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Protestants, many of us Catholic apologists argue, effectively act as their own popes. The reason why, we allege, is that every Protestant is ultimately accountable to his personal interpretation of divine revelation, which for Protestants is solely the sixty-six-book Protestant Bible. Every Protestant, we posit, acts as his own magisterial authority, both in interpreting the Bible and even in deciding what constitutes the Bible, given their rejection of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals">deuterocanon</a>.
But not so, declare our Protestant counterparts! They, like us Catholics, have confessions and creeds to which they submit. Carl R. Trueman, one of the most brilliant and interesting intellects in modern Protestantism, last year <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/11/protestants-need-to-go-back-to-basics">urged</a> his fellow Protestants to return to “orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession.” Kim Riddlebarger, a co-host of the popular White Horse Inn podcast, <a href="https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/about-the-author">declares</a>, “If you were to ask, ‘what is it that defines Christianity?’, my answer now would be ‘the definition of Christianity is given us in the Creed.’”
Recently, a friend sent me a video of Methodist lay apologist Joshua Pearsall, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjbNPvzH8QI&amp;t=105s">makes a similar argument</a> in reference to my book, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-obscurity-in-scripture-disputing-sola-scriptura-and-the-protestant-notion-of-biblical-perspicuity/?srsltid=AfmBOor7SNuNT5o002l6Y6MiuN14F4UagxCOJWCBmGhv1rN3cnnkD79G">The Obscurity of Scripture</a>. Citing confessional standards of such denominations as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and his own Methodist tradition, Pearsall asserts, “You literally can’t be your own pope. You are accountable to the standards of your tradition and of course the Scriptures on top of that.” Others, such as <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/10/01/the-reformation-as-renewal-is-an-exemplar-of-special-pleading/">Reformed scholar Matthew Barrett</a> in his recent work The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, claims much the same.
I can appreciate the thinking behind this Protestant line of argumentation. Indeed, I would have mouthed similar things fifteen years ago when I was a Presbyterian seminary student. Of course I wasn’t like those ignorant, low-church evangelicals with no knowledge of church history, no knowledge of Nicaea or Chalcedon, no knowledge even of their own Protestant theological ancestry. I eagerly submitted to the Westminster Standards, believing them to be an accurate interpretation of biblical truth.
But that, I eventually realized, was exactly the problem. I adhered to Reformed confessional documents based on their conformity to Holy Scripture—but whose interpretation of it? My own, ultimately. Nor was this my own novel understanding of how things are supposed to work within the Protestant paradigm. This is precisely the way they are supposed to work.
Why, for example, was I a Presbyterian rather than an Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist? Why was I submitting to the Westminster Confession of Faith rather than the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, or the Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith? Because I, as a conscientious, “Bible-believing” Christian, had determined that the particular confessional documents of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) were sufficiently biblical to merit my allegiance. My own pastors and professors told me that if I believed another Protestant denomination was more biblically faithful, I should follow my conscience and go there instead.
Who is in the interpretative drivers’ seat in such a scenario? The individual Christian, naturally. If Carl Trueman, Kim Riddlebarger, Matthew Barrett, or any other Protestant Christian read his Bible and came to believe that his particular Protestant tradition and its confessional documents are erroneous, it would be his prerogative to either protest those errors within his own denomination or, if he viewed them as sufficiently egregious, to join a different ecclesial community. He might even feel compelled to establish his own.
And that explains not only five hundred years of fissiparous Protestant history, but the remarkable explosion of non-denominational, Bible-based, evangelical churches in the last few generations. All of them purport to be simply returning to the fundamentals of Scripture, and all of them cannot help but offer their own bespoke takes on Christian doctrine and praxis.
Granted, I presume that many if not most Protestants do not intend this. They do not want to be postmodern individualists determining reality for themselves. They want to be embedded in the history and traditions of Christianity. That’s why they constantly cite not only Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, Turretin, Cranmer, and Owen, but also Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Jerome, and Augustine. What Catholics and traditionally minded Protestants share is a desire to be united to something greater than themselves, a proclivity for the ancient and venerable. We all want to believe that our faith was not born yesterday, but descends from the apostles.
The question is whether the Protestant paradigm, in any of its manifold manifestations, is actually capable of coherently doing so. What I came to realize almost fifteen years ago is no, it cannot. Even Pearsall in his YouTube videos attempting to refute my book cannot help but undermine his position, acknowledging that many Protestants are failing to honor their own confessional standards . . . and then immediately admitting that confessional standards are not infallible and “can be corrected down the line if they need to be.” Corrected according to what standard? The standard of the individual’s interpretation of Scripture.
In other words, Protestant creeds and confessional standards have only as much authority as Protestants are willing to grant them. If a Protestant comes to assess them as inadequate, on whatever grounds related to his conscience, he may edit or even dispense with them. And this applies not only to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant creeds, but the ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. This is why Protestants <a href="https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/ask-ligonier/what-does-it-mean-that-the-first-seven-church-councils-were-ecumenical">pick and choose which ecumenical councils they accept</a>. Indeed, many Protestants even argue that <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/confess-jesus-descended-into-hell/">parts of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed</a> are unbiblical and need not be accepted. And why not?
Catholics do not inhabit the same paradigmatic position. We do not pick and choose which councils or creeds to which we submit. We accept the authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church en totale, because we recognize that it has been granted that authority by Christ himself, preserved by the Holy Spirit. Such a recognition requires an act of faith, but it is based on evidence and reason, pre-eminently the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/my-church-is-more-credible-than-yours">motives of credibility</a>. And, unlike Protestants, whose interpretive authority of divine revelation rests in the conscience of each individual Christian, Catholics acknowledge a living Magisterium, whose voice is manifested not only through ecumenical councils, but, in certain narrow circumstances, through the living pope.
Creeds can’t save Protestantism from its inevitable descent into an individualism that equates to every individual Christian acting as his own pope. Only the Catholic Church with its internally coherent and historically verifiable magisterial authority can resolve the Protestant’s dilemma and give him the certitude that he is indeed following Christ and the fullness of his teaching, rather than the (often well-meaning) whims of his own conscience.

Creeds Can’t Save Protestantism

The Romans, as any first-year Latin student can tell you, were in the practice of ending their sentences with verbs. Regina agricolam amat, for example—literally, “The queen the farmer loves.” Unless you are Yoda, however, you would speak this sentence in English this way: “The queen loves the farmer.” (Something tells me this relationship is not going to work out.)
In any case, Latin word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, object, verb. In English, word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, verb, object. Because Latin nouns are declined—that is, they are assigned distinct endings for how they function in a sentence—it is easy to identify the subject and the object.
The Church preserves the practice of ending sentences and clauses with the predicate. Indeed, here is a sentence from Benedict XVI&#8217;s renunciation of the Petrine Office.
<blockquote>
Nunc autem Sanctam Dei Ecclesiam curae Summi eius Pastoris, Domini nostri Iesu Christi confidimus sanctamque eius Matrem Mariam imploramus, ut patribus Cardinalibus in eligendo novo Summo Pontifice materna sua bonitate assistat.
</blockquote>
 And here it is in English:
<blockquote>
And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff.
</blockquote>
I’ve put the verbs in italics so that you can see where they fall in their respective clauses.
What’s the point of this little exposition on Latin syntax? Well, sometimes a translator can alter the quality of a sentence, even unintentionally, by failing to appreciate how a verb at the end of sentence delivers a certain emphasis. Here is an example that you will know. It is the second sentence of Pope Leo XIII’s exorcism prayer that we know as the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.
First the Latin (with diacritics from the 1962 Roman Missal):
<blockquote>
Ímperet ílli Déus, súpplices deprecámur: tuque, prínceps milítiæ cæléstis, Sátanam aliósque spíritus malígnos, qui ad perditiónem animárum pervagántur in múndo, divína virtúte, in inférnum detrúde. Amen.
</blockquote>
And here is the English:
<blockquote>
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
</blockquote>
Now, before I make my point about verbs, there are a few things about the English translation that are of interest:
<ul>
<li class="p1">“Rebuke” is not a strict translation of imperet, which really means &#8220;rule&#8221; or &#8220;command.&#8221; But &#8220;rebuke&#8221; gives a more militant emphasis to the prayer, so a gold star to the translator for that one.</li>
<li class="p1">“Wander . . . through” is a faithful translation of pervagantur (we find the same root in “vagabond” and “vague”), but I prefer “prowl” because it has an emphasis of menace.</li>
<li class="p1">“Divine power” would be a more faithful translation of divina virtute than “power of God” (and you hear some people say that), but even &#8220;power&#8221; does not give the Latin sense of virtu, which really means something closer to “manly strength” and even “courage under fire” or “courage in adversity.” (For an extensive consideration of this concept of virtu and what it meant to the Romans, see Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.) The fact is, however, that we really don’t have an English word for this concept, so “power” is about as close as we can come without ham-handing the translation.</li>
</ul>
But here is the main problem with the English. The ending of the prayer, we have to admit, is a bit of a downer. This prayer is a vigorous battle cry, and the English translation ends with an image of defeat—that is, “the ruin of souls.” Not inspiring, I’m afraid, and certainly not what Leo intended.
The Latin, however, ends with the action verb detrude, from detrudere, which means “to thrust away.” In fact, I prefer “thrust into hell” to “cast into hell,” and detrude in English is a transitive verb that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “to thrust or force down.” Whether you like “thrust” or “cast,” the sense at the end of the prayer when it is said in Latin is one of victory, not of defeat. We have an image of the vigorous warrior-angel casting Satan and his demons into hell. In English, we are left with an image of souls falling into perdition.
There is a canard about translations: they can be faithful or beautiful. Alas, here the translator has been as faithful as he can be while still hewing to the practices of English word order. If he wanted to preserve the sense of vigorous victory, however, he would have to get a little creative and add another verb—in this case, “bind.” Sure, he would have to take some liberty with the original Latin, but in so doing, I think he would better preserve the martial quality of the prayer. How about this?
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray . . . and do thou, o Prince of the heavenly host, by the divine power, bind Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls, and thrust them into hell!
Feel the difference? I think Leo would approve.

