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Miracles in Other Religions?

<div>When should Catholics put up their Christmas tree and decorations? Are there any rules about this?</div><div>There is no rule about when to put up <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/christmas">Christmas</a> decorations. You can put them up and take them down whenever you want. You can even leave them up all year long!
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Christmas Decorations

Protestants often challenge Catholics to provide biblical evidence for their belief in indulgences. Can such a challenge be met? Karlo Broussard shows that it can.
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Transcript:
Paragraph 1471 of the Catechism defines an indulgence as “a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven.”
This presupposes that punishment remains after God has forgiven our sins and that we can do something to satisfy it.
But is this biblical? I think it is.
The Bible is full of examples of God remitting the eternal punishment due to sin while still willing temporal consequences. For example, David is forgiven of his sin in 2 Samuel <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=733s">12:13</a>-18 yet must suffer the death of his son. The Psalmist says in Psalm 99:7-8 that God forgives but avenges wrongdoing. Even Jesus teaches in Luke <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=767s">12:47</a>-48 that the servant who did what is deserving of punishment without full knowledge will be punished, but in lesser degree.
It is such temporal consequences that indulgences remit. By virtue of its authority to bind and loose, the Church declares certain acts to be of such value that, if they are performed under certain prescribed conditions, sin’s temporal consequences can be remitted, either partially or fully. It is no different than Jesus’ teaching in Luke <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=701s">11:41</a>, “give alms…and behold, everything is clean for you.”
The Church grants indulgences to help its children heed St. Paul’s exhortation in Philippians <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=132s">2:12</a>, “work out your salvation,” and to cooperate with God in bringing to completion the good work he has begun in us—Philippians 1:6.
So, the motifs of temporal consequences due to sin and the Church’s authority to bind and loose make a solid biblical foundation for the Catholic dogma of indulgences.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Are Indulgences Biblical?

Jonah is a familiar story. The prophet hears the call of God. He says no. He gets on a boat to go as far away from Nineveh as possible. There are unaccountably fierce storms, so he rightly discerns God’s judgment and has the crew toss him into the sea, where he is swallowed by a large fish—or perhaps a whale—and spit up after three days. He journeys to Nineveh, where our story picks up this morning, to preach repentance. The people repent, as does God—more on that in a moment—and then, after today’s selection, Jonah goes into a fit of pouting self-pity.
It&#8217;s an odd story in many ways, which is part of why it is one of the most memorable stories of the Old Testament. But it’s worth pointing out how the content of the book as a whole is also unusual in the context of the whole Bible. Jonah is sent not to the kings of Judah or of Israel; he is not sent to the people of the covenant. He is sent to heathen foreigners who have no direct contact with the God of Israel. In much of the Old Testament, we could easily forget that promise to Abraham long ago that in his descendants all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Yet here we have this clear insistence that God is interested in and cares for the Gentiles.
One other interesting aspect of the book is how it subtly asserts the absolute singularity of Israel’s God in the world. It wasn’t that unusual for ancient peoples to make large claims about their gods. But for the most part, those claims end at the border of the nation. It seems strange to us, but this was a typical ancient attitude: well sure, our god is the creator of all things, but by “all things” we really mean this village or this river or this nation. The other nations and cities have their own gods, and we leave them alone. Yet in Jonah, there’s this seeming ignorance that anyone even claims to worship other gods. We see God’s power first on his native turf—his call to Jonah. But then we see God’s power over the wind and the waves, his power over the animal kingdom, his power over plant life, over the sun, his power over a huge city that has never even heard of him. No other gods are even mentioned. The implication is that they are too small, too insignificant to warrant notice. Their power, if it is power, is illusory and limited. They are not really, in the end, gods at all.
But, hold on. Doesn’t Jonah’s God “repent” at the end of the story, changing his mind from the evil he intended to do to the city? This might seem the final nail in the coffin for a view of God’s transcendent, changeless perfection, but not so. First, the book as a whole seems designed to show God’s absolute singular and unique holiness in the face of the diverse powers of the world. Second, Scripture and Tradition as a whole insist that God is perfect and unchanging. How then do we interpret this line about God’s “repentance”?
We’d best go with analogy here. If you live in a hot, sunny place, and you defy the sun’s power, walking about at midday without cover or sunscreen or hydration, it may seem as though the sun is out to get you: it threatens dehydration, sunburn, heatstroke. If, however, you respect the sun’s power and prepare to be in its presence, it will seem that the sun is no longer your enemy. What once seemed the source of pain will now seem like a warm embrace. In these two scenarios, the sun didn’t change. You did.
Not that God is merely some great natural force like the sun. But for the ancient writer to say that God “repented” is a sort of shorthand for the idea that people have adapted to the reality of who God says he is, and so what once seemed like judgment now seems like mercy and grace.
Our Lord himself says, in that long conversation with the disciples on Maundy Thursday, that “in a little while” their sorrow “will be turned to joy” (John 16:20). The cause—in this case, the cross—hasn’t changed. But what changes is the disciples themselves, for when they really encounter the cross in all its power, and the one who gives it power through the divine life he most fully reveals in his resurrection, they experience it in a new way.
This radically different experience of the same ultimate reality goes at the heart of the Christian understanding of heaven and hell. We can say that hell is “absence” from the presence of God. But this is an absurdity, since God is everywhere. Hell is, rather, the experience of God’s presence as absence—or the experience of the good as something painful. It is like the person so worn down and corrupted by hatred and anger that he perceives a gesture of love as an attack.
Those aren’t perfect descriptions at all, but they suggest something of the paradox of God’s relation with the world. God never changes. But we do, and the world does. Furthermore, God has, in a mysterious way, chosen in his eternal will to allow our choice to matter. When we say that prayer matters, part of what we mean is that God’s changeless decision is to decide certain things in relation to our free will.
I think it is very much in the light of this same divine transcendence that St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians that we should live as if we were not married when we are, as if we had nothing when we don’t, as if we were rejoicing when we are not. It seems clear that these paradoxical statements aren’t concrete instructions—elsewhere, for example, he has some lofty things to say about marriage. The point is that whatever good things there are in this world—and there are some truly good things—cannot compare with the glories of eternity. Maybe we could even describe this as a Pauline argument for wit and good humor.
Anyway, we have to hold even the best things of this world, its joys and its sorrows, with a light touch. Here the Buddhist notion of “detachment” gets it right in some important ways, recognizing that the source of much suffering comes from holding on to things that do not last. Where St. Paul and Christianity part ways from Buddhism is on the recognition that detachment isn’t itself the ultimate goal; the ultimate goal is actually to be attached, just to the right thing: God. When we orient our hearts to him, all the earthly forms of goodness can shine with the reflected light of the true sun. But if we try to take these various mirrors away from the light, they will only ever be dull and meaningless.
The true light of Christ, the transcendent and eternal divine Son, is in fact the only thing worthy of the kind of devotion we see in the early disciples. For a serious Jewish man in the first century, there was nothing more important than family and work. The only thing that could dare call one away from that was . . . well, God himself. The fact that Peter and Andrew, James and John, drop their nets and follow him, suggests that they recognized in him something precious beyond price. Nothing is more important than following him. Nothing.
Today we don’t see those old visible competitions between gods of river and mountain and nation. But there are plenty of other gods demanding their place—gods of commerce, of political party, of family comfort, of wellness and self-care, of pleasure, of self-expression, of control. All of these want a small piece of us, and it seems reasonable because they want just that little piece, and they’re fine leaving the rest to somebody else. But Jesus does claim more, because he’s not just the god of Sunday or the god of traditional morality or the god of Catholics: he is Lord of the nations, King of Kings, the Alpha and the Omega. It is God, or it is nothing.
The time is running out, Paul says. That was a theme of Jonah’s preaching too, it turns out. Maybe we’re like the disciples, or like Jonah, or like the citizens of Nineveh. We cannot run forever. The city of this world will not last forever. Our family and our work will not last forever. All the best things will pass away. But if we choose first the kingdom of God, all the good things of this life will shine with the brightness of God’s own light.

