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Can You Reject Infallibility and still be Catholic?

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to explain why popes take new names after their election. Drawing from Church history and tradition, Jimmy explores how this practice developed, what these names signify, and why the choice often reflects a pope’s mission, inspiration, or theological emphasis.
Transcript:
Cy: The question is timely, so I wanted to throw it out to you. Where do popes get their names from?
Jimmy: Well, they pick them. This is actually the very first decision a pope makes after he becomes pope. The first decision is, do you accept your election? And if he says yes and he&#8217;s already a bishop, bam. That moment he&#8217;s the pope. So once he&#8217;s become pope, the very next thing that happens is they ask him, by what name do you wish to be called? So this is his first decision as pope. And then it gets announced, and then he comes out and so forth and greets the folks.
So that&#8217;s where the names come from, if you interpret the question in one sense. But there are a couple of other senses that you could ask it in. One of them is, well, what&#8217;s the source of the names? If the pope himself picks it, where is he getting it from? And the answer is, these days, popes get their name typically from previous popes. And so they look back on who were the previous popes, who&#8217;s someone that I would like to emulate, what message will be sent if I pick this pope&#8217;s name rather than that pope&#8217;s name. And they pick it from a previous pope, but not always.
Now, originally, popes didn&#8217;t have a papal name. You could argue Peter did, because Jesus changed his name. So he got his name from Jesus. His birth name was Simeon or Simon, but then Jesus called him Peter, and that&#8217;s what other people called him. But then after Peter, they just kept their birth name. So, like Pope Clement, he would have just been born Clement. And, you know, Pope Linus, he would have just been born Linus. And so they took their name from whatever their parents had given them.
Now, there were a few deviations from this in the first millennium. So that&#8217;s between, you know, that&#8217;s the first 10 centuries up to the year 1000, there were a few. The first guy to pick a different papal name was named Mercurius. That was his birth name. But he didn&#8217;t. It&#8217;s reported, at least. I haven&#8217;t seen a direct quote from him on this. But it&#8217;s reported that he didn&#8217;t feel it would be appropriate for the Christian world to be led by someone named Mercurius, because Mercury was the name of a Roman God. And so it&#8217;s like, why is your Christian leader named after a pagan God? So he thought there was a problem with that.
But not all popes have thought that, because there was a previous pope, Dionysius, and Dionysius was also a pagan god. So there have been popes with pagan god names, but Mercurius thought that was a bad idea. So he took the regnal name or papal name, John, and he was the second person to have the name John. So he became known as Pope John II. There were a handful of others in the first thousand years of church history that did the same thing.
But when the papal name custom really took hold was in the second millennium, just before the year 1000 in 996, we had a gentleman take a special name as pope. And thereafter, almost everybody did. I mean, basically, for a thousand years, you had people picking a new name when they became pope, with like three exceptions in the 1500s that kept their birth names.
And you might wonder, well, why would this happen at this point in time? You know, why would popes all of a sudden start this tradition of taking a different name? I have never seen a study done on that, a historical study done on that question. But my guess is it&#8217;s because of what royalty were doing. It&#8217;s been common with royalty throughout history to pick a different regnal name than their birth name.
And so by the Middle Ages, you know, when the year 1000 happened, kings and queens were a big deal in Europe. And the pope was also a monarch. He ruled the papal states. And so to make the. And it seemed more like a person was more authoritative if they had a new name in their new office as pope. And so it brought dignity to the office in that cultural context.
And so I suspect that the naming conventions among European monarchs had an influence on popes taking new names. If that hypothesis is true, then we might expect that sometime in the third millennium, that custom may fall away, because kings and queens are not a big deal now. The pope does not have the papal states anymore. And rather than trying to acquire more influence by imitating what secular rulers are doing, the popes are trying to come across as humble and as the servant of the servants of God.
So at some point in the third millennium, maybe 100 years from now, we may have popes just sticking with their baptismal names, unless their baptismal name is Peter or Jesus, because we&#8217;re not going to have a Pope Peter II. No one wants to. Someone who had a birth name of Peter, they would definitely pick something else, because otherwise it would be like, who are you to compare yourself to St. Peter, you know, so I don&#8217;t expect a Peter II.
Also, if someone&#8217;s named Jesus, what Pope Jesus? Really, that would be a bit of a shock to some people. And so I suspect anyone named Jesus or Peter will keep up the custom of changing names. But the custom may fade away.
And we even see signs that we&#8217;re living in an age right now where popes are reconsidering the pool of names they want to draw from. Because in 1978, we had John Paul I elected, and he had the first double papal name in history. He said he wanted to honor Pope John and Pope Paul, so he called himself John Paul.
Then we had Pope Francis, which was another unprecedented papal name after Saint Francis of Assisi. And even if we look at other popes like Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, they had reached back hundreds of years to find a papal name. And so that suggests that popes these days are feeling like maybe the current route, bunch of names is a little stale and they&#8217;re rethinking some things.
But I did a whole study of the subject of papal names back in 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI retired. I turned it into an ebook just called *Pope Names*. It&#8217;s not currently on Amazon, but I&#8217;m hoping I can get it up again real quickly.
And I also talk about this in the upcoming Monday episode of the *Jimmy Akin Podcast*, where I look at how four popes, the four most recent popes, so that&#8217;s John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV, how they met the world. And I cover their choice of papal names because that&#8217;s their first decision about how they&#8217;re going to interact with the world.
And then we watch footage of them coming out on the balcony, the loggia at St. Peter&#8217;s, and we analyze their body language and see what that tells us about how they&#8217;re going to reign. So there are some very interesting lessons you can learn about them from just their opening interaction before they say anything in public. Just studying. Okay. What&#8217;s their name and what are they doing with their body? That tells us a bunch about their reigns, and I&#8217;m going to be covering that on the *Jimmy Akin Podcast* on Monday.
Cy: Very cool. David, I&#8217;m sorry you weren&#8217;t able to stay on the line, but I hope you were listening and that answer was helpful to you.

