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

Have heretical anti-popes invalidly reigned for decades?

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

Can a Christian Drink?

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

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

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

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

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

Why Don’t You Think Catholicism Makes Sense?

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

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

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Did Pope Leo XIV deny Peter as the rock?

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

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

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

What are your thoughts on the mystic Luisa Piccarreta?

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

What are your thoughts on Exodus 4:24?

What is the best way to dispose of Catholic literature?

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

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

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

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

Is the Baptism of One Who Rejects a Teaching Valid?

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

Are Catholics Wrong About John 6?

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

Fighting Words for Easter

Why Do Catholics Accept the Deuterocanonical Scriptures?

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

Does John 6:44 Contradict Free Will?

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

Eastern Orthodoxy’s UNSOLVABLE Problem

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

Wrong Jesus, Right Jesus

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

Defending Vatican II

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

The Doctrine That Didn’t Exist: Early Christians v. Sola Fide

Our in-house-philosopher, Karlo Broussard, author of <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/prepare-the-way-overcoming-obstacles-to-god-the-gospel-and-the-church/">Prepare the Way: Overcoming obstacles to God, the Gospel and the Church</a>, joins us for a three part conversation about relativism. Why are conversations about right and wrong so often labeled “hate speech?
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Arguments in Favor of Relativism (Part 3)

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How are we to understand Eph. 2:8-9?

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How Should We Understand Ephesians 2:8–9 on Faith and Works?