How God Repents

Judging by social-media reactions, this year’s most controversial Super Bowl commercial was not the VW spot featuring a prairie-church wedding with two brides (and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/12/volkswagen-vw-super-bowl-advert-hiding-nazi-past/">making some choice omissions</a> about the company’s past) but <a href="https://youtu.be/94BqlDQ-Ppo">the latest installment of “He Gets Us.”</a>
That big-dollar media-evangelization brand, with its characteristic ads featuring emotion-baiting soundtracks, stark tableaus of human suffering, and the reassuring message that Jesus understands that suffering, is no stranger to controversy. Last year, for instance, it <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/should-jesus-have-super-bowl-ads">came under fire</a> from “progressive” Christians for receiving underwriting from conservative Evangelicals who must have been using the ads as a front for a homophobic, racist, exclusionist agenda.
This year, the brand is under control of <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/Ad-Meter/2024/02/11/he-gets-us-super-bowl-commercials-jesus/72562492007/">a new nonprofit group</a>, and apparently gone are the ties to the old conservative donors. And now the script has flipped, with conservative and traditional Christians largely panning the Super Bowl ad (though some on the religious left are still <a href="https://www.salon.com/2024/02/13/hobby-lobby-funded-jesus-super-bowl-ads-cant-hide-the-hate-that-fuels-the-christian-right/">warning us not to fall for the pro-Maga trickery</a>).
One reason for the criticism is the new ad’s embrace of hot-button political imagery. In the sixty-second spot, set to a cover of the 1980’s torch standard “Never Tear Us Apart,” various figures intended to represent the downtrodden are having their feet washed by figures intended to represent the powerful, followed by the message, “Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate.” Images include:
<ul>
<li>a pro-life protester washing the feet of a pregnant girl outside an abortion clinic</li>
<li>a cop washing a young, tough-looking black man in an alley</li>
<li>a suburban woman washing a bussed-in migrant girl</li>
<li>a Christian minister washing a gay man who had been roller-skating at the beach</li>
</ul>
Whether or not I agree with them, I “get” the criticisms over some of these images and others (still others were non-controversial and even poignant). The Gospel example of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet should not be appropriated for another context without extreme care, and it’s certainly debatable whether invoking modern politics and culture wars constitutes such care. It’s also debatable whether the ad is communicating opinions on some of those issues that are contrary to Catholic teaching or right reason.
But I’m noticing a deeper vein of debate dividing Christians: over the question of whether this approach is evangelically fruitful.
In one corner is the camp that says that messages like this “He Gets Us” ad are all bark and no bite; all Easter and no Good Friday; all consolation and no conversion. That the promise that Jesus &#8220;gets us,&#8221; full-stop, is too easy to take as an assurance that we are good just as we are. And so you end up converting people to <a href="https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.catholic.com%2Fmagazine%2Fonline-edition%2Fme-my-god-and-i&amp;data=05%7C02%7Ctaglialoro%40catholic.com%7Caf2a9611deec49a684fa08dc2cdca754%7Cdd9faf74765b495cac09cabd182c95a7%7C0%7C0%7C638434573421864749%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=Qc44xOsVjXL%2FAmvQKmstH0t1t3aTdmvGwKsUp%2FPyFR8%3D&amp;reserved=0">moral therapeutic deism</a>, which is probably where they already were anyway.
The other side counters that simply to be told that we are loved and understood in our suffering—and, yes, sin—is revolutionary. That for many people it’s all they’re able to hear and process at this point in their lives. And so it’s the milk they need before the harder food of faith and conversion, a necessary first baby step on the road to discipleship.
The parameters of this debate seem to me strikingly like those around the recent declaration <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20231218_fiducia-supplicans_en.html">Fiducia Supplicans</a>, which permitted clerical blessings for couples in “irregular” unions. One side saw it as a capitulation that will have the effect of confirming people in their sin; the other, as a gentle invitation to begin hearing the promptings of the Spirit.
Me? I think these are both examples of a classic evangelistic balancing act: to challenge but not repel; to sympathize but not enable; to convict but not pronounce judgment. I think the “He Gets Us” spot, whatever else may be said of its methods, its enormous cost, its underlying theology, and so on, both succeeds and fails at achieving that balance. Which is probably the case with most of our efforts to evangelize.

Will ‘He Gets Us’ Get Souls?

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Catholic school ≠ Catholic expert.

