial scriptural language is “the two become one flesh.” There is an undeniable permanence to this. You either become one flesh or don’t. And although it may be challenging to the world, this is the Catholic teaching on marriage. If you have a real, valid marriage, it is permanent, “until death do us part.” So either the marriage is fully real or it isn’t. If it’s not, it doesn’t mean that the relationship is nothing, or that the children are somehow wrong. It’s just that there isn’t a marriage.
Sometimes this teaching on marriage can come across as harsh—it’s a way of speaking that contrasts quite directly with mainstream culture and modern law. And it is possible, as Catholics, to lean into this in a way that is not edifying. Running around randomly telling people that their marriages aren’t real is rarely a good approach. But the supreme law of the Church is the salvation of souls, and salvation always involves confronting the truth. This is what we do every time we go to confession. It can hurt, but the pain isn’t forever. Healing is always possible.
Why, I wonder, does this teaching on divorce move straight into this famous passage about Jesus and the children? Some of that is just Mark, who always tells his story with a breathless pace. But the two incidents do go together.
Many in the crowd are annoyed at the children. Any parent knows this feeling, as do plenty of non-parents. We are adults, after all. We have important business to take care of. We cannot be bothered with childish demands and childish questions and silly things like needing to be picked up or needing to notice with awe the way a certain leaf has fallen on the ground.
This self-important adultness is, if we think back about two seconds, firmly rooted in the hardness of heart that results in bad marriage, divorce, and any number of other social ills. And in response to this type of adulthood, Jesus says quite directly: you must become as a little child.
Caryll Houselander says, “Our Lord’s words are a challenge. To become a child is a challenge to our courage: it demands first of all that we dare to grow up, to give ourselves to life, to accept life as it is, and above all to accept ourselves as we are” (see The Passion of the Infant Christ, 51).
We would do well to sit with that statement for a while.
Becoming like a child doesn’t mean becoming childish. Abandoning the adultness of misguided discipleship doesn’t mean not growing up. It means rather to be who we are, to have the humility of recognizing that we are in a world not of our making, full of wonders and truths that will always be beyond us.
Real marriage requires just this childlike approach. We speak a lot about being “ready” for marriage, and rightly so, but no one is “ready” for marriage any more than a person can be “ready” to grow up. It requires humility and openness to life, to the unexpected.
Likewise, no one is “ready” for God. The only one who was—the Lady whose “yes” unlocked the door of our redemption—exemplified this readiness not with a grown-up confidence and a fully worked out plan, but with the humble recognition that it is possible to receive a gift without fully knowing what it is or what it will be.
Let us be like children, approaching the altar of God. We are not here to claim something as a right, but to allow God to grow in us until we reach the full stature of Christ in the kingdom of heaven.

Marriage, Children, and Heaven

As COVID-19 vaccines become available to the public, some Catholics are concerned that abortion by-products may have been used in their production. Is this true, and can we receive any of these vaccines in good conscience? Jimmy Akin gives the answers.

Can Catholics Receive the COVID-19 Vaccine?

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to address a major point of division between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians: the role of the pope. Drawing directly from Scripture, Jimmy lays out a brief biblical case for the papacy, showing how the authority given to Peter—and his successors—points clearly to the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Caller: Just quick question. What do you think is the best argument against Orthodoxy?
Jimmy: Well, there are a few arguments that I used when I was evaluating this question because I came into traditional Christianity from a Protestant angle. And so I knew I needed to either become Catholic or Orthodox. In sorting through that, there were a few arguments that I discerned that split that, you know, indicated I needed to become Catholic. I&#8217;ve written about them in an article called &#8220;Why I&#8217;m Not Eastern Orthodox.&#8221; So you can Google &#8220;Jimmy Akin Why I&#8217;m Not Eastern Orthodox&#8221; and read about them.
But one of the key ones that struck my mind is the issue with the papacy, which is central here because the other differences are not on the same level of magnitude as the issue of the papacy. If the Catholic Church is right about the papacy, then the others tend to fall into line anyway. So this is the central issue.
It occurred to me that both Catholics and Orthodox acknowledge that the Bishop of Rome is the successor of Peter in a unique sense, and that he has correspondingly a special role in the Church. Sometimes that&#8217;s described as him being a first among equals, or to use Latin for it, primus inter pares. But he&#8217;s got a special role in the Church.
So how can we figure out which understanding of that role is the correct one? Here I would make a couple of points. The first one is the tack that&#8217;s taken by some Orthodox, which would be to say that he has a purely ceremonial special role, like a first among equals, kind of like the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. He has some special ceremonial functions, like he gets to assign cases to justices if he&#8217;s in the majority, but he has only the same vote as everybody else.
So he&#8217;s got a kind of ceremonial authority, but no substantive authority that&#8217;s different than any other justice. Well, if you apply that model to the papacy, that&#8217;s a concept that they wouldn&#8217;t have had in the ancient world. We have multiple passages in three of the four Gospels where Jesus gives Peter a special role among the apostles. If you&#8217;re given authority by Jesus, then you need to interpret the nature of that authority in terms of what authority looked like in ancient Near Eastern societies, in Judaism in particular.
They did not have the concept of purely ceremonial authority or a first among equals. In first-century Judaism, if God gave you authority, you could use it. He gave you authority. And so I think that just by examining the thought world of the time, we should understand the nature of Peter&#8217;s role and Peter&#8217;s authority in terms of substantive rather than ceremonial authority.
Also, it occurred to me that you have these two groups, Catholics and Orthodox, agreeing that the Bishop of Rome has this special role. Well, who is God more likely to guide into a correct understanding of that special role? Is it the group that has the special role within it, or is it the group that&#8217;s in separation from the special role?
As an analogy, I would point to the function of the Temple in ancient Israel, just like the Pope is a special institution in the Church today. The Temple was a special institution in ancient Israel, and there was a similar split when the ten northern tribes seceded. Politics has always been turned around in the Middle East, so of course the north secedes from the south there.
When the ten northern tribes seceded, that was blessed by God. He said, &#8220;That&#8217;s fine, but you still need to stick with the Temple in Jerusalem.&#8221; And they didn&#8217;t. The Samaritans ended up building another temple on Mount Gerizim, and that&#8217;s where they worshiped instead of worshiping at the Temple in Jerusalem.
From the biblical data we have, we know that that was a mistake. That&#8217;s something the authors of the Old Testament are very clear about. We see these two groups that have separated. One of them, the southern kingdom, has this institution of the Temple, and the other group that is in separation from the Temple has an erroneous understanding of it.
Whereas the group that has the Temple is guided into a correct understanding of the Temple. I would say the same thing would be true of the papacy. The group that has the papacy is the one we should presume has been guided into a correct understanding of it, while the group that&#8217;s in separation from the papacy, we should assume that that&#8217;s not the correct understanding.
So those would be the basic arguments that I would present. There are others I could go into, but if you&#8217;re asking what&#8217;s the best argument, it has to do with the papacy and the points I&#8217;ve just laid out, at least at a 30,000-foot top-level view.
Cy: That makes sense to you, Sal?
Caller: Yeah, no, it does. Very good.
Jimmy: Well, thank you for the call.

The Bible Proves the Pope—Not Eastern Orthodoxy

How do we reconcile God the father being a singular entity in the Old Testament to God prior being seen as a polytheistic idea?

How long did it take to replace Judas among the twelve and how did it happen?

Could you explain some of the contents of the Gospel of Thomas and why it’s not in the canon?

Why doesn’t the office of apostle exist anymore? Why did Jesus have to be crucified?

I dread being asked the following question: How can we defend the teaching of the Church when there are some situations where our own leadership refuse to defend it and sometimes even want to change the truth? How would you respond?

When I picked my confirmation name, I chose it after a secular person. Can I pick a specific saint now with that same name?

How do you explain Pope Francis’ comments with a sort of communion with Muslims and worshiping the same God?

In this episode, Trent sits down with Fr. Matthew Schneider to discuss the moral issues related to recent Covid-19 vaccine candidates such as whether they are connected to experiments done on aborted fetuses and what the Church teaches about using vaccines that were derived through illicit means.

Covid-19 Vaccines and Catholic Morality

What are the reasonable limits to sustaining a pregnancy, such as the case you were discussing vs embryos conceived in IVF?

Regarding the Georgia situation, since keeping dead person vitals going a new technology, would this be done only at the consent of the mother? Would that solve the dilemma?

I have a 13-year-old son. We were told that at 14 we would be asked to leave the room for our son to decide if he wanted to make his own medical decisions alone with the doctor. Are you familiar with this situation and would this be ethical?

Would it be ethical to implant a frozen embryo in a woman who is 60 years of age knowing that the pregnancy would probably not be viable?

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In this episode, Catholic bioethicist Fr. Tad Pacholczyk tackles tough moral questions about teenage medical consent, frozen embryo implantation in older women, and the ethics of sustaining life through new technologies. Hear a thoughtful Catholic perspective on where moral lines are drawn in modern medicine and why intention, consent, and dignity matter in every case.
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Catholic Perspective on Teen Consent, IVF, and Artificial Pregnancy

In this episode Trent reveals the reason liberals, including those in the Catholic Church, prefer downright ugly art.

Why Liberals Love Ugly Art

Why do we believe that we have free will if God already knows what we’re destined for?

If listening to music that’s offensive to God is sitting on your heart, you should listen to that and stop.

Revelation says the Lord will rule with an iron rod. What does this mean? Will this be a ‘dictatorial peace?’

Regarding divorce and Jesus’ comments in Mt. 5:31-32. What would justify divorce?

Is it licit for Catholics to receive donated body parts and materials from deceased people?

Are we supposed to bury an urn with ashes after a certain period of time? Can we keep the remains on a shelf?

Why do Catholics believe in guardian angels? What do you think they do?

How do you respond when a Protestant uses the Church Fathers to defend their position?

Is there distinction between venial and mortal sins in the bible?

Why does the Church teach that there are no more prophets after the apostolic age?

The Why’s of Catholic Beliefs

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent breaks down which is better: hotels or air bnb&#8217;s?

FFAF: Hotels vs Airbnb’s

Does God Want An Organized Religion?

How do I explain to protestants why they should at least respect the pope?

How can a priest absolve a person from sin if he is also only a man?

What are biblical or historical proofs that bishops were present from the beginning and not an addition in the 4th century?

How would we address someone who agrees that Jesus gave authority to his apostles but disagrees that it was passed on?

I’m distressed with the pope. How can I have any confidence in the Church? I need guidance.

&#8220;Does God Want Organized Religion?&#8221; In this episode, we explore the role of organized faith and its significance, along with questions like why Protestants should respect the Pope and how a priest can absolve sin. We also delve into the historical presence of bishops and the continuity of apostolic authority, providing a comprehensive look at these vital topics.
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Does God Want Organized Religion? Bishops, Authority, and Faith

Could there be apostolic traditions that are passed on by other means than written word or speech?

I think I got a piece of the Eucharist in my hair. How would I go about disposing of and cleaning my hair without desecrating the Eucharist?

I’m Roman Catholic, would my Sunday obligation be fulfilled if I attend liturgies at Chaldean or Melkite churches?

Can you pray for your own conception and it actually have any effect?

What is substance in the case of transubstantiation? Where does the change occur, Physically or spiritually?

Are public schools anti-Catholic or do they have anti-Catholic roots?

If Adam and Eve were the first people, how do we explain all the pagan people who were not aware of them?

What is the best English translation of the Bible?

What was the sin of Ham in Genesis?

Have you ever explored the cultural customs of using the Lord’s name in vain? Is prevalent in our culture but what about others?&nbsp;

Jimmy Akin tackles fascinating Catholic questions, from Sunday obligation at Eastern liturgies to Eucharistic reverence, transubstantiation, Adam &amp; Eve, public schools, and the best Bible translation. Don’t miss this deep dive into faith and theology!

Does Attending a Chaldean or Melkite Liturgy Fulfill My Sunday Obligation?

In this episode Trent shares not only how anyone can learn apologetics and but how they can turn this passion into a full-time career.

How to Become a Catholic Apologist

You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of entertaining and informative podcasts. Next stop, Trent’s favorite episodes of the classic series “The Twilight Zone” and his favorite parodies of it.

My Favorite Twilight Zone Episodes

Trent got a lot of feedback from his previous episode on Harry Potter, including many people who said he should examine what exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger has to say about the matter. So, in this episode Trent analyzes a popular video containing Fr. Ripperger’s reasons for why people should always avoid Harry Potter.

Fr. Ripperger, Harry Potter, and Healthy Skepticism

Episode 90: Year B &#8211; 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on one detail from the Gospel reading, taken from John 6:41-51, continuing the theme of the Eucharist. That one detail is Jesus’ comparison of the bread of life that he will give, which is the Eucharist, and the Manna in the wilderness. This revelation of the Eucharist as the New Manna, so I argue, supports the belief that the Eucharist cannot be merely a symbol of Jesus’ body and blood, but must be Jesus’ body and blood.
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081124.cfm">Click Here</a>
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The Eucharist and the Manna in the Wilderness

Rod Bennett&#8217;s new book, These Twelve, helps us see Jesus&#8217; mission through the eyes of the Apostles. For Holy Week, Bennett reflects on what the Apostle&#8217;s experienced as Jesus continued to teach them even as he suffered his passion.