St. Michael Prayer: A Better Translation?

Cy Kellett talks about beauty and the revitalization of culture with Bernardo Aparicio Garcia, founder and publisher of Dappled Things, a literary magazine dedicated to providing a space for emerging writers to engage the literary world from a Catholic perspective. Why does the literary world need the Catholic perspective? Bernardo gets into that and more in this wide-ranging interview.

Dappled Things

<div>If I commit a good act, such as protesting an abortion clinic, but the act produces bad consequences, such as provoking stricter anti-protest legislation so that fewer sidewalk counselors are allowed outside the clinic, have I done a bad act? </div><div>Not necessarily. Our good actions do not cause the bad consequences that accompany them sometimes; they are just occasional opportunities for people to do evil in reaction to them. They are not the causes of the bad actions. If this were not the case, what could we say of God himself as Creator? Surely there would be no sins at all if he had not created angels and men, creatures capable of sinning!
The principal example would be the Incarnation of the Lord. How many sins would never have been committed if the Savior had not revealed himself to us, only to be rejected by many, or if he had not taught the new law, which is far more demanding than the old. But this is most certain: &#8220;Christ Jesus came into the world to call sinners,&#8221; and there would be no forgiveness for us if he had not come.
Of course, it is necessary for us to evaluate our actions prudently and seek to avoid their being the pretext for any evil deeds. But it is impossible to do any good without the possibility that our good deed may be misused or misinterpreted by someone. So go ahead and do what you are doing, at least until some prudent persons determine that it is no longer useful for your cause.
</div>

Can Bad Consequences Make a Good Act Bad?

Jimmy Akin addresses the ongoing controversy surrounding the alleged apparitions of Our Lady in Međugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

New Medjugorje Apparition?

<div>Matthew 24:36 says, "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the son, but the Father only." If Jesus is God, wouldn’t he know when the end would come? Why then does it say "nor the son, but the Father only"? </div><div>The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains the orthodox interpretation of these words of the Lord:
<blockquote>By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal. What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal (474).</blockquote>
What this means then is that &#8220;not knowing&#8221; refers to his not being sent to reveal the day and the hour in his human nature, leaving that office to the Father. It has always been understood that as God, Christ knows the day and the hour but that in his mission on Earth he was not sent to reveal this. We need to remember that the word to know in the Semitic senses used in Scripture is very diverse and rich and does not refer only to mental information but to actions and offices.
</div>

Jesus Knows When the End Will Come

Ever wondered about the mysterious and obscure aspects of the Catholic faith? Dive into our podcast where Jimmy pushes the boundaries of apologetics, blending insights from various fields. Ready for an accessible, informative, and entertaining journey?

The Jimmy Akin Podcast

Tim Staples cites Scripture and early Church writings to refute the common Protestant claim that the Eucharist is only a symbol of Christ&#8217;s body.

Is the Eucharist Just A Symbol?

<div>Would it be appropriate for me to use the sign of the cross when I pray if I am not Catholic yet? </div><div>Certainly you may and should make the sign of the cross. It is not reserved for Catholics, and it is a powerful prayer for enlightenment and protection. If you make it while saying, &#8220;In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen,&#8221; then you are combining an act of faith in Christ&#8217;s Cross and Passion with the profession of faith in the Holy Trinity, and this will be very good for your soul. But become a Catholic as soon as you can. I will pray for you.
</div>

Should a Non-Catholic Sign Himself?

<div>What happened to the Church teaching about Limbo?</div><div><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/limbo">Limbo</a> was never an official teaching of the Church, as The Catholic Encyclopedia, published in the early 1900s, makes clear. But it was a common theological opinion for a good number of years. Limbo describes a place where unbaptized children and those unbaptized persons who had reached the age of reason but had not committed mortal sin would go upon their deaths. It is not heaven yet it is a state of complete natural happiness.
For more on this subject, please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/out-on-a-limbo">this article</a> by Catholic Answers founder Karl Keating.
</div>

Whatever Happened to Limbo?

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Is the Eucharist REALLY JESUS?

Does the Bible predict or explain pagan gods? How do Greek and Roman deities fit into the ancient Jewish worldview? In this video, Jimmy Akin unpacks this question and discusses leading theories on this matter.
Transcript:
Adam and Eve were the first human beings. How come there was this period of time, or how about all these cultures and people and beliefs that people had that had nothing to do with the Jewish God? What about, you know, like the ancient Greek philosophers not talking about God a lot? Or did they?
Oh, they talked about—they talked about all kinds of gods. They had loads of them. Um, but, uh, in terms of where the idea of pagan gods came from, there&#8217;s not a single answer to that question. Now, there are, um, there are various ways of answering it, and some of them are found in the Bible. Like, for example, um, there&#8217;s one passage that talks about how people made statues, and then they—of, of, of humans—and then they, uh, began to regard these statues as statues of deities. And that&#8217;s how, uh, the idea of, of some pagan gods came about.
But that&#8217;s not actually the majority explanation in the Bible. There, the biblical worldview holds that there are—there is more than one spirit up in heaven. I mean, God, he&#8217;s the supreme spirit, he&#8217;s the creator, he&#8217;s the one who made everything. But he&#8217;s not the only dude up there.
Um, in the Old Testament, God is depicted as, uh, as being surrounded by a heavenly court. And there are different levels within that court. Some people rank higher in the heavenly court than others. Some people rank lower in the heavenly court than others. The ones that we get to deal with—the angels—that term just means messenger. And if you think about any king&#8217;s court, the messengers, they&#8217;re like the lowest, you know. They just run—they just run messages from one place to another.
Um, but there are much higher officials in the court. There are also, you know, a king is going to have his army, and he&#8217;s going to have his high counselors. He&#8217;s going to have a prosecutor. That&#8217;s what Satan is. Uh, Satan means, in Hebrew, means—means adversary or prosecutor.
And so we see, uh, in various books of the Old Testament—and it&#8217;s also referenced in the New Testament—um, uh, you know, discussions of the heavenly court that surrounds God. And according to Deuteronomy, what happened was, when the nations divided—so this is when they&#8217;re starting to separate and become independent nations—God put each nation under a different high-ranking heavenly official.
Um, they&#8217;re sometimes referred to as the sons of God. They&#8217;re also sometimes referred to as the sarim, sarim being a Hebrew word that means prince or commander. And so God, like, put a different—different heavenly official over each of the nations, but he kept Israel for himself. And he eventually, uh, enlisted Michael, the angel Michael, to, uh, help him in overseeing Israel.
But he put each nation under its own prince or its own son of God. And eventually, those—a lot of those sons of God went bad, and they started opposing God&#8217;s plan. We see references to that, for example, in the Book of Daniel, where there are wars in heaven between the, uh, good angels like Michael and Gabriel and the bad angels like the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece.
And this is the biblical explanation—the main biblical explanation—of the origin of the pagan gods. They&#8217;re angels that God entrusted the nations to that then went bad and started demanding that people worship them instead of the true God.
Brian, that brings us to the break. I hope that that was helpful to you. Thank you very much for the question. Lots of lines full, but we got lots of time left with Jimmy Akin.
&nbsp;

A Biblical Explanation for Pagan Gods

Mary shows us the RIGHT WAY to read Scripture.