One of the frequent claims made by Protestants and skeptics of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/transubstantiation-for-beginners">Catholic eucharistic doctrine</a> is that it’s just too complicated. The doctrine of transubstantiation is too much for the human mind to grasp. It’s just ridiculous to believe that bread and wine are completely transformed into the substance of flesh and blood. The bread and wine are clearly still there, for crying out loud. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/william-of-ockham">Occam&#8217;s razor</a> points to a simpler solution.
Eucharistic theology is not meant to be easy. The early Church writer Pseudo-Dionysius found that it is, in fact, impossible to sufficiently explain the truths surrounding the divine essence. But even if theology were meant to be comprehensible, Protestants would be at a loss, for the only thing less sensible than transubstantiation is its alternatives.
Whereas all too many Protestants now dismiss the Eucharist as merely a symbol, the original Reformers and many of the more orthodox Protestant denominations (Lutherans, Irvingians, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc.) hold to some version of the theological concept of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/consubstantiation">consubstantiation</a>. This theology seeks to reconcile the physical “breadlike” properties of the post-consecration Eucharist with Jesus’ insistence that this substance is his body.
Consubstantial means “of the same substance.” The idea is that the Eucharist is two things simultaneously, fully Christ and fully bread. When we put it this way, it instantly brings to mind another similar doctrine, the theology of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-the-incarnation-cause-god-to-change">hypostatic union</a>, by which Christ incarnated is fully man and fully God. The Arian heresy argued that Christ himself was something along the lines of “just a symbol”— just a created fleshly being who serves as a representative from God to men. The modern orthodox Protestants respond to eucharistic Arianism the same way the early Church responded to Christological Arianism in the Nicene creed: Just as Christ is consubstantial with the Father, the bread is consubstantial with Christ.
Protestants disputing transubstantiation can say what they will in favor of consubstantiation, however they may define it—but one thing they can’t say is that it’s more rational or more simple than Catholic eucharistic dogma. After all, if consubstantiation means consubstantial—and it does—and if God is consubstantial with Christ—and he is—and if Christ is consubstantial with a piece of bread—which he is not—then a piece of bread would be something of a Fourth Person of the Trinity. And that’s going to require a lot more mental legwork to explain than the simple, albeit mysterious, dogma of transubstantiation.
Now, the Trinity is a mystery of faith that is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-not-to-share-the-trinity">almost impossible</a> to grasp. But the various creeds dogmatically assert that the three persons therein are consubstantial. The Athanasian creed—which most orthodox Protestants profess—says specifically that “we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.” It is precisely the fact that the three persons are identical in their substance that makes them one God. So if something else were to become consubstantial with any person of the Trinity, it would become God. Humans, by contrast, become the body of Christ in the Church, and so we “become” God through a process called <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-word-that-every-catholic-needs-to-know">theosis</a>, or participation in the life of Christ by grace. But there’s a major difference between theosis and consubstantiation. Theosis is a perfection of our human nature to (in a manner of speaking) make us “gods, sons of the Most High (Ps. 82:6; see John 10:34),” but consubstantiation specifically does not change the nature of bread. It is not any closer to the platonic form of bread—as anyone who has eaten stale matzoh knows well—yet, according to the teaching, it is fully God while still retaining its bread-nature. The bread is consubstantial with the Son, and therefore with the Father, and therefore with the Holy Spirit. How can it be called anything but a second Incarnation?
There is a way of working around this issue: by claiming that Jesus is only spiritually consubstantial with the bread. This, however, runs up against other significant problems. First of all, saying that Jesus’ soul can be present without his body is problematic to begin with. Jesus is a man, which means he has a human soul. Protestants profess this, too, when they recite the Athanasian creed. The soul and the body are a union for human beings (Gaudium et Spes 14). The soul is not a free-floating entity that can be supported by any kind of physical object. But even if humans were spiritual beings who only possess our bodies—<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-fake-quote-from-c-s-lewis">as the Gnostics taught</a>—it would still be hard to make the case for Christ being spiritually present in a piece of bread. But even if we take this case for granted, a spirit “present” in an object is not at all “consubstantial” with the object. A human is not fully body and fully soul, but a unity of the two. We are not, for instance, consubstantial with the Holy Spirit merely because he is present in us.
Detractors of transubstantiation can <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/catholic-cannibals">accuse us</a> of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-receiving-the-eucharist-cannibalism">cannibalism</a> if they like, but railing at us for creating a stumbling block with our overly confusing eucharistic theology is unjust. Actually, I think Protestants really have the opposite problem with transubstantiation. The problem with it is not that it’s abstruse and philosophical, but rather that it&#8217;s incredibly simple. All it requires is the unassuming faith of a child. The only explanation needed is “ecce agnus dei.” The Protestant view—meant to appeal to the intellect—is truly the head-scratcher.