Why Do Popes Change Their Names?

What happens when the Church is without a pope? In this Flannel Panel episode, Cy Kellett, Joe Heschmeyer, and Chris Check discuss the real-world effects of the current sede vacante. With no Holy Father to appoint bishops or canonize saints, important moments—like the potential canonization of Blessed Carlo Acutis—are on hold. The panel explores the theological and practical consequences of not having a pope and why the papacy remains essential to the life of the Church.
Transcript:
Cy: Trent Horn posted a video today about Pope Francis. And underneath it, people, you know, they write their comments and I read through the comments and there were probably four or five, maybe six comments saying, &#8220;I just came into the church yesterday and today I don&#8217;t have a Pope.&#8221; It was, I felt sad about that. It felt&#8230; well, it&#8217;s just sad, I guess.
Joe: Yeah, even, you know, I remember in 2005, I was in college and I&#8217;d never been in a church without a Pope before because I was born in &#8217;85, so I was, what was I, I guess, 20 when Pope John Paul II died. And it was very startling as a cradle Catholic. I can only imagine people who have come in and then suddenly find themselves without a Pope. And, you know, I&#8217;m thinking in here in Kansas City, we&#8217;re in the process of getting a new bishop on the Kansas side. So that was already a great deal of change. And, yeah, so, you know, finding yourself without a bishop or a Pope all at once is a very strange spot to be at.
Chris: Joe. Yeah, Joe&#8217;s ahead of us in this regard. We&#8217;re not going to have a bishop named until there&#8217;s a new Pope.
Cy: I guess so. No, it can&#8217;t be right. Because by canon law, I don&#8217;t think even if the past Pope had already signed it or something, that will all be stopped until the new Pope comes. Right? None of that can happen.
Joe: Yeah, that&#8217;s right. Basically, everything in terms of church governance slows to a snail&#8217;s pace.
Cy: Wait, what is it usually at? What pace is the church governance usually at? If we&#8217;re going all the way down to snail&#8217;s pace.
Joe: I mean, if God wanted things to be done quickly, he would have put the Vatican somewhere else. But there is this&#8230;
Chris: French, the Italians, everybody.
Cy: We&#8217;ll go after the English next.
Joe: I mean, the Germans would have been fast. I don&#8217;t know if it would have gone well, but they would have been quick about it.
Cy: Yeah, right.
Chris: He put it in Rome. I mean, these were people who got stuff done.
Joe: Yeah, Romans.
Chris: That&#8217;s a good point.
Cy: So, past tense, what happened?
Chris: Go ahead, Joe, you were making a point.
Jow: Well, just that everything slows down right now because in terms of governing decisions, anything that can be put off will be put off. So there&#8217;s some day-to-day stuff just kind of keeping the lights on that will continue to happen for the next few weeks. And if there are any truly urgent matters, they can handle that. But anything that you can defer to the next Pope is supposed to be deferred. And so I think you can expect, you know, even, you know, Blessed Carlo Acutis. His canonization is now suspended.
Cy: I didn&#8217;t think of that. Oh, my goodness, Joe. Because lots of people were going to Rome for that.
Joe: Yes.
Cy: Oh, wow.
Joe: It puts our missed day off really in perspective when you think about all the people who are impacted in a much greater way. Just because all of these things that rely on the Pope&#8217;s presence and authority&#8230; yeah, we&#8217;re going to have to wait. And so please pray.
Cy: You know, on the one hand, it&#8217;s such a big deal, but the other side of being Catholic is we don&#8217;t have a bishop here in San Diego. We don&#8217;t have a Pope. Sunday Mass at the parish, weekday Mass, it&#8217;ll all just be the same. It&#8217;s odd to&#8230; it&#8217;s both hugely dramatic and also not dramatic at all.
Joe: Yeah, there is something to that. That part of the beauty of having tradition, part of the beauty of being part of something that is 2000 years old, is that you don&#8217;t have to worry, well, is this going to be a totally different religion with the next Pope?
Cy: Right, right.
Joe: You don&#8217;t want to say autopilot, because that&#8217;s not actually a spiritually healthy way to live, but there is a sense in which the fundamentals are baked in in such a way that there is some presence and peace, and thanks be to God.
Chris: And as Jimmy said in the previous hour, the likelihood of the seat being vacant for very long in modern times is very low. Unlikely.
Cy: What&#8217;s the longest? Do either of you know the longest? It&#8217;s been years.
Joe: The longest it was vacant was years, but that was many centuries ago. In the 20th century, most papal conclaves are just a few days long because, I mean, the current way it&#8217;s set up, you need a 2/3 majority. So if all of their&#8230; you actually, this is one of the small things I&#8217;ve heard secular media get wrong. They&#8217;ve been saying 138 voting age cardinals or cardinal electors. There&#8217;s actually 135 eligible cardinal electors. So 2/3 of that is, I believe, 90. So if 90 cardinals agree that someone would be a good Pope, then we&#8217;re good to go. And it, I believe it took four rounds of ballots for Pope Benedict XVI and five rounds for Pope Francis. But in both cases, we&#8217;re talking about two days. You have one day on day one, there&#8217;s only one round of voting, and then you have four rounds of voting on the subsequent days until, realistically, until you come up with the Pope.
Chris: This in the perspective of, for example, the Western Schism, where there are at 1.3 claimants to the throne of Peter. So it&#8217;s going to be a little bit of a wait, but it&#8217;s not going to be a long one.
Cy: Yeah, yeah, right. We&#8217;ve had&#8230; it&#8217;s funny, like, even in the time of the multiple claimants to the papacy, the day-to-day life of the church is pretty&#8230; I mean, Jesus gave us a very sturdy structure. The life of the church just goes on. We&#8217;re okay. You can&#8230;
Chris: Baptisms, marriages, it goes on in spite of us.
Cy: Right. I&#8217;m sure that&#8230;Yeah, yeah.
Well, I&#8217;m not claiming any responsibility for it. I&#8217;m just saying it keeps going.
Let&#8217;s get a little&#8230; go ahead, Joe, did you have something else to say?
Joe: Well, I mean, this is maybe the flip side to the thing we were talking about before. You know, it&#8217;s easy to lament, &#8220;Oh, everything is very slow moving.&#8221; The bureaucracy and, you know, people who want change are perennially disappointed. But this is actually a good thing, that you don&#8217;t want a church that is constantly trying to be cool, constantly trying to be, you know, trendy and relevant.
We&#8217;re not trying to be the world. We want to be appealing to the world, but not by becoming like the world.