Holy Week Through the Eyes of the Apostles

Time is an essential component of the Christian Faith because Christians believe that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity became flesh and entered human history. From the earliest centuries, Christians focused on chronology and dating important events in salvific history.
The ancient world was also concerned with time and calendars to mark religious, cultural, and political events. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans (and others) created calendars. The Jewish people crafted a calendar (based on the lunar months) that was modified throughout their history.
The early Church, being born into the Roman Empire, had its understanding of time and dating impacted by the Julian and Jewish calendars. One of the first crises in Church history concerned the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-pope-vs-tradition">proper method</a> for dating the celebration of Easter. In the eastern provinces many Christians used the Jewish method for dating Passover so that Easter was celebrated on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, regardless of the day of the week. The Church in Rome, as well as in Alexandria and Jerusalem, celebrated Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox. The different methods for calculating the celebration of Easter became such a contentious issue that the revered St. Polycarp (d. 155) traveled to Rome to meet with Pope St. Pius I (r. 140­-155) to discuss the matter, which was not officially resolved until the fourth century, when the Council of Nicaea mandated the Roman method.
After the early fourth-century Great Persecution under the Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305), the Church marked events with the nomenclature the Era of Martyrs to highlight the sacrifice of these brave witnesses of the Faith and to replace the prevailing Era of Diocletian, which dated documents based on the emperor’s reign. This nomenclature remained in effect until the sixth century, when the monk Dionysius (d. 544), nicknamed “Exiguus” (meaning “the little” and used, more than likely, as a self-deprecating title) introduced the Era of the Incarnation as a dating method.
Dionysius was a native Greek-speaker who also knew Latin. He desired to make the writing of Greek theologians accessible to Latin-speakers, so he spent most of his time translating various works. He also had an interest in chronology. Dionysius believed that time should not be dated according to the reign of Diocletian, the great persecutor of the Church, but rather should be centered on the birth of Christ. Adopting this method would erase the memory of Diocletian and highlight Jesus, who entered human history in the Incarnation.
Dionysius Exiguus’s Era of the Incarnation was used first in Italy and then later in some areas of Spain, but widespread use first began in England, where the method was adopted at the Synod of Whitby in 664.
The next important event in the Christian marking of time was the designation of events as “Before Christ (B.C.)” and as Anno Domini, “The Year of the Lord,” (A.D.), which had been utilized earlier but became well known from the works of the English saint and Doctor of the Church Bede the Venerable (672-737). As a young boy, Bede was entrusted to an abbot of a Northumbrian Benedictine monastery for his education. Recognized for his intellect, Bede was a brilliant student who loved learning. He studied Scripture and wrote commentaries on the Pentateuch and the Gospels. His greatest influence was exerted in historical writings, especially through his book on the Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. Bede told the story of the English making reference to the dating of events in the “Year of the Lord” (Anno Domini).
Bede recognized that Christ is the center of history and that the telling of time should be rooted in a chronology based on the Incarnation. Bede produced other chronological words, including On the Reckoning of Time, in which he recounted the history of the world from Creation to his own time in eighth-century England.
Despite the influence of Bede’s writings, widespread application of dating events as A.D. did not occur until the time of the Charlemagne in the early ninth century. The king of the Franks and emperor was the first major secular ruler to mandate the use of A.D. as a dating device throughout his empire. But even with Charlemagne’s endorsement, the method was not utilized by the papal chancery until the tenth century. Eventually, the method became the universal standard of dating in the West and remained so until the modern age.
After centuries of acceptance, the use of B.C./A.D. as the standard dating convention has come under attack in the post-Enlightenment world because of its association with Christ. Secular humanists, including various academics and scientists, have embraced the use of “Common Era (C.E.)” and “Before the Common Era (B.C.E.)” to replace A.D. and B.C. in the spirit of “inclusivity” so that non-Christians are not offended by the dating methodology.
Some <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1041/the-origin--history-of-the-bcece-dating-system/">proponents</a> of B.C.E./C.E., which changes merely the nomenclature and not the Christian dating baseline, advocate that the change is not a “politically correct” attempt to denigrate Christians but is based on historical usage in the scientific and academic communities since the seventeenth century and is more exact than B.C./A.D. Other commentators believe that the use of B.C./A.D. is rooted in Christian anti-Semitism and akin to a Christian conquest of time or even a form of colonization. Accordingly, some academics now criticize the use of B.C.E./C.E. because the terms attempt to hide the Christian connection (like a “yellow sticky note,” in the phrase of one <a href="https://udayton.edu/magazine/2022/01/common-era.php">academic</a>) rather than celebrate the world’s diversity.
Regardless, the use of B.C.E./C.E. is common in the modern world, with some countries (England, Wales, Australia) mandating its usage in official school curriculum. The terminology is common in textbooks and popularly written histories in the United States as well.
How should Catholics approach this terminology? Names and terms are important, and their usage communicates beliefs and convictions. (For example, the use of the term anti-abortion rather than pro-life by various news organizations illustrates their position on the issue.) In a modern world where speech is weaponized and where propaganda flourishes, it is vital for Catholics to use language and terms that reflect Christian belief and history. The use of B.C./A.D. proclaims that the truth that the Incarnation was the central event in human history and that Jesus is the Lord of history, and so it is proper and praiseworthy to continue to utilize this centuries-old terminology.

The Controversy of Christian Dating

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Recently Catholic podcaster William Hemsworth had Sam Rocha on to explain why Catholics can be socialists. He then invited Trent on to give a counterpoint response and ask him some tough questions about Catholicism and socialism.
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A Counterpoint on “Catholic Socialism”

In this episode Trent rebuts a viral video that casts doubt on the Bible because of variants in ancient manuscripts.

10 Changes Made to the Bible (REBUTTED)

When can kids actually be confirmed? Could an atheist baptize someone? Check out how Trent answers these and other questions in this special episode on the sacraments of initiation.

Secrets of Baptism and Confirmation

Why do Catholics today celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus? After all, we don’t have feast days dedicated to any other organs of Jesus’ body. There’s no “Solemnity of the Arm of Jesus,” for instance, to honor his baptisms and healings. So why a feast day for his heart?
Biblically, the heart is “our hidden center.” Scripture refers to the heart more than a thousand times, often, as the Catechism (CCC) notes, in the context of prayer (2562-63). The greatest commandment of the Law is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5, Mark 12:30). In speaking of the Sacred Heart, then, we’re referring to the person of Jesus, to his humanity, and to his love for the Father and for us, what the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html">Dicastery for Divine Worship</a> (DDW) calls his “infinite divine-human love for the Father and for his brothers.” In a special way, the image of the Sacred Heart captures the moment in which that love was poured out for us on the cross, when a soldier pierced the side of Christ, and blood and water flowed out (John 19:34).
As the DDW notes, we find devotion to the Sacred Heart throughout the Middle Ages, but it goes from being a personal devotion to a liturgical feast in no small part in response to the heresy of Jansenism. In <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas.html">the words of Pope Pius XI</a>, “the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was instituted at a time when men were oppressed by the sad and gloomy severity of Jansenism, which had made their hearts grow cold, and shut them out from the love of God and the hope of salvation.”
So what was the Jansenist heresy, and how was the Sacred Heart an answer to it?
Although the heresy of Jansenism is sometimes unfairly oversimplified, there were three particular features of the heresy that (inadvertently) produced disastrous effects. The first was a double predestination: that God destined some for heaven and others for hell, irrespective of merits. As Leszek Kołakowski traces in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/God-Owes-Us-Nothing-Jansenism/dp/0226450538">God Owes Us Nothing</a>, Jansenist theology argued that God gives some people the graces necessary for salvation and withholds them from others (pp. 31-35). The result of this idea would be that some people are going to hell, and there’s literally nothing they can do about it. They aren’t saved—not because they refuse God’s overtures, but simply because God doesn’t want to save them.
The second feature regarded imperfect contrition, sometimes known as attrition. In simple terms: If I turn away from my sin out of fear of hell (rather than out of love of God), is that good enough to be forgiven? The Catechism (1453) now clarifies: by itself, “imperfect contrition cannot obtain the forgiveness of grave sins”; however, imperfect contrition is sufficient to receive absolution through the sacrament of penance, since imperfect contrition can be perfected through the sacramental graces flowing from the confessional. But the Jansenists taught the opposite: that even for a valid sacramental confession, a penitent needed perfect contrition. Worse, <a href="https://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/st-margaret-mary-alacoque-reception-sacred-heart">Jansenist priests</a> “routinely withheld absolution, in the belief that few penitents demonstrated sufficient precision and adequate contrition.”
Third, because so few people could count on perfect contrition, Jansenists warned against receiving Communion frequently, in a misguided attempt to avoid the scandal of unworthy reception.
What was the combined effect of these three teachings? That ordinary Catholics doubted God’s love for them; doubted whether they were (or could be) forgiven, even after going to confession; and stayed away from the body and blood of Christ in Communion out of fear, thereby depriving themselves of sacramental graces. The resulting vision of God was thereby distorted. As <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19280508_miserentissimus-redemptor.html">Pius XI would later recount</a>, “God was not to be loved as a father but rather to be feared as an implacable judge.”
This is an important insight. It’s not just that Jansenism got the details of predestination or contrition or sacramental reception wrong. It’s that Jansenism got God wrong, in a fundamental way that many of us still get him wrong today.
Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that it was God himself who set things straight. Whereas multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popes vainly tried to quash Jansenism, Jesus intervened in an unexpected way: through a series of apparitions to a French nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690). In the last and most famous of these apparitions, Jesus showed her his heart and said,
<blockquote>Behold the heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love; and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for me in this sacrament of love.</blockquote>
Theologically, this is the corrective Jansenism needed. Jesus did not deny any of what Jansenism was getting right: that sin offends God, that so many of us seem indifferent to God, that we can slip into ingratitude toward God with startling ease. But rather than express this in terms of divine wrath, Jesus presents it as a tragedy of unrequited love. That is, sinners act this way not because God denies them the graces to do otherwise, but because they fail to appreciate the depth and breadth of God’s love for them. Jesus saw the same problem that the Jansenists saw, but he answered it with open arms and an open heart.
A great difficulty in believing in God’s love and mercy is simply accepting that God is so radically other. It’s hard to wrap our minds around the idea that the uncreated and unchanging God of the universe has a personal love for us. And so Jesus reminds us that he has a human heart, and with it, the full range of human emotions. Yet he is fully divine as well as fully human. Thus, our devotion is not just to the heart, but to the Sacred Heart. Jesus has at once the full experience of human emotions and the perfect vision of divine foreknowledge.
Pius XI illustrates the implications of this divine-human union in a <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19280508_miserentissimus-redemptor.html">beautiful reflection</a> on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. On the one hand, he points out that it was chiefly “because of our sins also which were as yet in the future, but were foreseen” that the soul of Christ became “very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38). In other words, what weighed upon Christ was not principally the looming shadow of the cross, but the weight of our sins.
But there is a happy corollary to this idea: that when we read that “there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him,” this should also be taken as Christ foreseeing our acts of reparation to the Sacred Heart, that “his heart, oppressed with weariness and anguish, might find consolation.” And so, the pope concludes, “even now, in a wondrous yet true manner, we can and ought to console that most Sacred Heart which is continually wounded by the sins of thankless men.”
This is a wonderful and mind-bending insight. The promise of the Sacred Heart is that our actions today are wrapped up (through God’s perfect foreknowledge) with Christ’s experience in Gethsemane, that we are either adding one more burden to him through our sins, or giving him one more consolation through our acts of love and reparation. And so (in <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_03051932_caritate-christi-compulsi.html">yet another encyclical on the Sacred Heart</a>!) Pius XI encouraged that “the Feast of the Sacred Heart be for the whole Church one of holy rivalry of reparation and supplication,” in which we hasten in large numbers “to the foot of the altar to adore the redeemer of the world, under the veils of the sacrament,” pouring our hearts out to his. What better way can we celebrate the triumph of Jesus’ love over the cold justice of Jansenism and our false conceptions of God?

The Sacred Heart Kills Heresy

Why was it necessary for Jesus to Send the Holy Spirit if it seems as though we got everything we need with Jesus and the sacraments?

How do I explain to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grader boys why they don’t wear head coverings in Church in light of 1 Cor. 11:6-7 and Act 18 where Paul shaves his head?

If the constitution is more of a Protestant document, does it conflict with anything in our Catholic faith?

What are your thoughts on the authorship and dating of Genesis?

What is the mechanism of action for the devil’s temptations on the world?

Why did they stop writing books into the bible?

Doctrinally how do the differences work in the east and west regarding infant communion?

How would a protestant align intercession of the saints and a belief in soul sleep?

Why doesn’t the 9th commandment state coveting thy neighbor’s husband only thy neighbor’s wife?

In cases where one has discerned that certain media doesn’t impact one poorly, but it will affect others. Can one still listen to it?

