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The gospel is vitally important to Christians. It’s at the core of the Christian faith. But what, specifically, is the gospel?
The word’s roots mean “good news.” That’s the meaning of the Hebrew term bsorah and the Greek equivalent euangelion. But people have been giving and receiving numerous kinds of good news all through history, so what kind is meant in the Bible?
Previously, I looked at how the word gospel <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/misunderstanding-the-gospel">is used</a> in different groups—particularly Protestant ones—and some of the problems with these uses.
You may have noticed that in our previous discussion, we didn’t look at how Scripture itself uses the term. So that’s what we’ll turn to now.
Is the gospel really all about sin and salvation, about being rescued from hell and brought to heaven through the death of Jesus on the cross? Or is the gospel about something else?
The concept of the gospel leaps to prominence in the New Testament, and one of the things that’s clear about it is that it’s not coming out of nowhere. St. Paul writes that he is
<blockquote>a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures (Rom. 1:1-2).</blockquote>
If we want to understand the New Testament’s gospel, it’s important to look back into the Old Testament to see what was prophesied.
When the Old Testament speaks of good news being announced, it frequently has in mind the announcement of a military victory (2 Sam. 4:10, 18:19-31; 2 Kings 7:9; etc.). In other words, God has given his people victory in battle, and this meaning needs to be borne in mind.
The term good news becomes particularly prominent in the book of Isaiah, which—together with the Psalms—is one of the books that Jesus quotes most frequently in the four Gospels. Since Isaiah is a prophetic work, it is here that we would be most likely to find material directly prophesying the emergence of the gospel in the New Testament.
It is thus no surprise when we consult Isaiah and discover that the end of the book—which frequently deals with the coming age of the Messiah—has multiple references to good news. For example, we read this:
<blockquote>Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; 
lift it up, fear not; 
say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” 
Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; 
behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him (40:9-10).</blockquote>
Here the good news that is announced to Israel is the arrival of God as king. He comes with mighty power, and his right arm is going to rule. This hooks into the theme of military victory that we have already seen associated with the idea of good news.
Next, we read this:
<blockquote>How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, 
who publishes peace, 
who brings good news of happiness, 
who publishes salvation, 
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isa. 52:7).</blockquote>
Here the good news being announced is that there will be a time in which Israel’s God reigns, resulting in a time of peace, happiness, and salvation—the last of these being a common Old Testament reference to salvation from one’s enemies in battle, again hooking into the theme of military victory.
Finally, we read this:
<blockquote>The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, 
because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; 
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, 
to proclaim liberty to the captives, 
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; 
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Isa. 61:1-2).</blockquote>
Here the good news being announced includes encouraging the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to those who are captive or in prison, and the reason for this is the arrival of the year of the Lord’s favor—so once again, God brings about a new and improved state of affairs for his people.
We thus see Isaiah building up a picture of a coming time when God will arrive with powerful might and a strong right arm; he will reign and bring peace, happiness, and salvation from their enemies to his people; and in this time of the Lord’s favor, he will encourage the brokenhearted and announce liberty to captives and those in prison.
That is the essential content of the good news or gospel that Isaiah focuses on.
How well does Isaiah’s understanding correspond to the way the concept is handled in the four Gospels? The earliest reference we find to Jesus preaching the gospel is in Mark 1:
<blockquote>Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (vv. 14-15).</blockquote>
This fits very well with the understanding of the gospel in Isaiah. Here the gospel is presented as being “of God”—that is, it is good news from or about God—and it is announced that “the time is fulfilled”—meaning that what has been previously prophesied is now arriving. The thing that is now arriving is “the kingdom of God.” And the appropriate response is to repent or turn away from one’s sins and believe in the gospel, or good news, of God’s arriving kingdom.
All this fits with the vision of the gospel presented in Isaiah of a time when God would arrive with power and begin to rule in a new golden age, in which God’s people—those who have repented of sin and allied with God—will be blessed.
We also find a connection with Isaiah’s understanding of the good news in Luke, where we read this:
<blockquote>[Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:16-21).</blockquote>
Here Jesus quotes Isaiah 61—a passage we read earlier—and he announces that it was being fulfilled in his ministry. So Jesus was directly hooking into Isaiah’s understanding of the coming time of good news in which God would reign and bless his people.
This understanding of the gospel as the arrival of the kingdom of God is a common theme in the New Testament.
If you search the New Testament for references to “gospel of” or “good news of,” you’ll turn up more than thirty references where the concept is qualified to indicate where it comes from or what it is about. Of these places, seven passages speak of the gospel “of God” (Mark 1:14; Rom. 1:1, 15:16; 1 Thess. 2:2, 8-9; 1 Pet. 4:17), and six passages speak of the gospel “of the kingdom” of God (Matt. 4:23, 9:35, 24:14; Luke 4:43, 8:1, 16:16).
These references are consistent with Isaiah’s presentation of the gospel as the time when God arrives and begins to rule in a golden age, and they reveal a strong New Testament linkage between the idea of the gospel and God and his kingdom.
You may notice that something has been missing from the passages we’ve just covered. Starting with Isaiah and continuing in the New Testament passages just mentioned, there has been a focus on the gospel as being about God coming to rule and establishing his kingdom. But there has been no mention of his Son Jesus Christ, his death on the Cross, heaven or hell, or anything like that. All of those concepts have been missing.
We can’t chalk this up to the individual passages simply failing to mention them. That proposal won’t work for the passages referring to the gospel and the kingdom in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The reason is that Jesus did not begin his ministry and immediately announce his death on the cross. He was preaching the gospel. Mark 1:14-15 and Luke 4:16-21 both portray him doing that early on. But he didn’t reveal his coming death until much later (Matt. 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22), and even then, the disciples didn’t understand what he meant (Matt. 16:22-23, 17:23; Mark 8:32-33, 9:32; Luke 9:45, 18:34).
Also, it wasn’t just Jesus preaching the good news. Before him, John the Baptist had done the same thing (Luke 3:18).
We thus see that—early on—there was a proclamation of the gospel that did not focus on Jesus and his death on the cross. Instead, the focus was on the time arriving for God to come and inaugurate his kingdom. That’s why the gospel is so frequently referred to as the gospel of God and the gospel of the kingdom.
What role Jesus would play in these events had not yet been revealed.
This has important implications for how the New Testament understands the idea of the gospel.
It is true that Jesus died on a cross so that we could be forgiven our sins, saved from going to hell, and brought to be with God forever. However, sin and salvation are not what the gospel is about. That is a fundamental misframing of the concept as the New Testament understands it.
Instead, the New Testament initial understanding of the gospel is as the good news that the time has arrived for God to begin to reign and inaugurate his kingdom.
This is done through his Son’s death on the cross—so Jesus has the pivotal role in bringing God’s kingdom about—but it is the arrival of God’s kingdom that is the good news itself.
It’s to the relationship of the gospel and God’s Son that we’ll turn next.

What Does Scripture Say About the Gospel?

<div>What is the origin of evil?</div><div>God’s creatures—beginning with the devil and his demonic confrères, and then mankind, beginning with our first parents—not the creator, are responsible for the moral evil in the world. Moral evil results from the misuse of the God-given gift of free will, first with the fallen angels and then mankind, and associated general disorder results from that moral evil.
For more on this general subject, please see our responses on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/can-free-will-thwart-gods-plan">how the free will of creatures can’t thwart God’s plan</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/to-hell-with-heaven">the devil’s creation and related consequences</a>, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/augustine-had-it-right-calvin-did-not">how St. Augustine had it right on free will and John Calvin didn’t</a>.
</div>

How Did Evil Come to Be?

Tim Staples discusses the practice of receiving Communion in the hand with a caller on Catholic Answers Live.

Communion in the Hand

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Debate tip: don’t strawman. Steelman.

In this podcast, Catholic Answers senior apologist Jimmy Akin will take up a different challenge to Catholicism every day of the year and show how you can defend the Faith and give answers to skeptics. It’s the perfect podcast for the thinking Catholic on the go—less than five minutes a day to learn a new apologetic argument.

Daily Defense Podcast

Trent Horn briefly outlines the Church&#8217;s teaching on capital punishment and how it differs from other end-of-life issues such as abortion and euthanasia.
Transcript:
Host: So why do you reject Catholic morality? That is the question. We go now to Doug in Michigan listening on 990 AM. Doug, why do you reject Catholic morality?
Caller: Well first, thanks for taking the call, it&#8217;s not so much I reject the morality as I have a question about how the Church approaches capital punishment. We seem to be very vocal when it comes to assisted suicide or <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/abortion">abortion</a>, but am I missing the conversation, the dialogue, on how we view natively the capital punish—or what the right moral teaching is on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/capital-punishment">capital punishment</a>.
Trent: Sure, what I would say is that when people get the impression of the Church is &#8220;not as strong&#8221; quote-unquote on capital punishment, I would say that&#8217;s because capital punishment is not intrinsically wrong. It&#8217;s not something that is wrong in and of itself like abortion and euthanasia. It&#8217;s always wrong to directly kill a baby who&#8217;s growing in the womb. It&#8217;s always wrong to directly kill someone who is in the process of dying just so they can die. Now, it&#8217;s okay to discontinue life support if a person is near the end of life and that&#8217;s not helping them, but you can&#8217;t just simply inject someone with poison and end their life because they&#8217;re in pain or you just can&#8217;t directly kill a baby in the womb. You can&#8217;t directly kill innocent people in that way.
However, it&#8217;s not intrinsically wrong for the state to use its authority to protect society by ending the life of someone who&#8217;s committed a very serious crime like murder. So the Church has supported capital punishment in the past and the Catechism says there may be cases where capital punishment is acceptable today; though the Catechism and people like Pope St. John Paul II have offered prudential judgments about moving away from capital punishment, it&#8217;s not intrinsically wrong and there&#8217;s other theologians who put forward very strong cases that capital punishment can be used morally by the Church and actually should be promoted. A good book on that that just come out is called &#8220;By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment&#8221; by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette, so if you&#8217;d like to look at a great treatment of the issue from that perspective, &#8220;By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed&#8221; by Ignatius Press, the authors are Feser and Bessette. I think you would find that to be very helpful. So thank you very much for calling in.

How Is Capital Punishment Different From Abortion and Euthanasia?

From an early date, the Church in the West has used Latin—not only for administration, study, and communication, but for prayer. This was natural for regions where Latin was the majority language, but as the centuries passed, the Western Church persisted with a Latin liturgy in evangelizing peoples on and beyond the edges of the Roman Empire not conversant with it, such as the North African speakers of Punic and the speakers of Celtic and Germanic languages in western and central Europe. By contrast, the Eastern Churches sometimes made use of the languages of their new converts, even when these had to be specially developed in their written forms for this to be possible, as with Ethiopia’s Ge’ez and Russia’s Church Slavonic.
There is thus a close association between the Western Church and the Latin language. Even today, when the liturgy can be celebrated in a huge range of languages, this relationship has left its mark, and Latin remains an option for both public and private prayer—not only in celebrations of the pre-Vatican II liturgy, but also for the reformed Mass.
Why has the Church been so attached to Latin? The answer is that liturgical Latin is not just a convenient language, but a sacred language. Many religions have sacred languages, or a sacred register of an ordinary language, for use in their liturgies. Islam has classical Arabic, a language not widely understood by its many millions of non-Arabic believers, and some distance from the Arabic spoken today in the Arab world. Buddhism, Hinduism, and the Jain religion share the very ancient sacred language of Sanskrit. Judaism has biblical Hebrew, and the languages of many Eastern churches today are specialized sacred languages: the Church Slavonic and Ge’ez already mentioned, and the koine Greek of the Greek churches.
Sacred languages, like sacred garments, sacred forms of music, and the styles associated with sacred buildings and sacred art, may derive from the non-sacred, but even in their origins, they often have distinguishing features. Koine Greek and Church Slavonic were literary creations rather than natural languages. No one ever spoke the sacred English created by Anglicanism and found in the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible: it includes archaisms and deliberately exotic syntax to mimic Hebrew and Greek. The High German of Luther’s Bible and liturgy was the language of the imperial court, not the language of most German-speakers. Similarly, the form of Latin found, first in the early Latin translations of the Bible and then in liturgical texts, is distinct from ordinary Latin. No Roman ever said, “Amen amen dico vobis”: “Truly, truly, I say to you.” The first word of many Latin prayers, “quaesumus,” “we beseech,” was already archaic when it was first used in them.
There is a powerful religious instinct to have special, separate words, things, buildings, and music for worship. These are intended not to exclude worshippers, but rather to draw them in to something supernatural, to introduce them into a sacred zone for communication with the divine, a communication that transcends mere words. Hearing a sacred language, like entering a sacred building, is a clear signal that we are leaving the ordinary world behind. In common with other religions, the Church still insists on special vestments; sacred vessels not to be used for anything else; and distinctive furnishings, artistic styles, and language, even in the context of the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20010507_liturgiam-authenticam_en.html">vernacular liturgy</a>.
Latin is the Church’s superlative means of creating a sense that we are communicating with God and not with human beings. Even in the act of announcing the liturgical reform that would largely displace Latin with vernacular languages, Pope St. Paul VI <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/changes-in-mass-for-greater-apostolate-8969">described</a> Latin as “sacred utterance” and “the language of the angels”. The effect of Latin on the worshipper was noted by Pope St. John Paul II, who <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1980/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19800224_dominicae-cenae.html">remarked</a> on the sense of worldwide unity it inspired and also “the profound sense of the Eucharistic mystery” it elicited.
There is a parallel with the use of silence in the liturgy. This has a place in the reformed Missal of 1970 (for example, for the “priestly prayers”), and its importance was <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/2003/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20031204_spiritus-et-sponsa.html">emphasized</a> by John Paul II and Pope <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20120124_46th-world-communications-day.html">Benedict XVI</a>. In silence, nothing is communicated by words, but when worshipers are united in an act of adoration, a period of silent prayer can communicate at a deep level, both horizontally, in terms of a sense of solidarity, and vertically, to and from the object of worship, God. Latin does something similar in creating a meaningful frame for prayer.
It is relevant, therefore, that Latin prayers are meaningful. The liturgical formation that all adult Catholics should have should equip us to understand in general terms what is going on in Mass regardless of the language. Even people without formal Latin education know what gloria in excelsis, agnus dei, and the like mean. The Church has always encouraged the study of Latin, and this can provide us with a dimension of liturgical participation that goes beyond what we get in a vernacular translation, since (at least with prayers of ancient origin) it puts us in touch with the words used by our predecessors in the Faith, often from the time of the Fathers of the Church. We can, however, choose to focus on the words, or on the general thrust of the liturgy, just as someone praying the rosary can focus on the words of the Hail Mary or instead on the mystery being considered in that decade. Liturgy in the vernacular tends to be more insistent and demanding of our attention, word by word, particularly when we have to make responses and change our bodily posture.
The Latin of the liturgy has something special to offer those with a knowledge of Latin, since they can understand it better and be directed in their engagement with the liturgy in a more detailed way. Paradoxically, it also has something special to offer those with limited knowledge of the vernacular used in the liturgy they happen to attend. These include the speakers of minority languages and migrants. Many tens of millions of Catholics are obliged to worship not in their mother-tongue, but in a second language: in Africa, usually the old colonial language; in China, the “standard Chinese” favored by the State. The use of a vernacular inevitably favors those most at home in it, and also those who prefer verbal communication over non-verbal communication: adults over children, the more educated middle class over the working class, and even women over men.
In this way, Latin can be a leveler, like silence. As Pope St. John XXIII <a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/john23/j23veterum.htm">expressed</a> it, Latin belongs to no one in particular, but is “gracious and friendly to all.” The experience of the sacred that Latin makes possible has been appreciated by saints and scholars, soldiers, peasants, and sinners, and even small children, since the Church’s early centuries. It remains available to us today.