Joe examines the debate over whether you should lie to your kids about Santa Claus.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to tackle a controversial question even amongst Christians should parents lie to their kids about Santa Claus? My position is simple. If you want to tell them the true story of St. Nicholas, that&#8217;s great. If you and your kids want to play Santa, go for it. But lying is always wrong. You shouldn&#8217;t lie to anyone. You definitely shouldn&#8217;t lie to the kids. You are meant to be teaching right from wrong, and you most especially shouldn&#8217;t lie to honor the birth of Jesus Christ. Now, some of you are already disagreeing with this thinking, I&#8217;m pearl clutching or being legalistic. After all, it&#8217;s just Santa Claus, right? It&#8217;s harmless. It&#8217;s not really lying. And ironically, perhaps nobody has spent more time defending the pro lying side of the Santa Claus argument as Dennis Prager.
CLIP:
Every year, I can&#8217;t remember how many years already, many decades, I have devoted an hour of my radio show to making the case for people who celebrate Christmas to celebrate Santa Claus because I had heard and read Christians saying, or just Gentiles in general, non-Jews, oh, we don&#8217;t want to lie to our children. It&#8217;s not good to lie to your child.
Joe:
But here&#8217;s the thing, those Christian parents who say they shouldn&#8217;t lie to their kids are right. We shouldn&#8217;t lie to anyone. It&#8217;s Proverbs 1222 says, lying lips are an abomination to the Lord. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Whereas the devil has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him. For he is a liar and the father of lies, St. Paul tells us not to lie to anyone. Revelation 21 describes the lot of all liars as the second death, which means damnation. Now, Christians today often treat lying as kind of a trivial offense, but in the Bible it&#8217;s condemned in the strongest language. The catechism warns that lying is to be condemned by its very nature, meaning that it is always wrong to lie. It doesn&#8217;t matter why you&#8217;re lying. Lying is never the right answer. You were given the gift of speech to communicate the truth.
To use that gift to spread lies instead is a kind of perversion and it&#8217;s contrary to both justice and to charity. So if we shouldn&#8217;t lie to a stranger, how much more do we owe the truth to our own children, particularly when we&#8217;ve been entrusted the task of teaching them about Jesus Christ? Now I&#8217;m going to examine some more of the arguments for and against lying to your children about Santa. But first I want to take a moment to thank our patrons over@schmojoe.com. I&#8217;m incredibly grateful to all of you for keeping this channel going and growing. No lie, it&#8217;s been a great year for the channel and that wouldn&#8217;t have been possible without you. So thank you for all your prayers, your likes and your shares and the cash you can spare, and I promise not to try your rhyming for the rest of this episode. Liar. So even though Dennis Prager defends pretending that Santa&#8217;s real to your kids, he mentions an important phenomenon lying to your kids about Santa might end up turning them into atheists,
CLIP:
People who called my show up and they would say on occasion I was raised a Christian home and then my parents taught me about Christ and Jesus and then God and the Bible and Santa. And then when I learned Santa was not real, I thought, oh, maybe God&#8217;s not real too, which is a strange correlation.
Joe:
Obviously most people don&#8217;t go from Santa&#8217;s not real to God&#8217;s not real, but it&#8217;s also not as rare as you might think. And frankly, it&#8217;s not that strange of a correlation, particularly given that we&#8217;re talking about children here in the words of the Second Vatican Council, the Christian family is a sort of domestic church in which the parents serve by word and example as the first preachers of the faith to their children. If your kids grow up not knowing the gospel, you can&#8217;t just blame the school or the parish because that job first and foremost is your own. But what if you mix the truth about Jesus with weird lies about Santa? Remember, the catechism describes lying as the work of the devil. So what if you decide as the first preachers of the faith to intentionally mix the truth of Jesus Christ and the work of the devil?
It wouldn&#8217;t be shocking that your kids might have trouble separating the two and they might respond by rejecting your whole message. Now as an adult, the difference between Santa and God is obvious, but to a little kid, someone naive enough to believe in Santa in the first place, it&#8217;s not surprising if they&#8217;re not sophisticated enough to distinguish the two, particularly when they&#8217;re both presented in kind of the same way he sees you when you&#8217;re sleeping. He knows when you&#8217;re awake. He knows if you&#8217;ve been bad or good. So be good for goodness sake, I&#8217;m not the one rhyming here for the record, yes you are. So not only should you avoid lying entirely, you should be particularly mindful of avoiding lying when you&#8217;re talking to your kids about Jesus. It&#8217;s important for the good of their souls as well as your own. But Dennis Prager raises some important challenges to this idea and ones that I think are worth addressing head on. First, he argues that we&#8217;re not really lying. We&#8217;re just playing make believe.
CLIP:
Are you lying to your child if you make believe, make believe and lying are not the same thing. Here&#8217;s another question. Did you read to your kids&#8217; fairytales? Did you read Pinocchio to your kid or Cinderella? Do you make sure to say, you know, these people never existed. There really isn&#8217;t a Pinocchio, there really isn&#8217;t a Cinderella. Why don&#8217;t you do that? Are you lying? You&#8217;re making believe that there was a Cinderella and there was a Pinocchio.
Joe:
Now prager&#8217;s right about one thing, lying and pretending are not the same. So what is the difference the catechism defines the lie is speaking of falsehood with the intention of deceiving, a definition coming from sin, Augustine. So those are the two ingredients of a lie. You&#8217;re saying something you know is false and you&#8217;re saying it because you intend the other person to believe the false thing is true. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s not a lie to tell your kids a fairytale. It&#8217;s not a lie for an actor to perform in a play or for Jesus to tell a parable because in each of those cases, the things that you&#8217;re describing, they didn&#8217;t literally happen, but you&#8217;re not trying to deceive anybody into thinking that they did. And there&#8217;s a really simple test here. If your kid comes up to you and says, is this a true story or did this really happen? You&#8217;d obviously say no. If you told them yes, you&#8217;d be lying, but prager insists that if we&#8217;re going to be consistent on this, then we also can&#8217;t do things like teach kids that the tooth fairy is real.
CLIP:
So this notion you&#8217;re lying to your children if you tell them about Santa Claus is a strange notion. I&#8217;m curious, do none of these families have a tooth fairy? Do they tell their kids, oh, there&#8217;s no such thing as a tooth fairy.
Joe:
Is the tooth fairy not real? I don&#8217;t know that I ever asked about that one. Where do my teeth go? Who&#8217;s got my teeth? Hello? Darkness, smile, friend. But sure, okay, obviously pr we accept your terms. Don&#8217;t lie to your kids about the tooth fairy either. That one&#8217;s just less controversial. You don&#8217;t have a whole culture of people loudly insisting that we all must pretend like she is. In fact, tooth fairy Laura is so vague. I had to look up the fact that she is apparently considered by three quarters of Americans to be a female. So I think we can all agree to that. Let&#8217;s not lie about the tooth fairy either. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s going to be a big challenge. But here&#8217;s the thing. Unlike the tooth fairy, people are really resistant to tell kids the truth about Santa. And I think they&#8217;re motivated for a good reason. They&#8217;re afraid it&#8217;s going to spoil Christmas.
CLIP:
It&#8217;s beautiful to make religion fun for children. It shouldn&#8217;t only be fun. It has a very serious component, but it should be at least if you want your child to love it as well as intellectually appreciated.
Joe:
But the idea that kids need to believe Santa&#8217;s real in order to enjoy Christmas fundamentally misunderstands children from as young as 18 months. Infants understand the idea of pretend. They&#8217;ll do things like pretend to eat and drink. They&#8217;ll laugh when adult pantomime actions like that pretty soon after. They&#8217;re doing what&#8217;s called collaborative pretending, or what psychologists call joint pretense games, things like playing tea parties with you. And notice all of those things are perfectly enjoyable for the kids, even though they know that it&#8217;s just pretend a kid&#8217;s day is not going to be ruined when they learn. Peter Rabbit&#8217;s not based on a true story or there&#8217;s not really tea in your Tea Cup. Researchers interviewing kids from four to seven found not one of them thought, lying and pretend were the same, even if they sometimes had trouble distinguishing, for instance, whether white lies were lies or pretend, but in fairness to those kids, that&#8217;s frankly the same mistake Dennis Fragger makes when he insists that lying to your kids about Santa is the same thing as playing. Pretend so the choices here aren&#8217;t lie to your kids or refuse to have fun at Christmas. Kids can have a great time playing pretend with you. The question then becomes why that isn&#8217;t good enough for us? Why do we think it&#8217;s important to not just play pretend with our kits, but to actively lie to them about Santa? Now, I&#8217;d suggest this says more about us than it does about them. After all, there&#8217;s an entire genre of Christmas movies about cynical adults discovering that Santa is real. After all,
CLIP:
Is Santa Claus real? I don&#8217;t want a rob her of the fun of believing in Santa, but what if he is real? That Santa Claus is real? Yes, I believe in Santa Claus,
Joe:
But these movies are made for adults, not kids, and for good reason. Many of us have nostalgia for the Christmases of our childhood, but I think there&#8217;s an obvious reason for that, that has nothing to do with Santa Claus as a kid. Christmas was, I hope, a stress-free, joyful holiday that felt magical. We have memories of things like opening presence and spending time with the people we love the most in the world. And these moments are magical because there are all these people in our lives who love us enough to work really hard to make sure we have these amazing moments. But now that we&#8217;re adults, not only is nobody doing that for us anymore, it might actually be our turn to do that for other people. And so Christmas becomes a stressful time of year,
CLIP:
Although you hopefully don&#8217;t feel like you are the Grinch himself. You might relate a little bit because of the stress of the holidays. Oh my gosh, the cost of everything. People pulling on you from many different directions. We have the list of gifts to buy. We have the shipping to track, we have the meals to prepare. There&#8217;s a recent survey that I wanted to tell you about conducted by the A PA, the American Psychological Association. Nine and 10 Grownups say they feel significant stress during the holiday. They&#8217;ve got too much to do, they got to find the right gifts, they spend too much money, yada, yada.