Recently I was on a plane during boarding when a woman slotted into the row in front of me. While she stowed her bag and gathered up her stuff, I got a chance to read the back of her t-shirt. It went something like this:
<blockquote>Why be racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and transphobic when you can just be quiet?</blockquote>
Those words were intended for folks like me, and they were no big surprise. We all know how today’s opponents of Christian/natural/traditional views on sex, marriage, the family, and the nature of the human person reduce those views to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/why-i-dont-care-if-im-homophobic">nothing more than vicious bigotry and phobias</a>. And we know that there’s a battle raging in our culture over these issues, the outcome of which is likely to have a profound effect on religious freedom and the place Christians will have in public life.
I was still taken aback, though, by the brazenness of the shirt’s message—its threat, really. It was essentially a variation on the old quip: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85211-shut-up-he-explained">“‘Shut up,’ he explained.”</a> I’m aware, at least in theory, that <a href="https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/young-liberals-used-to-be-the-most">elite liberal opinion has become less liberal,</a> less tolerant of dissent and less interested in debate. Still, some part of me wanted to believe that reasonable debate and human connection are possible even between people of radically different viewpoints. But the lady with the t-shirt just wanted me to go sit in a dark hole.
As I sat there on the plane, my memory drew a connection to another time, decades ago, when I experienced a similar disappointment. I was in a courthouse where a group of pro-lifers were being railroaded—er, tried—for failing to “disperse” from a protest at an abortion clinic. During a break in the action, I approached the young male stenographer, fascinated by his arcane profession. I asked him in a friendly way how his stenotype machine worked and if it was hard to learn.
His eyes widened in surprise, his face swelled and turned red, and he twitched a little as he struggled to find words. Finally, with a rush of air like a bursting paper bag, he managed to push a reply over his lips: “Just . . . whatever!” Then he turned his back to me, conversation over.
A leper in the temple would have gotten a warmer reception. I was one of those crazy &#8220;anti-choice&#8221; people. We weren’t supposed to be humanized or dialogued with. We were supposed to be quiet. But I wasn’t being quiet, and this guy couldn’t even.
All these things are floating around my mind today, as we mark another solemn anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Among the many details of tragedy and heroism from that day, one lesser-known piece was the message from the terrorists aboard American Airlines Flight 11, meant for the passengers but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS_NFxBRlds&amp;t=283s">accidentally broadcast to air traffic controllers</a>:
<blockquote>Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay . . . If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.</blockquote>
No one knew at that point what was unfolding on that dreadful day. There was no <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93">desperate pushback</a> from that plane. The passengers stayed still and stayed quiet. And just twenty minutes later, Flight 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center.
Silence, enforced through the projection of fear: this is a core tactic of control. Whether it’s terrorists intent on death and mayhem or activists who want to suppress religion and re-engineer our culture, they can’t abide pesky resistance from people who should just shut up. (The latter bunch are not, of course, the moral equivalent of murderous terrorists; the point here is to note a shared aim or tactic.)
So, as we reflect on this sad day, let us also recall one of its lessons: do not let yourself be silenced.
First, because speaking the truth is not hate.
Of course we shouldn’t be bigots. And by all means, let’s cultivate a habit of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-church-militant-or-the-church-belligerent">gentleness and charity when we speak</a>, imitating the Lord and the saints. We don’t have to be cranked <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc">up to eleven</a> all the time—we should learn to pick our spots and to moderate our words as circumstances warrant. But we must also be bold, and not let ourselves be cowed by social pressure—at the point of a knife or the back of a t-shirt—to keep our God-talk and unfashionable moral opinions to ourselves because the elite opinion-makers now in control of the plane have deemed them intolerable.
Second, because the other side lies.
The 9/11 hijackers said the passengers would be okay. The foes of faith and right reason in our culture make similar empty promises. Just sit quiet and let us have our way in this school/courtroom/state capitol/library/workplace/parish council/public square, and we’ll make sure you keep a little safe space for your personal convictions. 
But silence never buys lasting peace; it just empowers the silencers. Instead, only our courageous speech and example, in and out of season, will fulfill our baptismal duty to make disciples and, as <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html">Lumen Gentium</a> charged the laity, to “work for the sanctification of the world from within, as a leaven” (31).

Don’t Stay Quiet

Lent is no Catholic Ramadan, and we as Catholics should be boldly honest about it. Although both seasons include fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, the two seasons arise from different visions of God and different understandings of salvation. Therefore, treating them as parallel religious expressions confuses what each one claims about the human condition and about the nature of the relationship man has with God.
First, Lent is rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The Church enters forty days of prayer and fasting because Christ himself fasted in the wilderness. The Gospel tells us, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights” (Matt. 4:1-2). Accordingly, Catholic fasting participates in his obedience. The season prepares believers to celebrate the cross and the Resurrection, where redemption was accomplished. St. Paul writes, “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Therefore, Lent overflows from within a covenant already established through the grace of Christ’s finished work.
By contrast, Ramadan is an obligatory pillar of work within Islam. It marks a month of daytime fasting, intensified prayer, and communal devotion. Many Muslims understand the month as a time of seeking forgiveness and increased reward. A well-known hadith states, “Whoever stands in prayer during Ramadan out of faith and seeking reward, his previous sins will be forgiven” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī). That line reveals a central feature of Ramadan’s spiritual logic. Forgiveness in Islam appears closely tied to faithful observance and pietistic work during a prescribed period, especially Ramadan.
The Christian faith thinks vastly differently about forgiveness. Scripture declares, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph. 1:7). Moreover, salvation for the Christian rests upon grace rather than accumulated merit. “By grace you have been saved through faith; and this is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). Consequently, Lent is not a spiritual transaction designed to secure divine favor. Instead, it calls believers to deeper repentance within a covenant relationship already initiated by God.
Furthermore, Christianity diagnoses the human problem as a wounded nature in need of healing and transformation. The prophet Ezekiel records the Lord’s promise: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezek. 36:26). Jesus teaches that sin flows from within, from the heart of man (Mark 7:21). Therefore, Christian conversion aims at interior renewal through the grace of divine life. In that reality, fasting serves that interior renewal by disciplining our base desires and turning our hearts toward God.
In Islam’s theological traditions, the central doctrinal issue is the slave’s insufficient submission to divine command and law. Consequently, the remedy is more stringent compliance with concrete revealed law. Nabeel Qureshi, the late Christian convert from Islam, wrote in No God but One, “Islam diagnoses the world with ignorance and offers the remedy of sharia, a law to follow. Christianity diagnoses the world with brokenness and offers the remedy of God himself, a relationship with him that leads to heart transformation.” Hence, in Islam, the believer demonstrates obedience through highly structured practices, including the fast of Ramadan. That framework shapes an entirely different spiritual posture. The worshiper seeks to fulfill what God has commanded in order to transactionally receive mercy and reward.
Christianity, conversely, has always taught a covenantal and filial vision. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven” (Matt. 6:9). That address changes the spiritual atmosphere and approach. The child approaches God as Father through the Son. St. John proclaims, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1). Therefore, all Christian Lenten practices arise from a spiritual adoption into God’s covenant family. The baptized fast and pray as sons and daughters seeking deeper communion and intimacy with the heart of their Father.
Moreover, Lent stands within a very specific historical drama. It leads toward Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The Church contemplates and relives Christ’s paschal mystery in suffering and victory. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ was “tested as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb. 4:15). Consequently, believers lovingly unite all their small sacrifices with his perfect obedience. Salvation in the Christian framework rests entirely upon his conquest of sin and death on the cross and the faithful’s subsequent participation in that sacrifice. The Christian fast therefore expresses a sense of both gratitude and repentance in response to that magnificent victory.
Ramadan, by contrast, commemorates the revelation of the Quran and reinforces communal, slavish, voluntaristic submission to Allah’s will. It does not culminate in the celebration of a redemptive event in which God enters history through incarnation and sacrificial death in benevolent love. Christianity proclaims that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Lent draws its meaning from that astonishing claim—a claim that, I’ve personally witnessed, simply outrages and scandalizes the Muslim. The Son of God took on human nature, bore human sin, and rose in triumph to save mankind from sin and death. Therefore, Lenten fasting participates in a mystery of complete divine self-giving; it is ordered in love precisely because of divine love.
The difference extends also to divine assurance. In Christian teaching, believers rest entirely on Christ’s finished work. Jesus cries from the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30). That declaration signals completion of the great work of man’s atonement back to God. Through repentance and faith, the sinner receives forgiveness grounded in Christ’s sacrifice. In Ramadan, earned forgiveness is directly linked to stringent observance within the sacred month. The spiritual logic of each of these traditions greatly shapes the believer’s interior life in distinct and disparate ways.
At the same time, Catholics can honestly recognize a sincere sense of devotion among Muslims during Ramadan. Regardless of one’s creed, physical hunger sharpens a person’s spiritual awareness. Extended prayer tends to build a desire for closeness to God. Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6). That longing for righteousness reveals something about God’s plan for the human person, even if someone doesn’t have faith in Christ. Therefore, Catholics should pray that these longings among the Muslims this month lead to conversion to the fullness of truth in Christ.
Charity, however, always necessitates truth, or it ceases to be charity. The gospel proclaims that “there is salvation in no one else” and that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The season of Lent compels us to renew that proclamation with conviction, boldness, and joy. It invites all of us as believers to repentance, confession, and renewed fidelity to the covenant way of life. Paul urges, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2). Lent embodies that urgency of the Gospel message.
Therefore, calling Lent a Catholic version of Ramadan simply ignores profound theological differences. The two seasons share outward similarities, yet their core foundations significantly diverge. One is based on a covenant sealed by Christ’s blood. The other is based within a framework of prescribed slavish submission seeking reward from a divine master. Consequently, their spiritual direction and meaning differ at the deepest level.
Even so, the overlap of the two seasons can serve as an opportunity for real witness. Catholics can live Lent with humility, sincerity, and joy. They can fast discreetly, give generously, and pray fervently. Jesus teaches, “When you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites” (Matt. 6:16). Instead, the Christian fast flows from love of the Father who sees in secret. Through such witness, neighbors may glimpse the difference between fasting for performance and participation in the life of grace. This should also, thereby, be an opportunity to pray for and work toward the conversion of Muslims to the lordship of Jesus Christ and life in his covenantal family.
Finally, Catholic hope is secure, because every human heart longs for mercy and communion with God. Lent directs that longing toward the crucified and risen Lord. As we believers walk through the forty days, we are called to remember that Christ has already secured our redemption. Therefore, Lent is a season of repentance within hope, sorrow within Christ’s promise, and fasting in divine joy that anticipates the resurrection of Easter morning. In that light, Lent remains uniquely Christian, beneath the shadow of the cross, yet also illuminated by the light of the Resurrection, all within the grace of Almighty God.

Lent Versus Ramadan

<div>Is centering prayer true prayer?</div><div>Fr. Thomas Dubay, an author and teacher on contemplative prayer, wrote the following response to a question asking if he thought <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-danger-of-centering-prayer">centering prayer</a> is helpful:
<blockquote>The simple answer to your question is no, I do not. Rather, it is more of a hindrance to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/contemplation">contemplative prayer</a>. It seems that the promoters of centering prayer have recently been changing their message, due perhaps to criticism. However, I shall respond to what has been generally presented to many people. Centering methods have been much influenced by oriental ideas, and that is the main problem. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I shall make three points.
The first is that one should beware of techniques for emptying the mind to prepare it for contemplation. This is unnatural. Our minds are made to be filled, not emptied. Nowhere does Scripture advise this. Rather, the beginner is told to fill his mind by pondering the word of God day and night (Ps. 1:1-2). This is meditation, not emptying our minds. St. Teresa rightly said that when we are ready, God gives us something better than our efforts can produce, namely, infused communing with himself. . . .</blockquote>
<blockquote>Secondly, it is an illusion to think that techniques can produce an immersion in God. He is not one to be manipulated as one can manipulate a machine or appliance.
And thirdly, emptying methods can frustrate both the beginner who needs input on which to reflect and the advanced person who needs freedom from human efforts to be able to receive the light and love God wishes to communicate (Prayer Primer: Igniting A Fire Within, 155-156).</blockquote>
</div>

Is Centering Prayer True Prayer?

What is "sacrifice"?

Tom Nash provides a clear and insightful response to the question of whether Catholics worship saints. He explains the distinction between worship and veneration, emphasizing that only God is worthy of worship, while veneration is a form of respect and honor given to saints for their relationship with Jesus Christ.
Transcript:
Hello. Hello. So I was having a conversation with someone and the topic moves to Catholic&#8217;s so-called worship of the saints. Yes. So I tried explaining about how worship is explicitly a sacrifice before God and due only to God and we do not do that to the saints. And her response was that in Revelations when John frustrates himself before an angel, the angel stops him saying worship is only for God. So if the Bible shows that bowing reparetingly is seen as worship, how do you respond to that?
I would say that&#8217;s the distinction. He was looking and thinking that because he was treating him like God, that&#8217;s the problem. With someone who kneels at an altar at a church with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, they are not worshiping her. Why do we have respect for the Blessed Mother of any saints? Precisely because, I always emphasize, precisely because of their relationship with Jesus Christ. She is the Mother of God and that&#8217;s why we look to her and as an intercessor. And quite frankly, it&#8217;s very biblically speaking of the book of Revelation, which you cited a moment ago. Revelation 8, verse 3 talks about the elders who bring forth the bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the faithful, showing that they somehow are interceding. And if James chapter 5 can speak about how a person on earth, or the prayer of a righteous man, avails much, well, how much more a person in heaven? And this isn&#8217;t necromancy where we&#8217;re contacting the dead like a seance and seeking out dead relatives. These are people who we know are canonized because of the authority given by God to the church that affirms that they are in heaven. And in addition to that, when we think about these saints, look what it says in Hebrews 12. Hebrews 12 says, you know, you&#8217;ve come to the throne room of God, to the firstborn enrolled in heaven, to the spirits of just the souls, the spirits of the souls of just men made perfect. Well, if they&#8217;ve been made perfect, then they have something better than we have here on earth. And because of God&#8217;s blessing, not because of anything themselves, they can intercede for us in heaven, and they can handle people. So how can they do that? It&#8217;s not humanly possible. Well, it&#8217;s not humanly possible for somebody on earth to exercise a demon. It&#8217;s not humanly possible alone for that or for healing. And yet the apostles did those things precisely because of God&#8217;s grace. And so with regard to the saints in heaven, we are not praying to them. Excuse me. We pray to them. We are not worshiping them. And whereas when somebody falling down, that case, yeah, in that case, that person is worshiping and need to be corrected that he&#8217;s, this is an angel, this isn&#8217;t God. And for those also with regard to icons or images, we don&#8217;t pray to them. We pray through them. We look at them and they guide our prayer. They keep us focused on the saints who lead us to Jesus Christ.
The Blessed Mother says it so well, &#8220;To whom shall we go?&#8221; Excuse me. That&#8217;s going back to John and John 6, but with the Blessed Mother says, &#8220;Do whatever he tells you in John chapter 2 of the wedding of Canaan.&#8221; In other words, she&#8217;s always leading us to Jesus. And the church always leads us to Jesus with St. Peter and to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life. So I would tell people that just because you are kneeling in prayer doesn&#8217;t mean you are worshiping someone. And number two, just because you have an image of someone doesn&#8217;t mean you are idolizing that or we could convict God of that with regard to back in the Old Testament with Numbers, right? Where they brought out, look upon this serpent, the seraph serpent, which they mounted on a pole and they were able to be healed by that. Now, interestingly enough, a little later as we see in salvation history, King Hezekiah had to destroy it because they were looking at it as an idol. So no,
images help us focus our prayer. They are not. And just, but kneeling itself does not necessarily, I mean, people kneel before a king or a queen and it&#8217;s not necessarily a sign of respect to say that it necessarily is worship, is to fail to make proper distinctions.
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Do Catholics Worship Saints?