How Dead Is Latin, Really?

By <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/the-call-on-the-field-is-reversed">giving an award</a> to the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” the Los Angeles Dodgers have declared to the whole world that Dodger Stadium, once a venue for America’s Pastime, is now a stage for blasphemy against Almighty God.
Either the execs in Dodger management don’t know what blasphemy is or they don’t care. I invite them to call Catholic Answers. We can explain <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/blasphemy">sins against the First Commandment</a>. We can explain the consequences, too.
I don’t think I’ll wait by the phone for that call.
Meanwhile, I invite all Catholics, and indeed all Christians, to ask themselves, “If I attend a Dodgers game, if I give my dollars to the blasphemers, am I cooperating in blasphemy?”
The answer is “yes.”
I know that theologians who are anxious about not burdening the consciences of the faithful will rush to make distinctions between formal and material cooperation, immediate and mediate, proximate and remote. Very well. I know that baseball fans are not intending to cooperate in blasphemy when they head to the ballpark. I know that the dollars they spend on bleacher seats are not essential to the funding of the blasphemy. I also know that it is well-nigh impossible to spend a dollar anywhere without some of it funding the destructive plan of some agent of devil.
However, when the offenders are so aggressive in their contravening of the Divine and Natural Law, (I think of Starbucks, Disney, Target, Anheuser-Busch and now the Dodgers execs)—Christians can decide to simply stop enriching the enemies of Jesus Christ. Don’t stop there. Encourage one another in refraining from underwriting evil. Offer a little fraternal correction to your brothers and sisters in Christ who can’t let go of that latte. Remind them they won’t be holding it at their judgment.
One thing more: I wish no ill on the multinational corporations mired in the consequences of their self-inflicted wounds (Target stock has shed $9 billion, I’m told). In fact, I invite them to renounce their promotion of wickedness and to undergird their resolution with a large donation to a worthy Catholic charity. Target, send a check to <a href="https://couragerc.org/">Courage International</a>. Dodgers Management, send a check to the <a href="https://benedictinesofmary.org/">Benedictines of Mary Queen of Apostles</a>.
Attach a yellow Post-It note asking them to pray for your immortal souls.

Stop Buying Blasphemy

A common charge against the rosary is that it violates Jesus’ prohibition of “vain repetition” (Matt. 6:7, KJV). Catholics often answer this charge by pointing to the fact that Jesus isn’t condemning repetitious prayer as such, but mindless prayer—prayer that involves repeated words with no attention, no intention, and no engagement of the heart. This makes sense, given that Jesus instructs his disciples not to pray “as the Gentiles do,” which involved repeated prayers aimed at appeasing their gods rather than forming the heart.
But you might wonder, “How attentive do we have to be in praying the rosary?” And what’s the point of the repetition to begin with, even if it’s not bad as such?
These are great questions. And they need answers. So let’s see what we can come up with.
Concerning the first question, I think we can look to St. Thomas Aquinas for some help. In the second part of the second part of his Summa Theologiae, question 83, article 13, Aquinas explains that when it comes to the end of prayer being better obtained—which is devotion (a movement of the will to readily subject oneself to things pertaining to God)—Aquinas says that conscious attentiveness is necessary. But when it comes to the effects of prayer, sustained attentiveness is necessary only for one of the three.
For meriting an increase in grace (the first effect) and obtaining what we ask (the second effect), the original intention with which one begins the prayer is sufficient. But for what he calls “spiritual refreshment of the mind” (the third effect), continued attentiveness is necessary. For support, he quotes 1 Corinthians 14:14, where St. Paul writes, “If I pray in a tongue . . . my understanding is without fruit.”
Now, you might be asking yourself, “What kind of attentiveness does Aquinas have in mind here?” He lists three kinds.
First, there is attention to words—making sure we don’t say the wrong thing. Second, there is attention to their meaning. Third, there is attention to the end of prayer—namely, God—and what we’re asking for.
For Aquinas, all three matter. But the last one is most important, especially because when prayers are committed to memory, the first and second senses of attention are easily fulfilled.
Here’s another important question: even if repetition is okay, what’s its purpose?
I can think of four things repetitious prayer achieves.
First, it orders the will toward God. Every Hail Mary and Our Father that we pray involves a new act of desire for the spiritual goods we’re asking for in the prayers. Such repetitive requests keep the will fixed on these spiritual goods, which in turn keeps the will fixed on God, because we recognize he’s the source of these goods.
Second, repetition intensifies love—for Jesus and for our Blessed Mother. Each repeated prayer expresses renewed trust in God’s grace and renewed trust in our Lady’s assistance, thereby deepening our love for both. As St. Augustine says in Epistle 130, his Letter to Proba, “by means of words and other signs [in repeated prayer] we arouse ourselves more effectively to an increase of holy desires.”
Third, repetition provides a stable verbal framework, freeing the mind to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s life rather than scramble for new words, while at the same time willing the requests that each prayer expresses.
Fourth, the repeated pursuit of the good in and through each prayer forms virtue, building stable dispositions of faith, hope, and charity. That shapes the soul over time into a saintly soul.
So there we have it: a fourfold purpose of repetitious prayer.
Okay. There’s one last thing I want to share. And it’s not so much a theological question, but more of a pastoral point. Again, it comes from Aquinas.
In article 14 of that same question mentioned above, Aquinas provides us with a helpful principle: the quantity of a thing should be commensurate with its end. 
In layman’s terms, that just means you use as much of something as the goal calls for—no more, no less. For example, you use only the amount of medicine that’s needed for restoring health. You don’t use ten painkillers for a mild headache—the amount should fit the purpose.
Applied to prayer, Aquinas says prayer should last long enough to arouse devotion—but if it causes weariness, it should stop. Here’s what he says:
<blockquote>Prayer should last long enough to arouse the fervor of the interior desire, and when it exceeds this measure, so that it cannot be continued any longer without causing weariness, it should be discontinued.</blockquote>
If we apply that to repetitious prayer, Aquinas would have us stop the repetition and employ another form of prayer if such repetition is causing weariness within the soul—a loss of fervor of devotion.
That matters pastorally. Some Catholics feel guilty for not wanting to pray the rosary. But they fail to recognize that it might be due to the simple fact that they’re weary of the repetition and need to foster devotion in some other way. Perhaps at that moment the Holy Spirit is moving them to another form of prayer for a season. Just like in human relationships, our relationship with the Lord involves a variety of different ways in which we express love for him.
So here’s the wrap-up!
Catholics would do well to continue being prepared to answer the “vain repetition” charge. But we’d also do well to equip ourselves to explain the spiritual benefits of repetitious prayer and the pastoral counsel surrounding it. This isn’t just for the purpose of persuading others about the rosary; it’s for our spiritual benefit as well.

When NOT to Pray?

Can Mary Save Us?

In the United States, in England, and across the developed world, <a href="https://www.capterra.com/resources/where-are-all-the-men-exploring-the-gender-gap-in-church/">women outnumber men</a> in Catholic churches on Sundays. (Figures over time in the USA can be seen <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/05/13/gender-gap-in-religious-service-attendance-has-narrowed-in-u-s/">here</a>; a worldwide study can be seen <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/">here</a>.) The phenomenon got a mention in Pope St John Paul II’s 1988 post-synodal exhortation Christifideles laici 52: “various sectors in the Church must lament the absence or the scarcity of the presence of men.” Despite this, there seems to be much more <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/04/19/church-crisis-why-do-catholic-women-stay">discussion</a> of the lapsation of women in the Church, and far more concern is expressed about teachings and liturgical practices that might put women off.
Male Catholics might be forgiven for forming the impression that the Church’s hierarchy and commentariat do not, in general, view their disappearance from Mass as very important. Certainly, there are some voices that seem more eager to use the absence of men as an <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/faith-and-justice/now-time-married-priests">argument</a> for the ordination of women than to do anything to redress the imbalance.
This month of the Sacred Heart reminds us that the Church is founded on love. This is not maternal love, vitally important though that is, but a specifically masculine, self-sacrificial love, like that of a husband, as St. Paul exhorts husbands, “Love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it” (Eph. 5:25). Christ’s love for us and for the Church, symbolized by his sacred heart, fits into the image of God as a father, and the chosen people as his wife or son, found throughout the Old Testament.
This is just to say that the masculine should not be written out of the Church’s life, any more than the feminine.
It is sometimes said that women are naturally more religious than men, but this is not supported by the evidence. Men are more religiously observant than women in Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, even as those traditions are practiced in the West. On the other hand, the more liberal a Christian denomination is, the more difficulty it has retaining men. The 1936 United States Census (before the relevant questions were dropped) <a href="https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpodles.org%2Ffiles%2FChurch-Impotent%2FChurchImpotent_Chapter1.pdf&amp;data=05%7C02%7Cdbelsky%40catholic.com%7Cadfb44f8baad4fc14bb808dc8497d542%7Cdd9faf74765b495cac09cabd182c95a7%7C0%7C0%7C638531036010142118%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=3kOYfkZpOchL1IH4FHT%2F%2BUS%2Bsl8Pev5wCKIzlLiNOys%3D&amp;reserved=0">found</a> (see pg. 11) that the sex ratios among religions varied from Eastern Orthodoxy (slightly more men than women) and Catholics (very slightly more women than men) to the other extreme, of Unitarians (1.4 women to every man), Pentecostalists (about 2 to 1), and Christian Scientists (3.19 to 1). Mainline Protestants were in the middle.
It is not difficult to understand what happened. In 1936, Western Catholic liturgy was more comparable to that that of the Eastern churches and had important things in common with the liturgies of Orthodox Judaism and Islam: ritual, solemnity, the use of a sacred language, and so on. The liturgy typically encountered today in Catholic churches has clearly moved in the direction of the female-dominated denominations: it is more spontaneous and emotional; it is not primarily concerned with evoking a sense of the sacred, but a sense of community; and it relies more heavily on verbal communication.
The last point is useful because it allows us to connect this process with another area of research. It is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7186802/">well established</a> that women are more verbally oriented than men: baby girls start talking sooner, girls are less likely to be dyslexic, women score higher in measures of verbal ability, they outnumber men in college foreign language departments, and so on. Men rely more on, and are often more comfortable with, non-verbal communication.
Evidently, the liturgical traditions of Islam and Orthodox Judaism, which use chant and sacred language (ancient Hebrew and Classical Arabic) not readily understood by most worshipers, are not primarily concerned with getting their message across by means of verbal communication. Instead, though their texts, postures, clothing, and ceremonies, they raise heart and mind to God by creating a sacred atmosphere and a feeling of historical continuity, and by the worshiper’s sense of inward, intentional participation in the act of worship. The same can be said for traditional religions from all over the world, including the Eastern churches and the traditional Latin Mass of the Western church. They are all examples of effective non-verbal communication.
The liturgical alienation of men has been an unfortunate unforeseen consequence of theological fashion. As the Jesuit sociologist (and theological liberal) Patrick Arnold <a href="https://archive.org/details/wildmenwarriorsk00patr">expressed it</a>, “as liberal religion stresses increasingly the immanent and ‘horizontal’ dimension of faith to the exclusion of the transcendent and ‘vertical’ reality, it inadvertently ignores the voracious appetite of men for the Great, the Wholly Other, and the Eternal” (pp. 77-78).
Some attempts to get men back to Mass have successfully used male-friendly retreats and group activities, only for the men involved to discover that when they do return to church, it is just as male-unfriendly as before. Others attempt to create a sense of religion as something tough and masculine, solely by berating and humiliating men and blaming them for all the problems of the Church. Those who try this need to understand that men are already given far too much of an impression that they are “toxic” and unwelcome.
What is needed for men to return to their places in Mass is for them to find a congenial atmosphere and a compelling message. This is not going to happen if the sanctuary looks like an almost exclusively feminine zone, if Mass lacks dignity, and if spirituality is presented as all about sharing our feelings with strangers. Indeed, it is quite clear to most priests, I suspect, what changes they could make to their churches, parish activities, and liturgies that would make them more masculine, and I doubt most female Catholics would object, especially if they saw the results. Nevertheless, there seems to a psychological barrier against doing anything along these lines. Anything male-friendly seems to be understood as traditionalist, rigid, and even misogynistic.
I don’t think Catholic women want a Church without their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. The Church needs to appeal to both sexes.

Getting Men to Mass

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What is purgatory?

This puts souls at risk...

<div>Please provide information on atheism.</div><div>Please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/search?q=atheism">this link</a> for various resources from Catholic Answers.
You may also want to purchase our <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-atheism/">20 Answers</a> booklet on atheism as well as Trent Horn&#8217;s <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/answering-atheism-how-to-make-the-case-for-god-with-logic-and-charity/">Answering Atheism</a>.
</div>

Information on Atheism

Is Birth Control More Sinful Than War?