Nothing Beats Transubstantiation

Most religious conversations between believers and nonbelievers lead to a contrast between religion and science. “Science is based upon reason; religion relies upon faith,” the nonbeliever will assert, believing that this in some way damages the respectability of belief. In fact, he is only echoing St. Thomas Aquinas, who taught that theology is done on the light of faith while philosophy—including the philosophy of nature and hence modern science—is based upon the natural light of reason. 
This, of course, is not what the nonbeliever wants to say. In contrasting religion and science, he is implying that the believer is a victim of superstition who fails to acknowledge that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-the-only-real-knowledge-scientific-knowledge">only science can lead to true knowledge</a> because it alone is based on empirical verification and rigorous testing. 
How is the believer to respond? Is it true that science alone is rational because it is based on demonstration and logical reasoning? 
Most people would agree that religious faith is grounded in truths that cannot be demonstrated empirically using the scientific method. For the Catholic, these beliefs of faith are justified because they are accepted as true on the revelation and authority of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. What is not obvious is that scientific knowledge too must be grounded in essential, nonprovable beliefs about the nature of the universe. 
What follows is a brief summary of the scientific method that grounds the scientific enterprise. As many philosophers of science have shown, the success and justification of the method rests on premises that cannot be demonstrated. Instead, these premises are accepted as true by the scientific community because science would be unable to function without them. These premises constitute the essential beliefs of every scientist—his natural faith—and reflect his implicit acceptance of classical metaphysics. 
<h2>First step: induction</h2>
The first step in the scientific method involves the process of induction. The scientist looks around himself, collects data, then makes a probable conclusion. For example, all the swans he sees are white. He therefore proposes the hypothesis that all swans are white.  
But using this process of induction alone, the scientist can never assert truths with absolute certainty. No great number of white swans could rule out the possibility that the next swan could be black. Consequently, the scientist often constructs his hypothesis so that it can be verified and tested through experimentation. The experiment is then thought to confirm or dismiss the hypothesis. 
But even this safeguard cannot guarantee the truth of scientific conclusions. This is illustrated by a simple example used by the philosopher Richard Swinburne (Simplicity as Evidence of Truth, 15-19). Let us say that a scientist is analyzing data composed of four pairs of numbers, the first number in each set being designated “x” and the second “y”: (1,2), (2,4), (3,6), and (4,8). He wants to determine the relationship between the first and the second numbers in the series where x increases by 1 and y increases by 2. 
Using induction, he compares the pairs of numbers and proposes that y = 2x. It is a reasonable hypothesis, but he resorts to more testing and comes up with two more pairs of numbers, (5,10) and (6,12). They seem to confirm his hypothesis, and he rejoices.  
What is not usually realized, however, is that this series of paired numbers can be adequately explained by an infinite number of alternate equations of the form y = 2x + x(x-1)(x-2)(x-3)(x-4)(x-5)(x6)z, where z can be a constant or another function of x. No further testing and collecting of data would be able to distinguish between these alternative equations and the basic equation y = 2x.
 In choosing y = 2x as his hypothesis, the scientist has made the assumption that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-divine-simplicity">simplicity</a> is a marker for truth. 
<h2>Does simplicity beg the question?</h2>
James D. Watson, describing his and F.H.C. Crick’s discovery of the double helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, said it was “an adventure characterized by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty” (The Double Helix, ix). And despite the absence of any definitive data that would favor the heliocentric over the geocentric model for the solar system, Copernicus believed that his hypothesis that the Earth revolved around the sun was true because it was simpler. These are only two examples that suggest that the simplest theories are most likely to be true. Most scientists believe this. Why? 
Swinburne discusses three possible answers (Simplicity, 44-51). First, some might claim that there are reasons why scientists choose simple theories beyond the greater probable truth of a simple theory. But examples from the history of science suggest this is not true. As Watson believed, simplicity itself is thought to be a marker of truth. 
Second, some might argue that the presumption of simplicity is justified because history has shown that simplicity is a reasonable assumption that has worked. Swinburne points out that justifying simplicity this way itself already relies upon the criterion of simplicity and as such begs the question. He points out there are many ways of extrapolating from past historical data.  
“Usually, simplest theories predict better than more complex theories” is one way, but “Usually theories formulated by Greeks in the bath, by Englishmen who watch apples drop, or Germans who work in patent offices . . . predict better than other theories” is another way. (Swinburne is referring here to Archimedes, Newton, and Einstein.)  
This second explanation of past data explains history equally well but is obviously absurd. The first alternative, the simpler one, has to be preferred. However, since simplicity itself is presumed, the appeal to history cannot be used to justify simplicity. 
The third possibility is that some mathematical or logical theorem justifies belief in simplicity. This, in fact, is only a more sophisticated way of saying that some mathematical formula can be devised to demonstrate that induction can give rise to certain knowledge. But, as the skeptic philosopher <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/to-err-is-humean">David Hume</a> wrote, “There can be no demonstrative arguments to prove that those instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (Treatise on Human Nature. 1:3:6). 
The future always remains contingent. Ultimately, if the principle of simplicity is true, it is a fundamental, indemonstrable truth that the scientist must accept on faith. It allows him to do science. 
<h2>Truth is beautiful</h2>
The quote from Watson above is a reminder that the conviction that truth is simple is not the only belief held by the scientist. Closely related to this is the belief that the truth is beautiful or, using Watson’s word, “pretty.”  
The mathematical physicist Paul M. Dirac—after recalling that the greatest modern physicists have looked for “beautiful theories,” “beautiful equations,” and “beautiful generalizations” to explain nature—recounts the case of a physicist who refused to accept his mathematical theory because it did not agree exactly with the observed data. Eventually, it turned out that the mathematical solution was true, and the observation was erroneous. Dirac wrote: 
<blockquote>I think that there is a moral to this story—namely, that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments. . . . It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress” (<a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-evolution-of-the-physicists-picture-of-nature/">“The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature,”</a> Scientific American, vol. 208, 47).</blockquote>
Today, theoretical physicists still use elegance and coherence, elements that reflect the beautiful, as signposts for formulating explanations for nature that may not at first be provable with empirical methods. String theory, with which scientists are attempting to unify all the fundamental forces with gravity, is one example.  
In fact, string theory is just one of many attempts to find a theory-of-everything, a single equation that can be emblazoned on the T-shirt of an M.I.T. student. It is a search driven by the realization that the standard model used by physicists to describe the structure of nature seems too complicated. It is not pretty enough. 
Clearly, it is not easy to justify this intuitive understanding that truth is beautiful in a logical demonstration. However, alongside simplicity, beauty allows the scientists to choose among his different hypotheses. It allows him to accomplish his task. 
Finally, as Pope St. John Paul II points out, the scientist takes for granted that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-it-true-that-there-is-no-truth">truth exists</a> and is the object of his endeavors: 
<blockquote>When scientists, following their intuition, set out in search of the logical and verifiable explanation of a phenomenon, they are confident from the first that they will find an answer, and they do not give up in the face of setbacks. They do not judge their original intuition useless simply because they have not reached their goal; rightly enough they will say that they have not yet found a satisfactory answer (Fides et Ratio 29.). </blockquote>
Hence, for the scientist, the truth is attractive—or, in classical terminology, the truth, because it attracts, is good. 
<h2> Based on an act of faith</h2>
We have seen that the scientific assumption that truth is simple, beautiful, and good cannot be demonstrated and yet must be accepted as true. As Swinburne has pointed out, an inductive argument cannot be used to justify this belief, since it has to be assumed in order to construct any conclusions from historical data. It is a metaphysical first principle, a basic assertion about the nature of reality that, as the ancient and medieval philosophers understood, is fundamental and non-demonstrable. 
Ultimately, it is nothing more than the scientist’s implicit acceptance of classical metaphysics that equates being with truth, unity, beauty, and goodness. Every scientist has to accept that reality is ordered and intelligible. As such, simplicity, beauty, and goodness constitute non-empirical criteria that must be adopted by every scientist in order to accomplish his work.  
These attributes reflect common metaphysical beliefs that must be presupposed in order for anyone—scientist or philosopher or theologian—to be rational. Hence, at the very heart of science’s rationality is an act of the will—an act of faith. 
Science is one example of human reasoning at its best. Most scientists would contend that their work attains truth, pointing at the successes of science—we fly planes, we cure diseases, we communicate on the Internet—to support their argument. These same scientists often fail to realize that these successes necessarily presuppose metaphysical and methodological principles that though non-demonstrable are accepted by them as true and certain. 
Is it surprising that there are truths that cannot be proved? Though most scientists would be suspicious, they shouldn’t be. Kurt Gödel, one of their own, showed in 1930 that there would always be some truths whose truth or falsity cannot be established using the axioms and deductive rules of arithmetic (John Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits, 218-231). He used logic to prove that there were things that could not be proved. Some of these include the metaphysical first principles that ground the scientific enterprise. 
Thus, if science is considered the paradigm of rationality as many people suppose, then one must conclude that believing is also rational. The believer can now correct the nonbeliever who has contrasted science and religion: science is based primarily upon reason but, as does every rational enterprise, including religion, science relies upon principles that are grounded in faith.