My heart sank when I saw Monday’s news of the Vatican&#8217;s <a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/260129/meet-luce-the-vatican-s-cartoon-mascot-for-jubilee-2025">unveiling of Luce, a cartoon mascot</a> intended to promote the upcoming Jubilee Year. After decades of attempts to make church cool and relevant had failed to reverse Christianity’s hemorrhaging of young people, Vatican leaders decided this was a perfect time to . . . try to make church cool and relevant.
In their own words:
“Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican’s chief organizer for the jubilee, described the mascot as part of the Vatican’s goal to engage with ‘the pop culture so beloved by our young people.’”
Everybody say the line!

This was my gut reaction.
And yet!
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143626" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-300x181.png" alt="" width="326" height="197" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-300x181.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-768x464.png 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-662x400.png 662w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502.png 1282w" sizes="(max-width: 326px) 100vw, 326px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143627" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-300x81.jpg" alt="" width="394" height="106" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-300x81.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-768x206.jpg 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-1200x322.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1.jpg 1284w" sizes="(max-width: 394px) 100vw, 394px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143630" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-300x258.jpg" alt="" width="390" height="335" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-300x258.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-768x659.jpg 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-466x400.jpg 466w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1.jpg 827w" sizes="(max-width: 390px) 100vw, 390px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143628" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-095715-e1730418597171-300x137.png" alt="" width="307" height="140"/>
At least some Catholics—across age groups!—are embracing Luce. Scores of <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/luce-the-vaticans-anime-mascot">fanart variants and memes</a> have exploded into the zeitgeist. Of course, the outcry against Luce has been just as loud and passionate. But that’s not surprising; it is surprising to see this many young Catholics voice such full-throated approval for Luce, rather than roll their eyes at the umpteenth attempt by these old men to “appeal to the youth.”
So what’s going on here? As a Gen Z staffer at Catholic Answers whose job is literally to be online, I observe the following.
First and foremost: as an anime character, Luce instantly appeals to an obsessive demographic that overlaps with a significant portion of online Catholics (the “anime profile pic trad” is a well-known archetype). I have never taken interest in anime, so I couldn&#8217;t say why other fully-grown adults find it so captivating; suffice it to say that this subculture is a major driver in Luce’s initial positive reception. But I don’t think it’s the only one.
Second: Luce is undeniably adorable. Maybe you disagree, but I have to hand it to the creators: they nailed the look of childlike faith and innocence. And the pilgrimage symbols embedded in her character—muddy boots, Camino de Santiago shells in her eyes, pilgrim’s cross, and World Mission rosary—are subtle. Nothing evokes the overbearing “Jesus is COOL, kids!!” lunkheadedness of, say, <a href="https://christchurchusa.org/questministries/blog/what-a-tripp-mascots-revealed-quest-kids-ministry/">VBS mascots</a>.
Finally, I take these folks at their word: they think Luce is fun.
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143631" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-091117-300x57.png" alt="" width="553" height="105" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-091117-300x57.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-091117.png 737w" sizes="(max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143632" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2-300x238.jpg" alt="" width="429" height="340" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2-300x238.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2-503x400.jpg 503w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2.jpg 667w" sizes="(max-width: 429px) 100vw, 429px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143633" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-300x91.png" alt="" width="544" height="165" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-300x91.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-768x232.png 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-1200x363.png 1200w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916.png 1462w" sizes="(max-width: 544px) 100vw, 544px"/>
I find myself agreeing more as the days pass. If nothing else, a cute Catholic mascot makes great <a href="https://i.imgur.com/0LYdOvf.png">meme fodder</a>—and the <a href="https://i.imgur.com/YQ8YonY.png">memes</a> have been <a href="https://i.imgur.com/IBDJJ7e.png">fantastic</a>. But I think it runs deeper.
Most of the time, Catholic social media (especially X) is just not fun. People accuse each other of heresy, bicker and squabble over nonessentials, post and re-post vain platitudes, popesplain, refute the popesplainers, refute the refutation of the popesplainers, say unthinkable things about “the Jews,” and generally conduct themselves with a degree of arrogance that would make a saint convulse. Gongs clash and cymbals clang. Meanwhile, news breaks every day about another church scandal, another confusing statement from the pope, another example of why everything is too trad or not trad enough and why the Church is therefore doomed; and if that wasn’t enough, election season is coming to a head.
<a href="https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/486/992/0f8.png">It’s all so tiresome.</a>
Enter a wide-eyed child with a Vatican-yellow raincoat and an unflinching smile:
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143634" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-261x300.png" alt="" width="406" height="466" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-261x300.png 261w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-768x882.png 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-348x400.png 348w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334.png 1297w" sizes="(max-width: 406px) 100vw, 406px"/>
I get it. Luce is <a href="https://i.imgur.com/dRP4QOK.jpeg">above it all</a>. Our Lord tells us we must “change and become like little children” to enter the kingdom of heaven, and she portrays that in a disarming way. That’s why Luce has won me over.
However, memes, trends, and hype are fleeting. The buzz will die down, probably sooner than we expect. And then it will be time to face the real question: did this help save souls?
Well…
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143635" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-090727-300x59.png" alt="" width="514" height="101" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-090727-300x59.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-090727.png 737w" sizes="(max-width: 514px) 100vw, 514px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143636" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-291x300.jpg" alt="" width="366" height="378" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-291x300.jpg 291w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-768x792.jpg 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-388x400.jpg 388w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2.jpg 1284w" sizes="(max-width: 366px) 100vw, 366px"/>
Maybe!
I mean, with God all things are possible, right? And he likes to work through the simple and the unexpected. We talk a lot in apologetics about the importance of planting a seed and letting God water it. I see no reason why this mascot, paired with an unusual outburst of online Catholic joy, can’t be a seed to outsiders.
But that&#8217;s speculation. Unfortunately, I have a more concrete reason to be pessimistic about a cartoon mascot&#8217;s salvific potential. You may be thinking about it already.
This move, like every move the Church makes these days, takes place in the shadow of a looming specter that hasn&#8217;t gone away since 2002. The institutional Church has yet to fully reckon with it and make complete restitution, and until such time, I can&#8217;t help but feel that a child cartoon mascot is just poor optics.
Father Paul Hedman puts it well:
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143639" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346-248x300.png" alt="" width="447" height="541" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346-248x300.png 248w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346-331x400.png 331w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346.png 740w" sizes="(max-width: 447px) 100vw, 447px"/>
Luce is a hit for some, but Vatican leaders can’t rest on their laurels. After the hype dies off, the stench of scandal will remain, still warding off souls. It takes more than a mascot to overcome that.

Live, Laugh, Luce

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Podcasts

Lent could be described as Catholic spring training, an annual period of more than forty days in which we renew our commitment to key fundamentals in the Christian life—specifically prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. My focus today is on almsgiving and the larger topic of tithing and stewardship.
Tithing is rooted in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/tithes">antiquity across religious faiths</a>. For example, in the Old Testament, Abram gives a tenth of everything he gained from defeating several kings to Melchizedek, priest of God Most High (Gen. 14:18-20). We see similar prescriptions for the ancient Israelites in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, with the Lord using some of the tithes he received to support the livelihood of his priests and their Levitical collaborators:
<blockquote>And all the tithe of herds and flocks, every tenth animal of all that pass under the herdsman’s staff, shall be holy to the Lord (Exod. 27:32).
To the Levites I have given every tithe in Israel for an inheritance, in return for their service which they serve, their service in the tent of meeting (Num. 18:21).
You shall tithe all the yield of your seed, which comes forth from the field year by year (Deut. 14:22).</blockquote>
Nevertheless, God desires the gift of ourselves more than simply the fruit of our labors. We see this in Genesis 4 in the story of Cain and Abel. In my naïveté as a young child, I thought it was self-evident that God preferred Abel’s lamb to Cain’s produce because meat trumps vegetables every time . . . especially if Cain were offering lima beans! But actually, Abel sought God and his kingdom first (see Matt. 6:33), giving the Lord “of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions,” whereas Cain gave “an offering of the fruit of the ground (Gen. 4:3-4). Cain held back from the Lord, and then killed his brother in a fit of murderous envy.
<h2>Tithing and Stewardship in the Life of Christ</h2>
In fulfilling the law in the New Covenant (Matt. 5:17-18), Jesus relaxes various Old Covenant disciplines, including the many dietary restrictions that had bound the Israelites (Mark 7:18-19, Acts 10:9-16). In addition, contrary to what many Protestant Christians claim, the strict obligation to tithe specifically ten percent is not continued in the New Covenant—and, being a type of discipline, which is by nature changeable, is one regarding which Catholic Church leaders have the divinely given power to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-protestants-dont-get-about-binding-and-loosing">bind and loose</a> (see Matt. 16:19, 18:15-18). Jesus doesn’t extend it to his disciples, and nowhere do the apostles and their early successors institute it, whether as recorded in the New Testament or otherwise in the early Church (see St. Justin Martyr, <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm">First Apology, 67</a>). Also, even though the Pharisees rigorously tithed in fulfillment of Old Covenant law, Jesus admonishes them for failing to meet the greater demands of that law:
<blockquote>Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! (Matt. 23:23-24).</blockquote>
In a similar scenario, Ananias and Sapphira are punished because they deceptively withheld in giving to the Church, whereas others gave in a joyously free manner (Acts 5:1-11, 4:32-37).
Later, in the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, a collection of canon law published in 1234, although the required amount of giving is changeable, the pope reaffirms that giving to God and his Church is a non-negotiable—i.e., “of divine law, since tithes were instituted not by man but by the Lord himself” (ch. 14, de decim. [On Tithes] book III, title 30).
At other times in Church history, the Church has required ten-percent tithes—e.g., at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (<a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm#53">canon 53</a>) and the Council of Trent in the 1500s, including to support New Covenant priests in advancing the mission of the Church:
<blockquote>Those who refuse to pay tithes… shall be compelled to do so by ecclesiastical censures and other remedies according to law (<a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/twentyfifth-session-of-the-council-of-trent-1492">Session XXV, Decree Concerning Reform, ch. 12</a>).</blockquote>
This conforms with what St. Paul preaches:
<blockquote>Do you not realize that those who work in the temple are supported by the temple and those who minister at the altar share the offerings of the altar? Likewise, the Lord Himself ordered that those who preach the gospel should live by the gospel (1 Cor. 9:1).</blockquote>
<h2>Time, Talent, and Treasure: A Catholic Approach to Stewardship</h2>
In recent centuries, the Church has not required a strict financial percentage, although it continues to encourage the faithful to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-is-the-churchs-position-on-tithing">give joyfully and generously</a>, according to their means, remembering that everything we have is a gift from God:
<blockquote>The fifth precept (&#8220;You shall help to provide for the needs of the Church&#8221;) means that the faithful are obliged to assist with the material needs of the Church, each according to his own ability (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c3a3.htm#II">CCC 2043</a>; see Code of Canon Law [CIC], <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib2-cann208-329_en.html">canon 222, §1</a>).
What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? (1 Cor. 4:7)</blockquote>
So tithing ten percent is encouraged if at all possible. The Diocese of Wichita, Kansas shows what’s possible when all of the diocesan faithful view one another as one family in the body of Christ, making it possible <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/news/catholic-education-stewardship-thriving-in-wichita">for all children to attend diocesan schools</a> (see 1 Cor. 12:12-26).
The Church today focuses on stewardship, on a holistic giving of our time, talent, and treasure, so that we don’t transgress, like the Pharisees of old, who were not motivated by love of God and neighbor. If one is thinking of strictly tithing, a suggested guideline is five percent to his parish and five percent to other Church giving, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/support-us">including apostolates like Catholic Answers</a>.
The U.S. bishops have an excellent <a href="https://www.usccb.org/committees/evangelization-catechesis/stewardship">Letter on Stewardship</a>, which provides basic principles in living out discipleship:
<ul>
<li>Time, including our prayer, worship, participation in parish life</li>
<li>Talent, our skills and abilities used to advance the kingdom</li>
<li>Treasure, financial resources given according to our ability</li>
</ul>
In this light, almsgiving is traditionally understood as giving <a href="https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=31743&amp;randomterm=false">financially or materially</a> to the poor, including to widows and orphans. Lent is an excellent time to engage in almsgiving more, and which is traditionally characterized as going beyond our normal giving and motivated by charity. In addition, almsgiving can encompass <a href="https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-year/lent/almsgiving-sacrifical-giving-catholics-lent#:~:text=During%20Lent%2C%20we%20are%20asked,performing%20other%20acts%20of%20charity.">our time and talents in other</a> “works of fraternal charity,” such as the spiritual and corporal works of mercy:
<blockquote>The works of mercy are charitable actions by which we come to the aid of our neighbor in his spiritual and bodily necessities. Instructing, advising, consoling, comforting are spiritual works of mercy, as are forgiving and bearing wrongs patiently. The corporal works of mercy consist especially in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead. Among all these, giving alms to the poor is one of the chief witnesses to fraternal charity: it is also a work of justice pleasing to God (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a7.htm">CCC 2447</a>).</blockquote>
When we Catholics embrace a holistic approach to our life in Christ, we fulfill the mandate that Jesus says in indispensable to advancing the Great Commission: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35; see Matt. 28:18-20).