How can missing church on Sunday be a mortal sin? It isn&#8217;t even the Sabbath, so why would Catholics refer to attending mass on Sundays as a grave matter? Jimmy Akin answers this question in an excerpt from Catholic Answers Live.
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Transcript:
Even though Sunday is not literally the Sabbath, it is the Christian equivalent of the Sabbath. It&#8217;s described in the Bible as the Lord&#8217;s day. And so, since the first century, Christians have met together on Sundays. St.Paul, for example, in the Corinthian Correspondence, talks about taking up a collection on Sundays when Christians meet together. So we know Christians were meeting on Sundays as the Lord&#8217;s Day for religious services. The question then becomes, how serious is that obligation, using the Jewish Sabbath as a parallel under the law of Moses, if you were a Sabbath-breaker, that&#8217;s one of the Ten Commandments, it&#8217;s right up there against don&#8217;t commit murder, don&#8217;t commit adultery.
Right up there is, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. In fact, you could even under the Mosaic law, you could even be killed, executed, if you were a Sabbath breaker who just disregarded the Sabbath. So this was regarded as an extremely serious obligation in the Jewish community, and it is among the Ten Commandments. And so even though we&#8217;re not obliged to keep the same day holy, the obligation to keep that day holy is a grave one. It&#8217;s not something that should just be ignored because we meet on that day. The obligation is a grave one because we have a grave obligation to render proper worship to our Creator. And this is how we do that. So that&#8217;s the basic reason.
Now, there can be good excuses for missing Mass. If you&#8217;re sick, don&#8217;t go. There are legitimate reasons for not going. But as a matter of principle, the obligation to meet together for communal worship, to give proper worship to our Creator together, is a grave one. And we need to honor that.

Is Missing Sunday Mass a Mortal Sin?

Intense expectation: this is the feeling and mental attitude of our worship as we begin the all-too-short season of Advent. It has so much to wait and watch out for, and yet it lasts not even thirty days. (The Eastern rites have more time of preparation, as does the Ambrosian rite of Northern Italy around Milan; they get six weeks, not just four!)
The texts of the Sunday and daily Masses of the season give us so many lovely motives for directing our hearts’ attention to the coming of the Savior. Unfortunately, we often miss these very ancient selections, as they are often omitted at weekday Masses (they shouldn’t be) or replaced by other songs from the missalette on Sundays.
Some of the most venerable selections going back to the ancient origins of the rite of the Church in Rome are the entrance antiphons and Communion antiphons for the four Masses that bring Advent to its close and fulfillment on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. These are the most often forgotten, as we sing our familiar Christmas carols (why not do both?), but if we pay attention to them, they provide a profound ground for our meditation.
They just happen to correspond to the four times Our Lord offers us for watching for him in the Gospel lesson of this Sunday: Christmas Eve, Christmas Midnight, Christmas Dawn (“cockcrow’), and Christmas Day. They are found in both the current and the classical forms of the Roman Mass.
What I propose in this first week of Advent is a simple devotion you can easily use each of the days of Advent in preparation for the great graces of the Lord’s birth of the Virgin Mary. On the first Sunday of Advent, the Church had us sing or recite the entrance antiphon or introit: “To you O Lord I lift up my soul.” This little four-part devotion will keep us lifting our soul to the Savior as he comes to save us.
Christmas Eve: “Today you will know that the Lord will come and he will save us, and in the morning you will see his glory” (cf. Exod.16:6-7). Reflect on this promise of hope and of glory for a minute or so, and pray a Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
Christmas Midnight: “The Lord said to me: you are my Son. It is I who have begotten you this day” (Ps. 2:7). Reflect on this mysterious birth of God the Son from all eternity from the Father’s heart—that in him is an eternal, everlasting Christmas between the unbegotten Father and his only-begotten Son. Pray a Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
Christmas Dawn: “Today a light will shine upon us, for the Lord is born for us; and he will be called Wondrous God, Prince of peace, Father of future ages: and his reign will be without end” (Isa. 9:1,5; Luke 1:33). Reflect a while on the marvelous names for the Holy Child, and pray a Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
Christmas Day: “A child is born for us, and a son is given to us; his scepter of power rests upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Messenger of great counsel” (Isa. 9:5). Reflect on how this child is, for you and for all the human race, born to rule over us and to teach us, and pray a Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
How sweetly and firmly we will prepare our hearts with these ancient themes for the celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh! And this will take only a few short moments a day.
If we do this, we will be obeying the Savior’s command to watch for his coming as his faithful servants, eagerly expecting his arrival. There’s nothing better than that.
Now, if you have the time and the inclination, I have another optional recommendation. Each of these texts has a beautiful Gregorian chant setting from the Church’s gradual. You might want to hear them. So do a search online for Christmas Eve; it’s called “Hodie scietis.” And then do a search for Christmas Midnight; it’s called “Dominus dixit ad me.” For Christmas Dawn it’s “Lux fulgebit.” And for Christmas Day it’s “Puer natus est nobis.”
Maybe you won’t have time to hear them all at once, but it would be great if you could hear them each at least once during Advent. They are all certainly on the internet, and since you have the translation of the entrance verse, you will know what is being sung, and you can allow the genius of the music to convey to you the spirit of the Church down through the ages as she has sung for many centuries.
Our Lady and your good angel will inspire you with the spirit of hopeful prayer as you take up the prayer of our good Mother, the Catholic Church, in her incomparable and deep awareness of the events of our salvation that are renewed for us each year, beginning with this the first week of Advent.

How to Make Advent Useful

<div>Can Muslim marry a Catholic? I’m dating a Catholic woman and the problem is that I need to raise children in Islam, not in Christianity. Although I will let her do her ceremonies. Can we perform marriage in a mosque only?</div><div>Catholics needs a dispensation to marry an unbaptized person (can. 1086 §1). In order to receive that dispensation, the following conditions (can. 1125) must be met:
<ul>
<li>the Catholic party must commit to remaining Catholic</li>
<li>the Catholic party must commit to raising the children Catholic</li>
<li>the unbaptized party must commit to the Church&#8217;s understanding of marriage (permanent, faithful, life giving, and until death)</li>
</ul>
If those three requirements are fulfilled then a dispensation can be obtained for the marriage. If the marriage ceremony in the Church would cause grave difficulties, a dispensation can also be obtained for the marriage to take place elsewhere (can. 1127 §2).
While the first and third requirements might not be a problem for you, it would appear that the second requirement (baptizing and raising the children as Catholic) is going to be a big problem.
</div>

May a Catholic Marry a Muslim?

Romans 6:3-4 is a go-to passage for many Christians when they want to show from the Bible that baptism actually does something—that it saves. Paul tells us that through baptism, we’re “buried therefore with [Christ] . . . into death . . . [so that] we might walk in newness of life.” Then in verse 7, he adds that in this baptismal death, we’re “freed from sin.”
Now, here’s something interesting: The Greek word translated as “freed” is dikaioō, which actually means “to justify.” In other words, Paul is saying we’re justified—or saved—through baptism. That’s a pretty strong claim.
But not everyone agrees. In his <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Rome-Biblical-Historical-Catholicism-ebook/dp/B0793SQWDL/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1LCKFYC64V0ZU&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Fk5bj4NZuV1mGQBc5qjfWFv6odqKjmqpAw8TX1cbs0A.Viow3QZMayCj6fzpIR95R0jsi7_dvJKkcQrxcxLxxqM&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=todd+baker+Exodus+from+Rome&amp;qid=1746209779&amp;sprefix=todd+baker+exodus+from+rome%2Caps%2C115&amp;sr=8-2">book Exodus from Rome: Volume I</a>, Protestant theologian Todd Baker pushes back on this idea. He argues that Paul isn’t even talking about water baptism here. According to Baker, Paul is referring to something merely spiritual. He gives two main reasons for this view, so let’s take a look at both.
Baker’s first argument is that Paul never actually says the word “water.” Here’s how he puts it:
<blockquote>Paul’s use of baptism in Romans 6:3-5 does not mention water anywhere, and therefore can conceivably convey the greater idea of identification with Christ in his death and resurrection for the sinner’s salvation, without necessarily pointing to the idea of the rite or act of water baptism . . . if Paul means a water and ritual baptism in Romans 6, he would have clearly included the term “water” as the descriptive modifier to baptism, which he does not.</blockquote>
But this is kind of a stretch. Think about it: Paul wrote Romans around A.D. 50. That means for about twenty years, Christians had already been practicing water baptism, following Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:19 to go out and baptize. And we have multiple examples of it in action—just look at Acts 8:16, 10:48, 11:14, 16:15 and 33, and 18:8, plus 1 Corinthians 1:16.
So, for early Christians, “baptism” would have naturally meant water baptism. It was the norm. Paul wouldn’t have needed to tack on the word “water” every time. Just like today—if someone says he got baptized, you assume he means with water. There’s no confusion.
And let’s be real—Paul is describing a powerful transformation here: dying and rising with Christ. That’s a pretty dramatic image, and what better way to symbolize that than through a ritual washing? Ritual washing with water fits the theological message perfectly. Take away the washing, and you lose a lot of the meaning.
Now, Baker might respond by saying, “Well, Paul must be referring to something else besides water baptism because baptism is just a symbol of our union with Christ—it doesn’t actually do anything.” But that’s begging the question. In other words, you can’t argue that Romans 6:3-4 doesn’t support salvation by baptism just because you already believe that baptism doesn’t save. That’s the very thing we’re trying to figure out.
Baker may also counter and say that I’m misunderstanding his argument, thinking he’s arguing that Paul should have merely mentioned the term “water.” But the next few lines specify how Paul would have used “water” as a modifier if he envisioned water baptism. Baker writes (emphasis added),
<blockquote>Consequently, the Apostle would have written Romans 6:3-4, if water baptism were the productive means of salvation and union with Jesus Christ, to read: “As many of us were immersed (baptized) into water in Christ were immersed into water into his death. Therefore we are buried with him by immersing in water into his death.</blockquote>
Baker assumes that if Paul were talking about water baptism, Paul should have said we’re baptized into water. But that would be strange, since Paul would be saying the ritual act of water baptism unites us to water itself, which makes no sense.
Moreover, this detracts from what Paul actually says: “We baptized into Christ.” Spiritual union with Christ is the result of the baptism that Paul speaks about. This fits perfectly with the sacramental reading of the text. Water is just the medium through which this union with Christ takes becomes a reality.
Now, Baker’s second argument seems to capitalize on this very point: We’re baptized into Christ. He makes a big deal of the Greek preposition eis, which means “into.” The fact that Paul says we’re baptized into Christ leads Baker to conclude that Paul is talking about a spiritual baptism, not a physical one:
<blockquote>It is simply what the text of Romans 6:3-4 says it is: a baptism into Christ. . . . To merely assume that Romans 6:3-4 is speaking about the ritual of water baptism is to force that idea into the text when it clearly speaks of a baptism into Christ, not a baptism of water.</blockquote>
But this reasoning is flawed, too.
Baker is mixing up two questions: (1) What are we being baptized into? and (2) What kind of baptism are we talking about? Baker thinks the answer to the first question logically entails the answer to the second. But that’s not true.
There’s nothing about having union with Christ that logically excludes a physical action bringing about such a spiritual state. Even Protestants believe that the physical act of verbal confession that Jesus is Lord brings about our salvation. And they quote Romans 10:9-10 to prove it, which is commonly called “The Roman Road to Salvation.”
Spiritual union with Christ, therefore, could be brought about by the physical ritual of water baptism. Thus, Baker’s appeal to the spiritual effect of union with Christ doesn’t necessarily exclude water baptism.
At the end of the day, Baker’s case against water baptism in Romans 6 just doesn’t hold up. Expecting Paul to explicitly say “water” every time he mentions baptism isn’t realistic, especially given the historical context. And insisting that being baptized “into Christ” rules out water baptism is based on assumptions that don’t follow from logic or the text.
On the flip side, reading Romans 6 as referring to water baptism makes sense both historically and theologically. It fits with what the early Christians practiced, and it lines up with the powerful spiritual transformation Paul describes. Far from being a stretch, the sacramental reading of this passage is the most natural one.

What Good Is Water Baptism?

<div>If mankind evolved over thousands of years, when was a soul introduced?</div><div><blockquote>The teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis 36).</blockquote>
The Church teaches that the physical and genetic makeup of the human person can come from an evolutionary process. The soul, on the other hand, is something that was immediately created by God.
When that happened is open to theological speculation. The Church has no official teaching on when in the human soul first appeared in history.
</div>

When Was the First Human Soul?

Anyone off the street can claim to be a <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/modern-prophets-and-prophesy">prophet</a> and make predictions. So how do we know Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the rest of the prophets in the Bible weren&#8217;t just making things up? Jimmy Akin explains how we sort the real ones from the fakes.

How Do We Know the Old Testament Prophets Weren’t Lying?

Bible in Texas Schools

Meatless Fridays

Conclave Movie

Martin Scorsese’s TV series on the Saints

Flannel Panel

Does God ever approve of abortion?

In light of the new Vatican document, is it sinful to hold an anti-AI position? I don’t think we can practically use AI well.

In another country (Switzerland), are they doing A.I. confession? Is this possible? What are the repercussions of this if true?

Is the Vatican / Catholic Church open to inputting the Archives into A.I.?

I think A.I. is great for making my life a bit easier (opinion/comment, not question).

I was praying with the rosary with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on YT, but something didn’t feel right (I remember him live); it turned out to be an A.I. generated voice. Is it okay to pray with A.I. generated resources?

I heard that God created man and Satan created A.I. because Satan can only copy God’s power; is this logical?

Karlo Broussard, the author of <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/purgatory-is-for-real/">Purgatory is for Real</a>, addresses an email correspondent who asks: &#8220;Isn&#8217;t eternal punishment unfair for finite sins?&#8221;

Is Hell Unfair?

A Catholic Priest changed biology FOREVER!

Can we actually earn heaven?

I want to know what Father thinks about the long lines for communion and the short lines for confession.

How should I engage my siblings who are lukewarm?

My husband goes to communion but not to confession. I’m worried about what to tell him.

What is the difference between discipleship and a relationship with Jesus?

I go to Mass a few times a week and help at the parish. But some people go to Mass every day. Should I be doing that too?

How important is it to have somebody else with you when evangelizing? Jesus sent the disciples out two by two but it’s hard for me to find a good partner.