The annual celebration of Thanksgiving is one of the few remaining modern occasions where openly religious and civil sentiments intersect. Americans on the fourth Thursday of November still voice something of a social expectation that some acknowledgment of debt is owed in a world otherwise marked by entitlements. Precisely to whom that debt is owed is somewhat ever murkier, some even suggesting that it is more of a “debt of memory,” to contemplate the blessings of liberty and prosperity. But sufficient fumes still remain that most Americans invoke a beneficent God as the recipient of that gratitude.
Is there a distinctive Catholic approach to Thanksgiving? I ask that not especially as a holiday as much as a phenomenon. My answer is yes.
In his pre-papal book on the implementation of Vatican II, Sources of Renewal, the future St. John Paul II wrote about “consciousness” and “attitudes.” Consciousness is an awareness of a particular dimension of faith, an awareness that keeps that particular understanding in our sights, a lens through which we see reality. For example, Wojtyła spoke of “creation” as a consciousness: if I see the world as the intentional gift of God, that will affect how I approach it. It will engender “attitudes” about how to look at the world, both positive (“this is what it is”) and negative (“this is what it isn’t).
Let me argue that thanksgiving is a basic attitude of the Christian toward everything . . . because everything he has is a gift.
As beguiling as creation sometimes is, the Christian is aware that of everything that is, none of it has to be. Nothing had to be, and in a world beset by terrorism, war, and violence, we are also increasingly aware of the fragility of what is.
Dame Julian of Norwich captures this in one of her visions. She says that God showed her something like a walnut. Wondering why she saw this, she asked God and was made to understand that it represented “all that is.” Astonished that all the things that tempt man in the material world could be contained in such a small and fragile vessel, she was beset with the question of how it continues nevertheless to exist. God’s answer was simple: “Because I love it.”
In a series of lectures in Austria recently transcribed and published, Josef Ratzinger (prior to his papal election) spoke of creation as “the divine project.” Creation is not some thing that evolved by happenstance or even just started from a divine bang only for its own internal dynamism to take over. Creation is part of God’s plan, and since God’s plan is one, creation is inherently tied to salvation: to God’s plan to enter in loving relation with those created persons called human beings he created and, through them, to give voice to the whole cosmos to the greater glory of God.
When we realize the contingency of everything that is, and yet its—and our—existence being personally willed and wanted “because I love it,” should the human response be anything less than thanksgiving? Isn’t that response captured in the verse of an old Polish hymn (Kiedy ranne wstają zorze)?
And man, whom You without limit
Have showered with all your gifts, 
Whom You have created and redeemed, 
Why wouldn’t he praise You?
Our age pays at least lip service to “social justice,” yet we often forget that for St. Thomas Aquinas, religion as a virtue is part of the cardinal virtue of justice. Justice is about giving another <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/when-you-really-just-need-to-kill-someone">what is owed</a> him, his “due.” People have no greater “due” than to him from whom their existence, at its start and in its continuation at this moment, comes. At the very least, thanksgiving is what we owe him from whom we have everything.
Yet, as Preface IV for Weekdays in Ordinary Time reminds us, God has “no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift. Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to your greatness but makes us grow in your grace.”
As much as basic fairness requires us to acknowledge that everything we have comes from God, the truth is that even the good desire to thank him is God’s own gift. So, in giving thanks, it is not just that we discharge an obligation in justice that—when compared to the immensity of the gift—can never be commensurate. No, thanksgiving perfects our own consciousness of our created dependence on God and shapes our attitude toward life. A person who recognizes his dependency is less likely to succumb to illusions of self-sufficient grandeur, exaggerated autonomy, or defining “one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Nor is it just a question of acknowledging our dependency. Americans give thanks for <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/freedom-and-the-americans-error">freedom</a>, something also ultimately rooted in creation (we are made in God’s image, one aspect of which being that we enjoy free will) and redemption (Jesus came to give us true freedom).
So a distinctly Catholic approach to Thanksgiving recognizes that the attitude the holiday seeks to embody should, in fact, be the attitude that marks a person’s approach to life every day of the year. The Church not only preaches, but practices that: she celebrates the Eucharist—a Greek word that itself means “thanksgiving”—every day of the year (but <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/no-communion-on-good-friday">Good Friday</a>). Each and every day, the Church invites her children to give thanks for creation and redemption. For the Church, every day is Thanksgiving.
And, again, that celebration of Thanksgiving “makes us grow in [God’s] grace.” In its votive Mass for Thanksgiving Day, the Church uses the Gospel of Luke, 17:11-19, the account of Jesus healing ten lepers, only one of whom returned to say “thank you.” “Ten were healed, were they not? Where are the other nine?”
The leper who returned to give thanks was a Samaritan—i.e., someone whom Israel considered not truly worshiping God because not truly part of the covenant. Yet—in contrast to his Jewish brothers who were part of that covenant and revelation and so should have known better—he did come to give thanks. He embodies the model of the real attitude of thanksgiving.
Having raised kids in Generations Y and Z, I had plenty of exposure to “Barney,” the purple dinosaur, who reminded children that “‘please’ and ‘thank you’—they are the magic words.” Magic not because <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-to-do-with-witches">they cast spells</a>, but because they speak love to another person, human … or divine. Let them be a Catholic’s “magic” words every day—not just, but especially on, the fourth Thursday of November.
Happy Thanksgiving!

What Catholics Should Be Thankful For

Trent Horn explains what confirmation bias is and why it is not a valid reason to discredit faith in any <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/religion">religion</a>.
Transcript:
Host: Let&#8217;s go real quick to try to get this in before the break, Anonymous in Fairfax, Virginia, listening online, you are on with Trent Horn, what&#8217;s your question, Anonymous?
Caller: Hey, so I just recently watched a video on Vice news that was talking about <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/interview-with-an-exorcist">exorcisms</a>, and they showed this one atheist activist named Michael Shermer who was trying to debunk exorcisms, and one of his premises was that &#8220;You know, religion and faith and all that, it&#8217;s nothing more than just confirmation bias.&#8221; And I kind of hear this a lot too, that, you know, &#8220;Oh, faith is nothing more than just confirmation bias. People with their beliefs, they&#8217;ll go wherever their beliefs&#8230;&#8221; You know, kind of ad hoc. But how do you respond to stuff like that, Trent?
Trent: What I would say is that confirmation bias is not an objection to Catholicism, or even to religion in general. Confirmation bias is a psychological defect that all people suffer from, including atheists. It&#8217;s just a part of the human condition, as fallen creatures, as fallible creatures. Confirmation bias is a tendency among human beings to only notice evidence that supports a belief they already hold, and then to ignore or suppress evidence that contradicts that belief.
And everyone does this, including atheists, and I would say even Shermer himself would do this, that if you were talking about exorcisms that he and others may bring up, yeah, there are cases where you might say someone who seems possessed may have a mental illness and it&#8217;s indistinguishable, but then people don&#8217;t bring up the other cases where the person who&#8217;s possessed speaks a language they never knew before, or has superhuman strength. That part gets kind of pushed to the side. That would be an example of confirmation bias. I don&#8217;t know if Shermer does that, but I can imagine there are atheists who do.
So I would say, to repeat that, well we have a little bit of time, I can go into this before we have to go to a break, that confirmation bias, it is a psychological defect, an error in thinking, everybody suffers from it. So everyone has to watch out for it, so there are atheists—and I&#8217;ve seen this in literature, where atheists will attack, you know, weak arguments against the Catholic faith, but then they don&#8217;t deal with other stronger issues or things that may contradict a belief that they hold.
So everyone does this, we have to be watchful for it, but it&#8217;s not an objection against the faith. It&#8217;s just something everyone has to watch out for, and Catholics believe in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/arent-faith-and-reason-incompatible">faith seeking understanding</a>, and everyone&#8217;s biased, but we can work hard to look at evidence objectively, and I would say the evidence objectively supports the truth of the Catholic faith.

Is Religion Just ‘Confirmation Bias’?