Do Catholics Really Have to Tithe?

Monica Doumit, the Director of Public Affairs and Engagement for the Archdiocese of Sydney in Australia, explains how anti-confession laws are bringing frightening implications not just for priests but for Catholic schools and other Catholic institutions throughout Australia. But do Catholics really have a right to keep secrets from secular authorities?

Confession and Modern States

In my book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/confusion-in-the-kingdom/">Confusion in the Kingdom</a> I document how lots of liberal Catholics refuse to speak frankly about sexual sin and often use ambiguous language to give the impression that sins like sodomy really aren’t so bad. But these same people often have no problem clearly denouncing sins that are not celebrated among their political tribe.
So, for example, Fr. James Martin <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1219216859007880">will say</a> that the Bible has unclear “clobber passages” against homosexuality, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154197847717882">but then say</a> the Bible is “clear” on the complex issue of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-nation-has-a-right-to-control-its-borders">immigration</a>. Or consider this article Alice Camille wrote in 2022 titled “<a href="https://uscatholic.org/articles/202208/sometimes-hate-is-the-friendly-man-next-door/">Sometimes hate is the friendly man next door</a>”.
She talks about “Bill,” an EMT who seemed to be a stand-up guy and was about to be received into the Church. Bill then, of his own free will, sent Camille articles he wrote that she considered racist. She writes, “It seemed our ‘model’ parishioner-to-be was a card-carrying Neo-Nazi racist.”
She said Bill was uneasy about his identity and so she “urged Bill to denounce [his writings] and put them behind him. I urged him not to approach the Easter mysteries until he had expunged the way of hate from his life.” The article then says she met him years later and she recounts the experience:
<blockquote>I didn’t see or hear from Bill for five years. Then I accidentally ran into him on the street one day. He saw me first and called to me. From a safe 10 paces away, he told me he’d burned all of his hate paraphernalia: books, magazines, flags, and keepsakes. He said he’d changed. He said it was over. I wanted to believe him and promised him my continued prayers. But I was too afraid to get closer and made no attempt to contact him again.</blockquote>
Camille is also the author of an article titled “<a href="https://uscatholic.org/articles/202109/even-god-got-bored-with-the-binary/">Even God got bored with the binary.</a>” The subtitle reads: “Dualisms—whether black and white, male and female, or good and evil—are appealing, but often fail to tell the whole story. ”
And yet for Camille, there is no dualism when it comes to racism. It is evil. Period. And, even worse, racism is an unforgivable sin. Even though this man repented of his racism, he still needed to be treated like a leper.
Let’s change the story and imagine “Bill” was a transgender woman (i.e. a man claiming to be a woman), who engaged in acts of sodomy. I doubt liberal Catholics would denounce his behavior and tell him to put his past behind him (or even address him as “him”). Let’s imagine further that Bill had written articles saying it was okay to kill so-called transphobes but then repented of this hatred.
Bill would be hailed as a hero whose hatred was “of course” wrong but understandable given how traumatic “transphobes” can be. Liberal Catholics certainly wouldn’t treat transgender Bill like an unredeemable monster as they might treat racist Bill, even though a transgender person <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting">could also commit</a> an act of violence.
So, when I see a Catholic effusively praising the LGBT movement without offering even a hint of a call to repentance, I ask that person two simple questions:
<ol>
<li>Are acts of racism wicked?</li>
<li>Are acts of sodomy wicked?</li>
</ol>
They almost always refuse to answer the second question because for many of them, deep down, they don’t think sodomy is sinful. I then ask why they can quickly denounce one sinful act but not another. These same questions also work for “far right” Catholics who may see nothing wrong with racism. As a Catholic, you should be able to easily answer “yes” to both questions; if you don’t, then I question your commitment to Catholic teaching.
As Christians, we should not let our politics cloud our witness of the Gospel. Jesus said that we must repent and believe in the Gospel; that means repenting not just of the sins of “the other side” we snipe about online, but also of the sins that may be common among our own political tribe that have no place among the people of God whose citizenship is in heaven (Phil 3:20).

Don’t Play Favorites With Sins

In this exclusive interview, the showrunners of Amazon&#8217;s Rings of Power, Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, delve into the series&#8217; religious undertones and how they sought to remain faithful to Tolkien&#8217;s Catholic worldview. Discover how the show&#8217;s portrayal of religion and spirituality differs from the often stereotypical depictions found in popular media.

Talking with Rings of Power Creators about Religion

One of the biggest things that separates Protestants from other Christians is their belief regarding the authority of Scripture. Protestants will claim that only Scripture is infallible—the only thing that cannot be wrong.
Protestant apologist James White defined sola scriptura in a debate with Jerry Matatics in 1992. <a href="https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/roman-catholicism/transcript-does-the-bible-teach-sola-scriptura-james-white-vs-jerry-matatics/">Here he is</a> making his case:
<blockquote>The doctrine of sola scriptura simply states that the Scriptures and the Scriptures alone are sufficient to function as the regula fide, the rule of faith, for the Church. All that one must believe to be a Christian is found in Scripture and in no other source. That which is not found in Scripture is not binding upon the Christian conscience. . . .
The Bible claims to be the sole and sufficient rule of faith for the Christian Church. The Scriptures are not in need of any supplement. Their authority comes from their nature as God-breathed revelation. Their authority is not dependent upon man, Church, or council. The Scriptures are self-consistent, self-interpreting, and self-authenticating. The Christian Church looks to the Scriptures as the only and sufficient rule of faith, and the Church is always subject to the word and is constantly reformed thereby.</blockquote>
There are a few things that a Catholic would agree with White on here. For instance, no Catholic will claim that Scripture&#8217;s authority relies on someone believing that those specific books are inspired. The Church did not make the canon inspired; the Church articulated which books are inspired. Regardless, in this article, I will explain why the claim that Jesus taught that only Scripture is infallible makes little sense logically.
First, let&#8217;s remember that Catholics believe that Scripture is infallible. As St. Paul says, it is &#8220;God-breathed&#8221; (2 Tim. 3:16-17). However, Catholics would claim that Jesus also left an infallible interpreter on earth.
Setting aside theology from a logical perspective, sola scriptura makes little sense. Let’s say that James White and other Protestants are correct when they claim that Jesus did not leave an infallible interpreter on earth. Now consider that Jesus, in his infinite wisdom, told us things like “If you blaspheme the Holy Spirit, you will never be forgiven” (Matt. 12:31, Mark 3:28-30, Luke 12:10) and “Unless you are born of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5).
Both of these statements are ambiguous, with extensive connotations. What makes this even worse is that Protestants disagree on what these verses mean. Lutherans will say that in John 3:5, Jesus is saying people have to be baptized to be saved, whereas other Protestants, such as James, would say that that is not the case.
What are we to make of this? Are we to conclude that Jesus made these statements without clarification and encouraged us to figure it out independently? And if we are wrong, send us to an eternal torment? Nonsense—Jesus would have done no such thing.
This poses another problem for Protestants regarding their belief in Scripture. Sola scriptura requires the essential things to be evident in Scripture. As many Protestants have said, &#8220;The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.&#8221; If two Protestants disagree on a verse, what happens? They would likely claim that they are not disagreeing on something that is salvific, and that is what is meant by importance. But the above two verses are salvific. Jesus says we must do something (be baptized) and must not do something (blaspheme against the Holy Spirit) to enter the kingdom of heaven. If we fail to follow these commands, we will not be saved.
So a Protestant will struggle to explain why these verses are unimportant. I doubt that many of them would try. However, a significant problem still needs to be solved. If these verses are important, and everything necessary is clear in Scripture, we should not have disagreement in Protestant circles about what these verses mean. But there is disagreement.
For this reason, a Protestant is left with three options:
<ul>
<li>Claim that these verses are not essential or salvific. This is impossible and would be going against explicit Scripture.</li>
<li>Claim that the Protestant who disagrees is misreading Scripture. It would be hard, in the framework of sola scriptura, to make this charge with charity, or even for it to make sense. So if Protestants do not want to go this route, they are left with option 3 . . .</li>
<li>Admit that sola scriptura is false.</li>
</ul>
As you can see, Protestants are in a pickle. And the problems continue: a Protestant is going to claim that sola scriptura is not ahistorical, and that believing that Scripture is the sole infallible authority does not mean we ignore history. But at the same time, Protestants like James White will deny baptismal regeneration despite it being unanimously accepted in the Patristic Era. Don&#8217;t take my word for it. Here&#8217;s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Doctrines-J-Kelly/dp/006064334X">a Protestant historian</a> on the subject: “From the beginning baptism was the universally accepted rite of admission to the Church. . . . As regards to its significance, it was always held to convey the remission of sins” (193-194).
A Protestant who believes in the salvific nature of baptism would likely be on my side in this scenario. However, the problems continue beyond there. Even sola fide (faith alone), the most essential doctrine in Protestant theology, said by Luther to be the article upon which the Church stands or falls, was unknown in the early Church.
For instance, Protestant author Alister McGrath <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/iustitia-dei-a-history-of-the-christian-doctrine-of-justification-fourth-edition-by-alister-e-mcgrath-cambridge-cambridge-university-press-2020-xv-494-pp-13000-hardcover-4499-paper/C52829C5CF353651364FF10BF0F466CD">admits in his book</a> on the history of the Christian doctrine of justification that sola fide was a “theological novum.”
<blockquote>A fundamental discontinuity was introduced into the Western theological tradition where none had ever existed or been contemplated. The Reformation understanding of the nature of justification as opposed to its mode must therefore be regarded as a genuine theological novum (186).</blockquote>
Notable anti-Catholic Church historian Peter Schaff also admits in his book about Church history that those looking for the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone in the Church Fathers will be “<a href="https://archive.org/details/historyofthechri009648mbp">greatly disappointed</a>.”
<blockquote>The doctrine of the subjective appropriation of salvation, including faith, justification, and sanctification, was as yet far less perfectly formed than the objective dogmas, and like the case, must follow the latter. If anyone expects to find in this period, or any of the Church Fathers, Augustine himself not excepted, the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, as the “articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae” he will be greatly disappointed (588).</blockquote>
All in all, I would encourage Protestants to think about the conclusions they are making when they say that Scripture is the only infallible authority on earth. In their attempt to prop up Scripture to the highest degree, they are making Jesus out to be an unusual leader who makes ambiguous statements with extreme implications and leaves no infallible authority to tell us what he meant. It also seems clear that despite Protestants&#8217; best efforts in claiming that sola scriptura is not anti-tradition, Protestant theology as a whole embraces even the most wholly absent doctrines in the Patristic Era.