Real Discipleship

Once, we had a couple of converts to the Catholic faith come by the Catholic Answers office to get a tour of our facility and to meet the apologists who had been instrumental in their conversions. One of the two gave me a letter she had received from her Pentecostal pastor. He had written to her upon his discovery that she was on her way into full communion with the Catholic Church. She asked for advice concerning how to respond, or whether she should respond at all.
As I read through the multiple points her former pastor made, one brought back particular memories for me, because it was one of my favorites to use in evangelizing Catholics back in my Protestant days. The Catholic Church, he warned, teaches “doctrines of demons,” according to the plain words of 1 Timothy 4:1-3:
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the Faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.
What is consecrated celibacy if not “forbid[ding] marriage”? And what is mandatory abstinence from meat during the Fridays of Lent if not “enjoin[ing] abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving”? So says this Pentecostal pastor. How do we respond?
Despite appearances, there are at least two central reasons these claims fail when held up to deeper scrutiny:
First, St. Paul in 1 Timothy 4 was obviously not condemning consecrated celibacy, because in the very next chapter of this same letter, he instructed Timothy pastorally concerning the proper implementation of consecrated celibacy with regard to “enrolled” widows:
Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband . . . well attested for her good deeds. . . . But refuse to enroll younger widows; for when they grow wanton against Christ they desire to marry, and so they incur condemnation for having violated their first pledge (5:9-11).
There is nothing ordinarily wrong with a widow remarrying. Paul himself makes this clear in Romans 7:2-3:
A married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives. . . . But if her husband dies she is free from that law, and if she remarries another man she is not an adulteress.
Yet the “widow” of 1 Timothy 5 is condemned if she remarries? In the words of Ricky Ricardo, Paul has some “‘splainin’ to do.”
The answer lies in the fact that the widow in question had been “enrolled,” which was a first-century equivalent to being “consecrated.” Thus, according to Paul, these “enrolled” widows were not only celibate, but consecrated as such.
Second, Paul was obviously not condemning the Church making abstinence from certain foods mandatory, because the Council of Jerusalem, of which Paul was a key participant in A.D. 49, did just that in declaring concerning Gentile converts,
It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity (Acts 15:28).
This sounds just like &#8220;enjoining abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving.&#8221; So there is obviously something more to 1 Timothy 4 than what we get at first glance.
What was Paul actually calling “doctrines of demons”? In A Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, the 1953 classic for Scripture study, Fr. R.J. Foster gives us crucial insight into what Paul was writing about in 1 Timothy 4:
Behind these prohibitions there may lie the dualistic principles which were already apparent in Asia Minor when this epistle was written and which were part of the Gnostic heresy.
Evidently, Paul was writing against what might be termed the founding fathers of the Gnostic movement, which split away from the Church in the first century and would last over 1,000 years, forming many different sects and taking many different forms.
Generally speaking, Gnostics taught that spirit was good and matter was pure evil. We know that <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/285.htm">some of them even taught</a> that there were two gods, or two eternal principles, that are the sources of all that is. There was a good principle, or god, who created all spirit, whereas an evil principle created the material world.
Moreover, we humans had a pre-human existence, according to the Gnostics, and were in perfect bliss as pure spirits dwelling in light and in the fullness of the gnosis or “knowledge”—perfect bliss, that is, until our parents did something evil: they got married. Through the conjugal act, perfectly pure spirits are snatched out of that perfect bliss and trapped in evil bodies, causing the darkening of the intellect and the loss of the fullness of the gnosis. Thus, salvation would come only through the gaining, or regaining, of the gnosis that the Gnostics alone possessed.
Eating meat was also forbidden because its consumption would bring more evil matter into the body, keeping a person bound to his evil body and further darkening the intellect.
Thus, these early Gnostics forbade “marriage and enjoined abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving.”
If there are any remaining doubts as to whom Paul was referring to as teaching &#8220;doctrines of demons,&#8221; he tips his hand in his final exhortation in 1 Timothy 6:20-21:
O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards faith. Grace be with you.
The Greek word translated above as “knowledge” is gnoseos. Sound familiar?
The bottom line is this: Paul was not condemning the Catholic Church in 1 Timothy 4; he was warning against the early Gnostics, who were leading Christians astray via their “gnosis,” which was no true gnosis at all.

Catholic ‘Doctrines of Demons’

<div>Are we obligated to forgive someone who has not asked for forgiveness? </div><div>Yes, we must forgive him. As Jesus makes clear in the Sermon on the Mount after providing the Lord’s Prayer, “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:14-15). Jesus sets the example on the cross in asking his Father to forgive those who have crucified him.
On the other hand, we need not necessarily associate with a person we forgive, especially if the wrongdoing he has committed against us is grave. And even if someone has repented of a grave offense, we need not necessarily associate with him. For example, if a woman has been sexually assaulted by a friend, she is morally obligated to forgive that friend but not morally obligated to continue having a friendship.
</div>

Should I Forgive Someone Who Hasn’t Repented?

The idea that Scripture is the sole rule of faith is central to the thinking of man Protestants, who see Tradition as a watering down of scriptural purity. But Catholics have good reason to reject this view. Author Casey J. Chalk explains.

Why Catholics Reject Sola Scriptura

In Exodus 1:15, Pharoah commands two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill every Hebrew male child among them coming out the womb. But neither of them did as Pharaoh commanded because they “feared God” (v.17).
When Pharaoh asked them why they had let the male children live, they responded, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to them” (v.19). The author then tells us that as a reward “God dealt well with the midwives” (v.20) and “because the midwives feared God he gave them families” (v.21).
“Wait a minute,” one might say, “how can God bless the midwives for lying to Pharaoh? Did God bless <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-it-ever-ok-to-lie">an act of lying</a> because they had a good intention? Or, perhaps, did their good intention make it not a lie in the first place?”
Let’s say for argument’s sake that the midwives’ response is in fact a lie. There’s nothing in the text that demands we say God is blessing them for what they say. The only clear thing that God blesses them for is “because they feared God.”
Now, God’s blessing of dealing “well with them” (v.20) is in some way connected to what they did. But the blessing doesn’t have to be for what they said. It could be for their good intention and not for their act. Given that God elsewhere forbids lying, and verse 21 speaks of an explicit motivation for their action (they feared God), it would be reasonable to conclude that God is blessing their good intention and not their act of lying.
But I don’t think this is in fact a lie. The midwives do not actually assert something to be true that they believe to be false. Notice what they say, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to them” (v.19).
This is a general statement about Hebrew women and their quick birthing, not a statement about the specific women that the two midwives assisted in giving birth. For the midwives to lie, they would have had to say something like, “The Hebrew women that we helped gave birth before we came to them.” That would be an act of communication that asserts something to be true when believed to be false. But that’s not what they say.
The act of the midwives, therefore, is not a lie. It is an act of<a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/mental-reservation"> mental reservation</a>. They make a general statement about midwives and Pharaoh erringly takes it as a statement about what they experienced.
On this reading, God not only blesses them for their good intention and their fear of God, but also for their cleverness in justly misleading Pharaoh away from punishing them.
So, this is not evidence that God blesses a lie when there’s good intention. Nor does it show that good intention can make a lie not a lie. God’s simply in favor of good ol’ fashioned wit.

No, God Did Not Bless a Lie

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to tackle a thought-provoking question about salvation and the possibility of losing it. Drawing from Scripture, including 2 Peter and the story of Simon in Acts, Joe provides insightful biblical examples to clarify the Catholic understanding of salvation and the importance of repentance.
Transcript:
Caller: I recently went to a Baptist service with my husband, and the pastor had mentioned in his sermon about, you know, that you can&#8217;t lose your salvation. This concerns me. I know there are a lot of verses in the Bible, you know, that talk about this, but I found the verse in Second Peter Chapter Two about the angels, and God cast them in hell. I was just wondering if that may be a verse I could use with him to show that, you know, you can lose it. Not that you will, but that you can.
Joe: I would look at that entire chapter, and I&#8217;ll get into why I would use the entire chapter. But you are dead on. You&#8217;re right on the money. I&#8217;m going to give you a couple other passages that are worth using as well. One is to take concrete examples. So, for instance, in Acts Chapter Eight, there&#8217;s a man named Simon who believes and is baptized. Now that is the formula for being saved in the Bible, Matthew 6, or, excuse me, Mark 16:16, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.
But then Simon commits the sin named after him, Simony. And Peter responds to him after he tries to buy the gift of confirmation. &#8220;Your silver perished with you because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money.&#8221; So notice he&#8217;s pronouncing a curse of damnation on him, is what it really is. Your declaration, I should say, of damnation on him that he&#8217;s spiritually dead. He says, &#8220;You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God. Repent, therefore, of this wickedness of yours and pray to the Lord that if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you&#8217;re in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.&#8221;
So notice what he doesn&#8217;t say. He doesn&#8217;t say, &#8220;I guess you never really believed,&#8221; or &#8220;I guess you were never really baptized,&#8221; and those are the two easy excuses you could come up with. Instead, he treats it as him clearly falling away. So now he&#8217;s back in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity, and his heart is no longer right, and he needs to be forgiven of that sin. This is different than just, &#8220;You need to believe Jesus is Lord.&#8221; He doesn&#8217;t say that. He already knows Jesus is Lord. Simon actually says in the next verse, &#8220;Pray for me to the Lord that nothing of what you have said may come upon me.&#8221;
So Simon knows who Jesus is. He believes in him. And he even, you know, even like the sin he committed, he said, &#8220;Give me also this power that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.&#8221; So clearly, even as he&#8217;s committing the sin of Simony, he believes in the Christian message because otherwise he wouldn&#8217;t believe in a Holy Spirit or the power of confirmation in the first place. So he&#8217;s not having a crisis of faith. You can&#8217;t say he didn&#8217;t really believe. That doesn&#8217;t make any sense. He clearly believes, has clearly sinned in a way radically contrary to the Gospel, and is now in a place where his soul is imperiled. And he is praying that if it is possible, God will forgive him and restore him.
That&#8217;s the first where it&#8217;s just so abundantly clear that unless you are committed to not accepting what the Bible says there, it&#8217;s clear what is being said.
The second is a little bit more of a confusing passage because it takes a little bit of working through, but it&#8217;s worth having in your back pocket. It&#8217;s Hebrews Chapter Six, where it says, &#8220;For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened,&#8221; that&#8217;s an early term for baptism, &#8220;who have tasted the heavenly gift,&#8221; the Eucharist, &#8220;and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit,&#8221; that&#8217;s confirmation, &#8220;and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come.&#8221;
So these are people who are fully sacramentally initiated and they&#8217;re well formed in the faith, who then, verse 5, &#8220;if they commit apostasy, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account, and hold him up to contempt.&#8221;
&#8220;For land which has drunk the rain that often falls upon it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God; but if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed. Its end is to be burnt.&#8221;
This is explicitly talking about those who were believers, who had the sacraments, were well formed in the faith, who had received repentance and then rejected God and embraced apostasy. Now, the reason I say you have to be a little careful with that one is because there was an early Christian misunderstanding of it that said, literally, if you commit a mortal sin after you&#8217;re a Christian, you can never be saved. That&#8217;s not what Hebrews 6 is saying.
Hebrews 6 is warning that if you accept Christ and then fall away, what can we tell you that you don&#8217;t already know? Like, you seem lost, just because there&#8217;s not some new information that&#8217;s going to come your way. Whereas like a pagan who&#8217;s never heard the good news can hear the good news and convert, you&#8217;ve heard it, know what&#8217;s on offer, and then have rejected it. So it is harder for such a person to be saved. It&#8217;s not impossible at the grace of God. But that&#8217;s the second passage I&#8217;d point out is Hebrews 6.
Then the third one is the passage you mentioned, Second Peter 2. In 2 Peter 2, St. Peter says, &#8220;False prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false prophets among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.&#8221;
So right there in verse one, we&#8217;re told these evil teachers or false teachers were, number one, ransomed by Christ. He was the master who bought them. Number two, Christ is their master or was their master. And number three, they have rejected him by embracing heresy. And it&#8217;s not only the evil teachers that have to be worried about this, but also the people among whom St. Peter is writing to who might fall into the trap. Because remember, he says, &#8220;These false teachers will arise among you.&#8221;
And then it says in verse two, &#8220;And many will follow their licentiousness, and because of them the way of truth will be reviled, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words.&#8221; So he&#8217;s warning the people to whom he&#8217;s writing that they are not immune from falling away. And who&#8217;s he writing to? He says in 2 Peter Chapter 1, that he&#8217;s writing to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours and the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ. Even those people can fall away and embrace destructive heresy instead.
And then he gives this laundry list to show that you can&#8217;t just rest content in this life. And the critical example is exactly the one you pointed to in verse four. That if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment, then it follows that he could do the same thing to you, that if the angels were able to fall, you&#8217;re also able to fall.
So &#8220;once saved, always saved,&#8221; pretending like it&#8217;s impossible to fall. How&#8217;d that work out for the devil? Not so great.
So I&#8217;m going to jump a little bit forward now towards the end of the chapter, because he goes through a lot of examples like this. But down in verse 20, towards the end of the chapter, after they&#8217;ve escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So they know Jesus, and not just in an intellectual way, they know him in such a way they&#8217;ve escaped the defilements of the world. They are again entangled in them, the defilements of the world, and overpowered. The last state has become worse for them than the first.
&#8220;For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.&#8221; So they didn&#8217;t just know about it, they were on the right road and then turned back. It&#8217;s right there. It&#8217;s explicitly there.
And then finally, in the very last verse, it has happened to them according to the true proverb, &#8220;The dog turns back to his own vomit and the sow is washed, only to wallow in the mire.&#8221;
So anytime you hear someone preaching &#8220;once saved, always saved,&#8221; just present them with these passages and say, &#8220;Well, how do you explain Simon in Acts 8? How do you explain this explicit warning against Christian apostasy in Hebrews 6? How do you explain this entire chapter of 2 Peter 2?&#8221; And don&#8217;t tell me we are different than the angels, because Peter&#8217;s point is you should learn from what happened to the angels because it could happen to you as well.
Cy: What do you think? Angels are in heaven with God and they&#8230;
Joe: Yeah, exactly. They didn&#8217;t have the full beatific vision, but before, they rebelled. But they had more than we have here on earth and still rebelled. Right.
Caller: Okay. So I just want to make sure that that would be an appropriate verse to show him or chapter that I could show him regarding that issue.
Joe: I guess I could have just said yes. Yeah, that&#8217;s a great one.
Caller: Thank you so much!