Why Not Having a Pope Is a Serious Problem | Flannel Panel

Today&#8217;s culture says, &#8220;Don&#8217;t judge others.&#8221; Jesus said, &#8220;Judge not, lest you be judged.&#8221; Aren&#8217;t they saying the same thing? As it turns out, they&#8217;re not. Karlo Broussard explains how the judgment that our culture condemns is different from the judgment that Jesus condemns.
Transcript:
Host: You are on with Karlo, Anonymous from Davenport, Iowa.
Caller: I would like to ask you a question: yesterday I was having a great interesting car conversation with my eleven-year-old son; I just mentioned that I had to throw away a humorous magazine I had purchased because it turned out there was a bunch of inappropriate material in it. And he said, “Oh,” he said, “well, you know, other families don’t, you know, they use those words, they speak that way, and—you know—just because we’re Catholic and we do that, that’s—all families are different.” And I helped kind of create this relativism, I think, by, you know, as he was growing up, trying not to, you know, pass judgements upon things. So now I’m wondering if this is actually turning around to be bad religion, so to speak. So could I have your advice?
Karlo: Yeah, well, first of all, you know, Anonymous, just as the Church does, and just as Jesus teaches us in the Gospels, there’s nothing wrong with making a judgement about a particular action, that a particular behavior is inappropriate human behavior. I mean, you do it every day with your eleven-year-old son, right? I mean if your eleven-year-old son mouths off to you, momma, you’re gonna have some consequences, right? Okay? So the fact that we make judgements about a behavior and say, “Hey, that’s inappropriate human behavior,” there’s nothing wrong with that. We have to do that as human beings in order to, as we were mentioning earlier, Cy, function as human beings in society.
So you can communicate to your son that there’s a difference between a certain behavior being inappropriate, wrong, immoral—whatever word you wanna use—and one’s responsibility for that immoral behavior. And this is where upbringing comes in, right? So let’s say, for example, your eleven-year-old son heard his friend at school say a bad four-letter word, right? Okay. Now, okay, so you can say, “Okay son, well, that word, it has a certain meaning to it that’s really bad, it’s not good for us as human beings, it contradicts our human dignity and our value created in the image and likeness of God. Now, so that’s bad, and we judge that we ought not to say that word, given the conventions of our society and the meaning that’s attached to it. But whether your friend is responsible for that or not, only God can judge that.” Because it may very well be that your son’s friend was brought up in a home where his parents simply didn’t teach him that these words are so bad and violating of our human dignity and keeping us from loving God and loving each other.
So notice, Anonymous, there’s a distinction to be made between judging a particular action to be wrong, and then judging one’s responsibility—or culpability, as we would say in theology, like whether that person has full knowledge of what they’re doing and whether or not it’s wrong. Does that help, at least for starters?
Caller: It does indeed, thank you very much.
Karlo: Okay, fantastic.
Host: Well, don’t forget to give your address to the call-screener, because you’re gonna be getting a free copy of Karlo’s CD, “Your Truth, My Truth.”
Karlo: And Cy, if I may just follow up very quickly, very briefly: you know, in the Gospels, when Jesus talks about “Do not judge;” he’s not talking about not judging a particular action to be immoral. Jesus did that left and right throughout his whole ministry. He said to the woman caught in adultery, you know, “Go and sin no more;” that implies that what she was doing was wrong. But the judgement that Jesus says for us not to enact, “Do not judge,” has to do with one’s responsibility, one’s culpability; judging one’s knowledge or one’s consent. Only God has access to that subjective dimension, right? Only God has access to the inner workings of the heart and the soul and the mind, but we can judge external behaviors and say “That’s not good for human beings; that is good for human beings; we ought to pursue the good, avoid the evil, etc.”
Host: Thank you very much, Anonymous.