In this engaging clip, Cy Kellett and Trent Horn dive into a thought-provoking discussion about why some individuals, like a viewer from Ohio, choose not to embrace Catholicism. Drawing from personal experiences in a Pentecostal background, they explore the impact of miraculous claims and the complexities of faith, challenging assumptions about doctrine and authenticity in religious practices.
Transcript:
Caller: So I would say the reason I am not Catholic is because of the denomination I was born and raised in. I was born and raised in a Pentecostal denomination. You know, emphasis on spiritual church services, speaking in tongues, healings, things like that.
We have ministers all the time from foreign countries that told us miracle stories, converting people by the millions. There&#8217;s one story of a woman who had a kidney that miraculously grew back after this Pentecostal preacher laid hands on her. So I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s that environment that I&#8217;m not Catholic and also because, well, can these people be teaching false doctrine if all these miracles are happening? So that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m not Catholic.
Trent: Sure. I think those are two good points. Number one, it seems to be you&#8217;re thinking, well, if these people are capable, let&#8217;s assume that at least some of the miracle claims they&#8217;re making are authentic. I mean, there have unfortunately been cases of preachers, including Pentecostal preachers, who claim to be faith healers. But it seems quite suspect what they&#8217;re exactly doing.
But let&#8217;s just. I think it&#8217;s. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s improbable that some non-Catholic Christians, whether they be ministers or lay people, are capable of performing miracles or having God work through them. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s improbable. But I don&#8217;t think that it follows that because God works a miracle through them, that God validates their theology completely.
It reminds me in the Gospels when there were the apostles, those who were following Jesus, that there were other people who weren&#8217;t direct disciples, who were also casting out demons and doing things. And Jesus said, look, if they&#8217;re not against us, they&#8217;re with us. Though that wouldn&#8217;t mean they had the same apostolic authority as Peter, John, and the other apostles just because other Christians, God empowers them to do miracles.
Because would you agree that, I mean, there are, you know, you said you grew up in the Pentecostal tradition. Would you agree that it&#8217;s possible there are, let&#8217;s say, Calvinists who have done miracles? God has worked through them with charisms. But that wouldn&#8217;t mean you should become a Calvinist, right?
Caller: Well, I guess that&#8217;s a fair point because I&#8217;ve heard of Mormon missionaries, to change the subject a little bit, who have prayed for miracles. Like I saw one video where they claim to stop a drought. And this one lady was cured of cancer after he was baptized in a Mormon baptism. So I guess that&#8217;s a fair point, right?
Trent: And that&#8217;s actually a great example because Mormons are not Christians. So God, I mean, He could choose to work a miracle through anyone, even someone who&#8217;s non-Christian, who&#8217;s not a believer. I mean, you know, God spoke through Balaam&#8217;s donkey, for example, in order to move him.
So there could be non-Christians or non-Catholics God could work through to do a miracle, but that doesn&#8217;t mean automatically their theology is correct. God&#8217;s sovereign. He can choose to do miracles through whoever He wants. For me, I would rather look at trying to determine which theology to believe in. I try to say, look, which one coheres with Scripture and two, which one coheres with history?
Because the Bible, you know, we didn&#8217;t have the Bible in the first century. There wasn&#8217;t a canon, really. There wasn&#8217;t one that was universally recognized until the 4th century. I would say, well, what does early tradition, history, and Scripture tell us? And my full study has led me to the Catholic faith.
I&#8217;d also offer you one more thought, Cole, and that would be that some of the traditions in Pentecostalism, so, you know, charism, speaking in tongues, healings, those kinds of things, they&#8217;re not contradictory to the Catholic faith. Catholics would agree that God can give different charisms to people all the time.
In fact, there are a group of Catholics that have a special devotion to that. They&#8217;re called Charismatic Catholics or part of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal. And that&#8217;s something you could look into, that you can kind of see there how those elements of spirituality that you may find to be positive within Pentecostalism, the Catholic Church also fully supports as well, as long as it doesn&#8217;t contradict Catholic doctrine or Catholic dogma.
Trent: So does that sound like something you might want to look into or&#8230;
Caller: Worth the thought?
Trent: Sure. Yeah. Well, why don&#8217;t you take a look at it? And again&#8230;
Oh, go ahead.
Caller: Well, I just like to say, well, just these preachers have such&#8230; They seem to have such authority when they&#8217;re speaking, and that&#8217;s just hard to kind of argue against, you know.
Trent: But remember, though, when you say authority, they may sound very confident, they may sound, you know, bombastic, they may sound very winsome. I&#8217;ll agree with you there. There are Protestant preachers that can preach up a storm, my friend, but we have to always be careful.
I remember, I believe it&#8217;s in the letter to the Thessalonians, Paul says there will come a time where people will not stand for true doctrine and hoping that their ears will be tickled or pleased, they will go after false teachers. So just because someone&#8217;s really impressive to listen to, sometimes that&#8217;s a warning sign they can be leading people astray.
So when we say speak with authority, we should not mean that they&#8217;re very confident. We should ask what is their authority? Who gave them the right to speak on behalf of Christ? If it&#8217;s just, well, I read the Bible, how do you know your interpretation is right? First Peter 1:20 says, no prophecy of Scripture comes about by one&#8217;s own interpretation.
So I would say the real authority lies in those people who are the successors of the apostles. And we find that apostolic succession fully in the Catholic Church. So something to think about and do. Call back at another time or maybe in an open forum if you want to get more answers.
Cy: Cole, thank you very, very much for that call. Our topic this hour, why aren&#8217;t you a Catholic? Why are you not a Catholic?

Pentecostal Miracles are Why I’m Not Catholic…

Reject the Mass, reject history.

Salvation often seems more like a Protestant issue than a Catholic one. And when Catholics don’t engage with the doctrine of salvation, they can develop some misunderstandings about it.
For instance, the topic of salvation can be grouped in our bookstores in the “self-help” section. Lots of things under that heading can be helpful, but salvation is not a self-help concept, as we will see. Another misunderstanding is viewing the issue purely from a “fire insurance policy” framework. Salvation is objectively a “saving” from hell, yes, but that significantly condenses the breadth of the matter.
<h2>Not Just Self-Help</h2>
Salvation isn’t something we do to become better. Rather, it is about something that God has done for us. God has given us a gift beyond comprehension.
Before exploring this gift, it will be helpful to get some background on what the ancient Roman Empire thought about gift-giving.
Recently within Pauline scholarship, John Barclay published a monumental work called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Gift-John-M-Barclay/dp/0802868894">Paul and the Gift</a>.” He notes how gift-giving was a major part of daily life in the ancient world, and how the Greek word charis was used often by nonreligious writers. A wealthy individual would give a gift to somebody he considered worthy—that is, someone who would not pocket the gift and walk away. Rather, the worthy person would gratefully receive the gift and give a gift back in return. A relationship of mutual gift-giving would develop.
With this background in mind, let’s look at Paul’s famous quote on gift-giving. He says, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). God has engaged in gift-giving to humanity! How exciting! Everybody likes to receive gifts.
But there are some differences between what God does in Ephesians 2 and what the ancient world thought of gift-giving.
God does not focus on giving gifts to worthy individuals, as the Romans did. Like the parable of the sower (Matt. 13), God spreads the gift-seeds recklessly, whether on good soil or bad soil. The latter looks like an utter waste of seed! Yet Paul says in his letter to these Romans that Christ died for the ungodly and unworthy (Rom. 5:6). This is saying that the gift God offers to humans is to unworthy receivers. Humans are sinful, defiant, and inclined to nasty selfishness. It flips the Roman concept of charis on its head. Surely humans are just going to pocket salvation and walk away. Yet God gives gifts to all.
A good example of this gift-giving in the Gospels is the episode of Zaccheus. In Luke 19, a worker for the Romans, Zaccheus, is approached by Jesus, who desires to give the gift of his presence. Anybody in his right mind would not offer a gift to this guy. He is not worthy and, from a human standpoint, will not offer a gift in return. Zaccheus is stealing from the people of Israel as a tax collector. His primary concern is taking money with the force of the Romans behind him, not receiving and giving gifts!
Keep in mind who the Romans were, too. They were terrorists and bullies. There are coins that depict them raping their subjects. Any basic respect for the human person went out the window for the Romans. Zaccheus is on the wrong team! He should not be approached by Jesus! Certainly, he will be ungrateful for a gift.
Yet Zaccheus turns into a worthy recipient. He experiences a conversion instantaneously, it seems, and gives a gift back to Jesus in a way that he knows Jesus would want: to return his stolen goods back to the injured parties and to give alms to the poor. Jesus gives a gift, it is received, and a gift is given back.
Now let’s turn to the specific gift God gives to humanity. Primarily, it is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This gift of atonement and payment of debts is for another article, but what needs to be highlighted here is that humans receive this gift by dying and rising themselves. What do I mean? They mystically, invisibly, and spiritually enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Humans are “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20), are “buried with him&#8221; under the waters of baptism (Rom. 6:3), and “rise” to new life (Col. 2:12).
This concept of entering into Jesus’ resurrection life is connected to the second misconception about salvation:
<h2>Not Just Fire Insurance</h2>
Salvation is not just a protection against hell, although that is a weighty advantage in and of itself. Condensing it into a “get out of hell free” card is a tremendous disservice. For it’s also about new life.
Humans receive the gift of Jesus’ resurrection life—the life that involved Jesus being able to defy logic and reality when he appeared to the disciples in their room although their doors were locked (John 20:26). This is the life that changes wealthy people to suddenly give their lives to lepers, whose skin is decaying and falling off (St. Francis of Assisi). It is the life that changes the jobs of comfortable people to the jobs of suddenly picking dying people off the streets and caring for them with tenderness (St. Mother Teresa). In a word, we enter Christ’s school of love.
This new life involves an ontological change in our being. Humans *partake* of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). They share in Jesus’s divinity. Christians truly become the body of Christ, which is why when people persecute Christians, Jesus says they are persecuting him (Acts 9:4-5).
Christians are literally what their title is: Christian means “little Christ.” As Fr. Jose Maria Castillo once emphasized, when I look at my hand, I don’t look at just a hand—I look at Jesus’ hand. This is why numerous miracles occur even today (see the studies found in Craig Keener’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Today-Supernatural-Modern-World/dp/1540963837/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1J4GIO1GWC71G&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.IEObadFBzNp20zQW9K9lACoOaVYMT44Yzluw1iWwWxNi6ZpbGpEZ3pzhC1x7f1UndqUbOr8pUid3ms3QnrRJZia7orlcmTBVxWlu5-Urwy-oXzH-AvKGW0zqd9hKc0VUZOkr_ZzbvZpjsF1PTEBjuzuBLSkUe35d3w2B6aTvF9Pl2rchtg0iYCVMIfZ4qzFimh3Kh-d9Nq7BIdQ_abP0EZ3piaiRVY3JHpvJg4u_TXQ.EqAJ7n0m484ej3Sv0hl9e4e74spdn5gv99WC2anfgw8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=miracles+by+craig+keener&amp;qid=1762965501&amp;sprefix=miracles+by%2Caps%2C118&amp;sr=8-1">Miracles</a>). I witnessed one last year at <a href="https://www.damascus.net/">Damascus Catholic Youth Summer Camp</a>, in fact.
To conclude, salvation is neither a self-help issue nor just about fire insurance. However, there is a sense in which salvation is self-help. For if you truly care about your well-being, you’ll gratefully receive the gift of salvation from Jesus. You’ll die to your old ways of selfishness and pride, enter into a gift-giving relationship with God, and give immense gifts back to God (the highest gift of which is your gift of self). As Paul continues in Ephesians, “we are his [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). We are made for giving gifts back to God, for God is the one invisibly propelling us to do this. Nor is salvation just fire insurance; rather, it is about receiving the gift of eternal life.
(To learn more about other misunderstandings on the topic of salvation, see the book by my professor at the Augustine Institute called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Salvation-What-Every-Catholic-Should/dp/1733522182">Salvation</a>.)