3 Bible Chapters That Debunk “Once Saved, Always Saved”

Sometimes, a bible verse seems to prove a certain aspect of our Christian Faith but falls short when presented to a non-believer. What is the purpose of these verses, and how can we use them to strengthen our own faith? Karlo Broussard discusses Luke 12:42 and how it relates to Peter being the leader of the Church.
Transcript:
In regards to Luke 1242.
And I kind of wonder why Catholics don&#8217;t use that more in regards to the primacy of the Pope.
All right, yeah, so let me share some thoughts and then we&#8217;ll get your response, okay? So hang tight here. So let&#8217;s first of all help our listeners out, Kevin. What is Luke 1242 talking about? Well that&#8217;s where Jesus, Peter&#8217;s, he&#8217;s actually responding to Peter&#8217;s question when he says, &#8220;Lord, are you telling us this parable for us or for all?&#8221; So Jesus says, he starts talking about a faithful and wise servant whom his master will set over his household. And so there, Kevin, you are right to think that this steward over the household is mapping on with the chief royal steward of the house of David within the Davidic kingdom. And so there it is true that Jesus is employing this imagery here in this parable of the faithful steward, which our Lord says, &#8220;Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find him doing.&#8221; That is to give, our Lord says, that steward giving the portion of food at the proper time to those over whom he is ministering. And then our Lord says, &#8220;Blessed is that servant whom his master will find when he comes and doing so.&#8221; And our Lord says, &#8220;Truly I tell you, he will set him the steward over all his possessions. The master will set the steward over all his possessions.&#8221; Okay, so your question is, why don&#8217;t we appeal to this passage in conversations about the papacy? Because we believe that Peter is given the role as the chief royal steward, the steward over the house of Jesus, leading with the church here on earth. And here&#8217;s my answer, Kevin.
I don&#8217;t think that we have enough evidence in the text itself that Jesus is specifying for us that Peter is this steward over the household to whom is given all possessions, a faithful steward that Jesus is talking about. Because somebody who doesn&#8217;t buy into the Catholic understanding of the papacy can just as easily read this passage and say, &#8220;Well, Jesus is just using the imagery of the chief royal steward or the steward over the household in order to teach his apostles a lesson about being ready when our Lord comes. And if you&#8217;re faithful, you&#8217;re going to receive rewards. And if you ain&#8217;t, you ain&#8217;t going to receive rewards if you&#8217;re not faithful.&#8221; And that&#8217;s all Jesus is communicating to us. And like he does elsewhere, just drawing from real life experiences among the Jewish people.
Now, so notice the only way, Kevin, that we could read this in a petrine way, like with a papal sort of coloring or interpretation, is if we assume that Peter is the royal steward, the steward over the household of Jesus Christ. And so if we appeal to this passage as evidence for the papacy, we would be begging the question. We would be assuming what we&#8217;re trying to prove in our conclusion. So apologetically speaking, I don&#8217;t think this would be a good text to substantiate or justify our understanding of the papacy and Peter being the first pope. However, I will say this, given that we have independent reasons to think that Peter is, in fact, the steward put in charge over the household of Jesus, which is the kingdom of Jesus, which is the church, we can come to this passage with that background understanding for which we have independent reasons to assent to and embrace and see in the parable that perhaps this faithful steward who is giving the members of the household the portions of food at the proper time and the master finding him doing so and giving him possession, all, you know, set him over all his possessions in the household. That could be an implicit reference to Peter as being the first pope. But again, that&#8217;s only going to be if we first have in place independent reasons for thinking that Peter is the steward over the household of Jesus, which is the church.
Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this Catholic answer, be sure to like, subscribe, and check out our live streams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific, or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or our Catholic Answers app.

When the Bible Doesn’t Prove the Papacy

Once a modernist, composer Frank La Rocca has written a Mass of the Americas that will premier at San Francisco&#8217;s Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption on December 8. We talk music, conversion, and the meaning of beauty.

A Musical Conversion (Part 2)

The First Book of Kings, chapter 17, contains the account of the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. The Church features it in the <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111024.cfm">first reading</a> for the thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, though the abbreviated excerpt does not provide the full context. As the Polish Jesuit Stanisław Biel points out in his study of Elijah, this passage is a challenge for faith in God’s providence and beneficence, both for the widow and for Elijah.
First, the context: drought-induced famine. The whole region—Israel and adjacent territories—is suffering from famine caused by a years-long drought. That drought is attributed to Israel’s infidelities: God closed up the heavens because Israel had admitted the worship of pagan gods under a foreign queen, Jezebel (with whose prophets Elijah would later have a fiery duel). When the widow says she and her son have virtually no flour or oil and, after they eat their last meager meal, they will die, it’s not just the hardship of their individual circumstances. Everybody is suffering because of the drought.
Second, God sends Elijah to “a widow in Zarephath.” In the Biblical world, “widows and orphans” are the most vulnerable of people, the poorest of the poor. God expects Elijah to rely on a woman whose future sister will have only a “widow’s mite” to drop into the Temple treasury. When it comes to security planning, the Father seems not to be the best fiduciary.
And she is from Zarephath. Zarephath is not in Israel. It is in neighboring Phoenicia, today’s Lebanon, the region of Tyre and Sidon. This means she is not a Jew, not a member of the Chosen People. God sends Israel’s prophet to a pagan woman for support.
As Biel noted, God has already begun softening up Elijah. Before God sends him to the widow of Zarephath, he feeds Elijah in the desert through the agency of ravens. Ravens bring Elijah food. In the Bible (Lev. 11:15), ravens are unclean animals. Elijah must accept that, for his survival, God used unclean birds.
Elijah departs Israel with faith in God that a pagan woman from the poorest social class would be his succor. And when he finally reaches the gates of Zarephath, where he meets her, she’s at her wits’ end, gathering sticks to cook a last morsel for her and a child, admitting that her most basic food supplies—flour and oil—were practically exhausted.
A modern reader might think Elijah presumptuous when, being informed of the widow’s plight, he nevertheless says, “First make me a little cake and bring it to me. Then you can prepare something for yourself and your son” (1 Kings 17:13). First, feed me—your unannounced guest—and then yourself and your child.
Elijah is no fool. The sound of those words may have been as challenging to him as they were to the widow. Both are called to have faith that God will not let them down, that he will protect them. Both are challenged to forgo control and self-reliance calculated according to purely human considerations.
The prophet has already put his faith in God and does so again. The woman puts her faith in this strange man of God from another land and in her people’s tradition of hospitality to the stranger, even at one’s own expense.
And God does great things with faith.
The modern, calculating mind might scoff: “How is it that ‘the jar of flour did not go empty nor the jug of oil run dry’?” But, like Genesis, the Bible is a book of faith: its job is to affirm that God made the world, that he fed his people with manna in the desert, and that the jug did not run dry . . . not how God created a universe, raised quail to feed Israel, or supplied the never-ending jar. Like Elijah and the widow, today’s modern empiricist is also challenged to put trust in God’s assurances.
In many ways, modern man eschews Providence. We Americans, heirs of the Anglo-American deist tradition, have <a href="https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2023/03/28/the-high-stakes-of-creation/">acquired a certain resistance</a> to the idea that God might act in human history outside explicable cause-and-effect ways. Joseph Ratzinger seized upon this proclivity in his Divine Project, arguing that some Catholics have a highly siloed, almost schizophrenic approach to the theology of creation: God created, but as a more hands-off Creator. We need to overcome this rigid dichotomy.
Distrust in God’s providence in history is not limited to cosmological or evolutionary questions. It’s found, for example, in the very “practical” assessment on the part of some people to reject parenthood because their calculus cannot factor in the conviction that God would not harm them because they trust in him. They prefer the “control” of their human horizon to faith in the omniscience of God’s plan.
So the problem of Providence is hardly new. The question is: do we have the faith—like Elijah and like the widow of Zarephath—to believe in it?

Do You Believe in Providence?

Catholic apologist Karlo Broussard joins Cy Kellett to tackle a challenging question from caller Ariel about the Catholic doctrine of hell. Is it possible for hell to be empty? Could annihilationism be true? Drawing on Scripture and the nature of the immortal soul, Karlo explains why the Church rejects annihilationism and what this means for our understanding of sin, judgment, and eternal life.
Transcript:
Cy: Which Catholic doctrine troubles you? Let me put it that way.
Caller: Basically, the doctrine that, you know, there&#8217;s an eternal hell, right? And that everyone&#8217;s going to go to this hell and it&#8217;s going to suffer forever. Because historically, there were a lot of early church fathers who disagreed with that idea. I chanced upon a book written by a priest. His position on it was basically that it&#8217;s possible, it&#8217;s not necessarily a heresy to believe in a thing called annihilationism. And so it&#8217;s possible that it is in fact not the case that when this person is sent to hell, they&#8217;re going to be eternally tormented. They may actually just cease to exist. Which I think anybody could agree that that&#8217;d be kind of nice if that was the case. Right? So I guess that&#8217;s what bothers me. I&#8217;ve looked it up and nobody can really point to anything particular that I can see to the real, actual doctrine that would make that impossible.
Karlo: Okay. Okay, Ariel, it&#8217;s a great question. So here&#8217;s my first statement. It is true, according to my knowledge, I cannot. Let me just make the claim and then I&#8217;ll make my comments afterward. The Church does not infallibly teach that hell will be factually populated at the end of time after the final judgment. And notice I emphasize infallibly. Now, that&#8217;s presupposing or assuming distinct levels of Church teaching. The reason why I say that is because I can, at least currently, according to my current knowledge, would not be able to defend the thesis. And I know many theologians who would agree that we would not be able to defend the thesis that the Church has infallibly taught that hell will be factually populated.
Okay? Now, that does not mean that the Church has no teaching on the factual population of hell. And in fact, I just had an episode of my local radio show called the Catholic Reason here in the Diocese of Tulsa, and the episode is on what the Church teaches about factual damnation. You can go to my website, carlaverssart.com, look under the Catholic Reason tab, and it&#8217;ll be the latest episode of my radio show where I document for you, Ariel, where I argue that the Church, in her magisterial teaching, which is official Church teaching, but within the non-infallible category, but nevertheless authoritative, that the Church envisions hell to be a reality and factually populated, which for us, as a Catholic, at least, Ariel, would not permit us to assent to the idea that hell will not be factually populated, or in this case, annihilationism.
So, as a Catholic, we would have to at least give religious submission of intellect and will and defer to this ordinary teaching of the Church in the non-infallible category concerning the factual population of hell. So that&#8217;s what I argue in that episode and I document the magisterial references for you there.
Now, with regard to annihilationism itself, I think we can conclude that it is false based upon certain lines of evidence. So for example, if we look to the biblical evidence, I think our Lord is very clear in Luke 13:23-24, when he&#8217;s given us the teaching about the way that leads to hell is wide and the door through which you pass to get on that path to hell and the way that leads to heaven is narrow. And Jesus says that some will seek to enter the gate that leads to that path, but will not do so. They will not enter the door, which the implication is to salvation.
So I think we can provide a strong argument that Jesus teaches that some in fact will not be saved and thus will not enter heaven. Now, of course, that raises that. That at least eliminates the idea that all will be restored, but it does leave open the possibility of annihilationism. And so we would have to look at evidence from Sacred Scripture that would indicate contrary to that. And I think the Book of Revelation is key there. It talks about the demons along with other human souls that will be in the lake of fire, indicating that there you have some who will be forever punished and not annihilated.
And then also I do think we can also appeal to Luke 13:23-24 where Jesus says some will not enter the door, but the implication is that they will remain outside of not entering the door. The further implication being that they&#8217;re not annihilated. Jesus says nothing there to indicate that they would be annihilated.
But also I think we can employ a line of evidence from reason itself based upon the revealed data that we have. Ariel, we can think about annihilationism and we can think about the nature of the soul and conclude that it would be contrary to God&#8217;s divine wisdom to annihilate a soul. So consider this. God creates the soul as the kind of thing that is immortal by nature. That&#8217;s just its nature, that once the soul exists, it belongs to its nature to always exist.
Now, is it theoretically possible, subject to God&#8217;s all-powerful nature, to annihilate a soul? I agree with St. Thomas Aquinas in saying yes, that&#8217;s at least possible given his omnipotence, but he would not do so because it would be contrary to his wisdom to create a soul that of its nature is immortal only to make it not immortal. That doesn&#8217;t fit divine wisdom. And so I think that&#8217;s a line of evidence from reason that we can construct an argument and say and conclude annihilation would not be true.
And then further, I do think that annihilation would take away from the gravity of a mortal sin, which is a definitive rejection of God. For someone to definitively reject themselves from God but yet be annihilated, it would in some way seem to undermine the gravity of the sin.
And I address this issue of annihilationism in one of the chapters in my book *Prepare the Way*, where I give different lines of reasons why I think annihilationism is false. So you might want to check out that book *Prepare the Way*.
Cy: And I&#8217;m going to leave it there because we&#8217;re going to take a quick break.
Ariel, thank you very much for the call.

Eternal Hell or Soul Annihilation: What Happens After Death?

Christ’s Virgin Birth Isn’t a Pagan Invention

Does a bishop have the authority to ordain married men to the priesthood without the popes approval?

What do Catholics say about Muslims and Catholics worshipping the same God?

Is a priest allowed to perform a marriage outside of a church building?

Why did they drop the word “One” from the closing prayer at Mass?

Our parish is adding an extra song after the consecration, and another one during the cleaning of the vessels. Is this proper?

I’m an evangelical Protestant and I’m getting curious about Catholicism. How do I go about this without falling into error?

What is the difference between the Anglican and Catholic views of the Eucharist? Is it efficacious to receive communion at a non-Catholic Church?&nbsp;

&#8220;Can a bishop ordain married men to the priesthood without the pope&#8217;s approval?&#8221; This question opens a discussion that also touches on whether Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, the appropriateness of performing marriages outside of church buildings, and the implications of changes in Mass prayers.
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Can a Bishop Ordain Married Men?

Episode 31: Year A &#8211; 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on four details that are relevant to doing apologetics. The first, which deals with the topic of original sin, comes from the second reading, taken from Romans 5:12-15. The remaining three details come from the Gospel reading, taken from Matthew 10:26-33, and deal with the topics of the General Judgment, Salvation, the Divinity of Jesus, the immortality of the soul after death, and the general resurrection.
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062523.cfm">https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062523.cfm</a>
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday</a>

The Immortality of the Soul

In this episode Trent sits down with Dr. Scott Hahn to talk about his latest book Hope to Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body and how the recent pandemic sheds light on our mortality and helps us understand the true meaning of life.

Hope to Die (with Scott Hahn)

Is there an actual burning in the cleansing of purgatory?

How do I answer the protestant objection to John 6 when they say that Jesus said He was talking about the spirit and not the actual flesh?

I don’t understand Gnosticism . Does the Catholic Church say this is wrong?

How do we dissuade people from thinking biblical stories are in the same vein as Greek mythology? Example: Jesus calls James and John the sons of thunder would be considered imagery of Zeus.