Can You Make Judgments About Human Behavior?

Catholic apologist Tim Staples joins Cy Kellett to tackle the misconception that Natural Family Planning is merely Catholic contraception. Tim passionately clarifies the Church&#8217;s teaching on responsible parenthood, emphasizing that being open to life doesn&#8217;t mean having to have as many children as possible.
Transcript:
Cy: I hate that. It&#8217;s among young people as well, who say this. Look, natural family planning is Catholic contraception. So is natural family planning just Catholic contraception?
Tim: Right. And the answer is a resounding no. And unfortunately, Cy Kellett, not only do we have folks outside of the church who say that, but you have some folks— not to pick on. You know, I like Trent Horn&#8217;s term &#8220;the Catholic fundamentalist&#8221; as a sort of nomenclature rather than, you know, radical traditionalist or whatever. But among the Catholic fundamentalists, like that fellow, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Cy: I wasn&#8217;t gonna mention, but I didn&#8217;t. Harrison Butker. And I didn&#8217;t like that talk he gave.
Tim: Harrison Butker.
But, yeah, Harrison Butker. Yeah, it was. Oh, he&#8217;s one of those. And God bless him, he&#8217;s Catholic and&#8230;
Cy: He seems like a very good man.
Tim: He&#8217;s on the side of the angels.
Cy: And he can kick it a mile.
Tim: Oh, my goodness. And his accuracy is ridiculous. Right. But the bottom line is&#8230; Yeah. He has this misnomer that, you know, as a Catholic, when you get married, you gotta have as many babies as&#8230; And remember Pope Francis, he got kind of slapped around for saying what he said, &#8220;We&#8217;re not rabbits,&#8221; you know. And I know some folks got mad at Pope Francis for that, but I was actually going, you know, if you forget about the surface and look at what the Holy Father was saying, no, we are not. It is as *Gaudium et Spes* section 50 talks about responsible parenthood. That is a Catholic idea.
And so anyway, to get to the answer here, no, as a Catholic, you do not have to have as many. In fact, some go to such an extreme that they say you can&#8217;t even have conjugal relations with your wife unless she&#8217;s fertile. Because if you have sex when she can&#8217;t get pregnant, that&#8217;s contraception.
But here&#8217;s the point. The key is that the Catholic position is a natural law position that states&#8230; And we can set it up by saying, look, all of our natural faculties as human beings, we can talk about the communicative faculty. Section 2485 of the Catechism says when we deliberately deceive someone with regard to truth, we&#8217;re acting contrary to the very end of our communicative faculty, which is the communication of truth. So if you purposely deceive, and that&#8217;s called a lie, why? Because you&#8217;re acting contrary to that faculty gifted to us by Almighty God.
Well, we could talk about other faculties of human beings, but here we&#8217;re talking about the sexual faculty. The purpose of the sexual faculty is twofold. One, the union of one man, one woman. That&#8217;s right. Not one man, one man. Not three men, one man, or any other one woman.
I&#8217;m just explaining math to you.
Sorry, math, that&#8217;s a tricky concept. But one man, one woman, the union of one man and one woman, and two, the procreation of children. That&#8217;s the purpose of the conjugal act.
But here&#8217;s the key, Cy. If we purposely thwart either of those two essential ends, that act becomes gravely— and yes, I&#8217;m going to shout it— gravely disordered. *A la* Pius XI in *Casti Connubii*. Gravely disordered. Why? Because you are purposely distorting. You are contradicting one or the other. And often it ends up being both of the purposes of the sexual act. Therefore, you&#8217;re distorting that sexual faculty.
Now, in what we call natural family planning, we are doing the opposite of what would be a sin in thwarting. Remember, it&#8217;s purposely knowingly thwarting either one of those two essential ends. In natural family planning, we are honoring both of those. So much so that if we are in a situation— that has to be a reasonable situation— where we believe we ought not to pursue pregnancy at this point in our marriage, and that can be for financial reasons, it can be physical reasons, a bodily ailment, it can be psychological. There are many reasons, and that&#8217;s something that needs to be determined by the couple, in consultation with a spiritual director and so forth.
But if you determine that, rather than thwart either one of those acts— and here we&#8217;re focusing on the second that I mentioned, which traditionally is the primary end of the conjugal act, and that is the procreation of children— if you don&#8217;t feel like, or you don&#8217;t&#8230; I shouldn&#8217;t say feel like. If you do not believe it is God&#8217;s will for you to have children at that time, you abstain from sexual activity, which, by the way, St. Paul recommends in marriages.