Salvation Is Better than You Think

Gary Zimak gives some advice on staying close to God while trying to discern his will for our lives.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Jennifer in Algonquin, Illinois, listening to <a href="https://www.ewtn.com">EWTN</a> on WSFI. Jennifer, your question for Gary Zimak.
Caller: Hi, thanks so much for your time.
Gary: Hey, Jennifer.
Caller: So my question is with anxiety and discernment. For me personally, I&#8217;m trying to discern a vocation, and every single person in my life is very much more on the secular side, or even anti-Catholic specifically, so every voice in my life is saying &#8220;No, don&#8217;t do that,&#8221; but there&#8217;s also part of me that&#8217;s like, &#8220;Well, what if?&#8221; So how do you move through the fear to actually determine what God really wants you to do?
Gary: Good question, and this is something that, even though I&#8217;m married, I have a family, I, five years ago, made the decision to go into full-time ministry. So this is a constant question for me: &#8220;Lord you really want me to keep doing this?&#8221; Because it gets challenging financially sometimes, so I&#8217;m very familiar with this whole idea of &#8220;Lord, what do you want me to do?&#8221;
One thing I would recommend&#8211;and I have a lot of details in my book &#8220;Faith, Hope and Clarity,&#8221; that really grew out of my own discernment&#8211;I would say stay close to the Lord, keep asking Him, &#8220;Lord, do you want me to do this? What do you want me to do?&#8221; You can always go through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, there&#8217;s some books written that simplify the Spiritual Exercises, which were written in order to help people discern vocations.
And then oftentimes the Lord, after we&#8217;ve discerned, we think, &#8220;Well, this is what I should do,&#8221; He wants us to try things and then pay attention to circumstances. I thought I was called to be a permanent Deacon one time&#8211;nothing worked out at all for me in that regard, so now looking back I don&#8217;t think it was the Lord&#8217;s will for me. But I would say stay with Him, keep asking Him, and then if you get an inspiration, try it and see what happens. Mother Angelica was big on that. If she got an idea, she ran with it, and she said, &#8220;If it&#8217;s from the Lord it&#8217;ll work; if not, it&#8217;ll fall apart.&#8221; Hope that helps.

How Do I Tackle Anxiety When Discerning a Vocation?

<blockquote>As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” As he said this, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing. (John 9:1-7).</blockquote>
Wow! If ever there were a reading that is right on target for our current days of bodily fears and dangers, this is it. Two marvelous truths are both implied and concretely shown in this delightful gospel lesson. (Note: Read the whole passage, not just the portion given above: how charming are the Lord and the Blind Man! They are like true, humble brothers, each made for the other for the glory of God.) There are of course many other truths found in this richly woven tapestry of spiritual power; we will speak of two of them here.
1. We are our bodies.
When you see or touch or hear my body, you see, touch, or hear me. Here, in contrast, is a surprising look into the religious beliefs of some Jews of our Lord’s time (and even among some sects of religious Jews now). Notice that the Savior’s disciples seem to think someone might be able to sin before he is born. They believed that the soul existed before it entered the body. This was a common error: it was hard to eliminate among the first Christians and even was considered by some of the early Church Fathers and writers.
Why do we reject this idea, common as it has been? Because, again, we are our bodies, living by the power of our spiritual souls. The very word soul means that it is a principle of life in a body, not a simple spirit. Our soul comes to be, is created by God, at its union with the body. A body is simply dead without a soul, and a soul is “out of place” without a body. My mother’s body lying in its grave is not my mother. My mother’s soul in the life to come did not give birth to me. She is both.
That is why death is a loss, and why we fear and mourn it. And that is why we are so afraid of epidemics and pestilence. We do not want ourselves or our loved ones to experience the separation of soul and body that is death. Angels do not fear disease; they do not need to take any precautions; they do not observe “social distancing.” Neither do the Risen Lord and His Holy Mother, likewise glorious, because they are immortal; they cannot die. Even the disembodied souls of the saints in heaven and the souls in purgatory, who will not die a second time, still are not “completely” immortal until their bodies are no longer dead, but alive!
Disease points to death, and death is the end of our complete, personal existence. This is a fearsome thought. We know that only a power infinitely greater than ours can heal all bodily disease and overcome death in the resurrection to endless life in body and soul.
2. The Body of God is God. Believe in, touch, receive, love, see, hear, desire, embrace the body of Christ, and you believe, touch, receive, love, see, hear, desire, and embrace God himself. This is because he was incarnate in a body, and he did not abandon it ever. His is always the body of God; he is not dead. He is ever your Jesus. This is why the Lord used his body to work miraculous cures.
St. Thomas Aquinas comments on the passage above and, speaking of the Lord’s miracles, says, “Frequently he uses his body in his miracles in order to demonstrate that his body, insofar as it is the instrument (literally “organ”) of his Godhead, has received a certain saving power&#8221; (Commentary on the Gospel of John).
We must stir up our faith and desire for the body of our God and the saving power it possesses to heal and even to raise up from the dead. It is a truth of the creed that we infallibly profess and declare that he will raise us up from bodily death on the last day by the power of his own incarnation, of his own body.
Let us confront sickness and death with this confidence, and all will be well! The same body that is the battleground of sin, passions, and sickness will be the place of victory, health and healing, and undying life. All glory to the glorious body of the Lord, born of the Virgin Mary, and dwelling in our tabernacles! All glory to the resurrection of his holy ones, unto which happy lot may he draw us by the power of that same body!
He is the one who said, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth [in his body on the cross], will draw all men to myself,” and elsewhere, &#8220;He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.&#8221; Let us feed on him by faith and love, and this will calm our fear of bodily death!

The Christian Confronts Death

<div>Is John the Baptist Elijah? </div><div>John the Baptist is believed to have the role of Elijah. He is not literally the person Elijah.
Elijah did not die but was taken up to heaven (2 Kings 2:1-11) and thus the Jewish people believe he will physically return to Earth from heaven before the coming of the Messiah (Sirach 48:4-11, Malachi 3:23-24). That is why John the Baptist denied he was the literal physical return of Elijah from heaven, but the Gospel affirmed he was a &#8220;typology&#8221; of Elijah (Luke 1:17).
</div>

Is John the Baptist Elijah?