Sola Scriptura and Basic Illogic

<div>Do people who commit suicide automatically go to hell? If so, why does the Church not teach that anyone is in hell?</div><div>There is no sin that automatically sends one to hell. There are sins that are grave and would kill the life of grace in the soul if they were fully deliberate and knowing, but we can never be certain that another person has sinned in this way, even if he has done something which would be a mortal sin if deliberate. Suicide is such a sin, but so often it is accompanied by such psychological distress that it would be unlikely that it was fully deliberate. Even so, it is important to teach that suicide is gravely wrong, since this teaching surely prevents many suicides. Not wanting to be eternally lost is a good reason not to want to die or to take one&#8217;s own life!
The Church does teach that there are persons in hell. Sacred Scripture is clear about the fallen angels, and Our Lord speaks unconditionally about the reprobate in Matthew 25. What the Church never does is identify who is in hell. It only declares the heavenly existence of a few of its children by canonizing saints. Even so, these saints are only just a few of the innumerable souls who are in heaven.
</div>

No Automatic Ticket to Hell

Among some Christian denominations, the assertion is made that baptism should be administered “in the name of Jesus only.” The historical arguments for Jesus-only baptism are interesting, but suffice it to say for now the Fathers of the Church were unanimous in support of the Trinitarian formula for baptism.
The Council of Florence (1439) in Session 8 <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/ecumenical-council-of-florence-1438-1445-1461">declares</a> the proper form of the sacrament of baptism:
<blockquote>Holy baptism holds the first place among all the sacraments, for it is the gate of the spiritual life; through it we become members of Christ and of the body of the church. Since death came into the world through one person, unless we are born again of water and the spirit, we cannot, as Truth says, enter the kingdom of heaven. The matter of this sacrament is true and natural water, either hot or cold. The form is: I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.</blockquote>
A great number of Christian authors and sources concur, including but not limited to the Didache (7:1, A.D. 70), St. Justin Martyr (The First Apology, 61, 150), Tatian the Syrian (The Diatesseron, 55, 170), St. Irenaeus (Presentation of the Apostolic Preaching, 3, 180), Tertullian (On Baptism, 13, 200), and St. Hippolytus (The Apostolic Tradition, 21, 215).
The Fathers and this Council of Florence were simply following the plain teaching of Jesus Christ from Matthew 28:16-19:
<blockquote>Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. . . . And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”</blockquote>
It seems as plain as can be, but as is the case with virtually all Christian doctrine today—thanks to the confusion foisted upon the world by the Protestant revolt 500 years ago—there are objections. Many among the various “Jesus only” sects will point out multiple biblical texts that appear to contradict a trinitarian baptismal formula, mostly from Acts:
<blockquote>And Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit; for it had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus (Acts 8:14-16).
And [Peter] commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts 10:48).
On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus (Acts 19:5).</blockquote>
What gives?
The key to understanding begins with context. In Matthew 28:16-19, shortly before he was to ascend to heaven, Jesus was teaching the apostles alone—”the Eleven”—the proper form for the sacrament of baptism. In Acts 2:38, in contrast, Peter was proclaiming the truth of Christ to thousands of Jews, specifying baptism “in the name of Jesus”—not to contradict the clear instructions Jesus had given him about the form of baptism, but rather to distinguish Christian baptism from other kinds with which they would have been familiar. For example, there was the baptism of John the Baptist, and there were the many and varied “baptisms” of the Jews and Jewish sects (such as the Essenes). Indeed, even pagan Mithraism practiced a kind of baptism.
This is why you’ll notice two different arrangements of words proclaiming Christ’s baptism in those four texts from Acts. “In the name of Jesus Christ” and “in the name of the Lord Jesus” are a hint that the inspired author was not giving us the proper form for the sacrament; rather, he was making a general declaration that it is Jesus’ baptism to which all are bound.
Many Christians wrongly think the word baptism is an exclusively Christian term. In the first century, it was not. As I mentioned above, “baptisms” were common practice among the Jews.
<blockquote>While [Jesus] was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him; so he went in and sat at table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner (Luke 11:37-38).</blockquote>
The Greek word for “wash” here is ebaptizthe.
<blockquote>For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they purify themselves; and there are many other traditions which they observe, the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze (Mark 7:3-4).</blockquote>
The words for purify and washing in verse 4 are baptisontai and baptismous, respectively.
Given the ritual-washing “baptisms” that were prevalent in the first century, is it any wonder that Peter and the apostles in the book of Acts would want to distinguish between sacramental baptism “in Jesus’ name” and other kinds of “baptisms”?
Some respond to this argument by saying that the apostle Paul commanded: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17). Peter adds: “the name of Jesus Christ . . . there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:10-12).
So shouldn’t we baptize “in the name of Jesus”? And the answer is yes! It is precisely because we can be saved only “in the name of Jesus” that we must baptize the way he taught us: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps a deeper look at one of the four texts from Acts we cited above will serve to clarify things for us. In Acts 19, Paul happens upon a group of “disciples” in Ephesus:
<blockquote>While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed through the upper country and came to Ephesus. There he found some disciples. And he said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And they said, “No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” And he said, “Into what then were you baptized?” They said, “Into John’s baptism.” And Paul said, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.</blockquote>
When Paul discovered these “disciples” had not “heard that there is a Holy Spirit,” he immediately asked what form of baptism they had received. The implication here is that if they had been baptized with the proper form, they would have heard of the Holy Spirit, because he is included in it! When Paul found out they had received only “John’s baptism,” he immediately had them baptized “in the name of the Lord Jesus”—that is, with Jesus’ baptism, which is done “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

When You Baptize, Baptize Right

The problem of grave <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-ten-most-common-liturgical-abuses">liturgical abuses</a> is so widespread that I regularly receive inquiries about what makes a <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-institution-of-the-mass">Mass</a> “invalid.” The technical answer is that nothing makes a Mass invalid. Validity is not per se a category that applies to the Mass as a whole. It is necessary to rephrase the question in order to give an accurate, meaningful answer. Typically, when people ask about the “validity” of a Mass, they wish to know one of two things: Did the Mass contain a valid consecration of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/eucharist">Eucharist</a>? And would a particular Mass fulfill one’s Sunday obligation?
Some people are driven to scrupulous distraction by the fear that the Eucharist they receive during a Mass where liturgical abuses have occurred has not been validly consecrated. Fortunately, their fears are almost always without foundation.
Like baptism, the Eucharist is a sacrament very central to the Christian life. Consequently, God has arranged matters so that it is quite difficult for the Eucharist to be botched so badly that the consecration would not take place. The requirements for validity are very simple and can be dealt with under the headings of minister, intent, matter, and form.
<h3>1. Minister</h3>
The minister needed for a valid consecration is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/bishop-priest-and-deacon">any man ordained as a bishop or priest</a>. Deacons and laity are not valid celebrants, nor are those who have invalid episcopal or priestly holy orders. Since holy orders can be conferred only on baptized males, women who have undergone a putative ordination are not ordained and cannot confect the Eucharist.
Attempts to celebrate the Eucharist in a Catholic parish by individuals who are not valid celebrants are rare. One occasionally reads scandalous reports of women or laymen being asked to “co-consecrate” at Masses held at a gathering of dissidents. But even then, there is almost always at least one priest present and participating in the consecration. So long as there is at least one valid minister there—no matter how many invalid “co-celebrants” there are—the consecration happens.
<h3>2. Intent</h3>
In recent years, the faithful have been scandalized by ambiguous and at times inaccurate preaching on the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-real-presence">Real Presence</a> and transubstantiation. Cases of priests actually disbelieving in the Real Presence are rare. However, when confronted with ambiguous teaching, a question naturally arises in the minds of the faithful: “What if my priest <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/can-a-catholic-reject-transubstantiation">doesn’t believe in transubstantiation</a>? Does the consecration still take place?”
The answer is that it should. It is not necessary for the priest to have the specific intention that transubstantiation take place so long as he has the general intention to celebrate the sacrament of the Eucharist, even if he has a very erroneous understanding of that sacrament.
People with scrupulous worries in this area might ponder this pastoral note: Jesus chose to institute in the Eucharist a sacrament whereby he is really, truly, bodily present. Yet this is not obvious to the senses. He chose to hide himself in this manner, which is why those without faith or with wavering faith are able to doubt the Real Presence. Yet he also made this the single most frequently given and received sacrament in the Christian life. He would scarcely, then, be likely to make his real presence contingent on the fluctuating inward faith life of the minister celebrating it.
Thus, for the Eucharist, but also for other sacraments, only the general intention to “do the thing that Christians do” is needed for validity: “Objectively considered, the intention of doing what the Church does suffices. The minister, therefore, does not need to intend what the Church intends, namely to produce the effects of the sacraments. . . . It suffices if he has the intention of performing the religious action as it is current among Christians” (Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, 344). This is also the interpretation of Aquinas (ST III:64:9-10).
In order for a minister to lack valid intention, while outwardly performing the rites of the Mass and the Eucharistic prayer, he virtually would have to say to himself, “What I am doing is not the Eucharist. I’m only play-acting and fooling all of these people into thinking I’m performing a sacrament, when really I’m not.” Needless to say, a priest is almost never going to have such an intention.
<h3>3. Matter</h3>
The matter required for a valid celebration of the Eucharist consists of wheat bread and grape wine (CIC 924). In the Latin Rite of the Church, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/was-it-a-valid-consecration-if-the-priest-used-leavened-bread">the bread must be unleavened</a> for a licit celebration (926). In all rites of the Church, the wine must be mixed with a small quantity of water for a licit celebration. However, neither the presence of water nor the absence of leaven is needed for a valid celebration. In fact, most of the Eastern Rites use leavened bread for confecting the Eucharist.
Though in special circumstances bishops may grant individual priests permission to use low-gluten altar breads, bread made from flour that has had all gluten removed is considered invalid matter (Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, June 22, 1994). Similarly, in exceptional circumstances, ordinaries may permit the consecration of mustum, which is fresh juice from grapes or juice preserved by suspending its fermentation by freezing or other methods that do not alter its nature (ibid.).
The addition of any other ingredients to the wheat bread and grape wine render the celebration illicit. If the additions are of notable quantity, the matter has doubtful validity. If the additions are significant enough that, in the judgment of reasonable men, the matter no longer consists of wheat bread and grape wine, then the matter is invalid. It is gravely sinful for any priest to celebrate the Eucharist knowing that he is employing illicit or invalid matter.
These days, one does hear a significant number of reports of parishes using illicit recipes for altar breads. However, if the recipe is strange enough to be invalid matter, this will be detectable by the faithful. If what you receive at Communion does not have a texture or taste that reasonable men would count as unleavened or leavened wheat bread, it’s invalid.
In such cases, rare as they are, parishioners should always find out what recipe was used, should try to get the proper recipe—wheat and water only—used instead, and should follow up with their bishop if this is not done.
<h3>4. Form</h3>
The form of this sacrament consists of the words of consecration. In Masses celebrated with the current missal, the only words that may be licitly used to consecrate the host are these: “Take this, all of you, and eat it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.” In Masses for adults, the only words of consecration that may be used over the chalice are these: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the cup of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”
Although the use of any other words of consecration whatsoever is both gravely illicit and gravely sinful, it is not necessarily invalid. So long as the words used for consecration express the fact that ”This is my Body” and “This is . . . my Blood,” the consecration will be valid. The other words used further specify and elaborate the purposes of Christ’s sacrifice and of the sacrament, but they do not pertain to the basic reality of Christ’s real presence under the forms of bread and wine. Consequently, they are not necessary to bring about the Real Presence (see N. Halligan, The Sacraments and Their Celebration, 67).
The faithful thus have little cause to worry about the hosts they receive having been validly consecrated. While there may be many liturgical abuses in American parishes today, invalid consecrations are rare and are usually obvious when they occur. Parishioners should not be scrupulous about this matter. Neither should they be concerned about the impact of such rare events on their Sunday obligation.
Can a Mass be celebrated in so illicit a manner that it would not fulfill the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-the-sunday-obligation-unreasonably-harsh">Sunday obligation</a>? The answer, under the current (1983) Code of Canon Law, will almost always be “no.” For practical purposes, the only Latin Rite Masses that would not fulfill one’s Sunday obligation would be those that make no pretense whatsoever of being based on the 2002 or 1962 missals or on other approved forms, such as the Dominican Rite or the Anglican Use.
Canon 1248, paragraph 1 states: “The precept of participating in the Mass is satisfied by assistance at a Mass which is celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite either on the holy day or on the evening of the preceding day.”
The legislative history of this canon is informative. Originally, it included the word “legitimately,” stating that one’s Sunday obligation was fulfilled by “assistance at a Mass that is legitimately celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite.” In the drafting process for the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the word “legitimately” was dropped. The Holy See did not want the laity in a position of having to evaluate which Masses were legitimately celebrated and which were not (cf. Coriden, Green, and Heintschel, ed.s, The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary, 854).
By showing up for Mass on Sunday (or the evening before), you are fulfilling your obligation. If the celebrant fails to fulfill his obligation of celebrating the Mass in a licit manner, that is his responsibility, not yours. You do not have to go to extra lengths, such as attending an additional Mass, because he is derelict in his duty.

Valid or Invalid Mass?

<div>If the Novus Ordo isn’t a new Mass but instead the ordinary form of the Latin Mass, why is it referred to as such by Pope Paul VI in his Address to a General Audience, Nov. 26, 1969?</div><div>To be sure, the &#8220;New Mass&#8221; is new. The term ordinary does not refer to the age of the rite but is purely a legal term, indicating its practical status in the church today. Obviously, if you are talking about the past millennium, then the &#8220;extraordinary&#8221; form is the ordinary one. So the word does not indicate long-term historical, but actual, current circumstances.The term ordinary has more the sense of a current default mode of liturgy than an evaluation of its value as a rite.
</div>

What Does ‘Ordinary’ Form Mean?

In the last century, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls raised the profile of the ancient community of the Essenes. Do these discoveries debunk Christian ideas about Jesus?

The Essene Code

<div>Does the Easter vigil Mass count for my Sunday obligation?</div><div>
If you attend the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/easter">Easter </a>vigil, you have fulfilled your obligation to attend Mass on Easter. You are not required to attend on Easter Sunday. Attending any Saturday evening Mass fulfills one&#8217;s Sunday obligation.
<blockquote>Canon 1248, 1. The precept of participating in the Mass is satisfied by assistance at a <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-go-to-mass">Mass </a>which is celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite either on the holy day or on the evening of the preceding day.</blockquote>
Wanna know more? Check out <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-seasons-and-feasts/?searchid=10739202&amp;search_query=feasts">20 Answers: Seasons and Feasts</a>
</div>

Does the Easter Vigil Count for Easter Sunday Mass?