Joe:
So I&#8217;d suggest the reason Christmas was more fun as a kid wasn&#8217;t because you thought Santa was real back then and now you don&#8217;t. It&#8217;s because you weren&#8217;t spending money. You can&#8217;t afford on gifts. You&#8217;re not sure your loved ones are going to like, or cleaning and hosting visitors or traveling and staying on somebody else&#8217;s couch or dealing with family members or in-laws or missing the loved ones you won&#8217;t be seeing
CLIP:
Look more presents. I&#8217;m going to need everybody to show me constantly how much fun you&#8217;re having, or I&#8217;ll be completely devastated. Time for our annual unhealthy holiday breakfast. Oh, yum. My body can&#8217;t handle junk food like this anymore. Same. I&#8217;m going to crash so hard in an hour
Joe:
Now. Now girls remember that if your mother doesn&#8217;t think you enjoyed every moment of this day, then I&#8217;ll be the only one left to console her when she cries later. What makes this worst is that the parents who&#8217;ve decided that they need to lie to their kids in order for them to enjoy Christmas, want the rest of us to join them in this lie. And look, I&#8217;m not going to go out of my way to tell your kid Santa&#8217;s not real, but don&#8217;t insist that other adults or worse other kids have to play along with something we know isn&#8217;t true. Will you stop at the ice cream store on the way home?
CLIP:
No, not today. It&#8217;s already way too late.
Joe:
Ready, please. I&#8217;ve been good all day.
CLIP:
I wish we could, but actually the ice cream store is closed today.
Joe:
What do you mean?
CLIP:
You didn&#8217;t know this? When it&#8217;s too cold outside all the ice cream stores close because the ice cream machines freeze up and they don&#8217;t work anymore.
Joe:
But here&#8217;s what I think is the heart of the issue.
CLIP:
It&#8217;s beautiful to make religion fun for children.
Joe:
Dennis Prager is right. It is beautiful to make religion fun for children. An advent is a perfect time for this. In my own family, we like the advent candles. We sing, oh, Emmanuel. We read special books. We set up the nativity scene without the baby Jesus present yet. And we help to kind of cultivate a spirit of joyful waiting in our little kids. But the church has rightly worn that this spirit of advent is threatened by the commercialization of Christmas and consumer superficiality. Don&#8217;t miss the 12 days of Toyotathon, but which side of the fight is Santa Claus on in this battle between Christmas and Toyotathon. But while Santa Claus comes from the Dutch name for St. Nicholas, the modern American figure of Santa Claus has basically nothing to do with the fort century bishop of Myra. Our whole mental image of Santa is shaped in no small part. By early 20th century advertising
CLIP:
By about 1900 Santa had developed into his current iconic style. It should be noted that contrary to popular belief, Coca-Cola didn&#8217;t change his colors to their corporate scheme, but instead used the conveniently red and white Santa in 1931 to help sell more soda during their off season. Though Coke didn&#8217;t create him, their omnipresent ads probably did brand this as the one true Santa in the minds of millions, helping spread him around the world to many cultures with no traditions of winter gift givers.
Joe:
Case in point, Santa now apparently lives at the North Pole, not Turkey. And instead of being a celibate bishop, he&#8217;s got a wife now whose name is Mrs. Claus. So apparently Claus is now his last name, and the message that he preaches isn&#8217;t one about the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. It&#8217;s a message about the importance of family and sharing, but most importantly of proving your love for others by buying more products.
CLIP:
The heart of a child is a wonderful thing worth more than all the presents in the world, but presents are good things. They symbolize our good feeling for each other. And I hope that among your presence you&#8217;ll find the things you&#8217;ll cherish from the ones you love to mother with, love to dad with love to junior with love to my best girl with love. Merry Christmas with love. You see, the present is merely the symbol. It is being together, being kind, respecting one&#8217;s friends and neighbors. That&#8217;s the true spirit of Christmas.
Joe:
So the risk here is that you&#8217;re not really making religion fun for children. Rather, in the name of fun, you&#8217;re taking the religion out of Christmas. You&#8217;re turning it from a religious feast day to some vague celebration of family or worse consumerism. The modern Santa is just a shabby substitute for the real sake Nicholas, and a much worse substitute for Jesus of Nazareth. So if you must keep Santa around, let your kids in on it, treat it as make belief and see for yourselves that they&#8217;re still going to enjoy it. There&#8217;s no need to lie, particularly to the children entrusted to your care and especially in something sacred. Instead, I&#8217;d argue we should be pushing to reclaim the true meaning of Christmas, which begins with reclaiming the true meaning of advent. Now, I actually talk about all that, including some aspects you might not know about in this video from last year right here. For Shameless Popery, I&#8217;m Joe, Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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Should You Lie to Your Kids About Santa?