If you listen to Catholics discussing the Blessed Sacrament today, you’re likely to hear—not just, but especially in traditional circles—an emphasis on the Eucharist as “sacrifice” and a complaint about overemphasis on the Eucharist as a “meal.”
Maybe you’ve wondered: what are they talking about?
Well, discussion of the Eucharist as sacrifice is certainly no novelty. In fact, it’s probably how most Catholics predominantly discussed the sacrament, certainly until not too long ago.
But sacrifice? We’re in the twenty-first century, remember?
Okay, but that doesn’t make the Eucharist any less real as a sacrifice.
In the ancient world, including the times described in the Old Testament, sacrifice was the way one sealed a covenant. A covenant was not just a “contract” or an “agreement.” It was a life commitment between two parties. To enter a covenant was to undertake a most solemn obligation on which the parties staked their lives. You’ve heard the expression “cross my heart and hope to die”? That child’s phrase today expresses something of the gravity of the commitment two parties that bound themselves to each other made.
Covenants were brought into being with blood because, for most human beings in antiquity, blood was the seat of life. If your blood was spilled, you were weak. If spilled too much, you were dead. That is why animals were offered in sacrifice: their blood was supposed to represent the human covenant-makers.
Covenants could be between equals, but they usually were between unequals, between a superior and a subordinate. A defeated king who now became a vassal to his conquerer was bound by covenant.
And when God made covenants—with Abraham, with Moses, with Israel—those were most definitely covenants between unequals.
Covenant partners bound themselves by their lives to do (or not do) something vis-à-vis the other. A vassal bound himself not to be disloyal to his king and to defend him. Israel bound itself to keep God’s Law, and God bound himself to be their God and they his people.
God’s first covenant is creation: God bound himself to man in a special way by creating him in “his image and likeness.” Man broke that covenant by wanting to be not God’s image and likeness, but rather “like God” himself, deciding for himself what is good and what is evil. Israel broke God’s covenant by its constant religious backsliding.
“Again and again you offered a covenant to man and . . . taught him to hope for salvation.”
The final and definitive covenant, “the new and everlasting covenant,” is made with God in Christ. It is made with his blood, “not the blood of bulls and goats” (Heb. 9: 13-14), but of a human being who, at the same time, was God. As man he offered himself absolutely to God; as God, his offering is absolutely perfect. Jesus did what we could not but needed to do. He offered himself on the Cross, unto death.
But what does this have to do with the Eucharist?
Jesus explicitly speaks of the Eucharist as his body and his blood. They do not “represent” or “symbolize” his body and blood; they are his body and blood, “the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” That act of Jesus’s absolute submission to his Father’s will, even unto death, is re-presented in every Mass.
Jesus clearly intended the Eucharist to be part of his offering on the cross. Catholic theology speaks of the Eucharist as making the “sacrifice of Christ present.”
But Jesus instituted the Eucharist on Holy Thursday night, and he didn’t die until Good Friday afternoon. So how are they connected?
Let’s remember that, for God, time is not past, present, and future. Jesus is not sitting at God’s right hand, waiting to see how history will turn out. “All time belongs to him,” we say during the inscription of the paschal candle at the Easter vigil. For us, mortal creatures, time is experienced as unfolding: past, present, and future. For God, all time is now.
So, yes, Jesus offered himself once and for all (a prime Protestant contention that also corresponds to Heb. 10:10). But Jesus’ offering encompassed his passion, death, and resurrection on Calvary that was already anticipated in the Last Supper and is made present in every Eucharist that has been celebrated from then until the end of time. This is Jesus offering himself.
Jesus enjoined his apostles to “do this in memory of me”—not as an afterthought, not as a “hey, Jesus did this, and isn’t it nice?” No, “memory” here in a Jewish context has a specific meaning. It is a making present of the thing being remembered here and now.
The Last Supper was a Passover meal. The Passover prefigures the Eucharist. When God institutes the Passover, he instructs Moses that Israel is to keep this “memorial” forever (Exod. 12:14) because every generation of Jews stands together with Moses and Aaron and the Jews of Egypt with whom God made this covenant. Even today, during the Passover meal, the youngest child asks, “Why is this night different from all others?” Take note of the verb and adjective: the child does not ask “why was that night different,” but “why is this night different?” Before Almighty God, every Jew who was, is, or will be was part of that Passover.
And if the Passover merely prefigures the sacrificial offering of the Lamb of God, the real offering on Calvary presupposes just as real a memory: whoever belongs to Christ is joined, in every Eucharist, to the Upper Room and Calvary. If by baptism we become part of Jesus’ death (Rom. 6:31-11), well, baptism makes us participants in that death in order to make us part of the mystical body of Christ.
So is the Eucharist a meal? Yes, but a unique kind of meal, because it is also a sacrifice, thanks to which (and thanks only to which) we are saved.
By taking part in and receiving the Eucharist, we—the mystical body of Christ—join the supreme offering of our head to God. That is why we speak of the priest as celebrating in persona Christi. It’s not “Father John’s Mass.” It’s Christ’s Mass, who acts through human ministers to accommodate us, mortal creatures bound to space and time, raising us up to God’s dimension not bound by such limits.
(To read more on the Eucharist as sacrifice, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c1a3.htm#1367">1362-72</a>.)

The Eucharist as a Sacrifice

Tim Staples delves into the complex theological concept of the kenosis, the self-emptying of Jesus Christ. The discussion explores whether Jesus withheld divine attributes during His earthly life and how the hypostatic union between His divine and human natures impacted His experience.
Transcript:
Is there any evidence for Jesus withholding divine attributes?
Right. Okay. It&#8217;s not that He withholds divine attributes.
It would be more proper to say, because of course, when you&#8217;re talking about Jesus in His divine personhood, He possesses all the divine attributes in full, because He&#8217;s God. The divine nature, as well as the three divine persons, cannot. It is impossible for a divine person to somehow deny the divine attributes. That&#8217;s metaphysically absurd, because they all three, of course, are the one God and possess all the, depending upon how you number them, the 14 or 15 divine attributes. Absolutely. All right. But what we are talking about in Jesus Christ, and here we go again. We&#8217;re talking about the kenosis once again. It&#8217;s in Christ&#8217;s humanity where the second person of blessed Trinity chose to humble himself. Let me think about that. That&#8217;s infinite humiliation of God, right? In the Incarnation,
in His humanity,
He withholds from what is His right, and that is the divine glory. You see, from the instant that Christ was conceived,
He merited by nature infinitely, right? From the first human act that He performed, He merited infinitely, and He continues to merit in every act, all the way up to and through the crucifixion of our blessed Lord, right? How can He merit infinite all the time? He can because of the hypostatic union, because everything that the human nature does must be understood to have as its subject the divine person. That&#8217;s what makes it infinitely propitiatory for our salvation. But He, the second person of blessed Trinity, chose to empty himself. Why?
Because if He accepted in His human nature the full reward of even His first action, guess what? He would be glorified. He would have the gifts of impassibility and subtility and agility and glory. All of that would be fully manifested in His human nature, and so therefore He wouldn&#8217;t be able to suffer. He wouldn&#8217;t be able to die, and so forth. And so He empties Himself of that which, you know,
Catholic theologians refer to it as His divine glory. But I think when they use that language, sometimes people get confused to think somehow He emptied Himself of His divinity. And that is heresy, okay? He can&#8217;t empty Himself of His divine nature. That&#8217;s metaphysically absurd. But what He could do is not&#8230; Here, the second person of blessed Trinity doesn&#8217;t permit the fullness of the glory that He has a right to, because He merited it, to be manifest. Why? So He could suffer and die for our sins, my friend. And you know, Cy and I were talking during the break of how if you look at Matthew 17 verses 1 through 3 in Luke&#8217;s version, in Luke chapter 17 verses 31 through about 35 there, and the transfiguration, what happens? He&#8217;s transfigured before Peter, James, and John. What is He doing? He&#8217;s manifesting what is His right, the fullness of the glory that awaits not only Him, but all of us. Amen. If we are faithful unto death, we will be glorified together with Him, says Paul in Romans chapter 8 verse 17.
We will be glorified together with Him if we suffer with Him in order to get there, right Cy? Well, Jesus, because He had it by right, He could manifest it anytime He wanted to, and He did. He gave them. Peter talks about this in 2 Peter chapter 1. Peter talks about how they saw His glory, and they&#8217;re talking about the transfiguration. Okay, so the point is, though, that Jesus, at every moment, He chose. This is why Jesus said, &#8220;Don&#8217;t you know I could snap my&#8230;&#8221; He didn&#8217;t say, &#8220;Snap my fingers.&#8221; I could call my Heavenly Father, and He would send a legion of angels and rescue me. But how would the Scriptures be fulfilled, right? In fact, He didn&#8217;t even need to call on the angels. He could do it Himself, you know. Jesus could, right? But what? He says, &#8220;How would the Scriptures be fulfilled?&#8221; Every instant. This is an important point to remember here.
When Jesus said in John chapter 10 verse 18, one of the most beautiful Johannine verses anywhere, &#8220;Think not that you take my life. I give it.&#8221; Right? &#8220;I give it as a ransom for many.&#8221; &#8220;I give it.&#8221; Why? Because nobody takes his life. He gives it. He could stop the whole carousel anytime he wants to. But there&#8217;s only one thing that keeps him on the cross, and that&#8217;s love.
The free choice of Him to continue to empty Himself for our salvation.

Did Jesus Christ Abandon His Divinity on Earth?

<div>Why does God allow babies to die from illness and miscarriages to happen?</div><div>Miscarriages and infant deaths are indeed great tragedies. Because of our first parents’ original sin (CCC 390ff.), suffering and death came into the world. And death comes to some sooner than others, including those preborn infants who die via miscarriages and those born infants and other babies who die from illness or other tragic means.
And yet God does not abandon us in our contracted original sin and personally committed sins. He doesn’t let sin, suffering and death have the last word. Instead, he sent his eternal Son to redeem and save us (see John 3:16-17). Indeed, God wants to save everyone, including preborn children who are miscarried and babies who die not long after birth (CCC 1257-61; John 3:16-17; 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9).
In addition, through his one redemptive Sacrifice of the Cross, Jesus also shows how suffering can be redemptive. Similarly, though he does not actively will our sufferings, he can permit them so as to bring about a greater good (see Rom. 2:28), namely our holiness and eternal salvation, and helping foster the same for others, who may have experienced similar tragedies. In the end, we must always remember that death does not have the last word, and that earth is not our lasting home.
</div>

Why Does God Allow Miscarriages and Infant Deaths?