For example, where is that? In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul talks about coming apart for a time of prayer. But be careful. Don&#8217;t do it for too long unless you get tempted. St. Paul said that that actually can be a blessing.
And I can tell you this. In my wife and my marriage, natural family planning has been a huge gift, not only in helping us to get pregnant. We&#8217;ve been pregnant nine times. We got pretty good at it. We have two in heaven and seven on Earth. It&#8217;s a great way to get pregnant, but it&#8217;s also in those times that are, you know, a serious situation that keeps you from wanting to have children at this particular point out of respect for the conjugal act and God&#8217;s law.
And that&#8217;s divine law. It&#8217;s not only natural law, but it&#8217;s also divine law because it&#8217;s revealed to us as well in Scripture, the sin of Onan in Genesis 38 as interpreted by Pius XI again in *Casti Connubii*. And the Church perennially has understood that to not only be a matter of natural law, but also divine law because of that revelation.
But here&#8217;s the key, all right? If you are using natural family planning, it is impossible for you to contracept. It&#8217;s impossible. Why? Because contraception is purposely acting contrary to one or more of those two essential ends. And if you are using natural family planning, you are respecting both by the nature of the act. You&#8217;re respecting both the love of one man, one woman. You&#8217;re renewing the covenant to strengthen your marriage, and you are respecting the procreative aspect by not engaging at that time.
It&#8217;s impossible for you then to contracept because the definition of contraception is to willfully thwart the procreation of children. Now, is it possible to sin by doing that? Yes, it is. For example, if you get married and you say, &#8220;Well, we&#8217;re just going to use natural family planning the whole time of our marriage to avoid pregnancy.&#8221; To avoid pregnancy.
Now, you would not be contracepting unless you contracept, that is purposely willfully thwart that procreative aspect of the conjugal act. But you can be guilty of sin because of your lack of generosity. And that can be grave in a marital context, depending upon, like I said, you have a healthy woman, healthy man. There&#8217;s no other reason for you not to have children other than, you know what? I gotta get that brand new car every two years. You know, I&#8217;ve gotta get the latest&#8230;
Cy: Then there&#8217;s&#8230; That&#8217;s in his selfishness. It&#8217;s not contraception.
Tim: It&#8217;s selfishness. It&#8217;s a lack of generosity. And yes, that can be sinful. But I think that the most important point, I would say to our friend from the Kansas City Chiefs, right, understand what contraception is. It&#8217;s that willful&#8230; You are imposing your will against what the natural law tells us, Revelation tells us is the purpose.
And I argue with Pius XI, the primary, which is the procreation of children, you willfully thwart that. You are standing against God. God&#8217;s will for your marriage and God&#8217;s will for the conjugal act. In my mind, it can&#8217;t get any more plain. This is not Catholic contraception. It&#8217;s not contraception at all.
Cy: And the fact is that if the Church says the parents have the right to decide on the spacing of children and the number of children, and with all the qualifiers that go with that, some people are going to get that wrong. And here&#8217;s the deal. The Church is comfortable with that. It&#8217;s not a busybody Church telling everybody what to do all the time.
Tim: That&#8217;s right. I encourage folks to talk with a spiritual director&#8230;

Is NFP Just “Catholic Birth Control”?

<div>Do the effects of a Mass said for the dead apply when the Mass is said or when the Mass is requested? In my parish, it can be months before the requested Mass is actually celebrated. That bothers me.</div><div>The fruits (graces) of a Mass offered <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/masses-of-requiem">for the repose of a particular soul</a> are applied when the Mass is offered. While you may find it unsettling that there’s often a long delay between when the Mass was requested and when it was offered, it helps to remember that every Mass includes a prayer for both the living and the dead. You can also offer your Holy Communion or obtain a plenary indulgence (CCC 1471-1473) for the holy souls in purgatory (or for a particular friend, relative, etc.).
<blockquote>The <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/prayers-for-the-dead">intercessions</a> [express the fact] that the Eucharist is celebrated in communion with the whole Church, of both heaven and of earth, and that the oblation is made for her and for all her members, living and dead, who are called to participate in the redemption and salvation purchased by the Body and Blood of Christ (<a href="https://cathdal.org/news/ten-ways-to-pray-for-the-holy-souls-in-purgatory">“20 Ways to Pray for the Souls in Purgatory,” online at cathdal.org</a>).</blockquote>
</div>

Remember, God Is Atemporal

Were the Apostles Baptized?