10 Classic Novels Every Christian Should Read

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reveals with timeshares are a bad investment idea and how it some companies can be even worse that promise to get you out of them.

FFAF: Why Timeshares Are a Bad Idea

Jimmy Akin explains why we ask certain <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/patron-saints">patron saints</a> to pray for us based on our names, our hometowns, or our stations in life.

Why Have a Patron Saint?

Can we know right from wrong without religion?

Get the JOE NOTES, sources for this episode, and more Shameless Popery on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/ShamelessPopery

Listen to Shameless Popery on Catholic.com:
https://www.catholic.com/audio/sp

Are Catholics wrong about purgatory?

Open almost any news source—or social media, if there’s a difference—and you won’t have to look very far before you start seeing quotes about people claiming that someone is “imposing his religious beliefs” on other people. Based on the posts of my more progressive friends, you’d think “religious belief” was the sole motivation behind everything done by those on the political “right.” In the health insurance coverage debates over the last several decades, we’ve seen arguments about employers who are supposedly “imposing religious beliefs” by insisting that they cannot in good conscience fund certain things like the murder of children.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that this “imposition” is impossible—indeed, I do think it would be problematic if the owner of the local Wendy’s demanded that I pray five times a day facing Mecca. But that’s not usually what we’re talking about.
The theme running through a lot of these conversations is that “religion” is something that only other people do. Those people. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that their own beliefs might be considered “religious,” or that they might be imposing their beliefs on someone else. Calling something “religious” in that context is a way to separate ourselves from other people, a way to excuse ourselves form the responsibility of conversation.
Religion, in modern America, is a meaningless concept. In effect, it suggests whatever it is that we don’t want to talk about. It is whatever area of life we think cannot be usefully discussed or regulated by the state—whatever part of life we think is off limits for a teacher or a parent or a policeman. So if we don’t want to talk about sexual morality, that must be “religious.” If we don’t want to talk about the nature of what it means to be human, that must be “religious.” If we don’t want to talk about the meaning of life, and why we should choose to live one way over another, that must be “religious.”
That’s exactly what the Pharisees are doing in Matthew. They come to him with a trick question: If God is as you say, is it right to pay taxes to Caesar? They’re saying to Jesus, in a way that we might imagine somebody doing today: “Are you saying something religious? Are you trying to impose your religion on someone else? Because the emperor might have a problem with that. You should keep your opinions to yourself. Don’t impose them on the rest of us.”
But Jesus refuses to accept this way of thinking. He doesn’t accept the nature of the question. The Pharisees aren’t interested in a conversation; they’re not interested in a debate. They just want to get Jesus into trouble.
Then we hear the response, which is pretty famous: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
It’s likely that a lot of us, hearing that, fit it neatly into that whole idea of “religion” that I’ve been going on about. We can read this as a justification of separating our lives into neat little categories: so here we have politics, over here we have cooking, and over here we have “religion,” AKA things having to do with God. And if we do that, there’s no conflict between God and politics, or God and science, or God and money, because God keeps to himself over here in the corner with things about God.
And that’s nice if you worship Zeus, or if you worship some little local river deity. But I don’t worship Zeus. I don’t worship the lord of the Schuylkill. I worship the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, who does not make a habit of keeping to himself. He is not some local river god, or the spirit of the mountain, or the father of dryads who only shows up when we start cutting down his special magic trees.