I was recently browsing an online Christian forum in which a poster asked, “Where does the Bible say marriage is only between one man and one woman?”
The answers were predictably depressing. As a bulk of Protestant denominations have accepted the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/watch-out-for-the-sin-bin">LGBT movement</a>, most of the respondents just flatly claimed that the Bible doesn’t restrict marriage to one man and one woman.
As Catholics, this might give us reason to be thankful for Sacred Tradition. Regardless of controversies on Biblical interpretation, we won’t face such drastic swings in sexual morality. Yet we should nonetheless be ready to face and refute such Protestant claims. Is it really the case that “biblical marriage”—between a man and a woman—isn’t actually all that biblical?
Indeed, there’s no single passage in the Bible that says, “Marriage is only between a man and a woman.” Of course, there is also no passage in the Bible that says, “Same-sex relationships are allowed and should be considered marriage.” Instead, these moral ideas are argued as conclusions from other, more explicit scriptural texts.
Even though the culturally relevant question is homosexuality, liberal Protestants often focus instead on another point of sexual ethics: polygamy, or having multiple wives at the same time. The Bible clearly records polygamous marriages—not just in Israel’s enemies, but even in the Patriarchs and revered kings of the chosen people. From this, some people will argue that biblical marriage is actually not between only one man and one woman, and if marriage can be between one man and multiple women, perhaps it can also be between two men or two women.
Even if the Bible endorses polygamy, this isn’t a valid argument for homosexuality. Polygamy is still a different kind of sexual union from same-sex relationships, and one doesn’t follow from the other. But does it?
Early parts of the Old Testament seem to. Many holy Israelites take multiple wives. Scripture records this historical fact without condemnation. Abraham, David, Solomon, Jacob—they are polygamous, and God and his prophets don’t speak out against their marital habits.
And not only are they silent, but at one point, Moses appears to command polygamy in the practice of Levirate marriage. Deuteronomy 25:5-10 outlines the practice: if two brothers live together and one dies without a son, the living brother should marry his brother’s widow and try to continue his family line. The living brother is not forced to do so, and the law does not specify whether he already has a wife of his own. But he’s strongly encouraged to marry the widow, and practically, the brother most often would’ve already been married—so, by implication, the law encourages polygamy.
Yet to conclude from this that Scripture endorses polygamy would be a flawed biblical interpretation. The Old Testament unfolded over thousands of years. Much changed over those millennia—in the secular structure of Israelite society, and also in its religious understanding and laws. God never contradicts himself, but he gradually revealed spiritual truth over many generations, culminating in his full self-revelation in his Son.
Jesus says as much in Matthew 19:8. God, through Moses, permitted Israelites to divorce in Deuteronomy 24; now Jesus, who is God, is banning divorce. But without contradiction—divorce was allowed as a concession to a people still spiritually immature, which permission now, in due time, is being revoked.
The Old Testament gives a similar principle. In Ezekiel 18:2-3, God forbids the proverb, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The proverb means that the children are being punished for the sins of their fathers. But such an idea comes from God’s earlier word—in Exodus 34:7, when God says the sins of the parents fall upon children down to three or four generations. God was forbidding something that he earlier seemed to imply.
Such things happen with all learning. We don’t teach kids fractions when they’re just learning to count. They’re not ready for it. When they are ready, we give them fractional math, and though it seems very different from the simple numbers we originally told them, we all know that this more advanced arithmetic doesn’t actually contradict our 123s and ABCs.
This takes us back to polygamy. Deuteronomy doesn’t explicitly endorse polygamy. It only implies it. And the later prophets show that such an implication is mistaken.
For one, though the Bible doesn’t say the Patriarchs’ polygamy is wrong, it shows it. Read about Abraham and Hagar, or David and Bathsheba, or Jacob and Leah. Again and again, kings and Patriarchs take multiple wives with disastrous consequences. We can read between the lines. Polygamy is shown to be a bad idea, even if it’s not said to be such.
Second, the prophets started using marital imagery to describe God and Israel. God is Israel’s husband. And he has only one chosen people. If God is not polygamous in such analogies, why should Israelites be?
Later Judaism thus started to have doubts about earlier polygamous allowances. By the return from their Babylonian exile, Jews had largely abandoned the practice. And by Rabbinical Judaism, polygamy was completely condemned.
We can go farther. Even if the Old Testament supports polygamy (as we’ve just shown, it doesn’t), the New Testament is what matters most for if its still allowable for us Christians. And plainly, the New Testament doesn’t allow it. Jesus says a man should be joined to his wife, and they will become one flesh (Matt. 19:3-6). Jesus defines adultery as even looking at another woman lustfully (5:27-28). And Paul commands that “each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband” (1 Cor. 7:2).
A clear picture emerges. Marriage is between two people: one man, and one woman. Polygamy—whether tolerated or condemned in previous generations—is not part of God’s ultimate design.
This should be expected, because polygamy really works only in a culture of male dominion. It doesn’t work if a woman is supposed to be an equal and integral member of family and society, as the Bible clearly teaches. Whose in-laws do we see at Christmastime? Who gets priority when hubby is in the mood? How are the children raised with multiple, equal women acting as mom? How are decisions made? Things inevitably devolve into what actually happened in the Bible’s stories of polygamy: one wife playing second fiddle, one wife domineering, one set of children fading into the background, and one husband with a throbbing headache.
So we can confidently say that biblical marriage is between one man and one woman. Despite the controversy about the “man” and “woman” part of the definition, we need not question the word “one.” Polygamy was once tolerated in God’s plan, but it showed itself prone to domination and domestic strife. And so God’s people abandoned it, and Jesus condemned it. Frankly, I’m happy for that—and so is my wife.

Does the Bible Permit Polygamy?

Can Non-Catholics Be Saved?

A commonplace criticism of religion in general and Catholicism in particular is its insistence on morality. No few modern people object to the connection between religion and morality, which they consider “judgmental,” perhaps even “hypocritical.”
Let’s consider that criticism more closely.
Yes, it’s true that Christianity in general as well as Judaism links religion and morality. We should be aware, however, what an enormous step forward that was in the understanding of what religion is and the purification of the concept of religion.
There are people who think all religion is mythology. Let’s pull that thread a little and compare Christianity with, say, Greek mythology. One way they obviously differ is that Christianity is monotheistic, whereas Greek mythology was polytheistic.
But there’s an even deeper difference: the God of Jesus Christ is connected to morality, whereas Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, et al. are not. The Greek gods are bigger and stronger than men, but not better. They rape, they cheat, they commit adultery, they lie, they seduce. Olympus is hardly heaven, and, although Hades had a particular zone for some miscreants—Tartarus—it was also a place where Zeus exacted revenge—e.g., on King Sisyphus for tattling about Zeus’s secret seduction of a lesser god’s daughter.
Compare that to the Christian gospel’s proclamation that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8). Not “God is like Love” or “God is loving,” but “God is Love,” so that the subject and predicate nominative of that statement are identical. Because he is Love, he cannot be but one Person, for Love gives itself. Because Divine Love is perfect, those three Persons (Love loving, Love loving back, and the intersection of that Love) do not in any way diminish the unity of the Godhead. On top of that, God gives himself to finite man by forming the latter in his “image and likeness” (Gen. 1:28).
Now—sloppy sentimentality aside—a God who is Love necessarily is a God connected with morality. Why? Because Love seeks its equal, its counterpart, its proper response. Love is true, and Love is good . . . consider the catalogue St. Paul provides (1 Cor. 13:4-8). But if all that is true, if Love = Good = Truth, then the free world of a God who is Love has to reckon with the real moral possibility that love will not be reciprocated, and will even be rejected. That is not and cannot be a matter of indifference. Love cannot make Anti-Love its equal.
For this same reason, the philosophy of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-bread-what-is-wine">nominalism</a>—the philosophy that so influenced <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-protestant-roots-of-the-pronoun-wars">Martin Luther</a> and the classical Protestant Reformers—is wrong. The nominalists argued that right and wrong are grounded not in truth—i.e., in intelligible reason (which has its source in God)—but merely in God’s will. If God’s will is almighty, the nominalists claimed, God can do whatever he wants morally, including making the Commandments the exact opposite of what they are. God could command rather than forbid murder, claimed the nominalists. Right and wrong are just labels God affixes by his almighty will.
Well, no.
God is not in contradiction to himself. A God who is Love and Truth and Good cannot make a world in which Non-Love and Lies and Evil are legitimate “options.” A God who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6) cannot make a world in which murder is allowed because he would deny himself, something Scripture says he cannot do (2 Tim. 2:13).
This brings us back to why, for Christianity, religion cannot be separated from morality. They cannot be separated not because God imposed morality as a checklist, but because of who God is. A God who is Love seeks to be in relation with other beings—including beings with moral capacity like men and angels—on the basis of the likeness of Love which is the likeness of Truth, Goodness, Life, Fidelity, etc., etc.
God, unlike Zeus, is not jealous of his divine prerogatives. Scripture, in fact, teaches that “he emptied himself” out of love to restore to goodness what human evil choice had ruined (Phil. 2:6-11).
Judaism makes similar points to Christianity. Judaism, in fact, broke with the religions of the world in which it grew up precisely because of its focus on morality.
Let’s take the story of Noah in Genesis. The Bible is not unique in speaking of some primordial flood: many cultures have a similar account. In ancient Babylon, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh also has a flood account.
What is unique about the flood in Genesis is its motivation. God allows the flood because he “saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Gen. 6:5). The preceding chapters of Genesis document the snowball effect of sin: man’s rejection of God’s command (3:6) quickly accelerates into murder (4:8), while pride corrupts the human heart.
God is also just. He holds man to account for his “wickedness,” and he differentiates between the good and the evil: “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (6:8).
There is none of this in the Gilgamesh flood story. In that epic, the flood is unleashed because the Babylonian gods want to have some sort of sadistic fun with man, not unlike the perverted child who enjoys causing pain to little animals. Indeed, in Gilgamesh, the gods themselves also almost perish because, in their caprice, they seem to have forgotten where the turnoff valve is and are almost washed away. Babylon’s gods are like Greece’s: bigger but certainly not better.
Likewise, in Judaism, God’s relation to his people stands on moral terms: “You will be my people and I will be your God,” a choice made by love and sealed by a covenant, whose terms God wrote on stones that we call “the Ten Commandments.” These are not a set of rules God just dropped on Moses. They are the norms for the relationship, and it is on fidelity (or infidelity) to those freely assumed obligations that God judges Israel throughout the Old Testament.
Would you rather have a “religion” separate from “morality”? Then you’d trade the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for Zeus, with all his skullduggery, or for some Babylonian sadist.
So do you really think the nexus between religion and morality is so bad?

Religion Without Morality?

<div>If the soul is eternal, and what the apostles (and their priestly successors) bind on Earth then is bound in heaven, would this not apply to marriage? </div><div>While we will indeed live forever, the sacrament of holy matrimony applies only to this Earth. That is why widows have always been able to remarry. Widowers too, except in the case of permanent deacons, who need a special dispensation from the Church to remarry. In addition, Jesus affirms that this sacrament doesn’t endure past death (see Matthew 22:23-33). So there will neither be binding on Earth nor in heaven in this regard.
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Heaven Doesn’t Bind Widows, Widowers

In this episode, Trent rebuts a recent TikTok video that claims God isn&#8217;t really &#8220;pro-life.&#8221;

Is God Pro-life? (Pro-abortion Tik Tokers REBUTTED)