Science is Based on Faith

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer delves into the complex question of Christ&#8217;s presence in the Eucharist within Protestant denominations. He emphasizes the distinction between different modes of presence, acknowledging that Christ can be present in various ways, even in non-Catholic gatherings.
Transcript:
My question is, does the church teach that Christ can&#8217;t be substantially present in the Eucharist in Protestant churches? If so, where do we find this teaching in either scripture or apostolic tradition? I can certainly see how the church could teach that we only know for sure, that Christ is present when consecrated by a validly ordained priest, but it seems to me that Christ could indwell the host in a Protestant church if he chose to do so. The twist on your question is the particularity of substantially present, because Christ makes it very clear he&#8217;s present in a lot of different ways. Like it&#8217;s through Christ that the entire universe is held together in existence. We believe in the omnipresence of God, Jesus is God. Yet he&#8217;s present in another mode of presence as he&#8217;s walking the shores of Galilee teaching.
He talks about being present in some way where two or more are gathered in his name. And then in the Eucharist, he&#8217;s not simply present. Presence is maybe not a strong enough term. And we talk about it as his sacramental presence.
But the way we use the term presence now makes it sound like he&#8217;s simply in with it under the bread and wine, as Lutherans believe. And we believe in something richer, that when he says, this is my body, that what had previously been bread is now his body, and not his body substantially united to bread. So in terms of modes of presence,
Lutherans do not claim to have the kind of sacramental mode of presence that Christ declares, and that Catholics have and believe we have in the Eucharist.
So I would say that at the outset, but that there are different modes of presence. So even like in a different Protestant church, you may have what is purely and obviously merely a symbolic representation. And this wouldn&#8217;t be Lutherans, but maybe non-denominationals or Baptists, someone from more of a Zwingian tradition, would take merely a representational view. And yet, Christ is still present in some way in the proclamation of Scripture. He&#8217;s present in some way in the gathering of the people together in his name. And so we wouldn&#8217;t deny even there that there can be modes in which Christ is present, simply not in the full sacramental presence where it is his body that we find in the Eucharist.
Lutheranism is somewhat special because they are desirous of and pursuing
a deeper encounter with the presence of God than many other Protestants are.
And so there&#8217;s a pretty famous line from a letter that then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 1983 to a Lutheran, Johannes Hanselman, in which he writes, &#8220;Even a theology oriented to the concept of succession,&#8221; meaning apostolic succession, &#8220;such as that which holds in the Catholic and in the Orthodox Church, need not in any way deny the salvation granting presence of the Lord in a Lutheran Lord&#8217;s Supper.&#8221; In other words, like Lutherans don&#8217;t have the Eucharist as Catholics and Orthodox, there it is, understand. And they don&#8217;t really claim to have the same thing. And they don&#8217;t offer the Eucharistic sacrifice because only a priest offers a sacrifice.
And this is not a power given to the lay faithful. Nevertheless, Christ can still be present in a really rich way in a Lutheran Lord&#8217;s Supper, just not in the same way that he&#8217;s present in the Mass. Now, if you want to know the biblical evidence for why that is,
the biblical depiction of the Eucharist is that of a sacrificial offering. This was foretold in the Old Testament in Malachi, where we were told in chapter 1, verse 11, that from the rise of the Son to its setting, a pure offering or pure sacrifice would be offered to his name by the Gentiles.
They did okay. One of the first Christian texts outside of the Bible itself views this as foretelling how Gentiles will offer the Eucharistic sacrifice. Moreover, St. Paul, in trying to describe what happens in the Eucharist, compares it to the pagan and the Jewish sacrifices in 1 Corinthians 10. And the reason this matters is, as I mentioned, only a priest offers sacrifice. And so there is a clear sense of there being, especially even though we&#8217;re all a priestly people, as God said of Israel and as St. Peter reminds us of the Church, within this priestly people, there is a class of ordained priests. This was true in the Old Covenant, it&#8217;s true in the New Covenant as well. Isaiah 66, verse 21, talks about how the Gentiles will be gathered together and some of them, God will take as priests and Levites of the New Covenant. So that the priestly and Levitical system wasn&#8217;t simply like a beta test that God just scraps and decides to do something totally different. It is rather a prefigurement of what he&#8217;s doing with the priesthood in Diaconate. So all that&#8217;s to say, that&#8217;s a long answer. We don&#8217;t want to deny the presence of Christ in Christian gatherings, even if they&#8217;re not Catholic. If they&#8217;re baptized, if they are united in Christ in baptism, Christ shows up in many and various ways, including in a Lord&#8217;s Supper that they&#8217;re offering, particularly if they are trying to do what he tells them to do at the Last Supper. But his full presence, the real presence we talk about in the Catholic Church, the real presence believed in by Catholics and Orthodox, this requires the priesthood, only the priests at the time of Jesus, that&#8217;s just the apostles. Only the priests are brought to the Last Supper and told, &#8220;Do this.&#8221; He doesn&#8217;t tell the crowds, he doesn&#8217;t tell everybody. So it is a particular office tied to the ministerial priesthood and a sacrificial offering, and Lutheranism doesn&#8217;t have that, even if they have other modes of presence.
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Is Christ Present in Protestant Churches?

<div>Can you tell me about consecration to St. Joseph?</div><div>In short, consecrating oneself to St. Joseph is an act of entrustment to his fatherly care, protection, and guidance. In the same way that St. Joseph was Jesus’ guardian, the Church calls us to put ourselves under his faithful care and patronage. 
Redemptoris Custos:
<blockquote>
Leo XIII explained “Joseph was in his day the lawful and natural guardian, head and defender of the Holy Family&#8230;. It is thus fitting and most worthy of Joseph&#8217;s dignity that, in the same way that he once kept unceasing holy watch over the family of Nazareth, so now does he protect and defend with his heavenly patronage the Church of Christ&#8221;(44).
</blockquote>
What are the reasons for such great confidence? Leo XIII explained it in this way:
<blockquote>
Recalling that God wished to entrust the beginnings of our redemption to the faithful care of St. Joseph, she asks God to grant that she may faithfully cooperate in the work of salvation; that she may receive the same faithfulness and purity of heart that inspired Joseph in serving the Incarnate World; and that she may walk before God in the ways of holiness and justice, following Joseph&#8217;s example and through his intercession (48).
Even today we have many reasons to pray in a similar way: &#8220;Most beloved father, dispel the evil of falsehood and sin . . . graciously assist us from heaven in our struggle with the powers of darkness . . . and just as once you saved the Child Jesus from mortal danger, so now defend God&#8217;s holy Church from the snares of her enemies (49).
</blockquote>
Today we still have good reason to commend everyone to St. Joseph.
</div>

Consecration to St. Joseph

Karlo Broussard gives a quick overview on the doctrine of predestination, what it means to say that all of our actions are present to God, and why His knowledge of our actions does not take away from our free will.

Do Catholics Believe in Predestination?