Responding to a caller who posits that certain models of a cyclical universe could do away with the notion of a first cause of the universe, Tim Staples explains why modern physics points toward the necessity of a first cause as laid out by St. Thomas Aquinas.
Transcript:
Host: Colin in San Francisco, California, listening on Immaculate Heart Radio, Colin, you are on with Tim Staples.
Caller: Hey guys, I was excited to hear last week you talking about <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/st-thomas-aquinass-five-ways-as-a-path-back-to-catholicism">the Five Ways by Thomas Aquinas</a>. Cy, you and Tim had suggested I read up on him, so I&#8217;ve been doing that. My argument would be that the natural universe itself could be self-existent and not need God as a first cause, which I think would divert from kind of where Tim was going last week.
First, I wanted to say that I agree that something has to be self-existent; it may have existed forever or it may have existed for all time, at least. But there&#8217;s two ways that the natural universe could do that: the first is a cyclical universe that continually gives rise to itself through a Big Bang, and there&#8217;s a number of models that are consistent with the Big Bang and with what we know about things like dark energy that would argue that the universe may be cyclical; the second thing is that time itself and space-time seem to arise in the Big Bang, so there may not be a time before the Big Bang for the universe to have been created if time itself is a property of the Big Bang.
Tim: Okay, sure. Well I, first of all I would say that in order to argue for that sort of the &#8220;Carl Sagan expanding and contracting universe,&#8221; the problem with that is science, you know, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/law-of-the-conservation-of-energy">the second law of thermodynamics and the law of entropy</a> still is something you have to deal with. Because even if you did—now I have read physicists who have debunked the whole expanding and contracting universe, simply because there&#8217;s not—here, to use an analogy, if I lit a firecracker right here and it blew up, the paper would fly up into the air, and then it would stop and then it would come back down, and why is that? Because there&#8217;s this massive dense object called the Earth underneath it that generates an enormous gravitational pull that pulls it back down, right?
Well, when you look at the Big Bang, the universe is&#8211;and I think science is pretty much in agreement on this—the universe is expanding, and in fact, surprisingly, it&#8217;s actually still increasing in speed, which tells you we&#8217;re just getting started, and it&#8217;s 13.7 billion years ago, and we&#8217;re just, the Big Bang is so unbelievable that we&#8217;re still in the acceleration phase right now. But eventually it will slow down, and the problem is, even taking into account alleged dark matter and such, there&#8217;s simply not enough density for the universe to contract again. You know, at least this is the argument that physicists are making. It just can&#8217;t do it.
But even if it could, the second law of thermodynamics does not pass away. Still, you would have entropy, and that means, as you know, Colin, there is less—there&#8217;s—you know, there is a certain stated amount of usable energy at the beginning of the universe. And that amount is going down. Well, entropy is increasing, which means the amount of usable energy is not there anymore, it&#8217;s dissipating.
And that doesn&#8217;t go away because you have another Big Bang; it still is going away, and so ultimately that demonstrates, I think, as Cardinal Ratzinger points out in his book &#8220;In the Beginning,&#8221; that you have to trace it back to a beginning in time, and you cannot look to the material universe, then, as being eternal. It simply cannot be. That&#8217;s contrary to science.
So I do think the problem is, Colin, and I&#8217;d like to get your thought here, is that you can&#8217;t have a material thing being the first cause, because by nature material things have beginnings. Everything in the material universe that we know—in fact, Colin, this is a principle of science; whenever we look at a galaxy, a star, a planet, one of the first things scientists ask is, &#8220;Well, how old is it?&#8221; And &#8220;How can we demonstrate how old it is?&#8221; And scientists have lots of different ways of dating, and so we know that material things cannot be that first cause, because everything that we see in the universe has a cause, is caused by something else. Again, that&#8217;s a principle of science.
