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Does Scripture support relics of the Saints?

Why Are Holy Orders Necessary for Some Sacraments?

<p>The doctrine of scriptural <em>perspicuity</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Protestant apologist James White is a huge proponent of this belief. </strong>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 <em>denying the antecedent</em> to make his claim.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ol>
<li>If A, then B.</li>
<li>Not A.</li>
<li>Therefore, not B.</li>
</ol>
<p>This logical form is invalid, because even though A <em>leads to</em> B, the negation of A would not necessarily lead to the <em>negation</em> 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:</p>
<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>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Another example may go like this:</p>
<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>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>As obvious as this may seem, it is the exact fallacy</strong> 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>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>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?</p></blockquote>
<p>This statement is a textbook denying the antecedent fallacy. The form goes like this:</p>
<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>
<p>This argument holds the same form as the logical form originally given in the original examples. It does not follow.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>In any case, despite not naming the fallacy, Joe did a good job</strong> 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.”</p>
<p>This is absolutely correct. If I say A leads to B, the negation of A does not necessarily mean the negation of B.</p>
<p>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.</p>

Peter Too ’Untaught’ for Paul?

<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Caller:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Trent:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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;</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So I think it&#8217;s the context, not just the image in and of itself. Do you see what I&#8217;m saying?</p>
<p><strong>Caller:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Trent:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>Caller:</strong> 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;</p>
<p><strong>Trent:</strong> What do you think about it? What do you think?</p>
<p><strong>Caller:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Trent:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>Caller:</strong> Yeah, I&#8217;ve always interpreted that as a reminder.</p>
<p><strong>Trent:</strong> 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.</p>
<p>So I would enjoy sending that to you if you could give your email to our call screener.</p>

The Statues Are Why I Can’t Be Catholic…

<p>When it comes to the Protestant doctrine of <em>sola scriptura </em>(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!</p>
<p><strong>The last book of the New Testament, Revelation, was not written</strong> 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?</p>
<p>Furthermore, if the doctrine of <em>sola scriptura</em> 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 <em>sola scriptura</em>.</p>
<p>[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.]</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>sola scriptura</em> 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.</p>
<p><strong>A Protestant might object:</strong> “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.”</p>
<p><strong>And here is how a Catholic can respond: </strong>“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 <em>sola scriptura</em> is a central doctrine, why would it be based on inference at best and supposition at worst rather than being explicitly stated in Scripture?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>That leaves us with apostolic authority.</strong> 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.</p>

Christians with No Bible!

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

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><p>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.</p>
</div>

Defective Miraculous Medal?

<div>Is it only the pope who is infallible? Are the bishops also infallible? What about priests? </div><div><p>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>.</p>
</div>

Is Only the Pope Infallible?

<div>is there biblical evidence of individual judgement and a judgement at the second coming?</div><div><p>The <em>Catechism of the Catholic Church</em> (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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>

Biblical Basis of Particular and Final Judgments

<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>We see these kinds of sacrifices elsewhere.</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The picture we get in Scripture is different.</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>

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

<p><strong>Episode 106: Year C &#8211; 1st Sunday of Advent</strong></p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120124.cfm">Click Here</a></p>
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<p>Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">Click Here</a></p>
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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?

<p>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.”</p>
<p>What sort of response would there be? “Anti-science!” is what you’d hear, and rightfully so. We heard this <em>ad nauseum</em> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>Climate Change &amp; Pregnancy: Exploring Risks &amp; Impacts </em>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 <em>problem</em> in science education.</p>
<p>What’s the solution? The curriculum states, “we must learn to <em>pay attention to our own emotions</em> and those of other people” (emphasis added). Why? Because they “can signal alignment or discord between cultural values and technical assertions.”</p>
<p>Wow! An advocation for emotions to replace rational thinking in the driver&#8217;s seat of science? <em>That, </em>my friends, is <em>real</em> “anti-science!” Appealing to scientists who disagree with other scientists is not anti-science. But letting emotions drive scientific research is.</p>
<p>So much for the &#8220;Thou shalt not be Anti-science&#8221; command.</p>
<p>For other ways in which that command has been violated by those who are fond of touting it, see my new book <em><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>. </em></p>

Anti-Science for Thee but Not for Me

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

<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The first Mass was on a wet and cold late fall evening.</strong> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The final church experience that particularly struck me</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>If we were half as willing to face the social media mobs</strong> and snickers behind our back as those in China are to face government intimidation, surveillance, and bullying, how much holier would our nation be?</p>
<p>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.</p>

A Hidden Church in China

<p>There’s no getting around the pretty obvious theme in today’s lectionary. Man and woman. Marriage.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>These aren’t the primary emphases of the readings</strong>, 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 <em>Four Quartets</em>, “only through time time is conquered.”</p>
<p>This concept of the redemption of time and history is surely relevant to what Jesus says in Mark about marriage and divorce.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>So what’s happening here is not all that different from what happens</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Why, I wonder, does this teaching on divorce move straight</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>The Passion of the Infant Christ</em>, 51).</p>
<p>We would do well to sit with that statement for a while.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>

Marriage, Children, and Heaven

<p>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.</p>