“I form light and create darkness / I make weal and create woe.” Just one verse after today’s reading from Isaiah, we hear this astounding reminder of God’s transcendence. This is not some God with an equal and opposite force opposing him. He’s not one of a large pantheon of powers. He rules all things. He makes all things. Without him was not anything made that was made. In this case, in Isaiah 45, even the movement of heathen monarchs is subject to his larger will. King Cyrus works for God’s purposes even when he has no knowledge of God. This God has no equal. “I am the Lord and there is no other; there is no God beside me.”
Here’s where we find what it is that Jesus is getting at with the Pharisees. They want him to say, “God is more important than the emperor; religion is more important than the empire.” They want him to put them in competition with one another and declare a winner so that the other side can get mad. But for Jesus, God and the emperor are so far apart that this competition is meaningless. It would be like an ant wondering whether the sun cares that he collects food for his colony. Obviously, the sun is more significant, more powerful, more everything than the ant colony. We can render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s—not because God has nothing to do with them, but because God’s authority has no need of emperors to work.
We can carry this logic through to our other supposed areas of separation. The reason that Christians, historically, have valued and respected the work of science, the work of history, the work of economics, and on down the line is not that each area has its own autonomy, and God keeps to himself. That’s Deism, not Christianity. It is because all of those things operate under the gracious will and power of God’s provision. We can talk about nature because God made it, and it exists. There’s no competition. When we try to figure out what happens when you subtract two from three, or calculate the force required to move a rock up a hill, the fact that we can talk about these things without reference to God does not mean they have nothing to do with God or are outside his sphere of influence—it means, rather, that God is not so needy as to be threatened when he allows his creation to operate with its own integrity
Why does any of this matter? It matters because human beings are good at dividing things up. This is not an inherently bad thing. The world would be a much less interesting place if we were all exactly the same. But we are also good at using these divisions just to get what we want, to trip one another up, to put others down. We’re good at using these divisions when we want to avoid criticism or avoid having to look seriously at our own beliefs. We love making excuses to avoid the hard work of being human.
This applies even within ourselves, which is maybe the harder part for some of us. We draw these neat little lines in our heads dividing the different parts of our life: family, work, relationships, Instagram, physics, golf, poetry, music, gardening. Those lines are necessary, because when you’re out there fixing somebody’s car, you’re not going to do it very well if you’re having a romantic conversation on Snapchat at the same time. But that doesn’t mean that the parts of your life don’t fit together into a whole, or that sometimes maybe physics does have something to do with the way you pray, or the way you throw a ball, or that maybe how you do the dishes in the sacristy might teach you something about your family.
Politics, like so many other parts of life, is unavoidable. But we can avoid the temptation represented by the Pharisees’ question—which is on the one hand acting as if the normal rules of human life don’t apply to us, or on the other acting as if they tell us everything there is to know. Following Jesus doesn’t mean submitting to Caesar, nor does it mean trying to overthrow him. Our job isn’t to manage the outcome of history—that is in God’s hands. Still, we do have to be disciples in history and not somewhere else. The only way we can balance the dual convictions that what we do matters and that we are not ultimately in control is by reference to God.
After all, whose image is on this coin? The coin that is you and me and all human nature? We are made in the image of God. We have many functions, many uses, many avenues of growth, but none of these accounts for much if we forget whose we are and why we exist. We are God’s, and we were made to love him and to worship him.
True religion has been imposed on us, whether we like it or not, by virtue of our existence. That identity and that vocation remain the same, no matter who is in charge of the country, whose face is on the money, or how much the culture supports what is right and good. If we can accept that vocation, following the complete and integral humanity of Jesus, we will become the saints that God intends for us to be.