Why do we not hear about Mary’s “sisters”?

Could a person with non-Catholic, non-water “believer’s baptism” be saved according to the Catholic Church?

&#8220;Is there an actual burning in purgatory?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the nature of purgatory, alongside inquiries about addressing Protestant objections to John 6 and the Catholic Church&#8217;s stance on Gnosticism. Other topics include the interpretation of biblical imagery and the role of Mary in scripture, providing a rich exploration of Catholic beliefs.
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Is There an Actual Burning in Purgatory? Gnosticism and Mary

In this episode, Trent helps us understand Pascal’s Wager and shows how to use it incorrectly through an atheist version of the Wager called “Roko’s Basilisk.”

Pascal’s Wager and Roko’s Basilisk

Ask Me Anything

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<h3>Fifth Sunday of Easter
Lectionary: 52</h3>
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<h4>Reading 1    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/acts/6:1">ACTS 6:1-7</a></h4>
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As the number of disciples continued to grow, 
the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews 
because their widows 
were being neglected in the daily distribution. 
So the Twelve called together the community of the disciples and said, 
“It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table. 
Brothers, select from among you seven reputable men, 
filled with the Spirit and wisdom, 
whom we shall appoint to this task, 
whereas we shall devote ourselves to prayer 
and to the ministry of the word.” 
The proposal was acceptable to the whole community, 
so they chose Stephen, a man filled with faith and the Holy Spirit, 
also Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, 
and Nicholas of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. 
They presented these men to the apostles 
who prayed and laid hands on them. 
The word of God continued to spread, 
and the number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; 
even a large group of priests were becoming obedient to the faith.
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<h4>Responsorial Psalm    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/psalms/33:1">PS 33:1-2, 4-5, 18-19</a></h4>
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R. (22) Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you. 
or: 
R. Alleluia. 
Exult, you just, in the LORD; 
praise from the upright is fitting. 
Give thanks to the LORD on the harp; 
with the ten-stringed lyre chant his praises. 
R. Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you. 
or: 
R. Alleluia. 
Upright is the word of the LORD, 
and all his works are trustworthy. 
He loves justice and right; 
of the kindness of the LORD the earth is full. 
R. Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you. 
or: 
R. Alleluia. 
See, the eyes of the LORD are upon those who fear him, 
upon those who hope for his kindness, 
To deliver them from death 
and preserve them in spite of famine. 
R. Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you. 
or: 
R. Alleluia.
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<h4>Reading 2    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/1peter/2:4">1 PT 2:4-9</a></h4>
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Beloved: 
Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings 
but chosen and precious in the sight of God, 
and, like living stones, 
let yourselves be built into a spiritual house 
to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices 
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 
For it says in Scripture: 
Behold, I am laying a stone in Zion, 
a cornerstone, chosen and precious, 
and whoever believes in it shall not be put to shame. 
Therefore, its value is for you who have faith, but for those without faith: 
The stone that the builders rejected 
has become the cornerstone, 
and 
A stone that will make people stumble, 
and a rock that will make them fall. 
They stumble by disobeying the word, as is their destiny.
You are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, 
a holy nation, a people of his own, 
so that you may announce the praises” of him 
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
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<h4>Alleluia    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/14:6">JN 14:6</a></h4>
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R. Alleluia, alleluia. 
I am the way, the truth and the life, says the Lord; 
no one comes to the Father, except through me. 
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
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<h4>Gospel    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/14:1">JN 14:1-12</a></h4>
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Jesus said to his disciples: 
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. 
You have faith in God; have faith also in me. 
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. 
If there were not, 
would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? 
And if I go and prepare a place for you, 
I will come back again and take you to myself, 
so that where I am you also may be. 
Where I am going you know the way.” 
Thomas said to him, 
“Master, we do not know where you are going; 
how can we know the way?” 
Jesus said to him, &#8220;I am the way and the truth and the life. 
No one comes to the Father except through me. 
If you know me, then you will also know my Father. 
From now on you do know him and have seen him.” 
Philip said to him, 
“Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” 
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time 
and you still do not know me, Philip? 
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. 
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? 
The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. 
The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. 
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, 
or else, believe because of the works themselves. 
Amen, amen, I say to you, 
whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, 
and will do greater ones than these, 
because I am going to the Father.”
Source: <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings">cms.usccb.org</a>
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Daily Holy Mass: Sunday, May 10, 2020

<div>Didn’t previous ecumenical councils teach that unbaptized infants could not enter the beatific vision? Or were these teachings considered fallible?</div><div>Previous ecumenical councils did not specifically teach the fate of infants who die before baptism. The First Vatican Council proposed a teaching on a limbo-like state for such infants, but it was never brought to a vote at the council.
A few regional councils addressed original sin and waded into the discussion of infants who die before baptism, but these councils are not infallible.
The Ecumenical Council of Florence (1431-1449) declared that all who die in original sin end up in hell but not in equal punishment with those who died in mortal sin. This would seem to logically include infants who die before baptism. However, we do know that the Church has always accepted that the righteous before Christ (who died in original sin) were able to attain heaven after the Resurrection, so this teaching clearly accepted that God makes exceptions to this rule. While man is bound by sacraments, God is not.  Although all who die in original sin descend to hell, it is also entirely possible that God can remove original sin from the souls of those he chooses right before their death.
The Ecumenical Council of Trent (1545-1563) stated that there is no other means of salvation other than baptism for infants. This is true in the same sense as we stated above. There is no other means that we have in this world, but God can act however he chooses.
Even today the Church strongly urges parents to baptize their children as soon as reasonably possible after birth (Code of Canon Law, can. 867 §1; Catechism of the Catholic Church 1261).
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Fate of Unbaptized Infants at Death?

Apologist Trent Horn responds to a student who asks for proof of humans have souls. In this video, Trent defines what the soul is and presents three key arguments for its existence, drawing from philosophy, reason, and Catholic teaching.
Transcript:
We&#8217;ll start with Lucas. Welcome, Lucas!
Thank you.
You&#8217;re from Maryland?
I go to a school in Maryland, but I&#8217;m from Virginia.
Okay. Very good You got a question for Trent?
Yeah. So my question is, how do we know, or is there any proof that we have a soul? Because I got taught by my religion and by my teachers and stuff like that, that we all humans have a soul. And I believe that we all do, but how do we know?
You can&#8217;t feel the moving around in the morning?
Okay. All right. That could just be indigestion Cy.
I got a soul right now.
That&#8217;s what soul food will do to you. That&#8217;s why they call it soul food. You feel it deep in your soul when you&#8217;re trying to digest it.
Yeah.
So Logan- sorry, Lucas, Logan was a previous caller. Lucas, I would say we have to first understand what the soul is.
So the soul in classical philosophy and theology, that&#8217;s just a principle of life. And the soul is not exclusive to humans. We would say that the soul is just a principle of life. So anything that is living has a soul. It is what makes living things different than dead things. Even if you have the same matter. So the soul is the form of the body.
I mean, have they taught you about the four causes yet? Like the material, formal, efficient cause, final cause?
Yeah.
We&#8217;re going to get into that.
Okay. So the material, formal, efficient, final cause. Right. So you make a statue, right? And the material cause, like, what is the cause of the statue? Michaelangelo&#8217;s David. Well, the material cause is the marble. But you can&#8217;t just have marble into the David. That&#8217;s to say, the marble has to be arranged in a certain way to be David. But the marble doesn&#8217;t arrange itself. So Michaelangelo&#8217;s the efficient cause.
And we&#8217;ll, okay. Well, why did he make the statue that way? Well, there&#8217;s a final cause. Well, to get paid and to glorify his biblical figure and make great art and all that stuff? So, you know, we have the material, formal, efficient, final cause. This soul is the formal cause of a living thing. So even if you have a dead thing and a living thing, they could have the same exact matter constituting them. But it&#8217;s not arranged in the right way. There&#8217;s a problem with the arrangements of the soul. And it&#8217;s not just the parts themselves put together. The soul is the invisible principle that arranges the body, that arranges it in a way to make it alive or dead. So all living things have a soul.
But as Christians, we believe that God created human beings in his image, and he gave man an immortal soul. He gave man a soul that, so when living things perish, when they die, they die. They sort of, like when a plant dies, it decomposes.
Okay, so like the thing, you know, we think about why do we say it decomposes? It was together and it starts coming apart. Okay, human, you know, when things die, they come apart. They decompose. Whereas like a rock, if it gets shattered, it just gets disassembled, right? Or a cloud dissolves. But living things decompose; they have a kind of organic unity to them.
And so when a living, when a non-human living thing dies, its soul also dies with it. Okay? And God can maybe resurrect both. That&#8217;s a question about, you know, whether my dog is in heaven, that&#8217;s for another show. But typically, humans have immortal souls, so the principle of what arranges our bodies to be living continues on. And the soul is also the seat of knowledge and is able to engage in rational abstract thought beyond what non-human material things can do.
Like a dog can understand, this is a toy; I play with it, this is fun, I enjoy this, but not the concept of what a toy is. You know, or a monkey can make a tool, but does not grasp the abstract concept of a tool, for example. But humans do that.
So some of the arguments for human beings having a soul are unique human abilities that we are able to grasp immaterial abstract things. So like a monkey finds a thing and it serves the function of a tool, and it gets that. Or a dog knows his favorite toy is this square thing. But out in the world, there is no such thing as the idea of a square. You don&#8217;t just bump into the idea of a square. You bump into square things, but not what a square is or a perfect circle. I don&#8217;t know, a perfect circle is out there. But our mind can abstract and comprehend these abstract universes that don&#8217;t exist. So there must be something about us that is not just purely material. There&#8217;s something about us that is immaterial that is able to engage these abstract concepts. That&#8217;s one argument.
Another argument is that human beings have free will. Other material things just behave in accordance with laws of nature. The humans are held morally responsible for our actions. So there must be something about us that guides our actions that is not purely material and subject to the laws of nature. And many people say that would be the soul.
And the final argument is, by authority, you know, Jesus Christ. It&#8217;s God. He rose from the dead, demonstrated his divinity. And he tells us that we have souls. He tells us that it&#8217;s not worth it to gain the whole world and lose your soul. And if a guy can walk out of his own tomb, tells me I have a soul, and I don&#8217;t want to lose it. I need to follow him. I&#8217;m going to do what he says.
So a lot of different arguments there.
There is a good book actually. If you want to go deeper, the Catholic philosopher Ed Faser has a new book out on the soul. That book is called, it&#8217;s in stock here, it&#8217;s called Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.
So that&#8217;s his new big book on the soul. It&#8217;s a great book on God called Five Proofs for the Existence of God. Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature. You might find that to be helpful.
So, all right. I threw a lot on you there. Is that helpful?
Yeah, no, that&#8217;s very helpful.
Do you know who the queen of soul is?
The Virgin Mary.
No the Virgin Mary is The Queen of Heaven Aretha Franklin is The Queen of Soul.
You should watch a great movie Blues, called Blues Brothers.
Oh, I have seen this.
You&#8217;ve seen the Blues Brothers?
Yeah.
Good.
Lucas is like, we watched it in my film study on movies from the 1900s.
(Laughter)

Do We Have Souls—And Can We Prove It?