In this episode Trent reviews the new film David and discusses one problem it has that affects many portrayals of David.
Transcription:
Trent:
On Christmas, I took my family to see David, a new film from Angel Studios that follows the life of the patriarch David from Humble Shepherd to King of Israel. And in today&#8217;s episode, I&#8217;m going to talk about my one problem with the film that comes up a lot in stories about David. But first, we need to talk about the film itself, which I would rank as good or even pretty good. Although I feel like someone in the production said, &#8220;Can we get the guy who did Prince of Egypt?&#8221; And someone told him, &#8220;No, but we can get his brother. And I hear he&#8217;s just as good,&#8221; except he&#8217;s not just as good. My eight-year-old said the songs weren&#8217;t very good, but I just call them forgettable. None of them had me cringing, but I don&#8217;t really remember any of the songs except for the Shalom song that David sings to Saul, which better be good because it&#8217;s supposed to illustrate God&#8217;s gift of music to David.
But overall, the songs were nothing to write home about. In contrast, I can still belt out, look at your life through heaven&#8217;s eyes, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, from Prince of Egypt. Which by the way, Samuel and David looks a bit like someone re-skinned Jethro in Prince of Egypt. The animation style in David is very good highlighting the character&#8217;s features, but also feels like a mashup of Disney&#8217;s and Canto mixed with the blockiness of the characters in the 1960s Marionette show, Thunderbirds. And the story is structured well for a film about David, because you might be surprised that David&#8217;s fight against Goliath happens midway through the film, and there&#8217;s still a lot to cover after that, which is a good time for me to talk about what I call the Goliath problem. The trailers for David do a good job of hiding Goliath&#8217;s face because when he appeared, I nearly burst out laughing.
He looked like a 12 foot tall, pasty Roman emperor due to his sharp facial features. My son also leaned over and asked me, &#8220;Dad, why is Goliath white?&#8221; Since everyone else in the film is Middle Eastern, to which I wanted to say. Oh my God, Karen, you can&#8217;t just ask people why they&#8217;re white. I was worried that the fight between David and Goliath would have a modern Marvel action pacing to it. Something where David uses his speed and agility to avoid Goliath attacks and then bring him down with his sling. But I was pleasantly surprised that instead of this, the camera shows Goliath taunting the God of Israel, who he sees as a more worthy foe than David. This loosely corresponds to one Samuel 17:43, which says the Philistine cursed David by his gods. As Goliath looks up and taunts Yahweh, the camera zooms out high into the sky away from Goliath and his voice becomes quieter and quieter.
The camera retreats and focuses on the midday sun hovering overhead, revealing that the God of Israel is infinitely bigger and more powerful than any supposed giant among men. The shot is then interrupted by David&#8217;s sling and Goliath is brought down. Though to keep the PG rating, they omit the part of the narrative where David cuts off Goliath&#8217;s head. In fact, there are lots of thorny issues about the Amalekites and how Israel fought them that the film bypasses, which makes sense given its scope and target audience. So it&#8217;s something I&#8217;ll probably address in a future episode. Instead, my main problem with the film, and it&#8217;s not a huge problem, but it&#8217;s an issue that always bothers me is how Goliath is portrayed. In children&#8217;s animation, Goliath is often portrayed as a ridiculously large Giant, maybe as big as a house. Goliath seems like he&#8217;s 20 or 50 feet tall.
Now, one Samuel 17: four says Goliath&#8217;s height was six cubits in a span or almost 10 feet, which would make Goliath taller than any historically verified person. However, older manuscripts from the Septuagint, the Dead Sea scrolls and Josephus say Goliath was four cubits and a span or about six foot nine inches, which places Goliath&#8217;s description within the known range of size for human beings. The Bible also says Goliath&#8217;s weapons were heavy with a spearhead that weighed 15 pounds and armor that weighed about 120 pounds. That would mean Goliath may have resembled someone with a large, strong man build. Someone like Javier Julius Bjornson who plays the mountain on Game of Thrones and is also six foot nine inches tall. Here he is lightly sparring with UFC fighter Connor McGregor, who himself is five foot nine, but looks like a preteen in comparison to Bjornsen. And for a more shocking comparison, Bjornsen&#8217;s wife is only five foot two inches tall.
In David&#8217;s time, the average man in Israel was about five foot five inches tall, so fighting a six foot nine Goliath would&#8217;ve seemed like a death sentence. But David may have been much taller than five foot five because the Bible never says David was small. When Samuel comes to anoint David, he thinks David&#8217;s tall brother Elieb will be king, but God reminds Samuel not to judge his man does because God sees what really matters. And when David is presented, all that said is that he was rutty and had beautiful eyes and was handsome, not that David was a shrimp in comparison to his brothers. After David petitions to fight Goliath, Saul tells David, &#8220;You are but a youth and he has been a man of war from his youth. Notice Saul doesn&#8217;t say David was too small to fight. And when Goliath taunts David, he basically calls him a pretty boy and mocks his lack of experience and proper weaponry, not his stature.
Finally, when Saul offers David his own armor for the battle, David rejects it, not because it doesn&#8217;t fit or is too big, but because David wasn&#8217;t used to wearing armor like this. Now here&#8217;s the kicker. Saul was kind of a giant in his own right. First Samuel nine: two says that from his shoulders upward, Saul was taller than any of the people. And if David was much smaller than Saul, he would&#8217;ve given David another soldier&#8217;s armor, not his own armor that would&#8217;ve been too big for David. First Samuel 21 also implies that David was strong enough to wheel Goliath sword as a weapon. Now, Saul said that shepherd David could not fight because he wasn&#8217;t experienced in warfare, but you know who was experienced in warfare? Saul. Saul had loads of combat experience. Since one Samuel 14:52 says there was hard fighting against the Philistines all the days of Saul.
In fact, Saul&#8217;s mental decay and madness may have been related to post-traumatic stress disorder from the harshness of ancient warfare. These details are important because most of us think of the story of David and Goliath as a story about David&#8217;s success, and it is, but it&#8217;s really a story about Saul&#8217;s failure. God gave Saul everything he needed to lead Israel, even the stature to fight the Philistines. The film does have a line referencing this when Saul&#8217;s son Jonathan tells Saul he can take on any Philistine, but Goliath&#8217;s cartoonish size obscures his detail. However, I appreciate that the film focuses a lot on Saul as the antagonist and how he fell from grace by pridefully thinking God had abandoned him when the opposite was true. As a result, Saul clung to his kingdom and tried to kill David in a paranoid fit of rage when he saw David as a threat to his power.
And that&#8217;s why we shouldn&#8217;t confuse animation with cartoons. When we treat stories from sacred scripture as cartoons, children can unintentionally categorize these stories with other cartoonish stories and treat them like fiction when they get older. But that doesn&#8217;t mean though that biblical stories can&#8217;t be created in mediums geared towards children from time to time. The 2017 film The Star is basically the nativity story mixed with the secret life of pets. It&#8217;s a cartoon film, but for what it&#8217;s trying to do, it doesn&#8217;t disrespect the source material and I show it to my children. The Prince of Egypt, on the other hand, is not a cartoon. It&#8217;s an animated film. It&#8217;s something children can appreciate, but it wasn&#8217;t created only for children. Adults also love this film. That&#8217;s why I usually pass on veggie tales and prefer to show my kids Hannah Barbera&#8217;s the greatest adventure series.
I mean, here&#8217;s how veggie tales describes the justification for Noah&#8217;s flood.
CLIP:
Because the oith is going to be flooded, Jim. Okay. It&#8217;s a what? God has seen that no one cares about doing what&#8217;s right anymore, so he&#8217;s going to start over.
You really?
The ark will save us from the flood. And
Trent:
Here&#8217;s how Hannah Barbera does it.
CLIP:
So God said to Noah, &#8220;I am going to put an end to all people for the earth is filled with violence and corruption. Because of this, I am going to destroy both them and the earth.&#8221; Thus, because wickedness are bounded everywhere, mankind had condemned itself to extinction. In all the land, only Noah and his family were righteous.
Trent:
When it comes to 2025&#8217;s David, I would call this a good animated film. It&#8217;s not Prince of Egypt, but it doesn&#8217;t fall into cartoonish slapstick or ADD pace nonsense. It does a good job of discussing complex themes such as the need to honor God above temporal goods like power and to have faith in God even in our darkest hours. It also has some elements pointing towards Christ&#8217;s fulfillment of the Davidic Kingdom, which I won&#8217;t spoil here, but are very good because they&#8217;re very subtle but powerful, though my 10-year-old son was able to spot them. As I said, it&#8217;s not the most memorable film, but if you want a good film the whole family can enjoy, which is a rarity nowadays, then David is definitely worth it. After the film, my five-year-old asked, &#8220;Dad, can we have David on our TV?&#8221; So I&#8217;d say that&#8217;s a pretty good endorsement.
And if you like more recommendations on faithful films to watch, check out my previous episode on Christian films you should watch with non-Christians. And if you want to join us in over 30 other Catholic creators at our first conference, April 11th here in Dallas, then visit conferenceoftrent.com and get your tickets today because half of them have already been sold. And if you want to help us create more content like this, then please support us at trrenthornpodcast.com. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

My One Problem with the New “David” Film

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Karlo Broussard answers the questions: Why must Mary have been Immaculately Conceived—couldn’t Jesus have been born of a sinner? How does addiction affect the conditions for mortal sin? Karlo discusses  the Church’s teaching on free will, grave matter, and culpability. He also addresses the claim of annihilationism—does the Bible really support eternal punishment in hell? Plus, is it accurate to call non-Catholics “Christians,” or should we still use the term “heretics”?
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Was Mary Really Immaculately Conceived? Could Jesus Be Born of a Sinner?

<div>When does Christmas officially end?</div><div>The liturgical season of Christmas begins with the vigil Mass on Christmas Eve and concludes on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.
</div>

When Does Christmas End?

Our secular culture has a confused relationship with nature. We consider the environment a top political and personal priority, obsessing over recycling, endangered species, and rainforests and coral reefs. Yet we also seek to manipulate and overcome nature through technological advancements: transhumanism, transgenderism, genetically modifying food. We <a href="https://greenly.earth/en-us/blog/ecology-news/why-is-plastic-bad-for-the-environment">condemn plastics as evil</a>, then leverage plastic in our most intimate physical encounters to obstruct the creation of new life. We celebrate everything that is natural and organic, but we call technological control over every aspect of our reproduction a “human right.” Perhaps the fact that we lack a solid philosophical, even theological foundation upon which to create a coherent way to think about creation has something to do with these tensions and incoherencies.
That probably is what St. Thomas Aquinas would say, as Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., argues in one of the essays in his excellent new book <a href="https://www.cuapress.org/9780813237770/principles-of-catholic-theology-book-3/">Principles of Catholic Theology, Book Three: On God, Trinity, Creation, and Christ</a>. In his discussion of beauty—admittedly a surprising source of reflection for modern debates over the environment—Aquinas presents us with philosophical categories that can help us make better sense of man’s relationship with nature. And, through White’s expert analysis, what we discover is that it is the Christian understanding that best equips man to both protect and cooperate with nature.
In his Summa Theologiae and Commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, Aquinas observes three characteristics that define beauty in creatures: the integrity of the form, properties of proportion or harmony, and expressive splendor. Integrity refers to something’s wholeness or perfection, a thing having all proper structure or parts. Proportion or harmony means symmetry and all the parts properly proportionate to one another. Splendor is the radiance of the thing, which entices us to admire and celebrate it. Aquinas argues that these three notions can be applied analogically to speak about the beauty of God, but they also relate to our view of nature.
All created things, whether physical living realities that do not have knowledge (plants), living realities that have sensate knowledge but no rational knowledge or deliberate freedom (non-human animals), or living beings that have both sensate and rational knowledge and deliberate freedom (humans), in some way reflect something unique about the beauty of God. Every created thing exists in a hierarchical, teleological order. Non-living things (rocks, water) create a context or setting in which living things can emerge. Plants, in turn, exist for the sake of animals, and plants and animals exist for the sake of humans. Humans, finally, exist for the sake of life in community with one another and ultimately for God. White explains: “The interdependent hierarchy that emerges from differentiated kinds of beings gives rise to a larger overarching order, one that implies all three notes of beauty.”
An argument appealing to hierarchy probably strikes many as contrary to a fruitful, symbiotic relationship between man and nature. Aren’t hierarchies inherently exploitative and oppressive? White, channeling Aquinas, disagrees. Yes, it’s true that if humans exist at the top of the hierarchy of the natural order, it is legitimate for them to make use of non-living realities and non-human living things for the sake of human flourishing. Humans, after all, have an ontological dignity and nobility that is greater than all other created earthly realities because they possess a rational soul.
To deny the hierarchical differential of human beings in relation to other creatures “does nothing to advance the cause of respect for other forms of life or being,” writes White. This is because humans are best equipped to protect and preserve nature. Endangered species of sharks, for example, do not care about various endangered fish species that are part of their natural diet. They just eat them! Nature, left to itself, is a messy, deadly jungle, defined by natural selection. Only humans, because of their unique capacity for reasoning and empathy, can facilitate harmony and flourishing in our natural hierarchy.
Indeed, White argues, humans are uniquely capable of acknowledging the deeper order and its beauty and can act in ways that respect the integrity, order, and beauty of non-human realities. To wit, it was not until humans began designating species as endangered or creating nature reserves that species had a fighting chance of surviving the often brutal realities of the natural order. It’s worth remembering that there have been entire epochs of pre-human history in which large numbers of species went extinct, with no one there to mourn their departure. Humans alone express any interest in the Mesozoic Era, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Humans are also singularly positioned to acknowledge the ontological integrity of non-human physical and living beings, because in their being, all those beings reflect something about the wisdom and beauty of God. “Each natural kind stems ultimately from the uncreated Logos of God and is in some way a distinctive finite expression of God’s infinite uncreated beauty,” says White. That means that as humans, we are capable of perceiving the goodness and value of creation—not as callous exploiters, but as prudent stewards. To negligently destroy an ecosystem, for example, is to harm the common good of the created order.
Within the Christian paradigm, non-human creatures exist for human beings—not only to sustain them, but as a mediating entity through which humans can discover God and live in community. Thus, to destroy parts of non-human creation is to harm the same environment intended to sustain the physical, material, intellectual, and spiritual well-being of humanity. Furthermore, to willfully harm the environment disfigures the same people who do that harm. Cruel treatment of animals, for example, not only is dishonoring to the animals, but also harms the rationality of the actor who does the harming by undermining his capability for empathy and kindness. Proper respect for nature engenders a proper respect for other humans as well.
Nor should we forget the aesthetic character of nature, as creation instills in man an admiration of beauty. For example, the careless or callous replacement of the natural order with monotonous, ugly, and even dehumanizing architecture and infrastructure doesn’t just damage creation—it also harms humans, obscuring their ability to see beauty and teaching them that creation is dispensable. “The modern world,” White observes, “is, in many respects, a world of terrific ugliness.” There’s a reason we celebrate parks, gardens, and trees even in dense urban spaces: they remind us of natural hierarchy and are even a manifestation of it.
We have examples aplenty of what happens when we ignore that natural hierarchy. If we treat nature with contempt, we vitiate our own humanity. If we elevate other creatures to be equal to, or even superior to ourselves, we undermine the proper role they are to play, similar to how worshiping a romantic partner, rather than honoring that person, reflects a warping of true love. Our obsessive focus on our pets—<a href="https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/pet-spending-statistics/">projected to be $150 billion this year</a>—in which we treat dogs and cats as humans and even children, while ignoring the immediate needs of real humans and real children, is a good example of this.
“Human beings should acknowledge the order of nature that pre-exists them precisely so as to live in the midst of nature with wisdom and aesthetic moderation,” concludes White. Having the proper philosophical understanding of our relationship with nature, it turns out, doesn’t just help us know and appreciate God. It’s actually the best means of ensuring creation’s survival and flourishing.