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Is Mormonism actually Demonic?

From the perspective of faith, the four Gospels—like all books of the Bible—are divinely inspired, and this has implications for their truth and reliability. According to the Second Vatican Council:
<blockquote>To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.
Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred scriptures (Dei Verbum 11).</blockquote>
Since, under divine inspiration, the Evangelists wrote “whatever [God] wanted written, and no more,” whatever the Gospels affirm is “affirmed by the Holy Spirit” and so teaches the truth “without error.” The Gospels are thus completely reliable.
This doesn’t mean that what the Evangelist is affirming is always obvious, but it does mean that if we have properly understood what the Evangelist is saying, God guarantees that it’s true.
Not everyone shares the faith perspective, so we should consider how far the reliability of the Gospels also can be shown from the perspective of reason, which can lead us to faith.
In the wave of skeptical scholarship that began a little more than two hundred years ago, everything was questioned and challenged. Skeptics came to hold that the Gospels were written by anonymous individuals, long after the events they portray, and that the stories and sayings of Jesus were the product of long periods of oral transmission in an unreliable game of “telephone.”
There are <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-the-gospels/">reasons to reject each of these claims</a>. The Gospels were <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/who-wrote-the-gospels">written by the men whose names are on them</a>, they were <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/when-were-the-gospels-written">written quite early</a>, and they are <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/where-the-evangelists-got-their-information">based on eyewitness or near-eyewitness testimony</a>. But we have additional ways of showing the reliability of the Gospels from the reason perspective.
The <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/whos-on-first-matthew-mark-or-luke">synoptic problem</a> helps, because it shows us how the Evangelists treated their sources. When Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel, they didn’t radically alter the substance of individual sayings or stories. They polished the language, but they carefully preserved the substance. The fact that there are so many passages with near word-for-word agreement shows how careful they were with Mark. And if they were careful with this source, that gives us evidence that they were careful with other sources they would have used.
We also have evidence that Mark was careful. In the first century, one of the great controversies in the Church was whether Christians had to obey the Mosaic Law, which would mean that certain foods were unclean to eat, as some early Christians claimed (Rom. 14:1, Col. 2:16).
It would have been convenient to have a saying from Jesus that settled the matter, and if the Evangelists had felt free to make up sayings of Jesus, they would have done so. But we find Mark doing something very different. In a discussion with the Pharisees over whether it is necessary to eat with clean hands, Mark records Jesus as saying:
<blockquote>“Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?” (Thus he declared all foods clean) (7:18-19).</blockquote>
The parenthetical statement is an inference Mark draws from what Jesus said. If nothing that enters a man makes him unclean, then that applies to food as well as dirt that might be on his hands. But Mark doesn’t put this inference on Jesus’ lips. He preserves Jesus’ saying intact and draws an inference from it rather than modifying what Jesus said.
The Book of Acts is another boon in assessing the reliability of the Evangelists. Acts covers a much wider span of time (about thirty years) and ranges all over the Greco-Roman world, meaning it gives us many more claims that can be checked. When this is done, we find that Luke was extraordinarily accurate.
British scholar William Ramsay did a study of Acts—expecting it to be unreliable—only to <a href="https://archive.org/details/bearingofrecentd00ramsuoft">conclude</a> that “Acts may justly be quoted as a trustworthy historical authority” and “Luke is a historian of the first rank. . . . In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians” (222).
But what about all those “contradictions” skeptics claim are in the Gospels? It is important to know how to address these claims.
In the first place, the alleged contradictions are never about major matters. Skeptics are not able to point to passages saying Jesus was a Greek rather than a Jew, that Joseph was his biological father, or that he was stoned rather than crucified. Invariably, the alleged contradictions are minor. Thus, even if there were discrepancies among the Gospels, they would be on lesser matters, and their substance would still be correct.
However, it turns out that the alleged, minor discrepancies are not contradictions. They might appear so to skeptics reading the Gospels as if they were written according to modern conventions. But when we examine the way ancient literature was written, we find they are not.
The Second Vatican Council points out the need to study the way ancient authors wrote:
<blockquote>Seeing that, in Sacred Scripture, God speaks through men in human fashion, it follows that the interpreter of sacred scriptures, if he is to ascertain what God has wished to communicate to us, should carefully search out the meaning which the sacred writers really had in mind, that meaning which God had thought well to manifest through the medium of their words (Dei Verbum 12).</blockquote>
Here we will look at three ancient writing practices that can trip up modern readers: selection, paraphrase, and sequencing.
Selection deals with what material an author chooses to include. Because books were fantastically expensive and the Evangelists wanted to keep their works small enough to fit on a single scroll, they had to choose which details to include and which to omit. John even alludes to the fact that he knew much more than he was able to write (21:25).
The Evangelists make choices about what details to mention and omit, and sometimes skeptics portray these as contradictions. For example, Mark 10:46-52 records how Jesus healed blind Bartimaeus at Jericho, although Matthew 9:27-31 indicates that he healed two blind men on that occasion.
This is not a contradiction. Mark simply focuses on Bartimaeus, whereas Matthew mentions the other blind man. This has been compared to how witnesses to a car crash may report different details without contradicting each other.
Paraphrase is using different words to convey the same meaning. We do this constantly in everyday speech. We communicate the gist of what someone said to us without using his exact words. But in written works, we don’t expect to see paraphrases put between quotation marks. This is partly due to the fact that we live in a world of recording devices, and it’s much easier to check what someone said and give his words exactly.
But they didn’t have recorders in the ancient world. They also didn’t have quotation marks (those are added by Bible translators), and so ancient audiences didn’t expect authors to always give exact wording. They expected authors to accurately give the gist of what someone would have said on an occasion, but not the precise wording.
For example, Matthew gives the opening of the Lord’s Prayer like this: “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (6:9-10), whereas Luke gives it in a shorter form: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come” (11:2).
Ancient audiences would regard this not as a contradiction, but as the kind of paraphrase they would normally expect. Both authors preserve the same meaning; it’s just that the wording of the prayer is slightly different.
Sequencing deals with the order in which an author presents his material. This can be done different ways. Sometimes an author may present material in a strict chronological sequence, but other times, he may arrange it by topic.
This can trip up modern readers because we live in an age in which records are often kept about precisely when things occurred. In the ancient world, this usually wasn’t the case. People would remember what happened, but not the exact date. As a result, ancient audiences didn’t expect an author to keep things in strictly chronological order unless he said that is what he was doing.
Thus, when Matthew collects different sayings of Jesus and arranges them into speeches by topic, such as in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7), the original audience would not have understood him as claiming that Jesus literally delivered all these sayings, in this order, on a single occasion. For them, the important thing would have been that Jesus said them, not when he said them.
An awareness that the Evangelists—like other ancient authors—may use topical rather than chronological sequencing thus resolves alleged discrepancies regarding chronology in the Gospels.
Ultimately, there are no contradictions in the Gospels, but showing this requires us to understand what the Evangelists were and weren’t affirming, which requires a knowledge of how ancient literature worked.

Can I Trust the Gospels?

Protestants claim the Bible disproves the Catholic dogma of Mary’s Bodily Assumption in 1 Corinthians 15:22-23. But is this true? Karlo Broussard gives reasons why the answer is no.

Does the Bible Disprove the Assumption?