Cy Kellett is joined by apologist Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the challenges of accepting Catholic dogma from the perspective of a former Protestant pastor. Joe shares insights on the necessity of a unified understanding of Scripture and the role of dogma in guiding theological beliefs.
Transcript:
Cy: Welcome, Tony. Why aren&#8217;t you Catholic?
Caller: Several years ago, I actually subscribed to the Catholic Answers magazine about 25 years ago. And I was mulling it over and I ended up becoming a Protestant pastor. At the end of the day, it&#8217;s basically whatever is held by the Catholic Church to be dogma must be accepted by every Catholic. And obviously within that, there are other reasons, specific theological reasons why I&#8217;m not Catholic, but that&#8217;s the main one.
Joe: I think that&#8217;s a great way of articulating that. Objection. First of all, what denomination or tradition were you a pastor? Were or are you a pastor in assemblies?
Caller: I was formerly Assemblies of God, but here recently, more non-denominational Pentecostal traditions.
Joe: Sure. Okay. So, I mean, I don&#8217;t want to put words in your mouth. Would it be fair to say you think that some dogma is okay?
Caller: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, a good percentage of Catholic Christianity is simply well-articulated Christianity.
Joe: Yeah. And so, I mean, even like within the Pentecostal world that you operate in, you&#8217;ve got Trinitarian Pentecostals and you&#8217;ve got Oneness Pentecostals, and both are reading the scripture and both are, you know, praying to God and trying to understand what his will is, what the meaning of scripture is, etc. So it seems to me like there is a need that both you and I see to have some way of adjudicating which readings of scripture are correct and which ones aren&#8217;t correct. Is that fair to say?
Caller: Well, yes. I think that the problem you have with a lot of theological trends and many Pentecostals kind of go on certain bandwagons is that, you know, they interpret it for themselves without actually looking at the scholarship, without looking at, you know, how it was originally interpreted by the Church Fathers or early Christians, you know, before a certain period of time, a point of no return, as most Protestants would kind of benchmark certain historical events. Does that make sense?
Joe: Yeah, it does. It makes total sense. And I would actually provisionally agree with you, Tony. If the Church isn&#8217;t infallible and it&#8217;s just one group of Christians telling another group of Christians what they should believe, then I would actually suggest maybe we shouldn&#8217;t have any dogmas at all. Because if it&#8217;s just, well, group A says we should interpret it in a Trinitarian way and group B says we should interpret it in a Unitarian way and neither side can speak on behalf of God, well, then I don&#8217;t know why I should trust either one over the other than that I happen to agree with A over B.
But when I go back and read the Bible, I see actually a very different picture. You have people who, you know, they read the Bible differently, they understand the Gospel differently. That has always been the case. And so in Acts 15, when you get the Judaizers who say, well, look, you know all these Old Testament passages about keeping the Mosaic Law, so therefore new converts have to keep the law of Moses and, you know, they gotta get circumcised. This is a theological dispute about the meaning and interpretation of Scripture. They can quote Bible verses at each other night and day. And frankly, the Judaizers have plenty of verses they can point to that make it look like they&#8217;re right, but they&#8217;re wrong.
And the way it&#8217;s settled isn&#8217;t that everybody just reads the Bible the same way. The way it&#8217;s settled is the Council of Jerusalem meets in Acts 15 and just declares that the Judaizers are wrong and speaks on behalf of the Holy Spirit. Acts 15:28. It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us, and then tells people what they are bound to believe and what practices they are and are not bound to hold.
So if the Church from the time of the first century has that authority, then dogma becomes really good, because every dogma is greater insight into how to understand the Gospel message. If the Church doesn&#8217;t have that authority, but I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on in Acts 15, or if the Church had that authority and then lost it somehow, then I don&#8217;t see a principled reason to say the Church can declare dogmas in areas that I agree with, but they can&#8217;t declare dogmas that challenge the way I would read Scripture on my own. I don&#8217;t know, maybe I don&#8217;t want to straw man your position at all. Is there?
Caller: Sure, sure. You need dogma to be definitive in anything. You need certain boundaries and certain&#8230; You need to color within the lines and express where the lines are. So obviously most Christians would say that in order to be a Christian, you need to believe X, Y, and Z. You know, Christians, people that don&#8217;t believe in the Trinity aren&#8217;t necessarily&#8230; Most mainstream Protestant denominations wouldn&#8217;t consider them to be Christians. You know, so I hear you.
And of course, you know, the Assemblies of God have the 16 fundamental truths. Presbyterians have their beliefs, Methodists have certain confessions. I get that. It just seems like within the Roman Catholic Church, not the Eastern Catholic Church, there is a need to maybe overly define certain things versus allowing some freedom of personal exploration. Obviously, we see the danger when we look at the growth of Protestantism with personal interpretation run amok. There needs to be some sort of authority and that needs to be expressed clearly. But there should be some freedom or some mystery allowed. Like, let&#8217;s say the Eastern Orthodox do allow certain mysteries and don&#8217;t necessarily feel the need to explain certain things where the Catholic, Roman Catholic Church does. And so that&#8217;s basically just that.
Joe: Yeah. No.
Caller: Sorry.
Joe: No, no. I kind of cut in. I apologize. But I guess I&#8217;d&#8230; Let me toss something to you and see how you&#8217;d take that. If the Church is infallible, it seems to me that that clarity with dogma is actually really helpful. Like, it&#8217;s not good if it is a case where one group is actually misunderstanding and another group is understanding correctly and the Church can speak to which one&#8217;s right and which one&#8217;s wrong, wouldn&#8217;t that be a good thing in that case? I mean, even though&#8230; Sure, I guess if you have a certain conception of freedom, maybe not. But it seems like you have a greater knowledge of the truth in that case.
Caller: I understand. I hear you. And I guess for me it was just a matter of, hey, I have&#8230; In order to become a part&#8230; I had&#8230; This was 25 years ago. I had to fully assent to everything. And if I&#8217;m going to be honest with you, I didn&#8217;t. So I couldn&#8217;t, you know, I did get confirmed and I did do, you know, go spend some time about a year or two studying Catholicism. But at the end of the day, to be a good Catholic, I had to assent to everything that was dogmatically passed down through the Magisterium, and I could not do that. And because of that lack of freedom, I just had to be honest with myself and ended up going a different route.
Joe: Look, I respect your intellectual integrity there.
Caller: Yeah. Okay.
Joe: I do. I think that you are&#8230; It is better to say I can&#8217;t say yes to this in good faith than to just pretend like you can when you can&#8217;t. And I would suggest this as a way to, for anyone who might be in similar situations to what you were in, if you take the teachings of Jesus and you just start with listing all the teachings and say, which ones do I agree with? Which ones do I not agree with? There are ones that I&#8217;m going to be confused by and ones that I&#8217;m going to be challenged by. But if I start with who Jesus is, is he who he claims to be, then it&#8217;s a lot clearer. Then I can say, okay, well, I actually trust him even when I would have come to a different conclusion.
So I&#8217;d suggest that the question with the Church one way, and I know this is the way many people go about it, is they think, okay, here are all of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Does my reading of Scripture align with each of these? Here, yes, here, no. But I think the deeper question to ask is the Church doesn&#8217;t just claim to happen to be right in these. Like the Church claims to be the Church founded by Jesus Christ. The Church claims to speak with the authority of God in certain contexts and to be the bride of Christ and points to biblical support for that. I think those claims are either true or false. And if they&#8217;re true, we should all be Catholic. And if they&#8217;re false, then frankly, none of us should be Catholic. Even if the Catholic Church happened to get all of the disputed questions right.
You know, in that sense, it&#8217;s different than being Assemblies of God or non-denominational or Presbyterian or whatever else where the statements of belief aren&#8217;t held to be infallible, they&#8217;re fallible. Men&#8217;s best guess about what Scripture means and what Christianity should stand for. And there&#8217;s an acknowledgment often pretty explicitly that this best guess may not be perfect, it may not be right, and the denomination next door may have a different best guess. Now, they don&#8217;t say best guess, but you see what I mean. Like if it&#8217;s&#8230; I guess it does come down to this question of who is the Church? And if so, then the question of my freedom kind of takes on a different character. Does that&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, does that make sense?
Caller: Tony, I hear you perfectly. I understand.
Joe: All right, that may be the best we could do for today, but I appreciate your call a lot and I think you&#8217;ve done a good job of putting to words experiences many people have!

Why Must I Believe Everything the Church Teaches?

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DAY 338
CHALLENGE
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“Unanswered prayer disproves Christ’s teaching on prayer. Jesus said, ‘If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you’ (Matt. 17:20b). But experience shows that we can’t do such things by prayer.”
DEFENSE
Jesus’ teaching is more complex than this challenge suggests. It doesn’t involve a promise that we’ll always get what we ask.
First, Jesus makes the statement when the disciples have just failed to exorcise a demon. When they ask why they were unable to drive it out, he says, “Because of your little faith” (Matt. 17:20a). If the apostles, who were accustomed to working miracles, including driving out demons (Matt. 10:1, 5–8), could have inadequate faith, then we may, too. (Also, in this instance the disciples were trying to cast out a particularly powerful type of demon; Mark 9:29).
Second, the statement that having faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains does not mean that faith has some magical power of its own. The point is that it is God who performs miracles, and he is omnipotent. The size of the miracle is therefore not dependent on the size of the person’s faith but on God.
Third, this means that we do not have a promise that simply anything we pray for will happen. It must be the will of God (cf. Luke 22:42; James 4:13–15; 1 John 5:14).
Fourth, the fact that mountains usually do not move in response to prayer indicates it is usually not God’s will for this to happen. That’s why Jesus uses this example—because of how striking it is. He is using hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point). The point is that our prayers are dependent on God, not the size of our faith; Jesus is not issuing a promise that simply anything we ask for will be granted.
Fifth, elsewhere Jesus indicates that in some cases we will need to believe without doubting (Matt. 21:21; cf. James 1:6–7).
Sixth, the New Testament indicates that our individual dispositions can affect the outcome of our prayers in other ways, particularly with regard to whether we are living in a way pleasing to God (John 15:7; James. 4:3, 5:16; 1 Pet. 3:12; 1 John 3:22).
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Unanswered Prayer

A student of mine recently was troubled by a challenge that a Protestant pastor posed to him and a group of teenagers. The pastor claimed that the denial of the “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/once-saved-always-saved">once saved always saved</a>” doctrine—that’s to say, the Catholic belief that it’s possible to lose your salvation, isn’t good news, it’s bad news. And he didn’t mean this in the sense that the denial of such a doctrine is incompatible with what the Bible reveals (although he’d probably make that argument as well). He simply meant that such a belief isn’t something to rejoice in and thus doesn’t make us happy, so we should reject it.
What should we make of this kind of objection?
Well, there are two approaches we can take in response. One exposes the double standard at play in the objection; the other argues that the denial of “once saves always saved” is actually “good news.”
To begin our first approach, let’s specify what Catholics mean by “it’s possible to lose your salvation.” This is simply another way of saying it’s possible to reject the gift of salvation after we’ve already received it.
Now, there’s another time it’s possible to reject the gift of salvation: before conversion, when it is initially offered. When 3,000 people asked Peter on the day of Pentecost what they must do to be saved, Peter responded, “Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). The people repented and were baptized. But they didn’t have to do that. They could have said, “To heck with that. I’m out of here.”
But notice Protestants don’t dismiss this as “bad news.” So, the question arises, “Why?” If the possibility to reject the gift of salvation before conversion isn’t bad news, how come the possibility to reject the gift of salvation after conversion is bad news?
There seems to be a double standard here. For the objection to succeed, a Protestant would have to give a principled reason why only the possibility to reject the gift of salvation after conversion is bad news—especially when it’s possible, at least according to Catholic and Orthodox belief, to get the gift back (through the Sacrament of Reconciliation). Until that’s done, the objection doesn’t hold water.
On to our second approach: the denial of “once saved always saved” is good news.
There are two senses in which we can take this. One is that the denial of such a doctrine is compatible with the “good news” in the sense of Christ’s and the apostles’ teachings in the Bible. The other is that the denial of such a doctrine entails a good thing. While both senses are true, it’s the latter sense that we have in mind here.
Consider that if it’s possible to reject the gift of salvation after our initial conversion, this implies that it’s also possible to choose to continue our commitment to living for Christ. Now, isn’t the choice to commit to a loving relationship with Christ a good thing? I think every Christian would say yes.
So, we could ask, “If it’s not bad news to say we can choose to commit to living for Christ initially at the time of conversion, why would it be bad news to say we have the possibility of making the same choice later on? What would make the commitment to continue in our relationship with Christ bad news?” Again, there would be double standard if this were so. There’s no principle that makes one bad news and the other good.
So, if a Christian believes it’s good news to have the possibility to commit to Christ at the beginning of conversion, then he must believe it’s good news to have the possibility to choose to continue in that commitment after initial conversion. But since the former necessarily entails the possibility to reject the gift of salvation at the time it’s initially offered, the latter also necessarily entails the possibility to reject the gift of salvation after initial conversion.
Given that Christians recognize the former is a good thing, it follows that the latter is a good thing (good news) as well.
I’m sure our pastor friend had good intentions in preaching to the students. He just needed to think things through a bit more to perceive the “good news” in our ongoing renewal of commitment to Christ having real value.

‘But That Sounds Like Bad News!’

Who were Mary’s parents? Did she have a natural birth? Did she have original sin?

I’m new to the Church. Is studying spiritual warfare making me a target for demonic attacks?

I read the documents of Vatican 2. I don’t see a lot of the liturgical reforms. Where did they come from?

Many Catholics read the Vatican II documents and wonder: where are the reforms we see today? We explore what the Council actually said, how those ideas were implemented, and also dive into Marian theology and questions about spiritual warfare.
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Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>
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Where Did the Liturgical Reforms After Vatican II Really Come From?

What to Do When A Spouse Is Addicted to Pornography

What if you could get a personal message each day from beyond this world? Millions of people seek such messages in astrology charts and readings. But the Church has a better &#8220;<a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/astrology">astrology</a>,&#8221; in which God really does have a message for you each day of the year.

Horoscopes, Astrology, Catholicism, Oh My!

You don’t hear of a lot of Muslim Convert

What would It take to Evangelize a Muslim Effectively?

What are the most effective arguments for a Muslim?

What does the saying “without reason” mean?

How is the person of Jesus himself an argument against Islam?

What is meant by “The Muslim Dilemma”?

Is Islam pretty unified or divided?

Has the Koran been changed?

How does the Muslim view of heaven compare with the Christian view?

Why did you decide to start sharing your testimony?

Growing up as a Muslim in Canada

Watching the livestream of the killing of the Coptic martyrs.

Slavery in the Koran

I asked Jesus if Christianity is true.

How did your family react to you leaving Islam?

How did the Christian missionaries introduce you to Jesus?

How would you invite a Muslim to consider Christianity?

Every religion has to deal with Jesus.

In this interview, Catholic Answers Producer Edgar Lujano talks about Islam with Muslim to Catholic convert Ismail Youseff.
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Why I Left Islam w/ Ismail Youseff

<div>Is there a patron saint of marriage or relationships?</div><div>There are several patron saints of marriage and aspects of marriage. The patron saints of marriage include:
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<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/adelaide-saint">Saint Adelaide</a> of Burgundy (second marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangulphus">Saint Gengulphus of Burgundy</a> (difficult marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/joseph-saint">Saint Joseph</a> (married people)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/monica-saint">Saint Monica</a> (married women)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/prisca-saint">Saint Priscilla</a> (good marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/rita-of-cascia-saint">Saint Rita of Cascia</a> (difficult marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/thomas-more-blessed">Saint Thomas More</a> (difficult marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/valentine-saint">Saint Valentine</a> (happy marriages)</li>
</ul>
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Is There a Patron Saint of Marriage?