And so there must be, the argument goes, Colin, a first cause that itself was not caused. The universe is demonstrably caused. It cannot be eternal. And again, that&#8217;s scientific principles here. And so there must be a first cause that itself is not caused, and therefore would be the cause of all things and yet not caused. Now if it&#8217;s not caused, that means it is in fact eternal.
Now Colin, there are certain things we can know about that first cause, like namely: could never die; could never move from ignorance to knowledge. Why? Because in order to move from what Thomas Aquinas would call a potential to an actuality, or potency to act, you must be acted on by something else that already has that perfection. Well, the first cause could not have, by definition, any of those potencies. It must be—and I&#8217;m diverting here, Colin, into Thomas&#8217; first proof—it must be pure actuality, or else it&#8217;s not the first cause. Pure act; that means it can&#8217;t move from potency to act, can&#8217;t move from ignorance to knowledge, can&#8217;t even move from here to there, because it&#8217;s impossible. Why? Because it&#8217;s already there.
So at any rate, Colin, I don&#8217;t know if I got to your second point, but are you following me?
Caller: I&#8217;m worried that I might have a better understanding of this then you may. I suggest you look at the cyclical models of the universe that have come since our knowledge that the universe is currently expanding. Wikipedia is a good place to start for that. There&#8217;s models like the Baum-Frampton model that saves for a certain way of conceiving of dark energy; you could have a big rip, so the universe could expand outward, but get to the point where space-time itself rips, and because everything&#8217;s so spread out, you don&#8217;t actually have entropy, and you could have another big bang, because you need particles, you need matter to be close enough together to actually have an increased state of entropy. If they&#8217;re so spread apart that they can&#8217;t communicate with each other, because they&#8217;re over the event horizon, and that issue actually goes away, so there&#8217;s—
Tim: But Colin, I think you&#8217;re not answering a very important point, though. Because everything that you&#8217;re saying presupposes that you have particles and such that are in motion. And if in fact those particles are in motion they cannot be the first cause. Because that means they have potency, and in order for something to move, it has to, from potency to act, move from potency to act, it must be moved by something that already has that actuality. So there must of necessity be that first cause, that unmoved mover, that is in fact pure actuality.
So when you&#8217;re talking about a Big Bang, the motion of particles, that you&#8217;re talking about, a rip, etc., you&#8217;re talking about things that have to be caused, have to be placed in motion, by another. So again, this gets back to St. Thomas&#8217;s first proof, which demonstrates that in order for all of those things to exist that you&#8217;re talking about, there must be the first cause, the unmoved mover, that itself is pure actuality. Pure and infinite being. Absolutely one, absolutely simple.
Caller: I think we&#8217;re gonna have to part ways there, because with a cyclical universe that continually goes through the same cycle, that could conceivably have existed in and of itself without a starting point; in fact, the fact that it&#8217;s cyclical would infer that it could always have existed in cycles, even though everything and it&#8217;s moving. And if you want to look at something that&#8230;and if you look at something like the revolution of one planetary body around another, that&#8217;s something that&#8217;s so stable that it could continue infinitely. So I&#8217;m gonna have to disagree there, but—
Tim: Yeah that&#8217;s not—but I appreciate that Colin, but what you&#8217;re saying there is not science. That&#8217;s more science fiction. Because there there&#8217;s no such thing in science as perpetual motion. Everything that is—I mean, again, this is, this gets back to Newtonian physics, but everything that is in motion was placed in motion by another that is already in motion. And so again we get back to Thomas&#8217; first proof for the existence of God. I think actually you&#8217;re demonstrating our point, Colin.