Jimmy Akin offers a few philosophical and theological counter-arguments to the concepts of karma and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/reincarnation">reincarnation</a>, and cites the letter to the Hebrews as the definitive Christian declaration that we die only once before judgement.
Transcript:
Host: Joshua on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/catholiccom">YouTube</a> Live poses the following question: &#8220;How do we disprove reincarnation through philosophy, if that&#8217;s the best method for resolution?&#8221;
Jimmy: Well, so, it&#8217;s an interesting challenge. There&#8230;reincarnation is something that you can critique on more than one ground. It is possible to mount a philosophical critique of reincarnation, and point out, for example, there are aspects of reincarnation that are potentially problematic.
Like the idea of karma, that whatever you do is going to bounce back on you, and there&#8217;s basically no mercy in the universe, that the universe is a merciless place. And that&#8217;s something that doesn&#8217;t fully appeal to the human heart. The human heart wants to find mercy in the world, and in fact some adherents of Eastern religions talk about mercy and place a value on mercy. But if the universe is fundamentally merciless, per the law of karma, then that would&#8230;then why should they even bother being merciful? Why should that be of value? Well, our hearts tell us that mercy is a value, and so that should tell us that mercy is available in the world, and should be&#8211;there should be some room for cosmic mercy in our worldview as well as cosmic justice.
Now, other forms of the idea of reincarnation may incorporate elements of mercy, so they may not respond to that argument. There are other potential arguments as well. For example, sometimes it&#8217;s proposed, in these religions that believe in reincarnation, that ultimately everybody is going to end up in an ideal spiritual condition, whether that&#8217;s conceived of as Nirvana, or Krishna consciousness, or whatever it may be. But how do you know? How do you know that&#8217;s gonna happen? That&#8217;s&#8211;if the universe is&#8211;it just operates kind of mechanically according to karma, people could descend spiritually as easily as they ascend, so what gives you faith that that people are going to ascend? That&#8217;s not something that falls right out of the concepts involved, and so you can ask for evidence.
Now ultimately, from a Christian point of view, it&#8217;s not a philosophical case against reincarnation that&#8217;s going to be the most convincing. From a Christian point of view, the fact that the idea of reincarnation is not compatible with the Christian revelation is what&#8217;s going to be most convincing. It&#8217;s directly stated in the book of Hebrews that it&#8217;s appointed for man once to die, and then the judgment. So we die once, and then we&#8217;re judged by God. We don&#8217;t die over and over again. That&#8217;s the specific idea that was out there in Greek culture that the author of Hebrews is responding to. He&#8217;s not just saying that out of the blue, he&#8217;s saying that in response to a cultural background where many people did believe in reincarnation. And you find the same theme echoed over and over again in the Church Fathers. You can check out my book &#8220;The Fathers Know Best&#8221; if you want examples of that.
But from a Christian point of view, I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s not the philosophical arguments that are ultimately decisive&#8211;although they can be helpful. I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s the Christian revelation, and so in talking with someone who believes in reincarnation, I would either, if they&#8217;re already a Christian of some sort, even if they&#8217;re at, say, a New Age-er who still has some kind of belief in Christ, I would try to build on that.
I would also say I understand&#8211;if they&#8217;re not, let&#8217;s say they&#8217;re Hindu&#8211;I would say &#8220;I understand and respect your position; here&#8217;s why I don&#8217;t believe in reincarnation, and let&#8217;s talk about the basis of the Christian faith, then. Because if the Christian faith has a good basis, that means you would want to take its teachings&#8211;like resurrection is our fate, not reincarnation&#8211;you&#8217;d want to take those seriously too, so let&#8217;s talk about the reasons why one should take the Christian faith seriously. And to your knowledge, was there ever a time where maybe a Christian group or something grasped on to&#8211;ignored, for example, that admonition from the letter to the Hebrews, and nonetheless believed&#8211;&#8221; You find scattered instances all the way down through history, because, you know, people get crazy ideas that are inconsistent with the teaching of the Church in every age.
And certainly that&#8217;s been true in recent in in recent times. In the last 150 years there has been a lot of interaction between East and West, and various groups have tried to hybridize eastern and western religious concepts, like the Theosophical Society and the New Age movement and things like that. So you do find people who are trying to kind of straddle that east-west divide these days.

How to Disprove Reincarnation

<div>Which animals does the Bible say were present at Jesus’ birth?</div><div>The Gospel writers do not directly mention animals present at Jesus&#8217; birth. Artists have inferred from the infancy narratives that there could have been a donkey (for Mary to ride during the journey to Bethlehem, since she was pregnant), oxen (since the Holy Family took shelter in a stable with a manger, which is used for feeding cattle), sheep (under the care of the shepherds), and camels (for the wise men to ride on their journey to visit the child Jesus). If we include the presentation of Christ in the Temple as part of the infancy narratives, then there were also two birds, either turtledoves or pigeons, which Joseph and Mary gave as their offering.
</div>

Animals at the Manger

It is fairly unusual for Good Shepherd Sunday to coincide with Mother’s Day—a secular American holiday, to be sure, but to say that it has nothing to do with the Church calendar doesn’t really change its influence. Add to this the novelty and rarity of a papal conclave—or at least that’s what it was when I was first preparing this homily; now, of course, we have a new pope!—so we do have quite the competition of ideas striving for our attention.
As usual, though, divine providence can use all these things for our advantage, so I want to begin with something of a bundle of all these thoughts at once before homing in on what is ultimately my theme for the day: that the love of the Good Shepherd fills us with joy even through suffering.
On Wednesday morning I celebrated a Mass for the election of the pope. This was a first. I was—as is usually the case when encountering traditional liturgical texts for the first time in practice—moved by the words: first, the propers taken from the votive Mass of the Holy Spirit: “Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered; let them also who hate him flee before him.” That felt right somehow. And then the collect asked that God would provide to the holy Roman Church a pontiff who might please God by showing “tender care” toward us and by “studying to preserve thy people in safety.” The proper color is red, which is also famously the color for cardinals who by receiving those robes profess their willingness to die for their mother, the Church. That mother gave birth to them in the waters of baptism, which <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/whats-so-important-about-blood-and-water">flowed from the side</a> of Christ. Likewise, they offer themselves in love and in potential suffering in order to “birth,” in a way, that man who will succeed St. Peter as the prince of the apostolic succession.
All of this is to say that motherhood can never be very far from any real consideration of the Faith, whether in our relationship with the Church, our relationship with Our Lady, or our relationship with the sufferings of this life. For motherhood is a kind of intrinsic suffering—and I don’t mean by that that it is all pain, but that it involves willingly tying one’s well-being to the good of another, relinquishing a certain amount of control even over one’s own body.
But back to our readings of the day. In Acts, Paul and Barnabas face persecution over their proclamation of the gospel. But the passage ends with this simple statement that the disciples were “filled with joy.” Peter Kreeft gives the vivid image of this joy being “pumped in from the outside” by the Holy Spirit. In other words, the joy is a gift, not the product of hard work or thinking all the right thoughts. But it does seem to go with the suffering. Often when we look at the martyrs of the early Church in particular, it seems like the more intense the suffering, the more intensely we see the joy.
The scene from Revelation builds on this theme with the striking image of robes being washed white with the blood of the lamb. Maybe, like me, you’ve heard that image all your life, so it’s hard to settle on just how weird it is. You don’t get sparkling white cloth from blood. This isn’t some obscure natural analogy. It is, rather, a supernatural insistence that the right kind of suffering—above all the suffering of Jesus, the lamb—is productive of something very different: new life. Again we see the maternal analogy, one famously employed by Julian of Norwich, suggesting that, by his bodily suffering for us, he, who shares our nature, is like a mother whose suffering results in birth. Through the Patristic meditations on the so-called “baptism of blood,” which is to say martyrdom, we can see the red-white contrast in Revelation as a veiled sacramental affirmation that the baptism of blood is not less than the baptism of water. Both cleanse because both unite us to the sacrifice of Jesus.
All of this language of suffering is important for understanding the image of the Good Shepherd. It is a rich image, and there’s good reason that Holy Church in the modern lectionary finds a way to split up the “Good Shepherd discourse” into three distinct moments for the three-year cycle. In other years, we hear more about how the Shepherd “lays down his life” for the sheep, or how the sheep know his voice in distinction from the other false shepherds. But today we hear this short passage emphasizing the relation between the Father and the Son, along with the simple claim—opposing those looking for much more complicated reasons to reject or belief the Lord—that “I know them and they follow me.”
He knows us. That may seem either comforting or terrifying, but I think the point is that the Lord’s knowledge is inseparable from his love. The idea that God knows us, in a dispassionate intellectual way, is not very difficult to grasp or accept. We live, after all, in a world that far exceeds our understanding, so it is not that hard to imagine someone capable of knowing us better than we know ourselves. But we don’t usually think of knowledge as a kind of love.
In a common twelfth-century debate between knowledge and love, academic intellectual pursuit or affective devotional feeling, it was increasingly common, as we see today, to separate intellect and affect, knowledge and love, as separate and opposing forces, even within the realm of faith: do we, fundamentally, believe in order to understand, or do we believe in order to love?
Perhaps one of the greatest insights in that century comes from the Cistercian monk William of St. Thierry, who says, “Love is itself understanding” (Amor ipse intellectus est). This is at times interpreted as a kind of anti-intellectual escapism by which we claim experience and feeling as a kind of knowledge that trumps reason, but I think that to truly understand William’s aphorism it should also be reversed: Understanding is itself love. True knowledge isn’t some kind of abstract and disconnected compilation of information. It is always a personal encounter with truth, and ultimately an encounter with God himself or God’s creatures.
All of this is to say that when the Good Shepherd knows us, this knowledge is love. He knows us not just in the way that we know a table of figures; he knows us for our own good. Hence, “No one shall snatch them out of my hand.”
But the fact that he holds on to us in knowledge and love doesn’t translate into preserving us from all suffering. Just as Paul and Barnabas suffer, just as the martyrs in Revelation suffer, just as Our Lord and Our Lady themselves suffer, perfect love is known only in suffering.
But this is still a good place to be, in the hand of the Good Shepherd. No, he doesn’t promise to preserve us from all suffering, but he does promise to hold on to us and to love us, to bring us with him to good pasture. That is what we need. We might want to be protected from all suffering, but such protection would mean the abandonment of our humanity, the rejection of our ability to grow and mature.
May we continue to grow under the hand of the Good Shepherd all our days until he brings us at last to his Father’s house. And may our new pope, as the new vicar of that divine Good Shepherd, mold his ministry, his governance, and his love for the flock after the example of his Master.