<div>May I get a mole removed for aesthetic purposes?</div><div>Yes, skin blemishes may be removed for aesthetic purposes. If the mole is particularly prominent, it could also be argued that removing it also serves a preventive healthcare purpose, to guard against future risk of skin cancer.
</div>

Moles Can Go

In looking at this Sunday’s propers, I came across the collect that was used on this Sunday in many of the modern Anglican prayer books, which reads as follows:
<blockquote>O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls: that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.</blockquote>
I love the strength of these Lenten orations.
Anyway, in our Missal, that collect was actually one of the options for last Sunday, the second Sunday of Lent, alongside a collect making more explicit reference to the Transfiguration. That is where it was in many of the older versions of the Roman Missal and from there going all the way back to the Gregorian Sacramentary in the tenth century, which is itself a compilation of earlier sources. Sadly, it is one of the many prayers cut from inclusion in the Missal of 1970. The Latin original is also quite strong: Deus, qui conspicis omni nos virtute destitui. “O God, who seest that we are bereft of all virtue.” Cranmer’s 1549 translation is expansive and a little more poetic, but I think very much in keeping with the character of the original: “O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.”
We might hear this and think it some depressing Calvinistic statement of depravity. Perhaps that is how Cranmer took it, and perhaps that is why the reformers in the 1960s disliked it, but this is a very old prayer of the Roman Rite, well over a thousand years old, likely dating to the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great. In a way, it questions what we often see as the whole point of Lent. Lent is about self-discipline and penitence, about preparing ourselves for Easter, right? But then we get this downer: O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
The collect stands as a warning and a prayer against that old heresy, Pelagianism—still a very live memory in the sixth and seventh centuries—which is the idea that we can earn the grace of God on our own merits, the idea that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, whatever that means. But it is just as much a warning against a recurring variation of that heresy, known as semi-Pelagianism, that is the somewhat more attractive idea that “God helps those who help themselves.” No, the collect tells us. We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
The language is actually pretty subtle, because it doesn’t say we have no power to help ourselves, but that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. That, perhaps, is an attempt to translate omni vos virtute destitui in a way that does not imply we are doomed to remain merely passive subjects forever. It’s an important distinction, because what it suggests is that we may, in fact, have some ways to help ourselves, but that even those ways are already given by the grace of God. This is a very useful thing to remember at this point in Lent, because it is always tempting to think about how much we’re doing to prepare our hearts for Easter, how much we’re giving up, or fasting, or praying, or going to church—but actually all of those things are already gifts. What we have is grace upon grace.
The difficult part is getting into that cycle of grace, that cycle in which the gifts of God give way to more gifts. St. Paul speaks to us in Romans, in the verses between today’s selection (5:3-4), about suffering that produces endurance, and character and hope—but surely, to many who suffer, suffering would seem to do no such thing. Sometimes suffering is just suffering, and often suffering leads to more suffering; pain begets pain, hardship begets hardship. Not always, maybe—certainly there are many people whose suffering gives character. But, especially when we think about people who are stuck in seemingly endless cycles of poverty or violence or addiction, whether here or throughout the world, the idea that suffering is character-building can sound cruel. In most cases, one cannot simply will to get out of the cycle; something dramatic has to change. The will to break free is only part of the solution: one needs the power to break free.
The Samaritan woman at the well was, pretty clearly, stuck. She was a Samaritan, for starters, stuck before she was even born in a centuries-old feud between the Jews and their less pure neighbors to the north. That cycle of hatred and resentment was not something she chose, but something she embodied. No self-respecting Jew would speak to her, however nice and respectable she chose to be. On top of this, it turns out that even her own people want nothing to do with her. She comes to the well at the middle of the day, in the heat of the sun, because that is the least likely time for anyone else to be there. She’s an outcast, probably, because she’s had five previous husbands, not to mention her current one, who actually isn’t her husband.
It may seem harsh for Jesus to air all these details at the well, but of course, he’s just stating the facts. He doesn’t delve much deeper than that, or try to give explanations or even condemnations, but he does name with stark clarity the situation she’s in. Whether it was something abusive, or manipulative, or violent, or just plain old-fashioned immoral, this woman is in a cycle that she has, no doubt, fed by her own volition, but that is, at the same time, far beyond her control.
The Church Fathers loved to read this story as an allegory of the human soul. In one version of it, the woman’s five husbands are the five senses. St. Augustine says that when Jesus asks her to call her husband, what he’s saying is: seek new understanding beyond the senses. She’s doing that already, in a way, because she’s with a sixth man—but this man, says Augustine, represents not true understanding, but error. Her true and perfect seventh husband is Jesus himself, the Word of God, who will lead her into truth and life.
Whatever you think of the allegory, I think it’s correct in suggesting the nature of Jesus’ call to the Samaritan. He’s not asking her to summon her strength and get herself out of the trap she’s in. He does, though, ask her to acknowledge the truth of her life, which then prepares her to receive the transformation that he offers.
When the Church administers baptism, whether to children or adults, the first step is this same kind of truth-telling: of acknowledging the reality of sin and evil, of naming our inability to get out of it ourselves, and then turning and accepting the grace of the one who offers us new life.
Baptism is one aspect of the living water that Jesus speaks of at the well. Baptism is meant to break us out of the world’s cycle of sin and death, giving us the power to pursue the life that God intends for us. Surely this is part of the logic why, early on, Christians started baptizing their children, not just adult converts: because they wanted to give their children from the very start the power to live a life of true freedom.
But the living water isn’t just baptism. It’s also, and more importantly, the Holy Spirit himself, who is the love of God poured into our hearts, as Paul says in Romans. And here’s the first answer to how we can ever break out of the cycles of sin and evil that trap us: we have to let the Holy Spirit break in. We can escape the cycles not because we have the power to do so, but because the Holy Spirit has the power to change us. It’s not so much that we escape the external situation as much as we escape our former selves. The woman at the well is no longer trapped in a cycle of immorality and social stigma, because she is no longer herself: she is a new woman, through the living water of the Word of God.
That is what God wants to give us this Lent: not just a booster shot in self-improvement, but an insistent reminder of the new identity that we have in Jesus Christ. It is in that identity, and no other, that we can escape the cycles of sin and evil that try to imprison us.