Render Unto . . .

Since 1670, when they were first published, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/wanna-place-a-bet-on-god">Blaise Pascal</a>’s <a>Pensées</a> have proven to be extraordinarily influential upon the minds of Christians and non-Christians alike. Avery Dulles noted, “Few if any apologetical works have brought so many unbelievers on the way to faith.”
One might even argue that these scribbled thoughts of a French philosopher and mathematician have grown in importance over time. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Modern-Pagans-Outlined-Explained/dp/0898704529">Peter Kreeft</a> says they are “for today”—that, whereas most modern works of Christian apologetics are written as though we were still living in a Christian culture, the Pensées speak “to modern pagans, not to medieval Christians.” And Pope Francis praised Pascal&#8217;s &#8220;brilliant and inquisitive mind&#8221; just <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/20230619-sublimitas-et-miseria-hominis.html">this past year</a>.
Unless an apologist gets his first premise right, the rest of the argument has nothing to stand on. There are many reasons why the Pensées remain relevant, but one key reason is Pascal’s starting point: life is suffering. 
What is the greatest good for man? What is every human being really looking for? Most people will readily agree with Aristotle that it is happiness. Pascal agrees: “All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions.”
The trouble is that we tend not to get what we want in this life—at least not entirely. Here enters the universal reality of human suffering. We are left unfulfilled in this life, and therefore we suffer. 
The loss and deprivation of happiness are normative experiences for all human beings. “We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death,” writes Pascal. This is where his approach is so strong. It begins with the most obvious spiritual fact about humanity that not even skeptics can deny, what Chesterton called the only part of Christian theology that can really be proven: the damaged soul of man. 
Every man knows through his own interior experience that he is “wretched,” Pascal continues, “but he is truly great because he knows it.” Man knows he is wretched because he possesses an intellect; therefore, he is also able to do something intelligent about it. Man’s greatness resides in his power to change his situation.
Because Pascal understood the fundamental human condition of suffering, he had wise insight into the psychological barriers involved with conversion. One of those barriers, he says, is fear: “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.” The eminent atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Word-Thomas-Nagel/dp/0195149831">gives credence</a> to this observation:
<blockquote>I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.</blockquote>
What could be so scary about Christianity? One plausible answer might be the obligations, religious and moral, that logically follow if Jesus is God. Perhaps non-believers recognize that they would need to change, radically, if Christianity turned out to be true. And change tends to involve suffering in direct proportion. 
When a potential Christian fixates on the cost of discipleship—on the cross to be borne—conversion to Christianity seems utterly painful and undesirable. It is only once he sees clearly what is to be won (everything, according to Pascal) that the suffering of change and giving up short-term desires appear worthwhile. Even those who are not altogether convinced of Christianity may come to see that the eternal attainment of the greatest Good is perhaps worth the wager.
One of the reasons my fellow countryman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson">Jordan Peterson,</a> a University of Toronto psychologist, has influenced such a wide swath of people—Catholics and Protestants, believers and non-believers, men and women—is that he speaks hard truths about human nature with genuine conviction. Like Pascal, he doesn’t sugarcoat the indiscriminate reality of man’s wretchedness. 
Like Pascal, Peterson only begins with suffering. Then he moves to commonsense solutions—not for eliminating suffering, but for living a meaningful life despite it. Peterson’s solutions are essentially practical in nature. Pascal, though, moves beyond the merely practical. His ultimate remedy for sin and suffering is not a mere strategy or archetypal interpretation of reality, but a real, personal Savior who is the incarnation of the all-loving God:
<blockquote>Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.</blockquote>
Teachers like Peterson offer hope for this life, and that is good and necessary, but we desire an end to our sin and suffering, indeed victory over death itself—not mere coping skills. Christ alone offers the ultimate, all-sufficient solution.
The overall form of Pascal’s approach is nothing new. It is the same general plan of evangelization used by the apostles 2,000 years ago, when they set the world ablaze. It is essentially the program laid out in St. Paul’s epistles: all men are sinners (Rom 3:23); if Christ has not been raised, then we are still in our sins (1 Cor. 15:17); but Christ has been raised (1 Cor. 15:20)! Therefore, whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life (John 3:16).
Pascal knew that faith working in love was the only way to the truest experience of happiness in this life; that a person can have all the coping strategies in the world, but if he has not uncompromising love for God and man, he has nothing (1 Cor. 13:1-3, Gal. 5:6). Life is suffering, yes. But in the life to come there awaits eternal bliss that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived of. For that reason, the Christian life is not marred by misery. It shines with joyful expectation.

Why Do We Suffer?

<div>Can I defend myself with deadly force?</div><div>The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2264):
<blockquote>Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one&#8217;s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:
If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one&#8217;s own life than of another&#8217;s (2264).</blockquote>
We must only use lethal force in self defense if it is absolutely necessary to defend our own life of life of another. Outside of absolute necessity, a person would be guilty of murder.
</div>

May I Use Defensive Lethal Force?

Tom Nash explains the difference between ordinary and extraordinary care for the dying, and how the approach of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/euthanasia">euthanasia</a> to the latter case differs from the approach of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/hospice">hospice care</a>.