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

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

Can a Christian Drink?

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

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

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

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

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

Why Don’t You Think Catholicism Makes Sense?

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

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

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Did Pope Leo XIV deny Peter as the rock?

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

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

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

What are your thoughts on the mystic Luisa Piccarreta?

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

What are your thoughts on Exodus 4:24?

What is the best way to dispose of Catholic literature?

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

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

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

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

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

Are Catholics Wrong About John 6?

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