We Just Can’t Help Ourselves

As a young Greek Orthodox Christian growing up in suburban Buffalo, James Likoudis sensed the deficient unity of the Orthodox communion of churches. Like Catholics, the Orthodox have all seven sacraments, including <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/apostolic-succession">validly ordained apostolic successors</a> as their bishops. But because they lack the divinely founded principle of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/pentecost-and-the-papacy">unity</a>—the primacy of St. Peter and his papal successors—ethnicity and, often, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-i-didnt-convert-to-eastern-orthodoxy">related nationalist politics</a> take precedence over <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-rite-not-to-be-roman">a common, unifying faith</a>. In his own experience, because the Greek Orthodox church was in Buffalo and his parents didn’t own a car, the Likoudis family rarely made it to the Sunday Divine Liturgy (Mass), even though there was a Serbian Orthodox church only a few blocks from their Lackawanna home.
“It frankly never occurred to me to try to frequent regularly an Orthodox church of another ethnic group closer to home,” writes Likoudis in Eastern Orthodoxy and the See of Peter, which includes his personal journey to Rome. “We were Greek Orthodox, ‘pure Greeks’ (Hellenes), and though we shared a common religion with Orthodox Serbs, Macedonians, and Russians, different languages and customs make it difficult to feel a sense of real solidarity with them.”
In his apologetics and evangelization, Jim always emphasized that Jesus founded a <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/the-church-visible-or-invisible">visible Church with a visible hierarchical structure</a> (Matt. 16:18-19; 18:15-18)—and if the Church’s leadership was needed in the earliest years, how much more in subsequent decades and centuries, when Jesus and his hand-picked apostles were not visibly present to preserve what the Lord had started during his earthly ministry? Likoudis took his cue from Jesus himself, who prayed that his disciples “may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-helpful-question-for-our-protestant-friends">so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me</a>.”
Because Jesus is eternal God (John 1:1-3, 14; 8:58-59), his words are guaranteed to come to fruition (Isa. 55:10-11), so that his Church would be visibly one, so the world could believe in him—and so that the Church could and would progressively make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:18-20), and the gates of hell would never prevail against it.
The college-aged Likoudis could see that the Orthodox churches, despite their beautiful liturgies “and other elements of sanctification and of truth,” as <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html">Vatican II</a> recognizes in Lumen Gentium 8, had not been able to call an ecumenical council for almost twelve hundred years, let alone validate one, nor could they—as he would see in time—definitively pronounce on the pressing moral issues of our modern day.
Jim was not a “Triumphalist Catholic,” viewing himself as superior to his beloved Orthodox brethren, other Christians, and non-Catholics in general. Rather, he strove to follow Jesus on Jesus’ terms. Because he came to know that Jesus Christ founded his one Catholic Church, Likoudis knew that any catechesis or ecumenism that diminished the divine identity of the Church, with its divinely ordained primacy in teaching and governing power of St. Peter and his papal successors (see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/bible-navigator/primacy-of-peter/luke2231-32">Luke 22:31-32</a>), was bound to fail in one way or another—and thus undermine the Church’s saving mission, including by promoting, wittingly or unwittingly, religious indifferentism. The words I’ve italicized are reflective of Likoudis’s apologetics and the title of his magnum opus, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-divine-primacy-of-the-bishop-of-rome-and-modern-eastern-orthodoxy/">The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy</a>. (I was blessed to serve as an editor for my dear friend and mentor for the updated edition.)
I recall when a young Alan Schreck equivocated on the Church’s divine identity in his catechism Basics of the Faith, which Servant Books originally published in the latter 1980s:
<blockquote>These teachings [of Vatican II] are intended to break down the simple and incorrect dichotomy of one church being the “true church” and all others being “false” churches. Catholics believe that the Catholic church is unique not because it is the only true church or body of Christians but because it possesses the fullness of Christian truth and the means of salvation.</blockquote>
Likoudis, who by then had become the president of the lay apostolate Catholics United for the Faith (CUF), responded that Schreck’s catechism “has many fine qualities with its author manifesting a flair for explaining simply various aspects of Catholic teaching.” Still, in an exchange with Schreck in the February 16, 1989, issue of The Wanderer, Likoudis noted,
<blockquote>To allege, as Prof. Schreck does, that the one true Church also exists, however imperfectly, in other churches and ecclesial communities, is to radically alter the meaning of “the one true Church” as traditionally professed by Catholics. Vatican II declared that there was but “one and unique (only) Church” founded by Christ, and Prof. Schreck concedes that this was simply another way of saying “the one true Church,” “but he does not seem to see that conciliar teaching identifies this “one and only Church of God” and “only Church of Christ” with the visible Catholic Church in this world. This is because he posits an unwarranted distinction between the Church of Christ and the visible Catholic Church. But this is what cannot be done. There is only one Church of Christ, the visible Catholic Church built on the Rock of Peter, and though there are elements of the Catholic Church adhered to by our separated brethren, their possession does not suffice to declare “the church of Jesus Christ as a reality that extends beyond the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church,” as Prof. Schreck would like us to believe. Such a notion only serves to promote the error of those who have mistakenly thought that (emphasis original; see <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html.">CDF, Dominus Iesus 16-17</a>).</blockquote>
Schreck humbly accepted this and other constructive criticism from Likoudis, incorporating it into his Essential Catholic Catechism, the successor to his Basics of the Catholic Faith, <a href="https://tanbooks.com/products/books/the-essential-catholic-catechism-a-readable-comprehensive-catechism-of-the-catholic-faith/?srsltid=AfmBOorZRnZDz8TR0rP1dWIGtWnraRjM_Mc0LgCMnx8AelncolyGStXt">which TAN Books republished</a> in recent years.
Amid the confusion prevalent in the post-Vatican II Church, Likoudis covered the gamut, from infallibility to chastity to the liturgy. He also covered the gamut of the media, from appearing on The Phil Donahue Show to writing, with Kenneth Whitehead, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-pope-the-council-and-the-mass/">The Pope, The Council, and the Mass</a>.
Some observed only the publicly pugnacious, fiercely faithful side of Likoudis, but I was edified to see how tenderly Jim loved his wife, Ruth. Their storied union of seventy years has blessedly begotten six children, thirty-five grandchildren, and—at present—forty-seven great-grandchildren, including five who are unborn. All of them, like many people beyond their clan, have benefited from the faithful witness of the Likoudis Catholic patriarch, who understood, embraced, and defended the great gift Jesus has bestowed on the world in founding and sustaining his Church, the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/pentecost-and-the-papacy">restoration</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/jeremiah-3131-34-foretells-the-new-covenant">fulfillment</a> of the Davidic kingdom of Israel.
“It is simply not true, and never has been, that all bishops are equal by divine right as to their authority, and that Our Blessed Lord established a visible Church without a visible head,” Likoudis noted in the preface of the updated edition of The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Modern Eastern Orthodoxy. “It has been a myopic ‘tunnel vision’ of the Church that denies Christ instituted the divine primacy of Peter and his successors in the Church, and it falsifies the import of testimonies to this primacy available from the Fathers, the councils, and even the popes themselves . . . and that even ecumenical councils necessarily required papal confirmation (as Peter ‘confirming his brethren’ [see Luke 22:31]).”
To honor James Likoudis, and to further his work and life mission, the Likoudis Legacy Foundation has been established.