Is the Universe Cyclical?

I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has said to me, “That was not very Christlike.” This response usually comes after someone is upset by my being firm and honest. The implication is that Jesus was a cuddly, soft-hearted nice guy who was always smiling, always accepting, always with kind words of affirmation. In short, he was nice.
In America, we are known to be relatively polite and courteous, except maybe if you live in New York City. In contrast to much of the world, we tend to be very polite, genteel, gracious, and nice. Tour guides in other countries will tell you that Americans are the nicest people and their favorite groups to guide. We transfer our niceness onto Jesus and assume that he was a lot like us.
When we study the New Testament, especially the Gospels, what do we find? First, let’s discuss what we don’t find. The word nice is never found in the Bible. It is a very popular word in conversation today, but it has not always been so. With its current meaning of giving pleasure, agreeable, good-natured, or kind, it has existed only since the eighteenth century. The origins of the word are fascinating. According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, “Middle English, foolish, wanton, from Anglo-French, silly, simple, from Latin nescius ignorant, from nescire not to know.” Its current meaning of socially acceptable, well bred, polite, or kind is only from recent years.
Nice is often used as a synonym for loving and kind, as in “That is nice of you to say. You are a very loving person.” But are “love” and “nice” interchangeable, especially in a biblical context?
The English word love in its various forms is found 578 times in the Bible. Jesus uses the word at least fifty times in the Gospels. Love is one of three theological virtues: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). We know that God is love (1 John 4:8), and Jesus, being God in human form, was the most loving human to walk the earth.
Love can be consoling, forgiving, gentle, and warm. One who loves puts the other person first and often makes that person feel special and accepted. The love of a mother for her child is a perfect example of such love—both caring and nurturing. The love and affection of a newly married couple fill us with joy and warm feelings.
However, love does not always equate to nice. Though Jesus speaks of love fifty times, he never speaks of niceness in its modern sense.
We can ask the question, “Was Jesus nice?”
Jesus was always loving, but he was not always nice, as we Americans define niceness. There is such a thing as “tough love.” It is the kind of love that cares enough to be honest, to confront, to discipline, to cause temporary pain to bring about eternal glory. On the surface, “tough love” does not always appear to be nice. While being disciplined out of love, a badly-behaved child may blurt out, “You are not very nice!” Speaking firmly to a belligerent teenager may get the response, “Jesus would never be mean like you are!”
Jesus was not always cozy and cuddly. Here is just one example: Jesus spoke very harshly to his fellow Jews. People today might consider it rude, disturbing, unkind.
<blockquote>Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. . . . You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matt. 23:27, 28, 33).</blockquote>
Ouch! It doesn’t sound very kind and courteous—not very thoughtful or nice! Yet they deserved it, and he spoke justly—and ultimately out of love, with the goal of repentance and educating the general population on acceptable and unacceptable moral conduct. The Jewish leaders were offending God by their hypocrisy, and Jesus was loving enough to say it how it is.
There is a shocking story recorded in all four Gospels, and it may have actually happened on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-many-times-did-jesus-flip-tables">two separate occasions</a>. Imagine arriving at the Temple in Jerusalem one day to pray. It is a typical day in the courtyard . . . when suddenly, a man bursts onto the scene with a whip and begins to disrupt everything. Shouting and tension fill the air. Shocked, you run over to see what this commotion is all about. The man is yelling as his whip whistles through the air. He is flipping over tables and tossing the merchants’ coins on the ground. Pigeons fill the air as he shouts, “Take these things away!”
Everyone is shocked at this rude and disruptive conduct. This was completely unacceptable social behavior. He was inconsiderate and bad-tempered to lash people with a whip. Folks ran in fear! Imagine if the legacy media had been there! The headlines would be shocking.
This wasn’t just some wild man. This was Jesus. He was red in the face and glaring at the crowd. It certainly didn’t appear very “Christlike.” He was not being nice at all!
So maybe there is more to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do?) than we’ve been led to believe. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry so much about being nice, being liked, acting as genteel Americans. Maybe we ought to be more honest and forthright about the things that really matter. Perhaps we should be more willing to hurt feelings, step on some toes, and practice tough love toward those in sin. Maybe we should be more Christlike.
In C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus is represented by Aslan the lion. The children love Aslan, but they never consider him tame. The dialogue is instructive.
<blockquote>“Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” . . .
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. . . . “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn&#8217;t safe. But he&#8217;s good. He&#8217;s the King, I tell you.”</blockquote>
Jesus is approachable and loving, but don’t ever consider him “tame” or too cuddly. He may not live up to our perception of nice. Jesus is God as well as man. He expressed the wrath and anger of God as well as the mercy and love of God. Even the “disciple whom Jesus loved” was afraid when he saw the glorified Christ: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last.” (Rev. 1:17).
Many of us have sung the old hymn, “What a friend we have in Jesus,” but we must remember that Jesus is not here just to be nice or simply our amiable friend. He is God, and his goal is to make us holy. Sometimes, that requires discipline. In Hebrews, we read, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (12:5-6).
Love should permeate our relationships with others, not niceness. And sometimes love is tough. If we ever wonder just what qualities we should have as Christians, St. Paul gives us a good place to start. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” And we should always “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15).
So was Jesus nice? Actually, that is the wrong question. The real question is, was Jesus loving? Did he love us enough to tell us the truth and require us to be holy?

Was Jesus Nice?

The site formerly known as Twitter brings us another gem of popular atheism:

Of course, there’s something deeply ironic here. The idea that “religion” teaches that if you read one book you “know everything” is a gross caricature. Perhaps this critique captures something true of some shallow forms of religion, but anyone who thinks that this represents all or even most religious people is being too intellectually incurious. Before painting with such a broad brush, they should cultivate an intellectual curiosity, and realize that they “don’t know enough” about what religious people actually believe.
For instance, did the Catholic Church really invent the university system (with the Universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford in the 11th century) because they only wanted people to know about one book? By that same reasoning, why does the Vatican run one of the oldest astrological research centers on Earth, the Vatican Observatory? And <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/07/12/why-are-so-many-craters-moon-named-after-jesuits">speaking of astronomy</a>, “Jesuit contributions to astronomy are significant enough that 34 craters on the moon and several asteroids are named after them.” Nor is this scientific interest anything new, or confined to astronomy: the father of genetics was a monk, Gregor Mendel; the fallopian tube is named after the 16th-century anatomist Fr. Gabriele Falloppio; and the Big Bang theory was first proposed by Fr. Georges Lemaître. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lay_Catholic_scientists">Additional</a> examples <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists">abound</a>. The point is, all of this seems like an awful lot of unnecessary work for people who supposedly think one book is all you need.
Atheists who want to cultivate intellectual curiosity (instead of simply bragging about how curious they already are) might start with this question: why has the Catholic Church in particular been so interested in learning more about science? A good resource here would be Pope John Paul II’s encyclical <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html">Fides et Ratio</a>, on faith and reason, in which he declares that:
<blockquote>Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.</blockquote>