Remembering James Likoudis

Sometimes I feel as though I’m the last to know things. Maybe you feel the same. I’m coming from the perspective of a husband and father, as a boss in my day job, but also as a lay Catholic who wants to share the truth of our Faith with the world. Information and skills with using that information are vastly important to all of these activities and states of life.
It’s easy to be impatient or frustrated in “I didn’t know” or “not knowing before I should” moments, because let’s face it: the stakes are high. A child wants to know why it’s immoral to do this or that when everyone at school is allowed, and the parent struggles to explain why outside “because I said so.” Or, at a New Year’s party, religion comes up, and someone who knows you are Catholic asks why you don’t just confess your sins to God, and you fumble to come up with a practical explanation rooted in biblical truth. There goes a chance to put the issue to rest and vindicate the Catholic Faith.
We’re all familiar with this. I’ve had my own moments of frustration, when I don’t know what I’m supposed to. But something happened in 2015 that began to straighten things out. The details don’t matter here, except that it ended with a friend saying something profound: “Knowing you don’t know something is still knowing.”
This statement carries profound truth, particularly for those who walk the path of faith. As Catholics, we are invited to embrace the mystery of God and to approach the unknown with both humility and trust. Our faith deals with incredible concepts like revelation, mysteries, miracles, and divisions of authority. Whether we were raised in the Catholic faith or came home through a conversion, even with a lifetime of study, the task of pulling these concepts together is requires a most humble rigor: recognizing the limits of our knowledge. It is not a weakness at all, but a strength—a doorway to deeper wisdom, faith, and understanding.
The Bible reminds us repeatedly of the value of humility in the pursuit of knowledge. In the Book of Proverbs, we are told, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (9:10). This verse underscores that true wisdom begins not in certainty, but in reverence and an acknowledgment of our dependence on God. And God, let’s face it, didn’t back the FedEx truck up to the Garden of Eden with instructions and diagrams of everything we want to know. To “fear the Lord” is to recognize our finite understanding in the face of God’s infinite wisdom.
Job’s response to God is a profound example of what I call “holy ignorance.” After chapters of questioning and wrestling with his suffering, Job ultimately declares, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (42:3). Job’s humility in acknowledging his limited understanding leads to a deeper relationship with God. His story is a powerful reminder that it is not our answers that bring us closer to God, but our willingness to surrender to His mysteries.
The saints, too, have much to teach us about intellectual humility. St. Augustine, one of the Church’s greatest theologians, famously wrote, “If you think you understand God, it would not be God” (Sermon 117). Augustine’s insight challenges us to embrace the mystery of God rather than confining him to the limits of human reason. His own journey of faith—from skeptic to believer—was marked by a growing awareness of his dependence on God’s grace and wisdom.
St. Thomas Aquinas, often regarded as the pinnacle of Catholic intellectual thought, experienced a moment of profound humility near the end of his life. After having written volumes of theological works, he had a mystical experience that left him declaring, “All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.” This confession did not diminish his contributions, but rather highlighted his awareness that even the greatest human intellect pales in comparison to the fullness of divine truth. St. Teresa of Avila offers yet another perspective, reminding us of the importance of recognizing our limitations. “The real truth,” she said, “is humility.”
The Catholic Church has always encouraged intellectual humility as a cornerstone of faith. Pope St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, emphasized that faith and reason are complementary, but human reason must always remain open to the transcendent. He wrote, “Faith liberates reason from presumption, the typical temptation of the philosopher” (76). Meaning all human people, John Paul II was communicating that by acknowledging what we cannot know, we create space for the mystery of God to fill our hearts and minds.
As we settled in to pray the rosary as a family recently, my son, who is eight years old, asked, “What’s a mystery?” I had to think on my feet to get this mighty concept down to a third-grade level. I said something like, “These are things we understand on a basic level, but make us ask questions we cannot have the answer to—and by doing this, they build our faith through trust in God. Like the wedding at Cana—we know that Jesus performed a miracle, but it’s more than that. It was the start of his public ministry. He obeyed the request of his mother, and the whole situation made for an analogy about new wine coming last. On the basic level, we see the story of a miracle, but really there is a lot more we don’t know that informs us about who Jesus is, which deepens our need act in faith, not according to mere narratives.”
Okay, maybe I overexplained, but Dominic said he understood, so I’ll take it as a win.
How can we, as Catholics, cultivate this intellectual humility in our daily lives, especially as we get older? First, we can embrace the mysteries of our faith rather than seeking to explain them away. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Trinity, and the Incarnation all transcend human understanding. By approaching these truths with reverence rather than skepticism, we open ourselves to deeper faith.
Then we can practice humility in our conversations, whether friendly or adversarial. St. James reminds us, “Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (1:19). Recognizing that we do not have all the answers allows us to listen more attentively to others and to learn from their perspectives.
Always, we must turn to prayer. In moments of uncertainty, we can echo the prayer of the father in the Gospel of Mark: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (9:24). This simple plea acknowledges both faith and doubt, and it invites God to lead us into deeper trust.
“Knowing you don’t know something is still knowing” is more than a clever aphorism; it is a spiritual truth with deep roots in Scripture, tradition, and the lives of the saints. As Catholics, we are called to walk in humility, recognizing our limitations while trusting in the infinite wisdom of God. This intellectual humility is not a surrender, but an invitation to grow in wonder, faith, and love.
In a world that often prizes certainty and control, the Catholic perspective reminds us that true wisdom lies in surrendering to the mystery. As St. Paul wrote, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Until that day, may we embrace the beauty of not knowing, trusting that God’s truth will always surpass our understanding. Whether we are defending the Faith, teaching it to our littles, or searching for the bits of knowledge that help us retain and appreciate the divine mysteries, we must always apprehend the strength of humility over all other forms of knowledge.

When You Just Don’t Know

<div>If we don’t have our bodies in heaven until the end of the world, how are we present to each other there? How do we see and interact with each other?</div><div>This is a good question. Of course, the answer comes from theological reflection with help from some philosophical principles. The human soul separated from the body is naturally very restricted in what it can actively know and experience. This is because the human soul, even though it is spiritual in nature, requires the use of the senses for its natural knowledge, and without a body, there is simply no natural sense experience. So, if the soul separated from the body is to have any specific knowledge beyond the awareness of its own existence and its dependence on God, it will need to be helped and strengthened by higher beings—namely, God and the angels.
So we can say that in heaven the souls perceive each other in their vision of their common source and cause: the essence of God. They may also be enlightened by the angels and Our Lady (who has a body already) about God&#8217;s effects in his creatures. Once they are given this knowledge, then they have a simple, intuitive understanding of each other and any of the things that have been shown them. The real question, given all this, would appropriately be &#8220;Is there anything they do not know?&#8221; St. Gregory the Great exclaims in a concise phrase, &#8220;What is it that they cannot see, they who see Him who sees all things?&#8221;
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How Do Souls Without Bodies Interact?

Jimmy Akin joins us and we gave him two simple tasks—explain the Kalam Cosmological Argument and tell us whether it proves that God exists. Jimmy obliged.