In this episode Trent talks about a problem he sees with the idea of a Christian &#8220;Content Creator.&#8221;
Transcription:
Trent:
Last month I spoke at the Live Action Young Leader Summit where we gave away a thousand copies of my book Persuasive Pro-Life to equip these advocates to end the scourge of abortion. Also in attendance, were a dozen Christian content creators, and I love seeing so many young people using popular media to evangelize, but something was bothering me after meeting with them. I couldn&#8217;t put my finger on it until now. So what&#8217;s the problem with Christian content creators? Well, it&#8217;s not the creators, at least not these creators. I&#8217;ve seen a lot of their work and I&#8217;m impressed with their heart and skill. That doesn&#8217;t mean I agree with everything they&#8217;ve ever said. It&#8217;s just that I&#8217;m glad to see the overall godly orientation of their craft. Instead, what bothers me is the term content creator and specifically being a Christian content creator. Now, once again, I&#8217;m not criticizing people who use this term, Kyle Whittington, who previously moderated our YouTube channel, hosts an excellent Catholic content creator conference at the St.
Paul&#8217;s Center. So I understand the utility of the term content creator, and I&#8217;m not attacking anybody for using it. I just don&#8217;t like the term because it sounds like an inhuman job in some science fiction dystopia. A content creator sounds like someone who mindlessly and inhumanly pumps out product to satisfy rampant consumers. Demand ads that promise help to quickly create monetizable content, make the internet feel like a place where barely nutritious digital gruel is dumped on your plate for you to eat. It feels like a lot of modern entertainment that has become this kind of slop or is J from Red Letter Media puts it. Don&#8217;t ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products. This content creation mindset isn&#8217;t just a temptation for Christians who have sizable YouTube channels or Instagram accounts. It&#8217;s a danger for anyone who publicly posts on social media.
Anytime you or I post on X or Instagram or Facebook, we are creating content for public consumption and social media algorithms use psychological tricks to manipulate users into creating content for companies to monetize to see how this works, think about the difference between products and users. When you buy a book, a movie ticket, a meal or a video game, it&#8217;s easy to tell the difference between the user who buys the product and the product being consumed. But what is the product we buy on social media? The 2020 documentary, the social dilemma says, if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product. The product on social media are the users. When we use social media, we become products for other people to consume and we consume other people as products. Even if we use social media for the noble goal of sharing our faith, the faith or at least our commentary on it, becomes a kind of product that these companies manipulate for advertisers.
Now, that&#8217;s not evil because if it were, I would shut down my channel, but it does call us to vigilance because these platforms spend millions of dollars to research how to manipulate us into working for them without us realizing it. One way they do that is by posting how many people view and like our content, which causes a dopamine surge in our brains. When the surge wears off, the user wants that next hit. So they try to think about what content will get similar engagement, and if they don&#8217;t get as much engagement with the next post, they keep trying like a gambling addict who can&#8217;t let go of the slot machine because they know the next spin will be the big winner if they can just hang on a little bit more. Moreover, the posts that get amplified and shared tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator among human behaviors.
This includes adult material clickbait that promises adult material and rage bait that gets engagement by just making lots of people outrage at a post or things that just appeal to our most basic emotional responses without a lot of thought put into it. When this kind of content becomes religious, I call it clicks for Christ. Consider this meme. Jesus was born for you, died for you. If you love Jesus and are not ashamed, put amen in the comments below. Now, reminding people that Jesus died for them is a good thing and the person who posted this may have good intentions, but does this really call people to repentance or to grow in the Christian life? The only thing this seems to do is create engagement by encouraging lots of comments to this post, and the poster may not even be as sincere Christian, just someone who works for a click farm in another country that does this for ad money.
This is especially common with AI slop like this fake picture of a man in a wheelchair using the following artificial intelligence prompt that&#8217;s been translated from Hindi American soldier veteran holding cardboard sign that says, today&#8217;s my birthday. Please like injured in battle, veteran war American flag. In fact, the cover picture on the Wikipedia entry for AI slop is an image of Jesus made out of a school of shrimp because reasons. Now, you might be thinking, Trent, this is bad, but the Christian content creators I know make good content, so why are you worried? Sure, nobody goes from edifying content to seafood Jesus overnight, but many people gradually get sucked into the content creation mindset that values engagement over edification. So here&#8217;s a solution I want to propose. Replace the term content creator with the term artist or digital artist. Be an artist, not a content creator.
Artificial intelligence can create content, but AI can never create art because art is a way for human beings to communicate truth through beauty, not data through pattern recognition. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve instructed my editors to not use AI to create religious images for thumbnails because I want to feature true religious art in my episodes, and I direct this to everyone, not just people who post online in his letter to artists. Pope St. John Paul II said, not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet as Genesis has it all, men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life in a certain sense. They are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece. Our lives are not pieces of content for other people to consume. They are works of art that reflect the beauty of our creator and the art we create doesn&#8217;t have to be complex.
A simple post on X can be art in the same way a haiku or a short poem is art. A picture on Instagram can be as artistic as an award-winning photograph. When we create something for others to read or view, we should consider it part of our vocation as a Christian artist. For most people, that&#8217;ll just be an occasional artistic venture, but some people see that God gave them an artistic gift. John Paul II writes those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark, which is the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor, and so on, feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent, but to develop it in order to put it at the service of their neighbor and of humanity as a whole. When Michelangelo sculpted the pieta, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy or Fulton Sheen preached with a chalkboard.
These men were not creating content to boost engagement. They were making great art, which ironically leads to the highest forms of engagement because people desire beauty even more than they desire pleasure. That&#8217;s because God is beauty itself, and so the truly beautiful art always reflects God in some way. Christian art shouldn&#8217;t exist in a Christian ghetto where it gets a pat on the head for trying. It should reflect ancient traditional principles of beauty so that anyone, even a jaded modern person can appreciate it for more on that, see my previous episode on why liberals love ugly art and how good art lifts the human spirit to contemplate the divine. Moreover, having the mentality of an artist instead of as a content creator also leads to embracing another virtue of the artist not selling out. True artists don&#8217;t care if their work makes money, or even if lots of people like it, hence the trope of the starving artist.
They just want their art to be authentic and objectively good. It&#8217;s better to be an unknown good artist than a widely popular sellout. Being a Christian artist on social media platforms means we should choose quality over quantity. Now, that&#8217;s hard to do because algorithms like YouTube punish accounts that don&#8217;t post on a regular basis by not recommending their content, but it&#8217;s better to do that than to always scrape the bottom of the creative barrel in order to meet some arbitrary deadline. Social media imposes on us. We should also choose resting over rushing, for example. It&#8217;s really tempting to maximize engagement by being the first person to post a hot take on a widely discussed issue, but it&#8217;s better to have a prudent holy take that less people see than a viral hot take that could be wrong or even emus. The content creation mindset also makes people think that to be successful, they shouldn&#8217;t take any risks.
They should just copy successful Christian content creators, but that&#8217;s what Hollywood content creation is right now, and it&#8217;s awful, endless reboots, prequels, sequels and spinoffs of existing ips because companies know what leads to box office success, apologetics, evangelization, and catechesis don&#8217;t have to live within a prison of feisty ex posts. Long form interviews, reaction vids and video essays with a host sitting in front of a warm, inviting background talking about a subject while cool stock footage plays over him. Okay, that one feels a little bit close to home, but to be clear, those things aren&#8217;t bad. It&#8217;s just bad. If Catholics who want to publish on platforms like YouTube think they have to follow a certain mold, but if you embrace an artist&#8217;s mindset over a content creation mindset, you&#8217;re more willing to take risks to break the mold, to try something new, even if it doesn&#8217;t lead to much engagement.
I&#8217;d love to see more Catholic and Christian documentaries, oral histories, short films, animation, stop motion poetry. I mean the sky&#8217;s the limit. For example, Catholic lo-fi music is a great example of Christian art and John Kramer of the church. Lego Project shows that you can glorify God through any medium by just taking a picture or video of it and uploading it online. So how do we get this kind of inspiration? Well, the very word inspire is rooted in the word breathe like inspiration. Being inspired means God breathes into you and I divine truth, similar to what the ancient Greeks thought a muse could do in inspiring someone and whisper inspiration to them. John Paul ii put it this way, the divine artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. I also think it&#8217;s a good sign if you have a little bit of reluctance towards being a digital artist that shows you aren&#8217;t trying to just become famous or chase a dopamine rush. You sense the great responsibility that comes with representing the faith even in social media posts, but we shouldn&#8217;t let prudent caution paralyze us inaction because we worry that we&#8217;re not skilled enough to share our faith. Here&#8217;s a two minute clip from Brian Holdsworth describing how he got started creating his YouTube channel in a way that embodies a humble, almost reluctant attitude that guards against being an annoying content creator.
CLIP:
After seeing the success of Apostle, that&#8217;s like word on fire. I wanted to encourage other preachers and teachers to do the same, and I had a clergy friend here who I thought would be great in that role. He was one of the more prominent evangelists and preachers in this archdiocese, so I kept on encouraging him. I bought all the video gear. I learned how to use it, and I tried to convince him or anyone to sit down in front of the camera so that we could take advantage of the opportunities that new media was presenting to the church&#8217;s mission as had been proven as a proof of concept by people like Bishop Barron, but I, busyness and reluctance got in the way and I couldn&#8217;t convince anyone to do it. I had this studio all set up and no talent in front of the camera, so out of restlessness and a desire to practice what I was learning and to provide a proof of concept for potential evangelists that I could work with.
I sat down in front one day and I just ranted about a topic that was being debated here in Canada, but was only getting one side of the argument, and then after turning the camera off and watching it back, I watched it and I thought, huh, that&#8217;s actually serviceable. So I somewhat reluctantly and Bashfully started posting these little sessions that I would have in front of the camera to my own YouTube channel, fully expecting that nobody was going to watch them, but that they might serve as at least a portfolio piece to show my production skills to prospective clients. And honestly, to my complete surprise, people started watching and interacting with those videos in fairly large numbers. At least it felt large to me. At one point, someone ripped one of my videos from my channel and then posted it to their Facebook page, and it ended up getting half a million views. It was at that point I realized that what I said had the potential to reach a lot of people. So as you&#8217;d expect, I decided to take it more seriously and to focus more on what I thought people needed to hear about, which was the Catholic faith.
Trent:
Finally, we should make everything we do as artists beautiful. This means surpassing objective standards for aesthetics and making the words and images that we create, even if they&#8217;re a humble posts on social media, make them of the highest quality. But that doesn&#8217;t mean everything we make has to be sunshine and rainbows. Flannery O&#8217;Connor is one of the great modern Catholic authors, and she specialized in grim sometimes violent stories that we&#8217;re still rooted in the faith without beating you over the head with the message. John Paul II says, even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption. That means it&#8217;s okay in moderation to post about bad things in the church. Michelangelo even took artistic revenge on a papal master of ceremonies who complained about nudity in the Sistine Chapel by painting that priest in hell.
But just as the Sistine Chapel has far more glory to balance out this slight, we should not disproportionately focus on the church&#8217;s warts. When a person consistently posts about the bad things in the church, it&#8217;s a sign that they&#8217;ve become a content creator, mining an addictable product, even if they don&#8217;t realize it. In this case, anger, and they&#8217;ve lost sight of the artist&#8217;s duty to save the world through beauty. I&#8217;ll leave you with these words from John Paul ii. Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden for God, which is a lover of beauty like St. Augustine could express in incomparable terms late Have I loved you? Beauty so old and so new late. Have I loved you? Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day. I.

The Problem with Christian “Content Creators”

In my experience, church mission statements are usually more trouble than they are worth. What is it that our parish does that the one next door does not? Well, a lot of things . . . and nothing. We may be good at outreach, and our neighbors do beautiful liturgy, but we ought to do better liturgy, and they ought to try a bit harder to help people who don’t show up on Sundays. At the same time, every community has a particular character—a charism, even—and it is worth identifying and developing.
I am agnostic on the question of getting a committee together to craft a fifty-word blurb for the cover of the bulletin. But if a parish does choose to craft and publish a mission statement, the main thing I would counsel is to be careful how it uses the word kingdom, particularly in relation to any version of another word: build.
Talk of building the kingdom has become common among Catholics and Protestants alike, and for the most part, it is well-meaning. No less an authority than St. John Paul II said in a <a href="https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=3274">general audience</a> in 2000,
<blockquote>All the just of the earth, including those who do not know Christ and his Church, who, under the influence of grace, seek God with a sincere heart (see Lumen Gentium 16), are called to build the kingdom of God by working with the Lord, who is its first and decisive builder.</blockquote>
Even with non-Catholics, Catholics build. We seek to make the experience of life in the world more fruitful than others, and institutions like schools, soup kitchens, community centers, service organizations, social clubs, and devotional societies are part of this divine construction project.
There is a danger, however, that some Christians will mistake social service for the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Such thinking mistakes the Church as an institution, where grace happens to be available. In this way, the Mass and, by extension, all Catholic liturgy and ritual become utilitarian—at best, the Lord’s body is a pill that infuses our souls with strength to go out somewhere else and make a difference. In the same way, to some people, education is mostly utilitarian, valuable since the contents that we learn may be applied for our own or others’ material gain.
Institutions tend to have utopian or at least progressive ends, even where the institution may have a stated conservative viewpoint. That is, every institution works to create more of something, do more of something, expand its reach, and heighten its influence. The Church’s institutions unabashedly seek these kinds of ends, but the Church itself is not becoming anything else, going anywhere else, or waiting for us to fix it or finish it. The Catholic Church is because Christ is. The kingdom of heaven has already come near, and our participation in the liturgy of the Catholic Church is our experience of the veil separating heaven and earth dropping in our midst.
The Catholic Church is not a theory waiting to be put into practice. Nor is its earthly form a mere shadow of a heavenly reality that is to come. It exists. It is a concrete reality, composed of everyone baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. It is a people, just as God’s chosen people Israel were and are a people.
Not an institution. Not a box.
The Catholic Church is in quite a bad position today in relation to State and society, masking its true identity and destiny and leaving even its most devoted members at a loss for how to proceed with evangelism.
In the earliest days of the Church, the Jews in Jerusalem who believed that Jesus was their promised Messiah differentiated themselves from other Jews who did not share their view. Although they continued to attend the Temple, eventually, they faced persecution from their kinsmen, as Jesus had foretold in the Gospel according to St. John. In the next few centuries, as the missionary endeavors of Peter, Paul, James, and the rest of the apostolic band spread the Faith throughout the Roman Empire, persecution flared up here and there. But in both directions—toward Judaism and paganism—the Christians knew what they were about. They were a people made up of many peoples, dwelling among many peoples.
As the Church took root in Europe and Christendom was born, being Catholic defined the identity of peoples not as a rebellion, but as a culture—indeed, as civilization. It was obvious to all that the Catholic Church was not an institution, but the wellspring of the moral life of individuals and families and the ground upon which tribes and kingdoms and ultimately modern nation-states stood. In a time and place where everyone was baptized (or almost everyone), there was implicit pressure to create laws, maintain norms, and in every conceivable way organize life around the sacramental life of the Catholic Church, whose cathedrals, monasteries, abbeys, and churches were not accidentally the centerpiece of every city, town, and village. That is, the ubiquity of Church institutions and their power to form individuals signaled the identity of the Church as the transcendent marker of identity that defined the group. Even where—or especially where—individuals were not personally on fire for the gospel, only the mentally deranged or deficient thought society ought to conform to their dissenting view. The assertion of rights within a theoretical religiously neutral space was simply anachronistic.
In recent centuries in the once thoroughly Catholic societies of the West, however, Christianity has fragmented into groups, which we explored earlier, making its various expressions look more like institutions among others in a broadly Christian but officially neutral society. For a long time in countries like the United States and France, secularism still maintained an essentially Christian character. Hence, my own parents remember saying the Lord’s Prayer in their public schools, and no one—including Jews and other religious minorities—objected on the grounds that some fundamental principle of a separation of Church and State was being violated. In this example, the school was obviously the institution, whereas churches were understood to be something more like the guardians and promoters of the values that everyone agreed ought to underpin all institutions.
In the 1960s, however, things began to change. God was banished to the private sphere, and Christian secularism transformed into a non-religious or even anti-religious version of secularism. In Europe and North America, the Catholic Church, along with Protestant communities, came to dwell in a no-man’s-land between where ancient Christians died for the Faith and the everyday Christian reality where medieval and early modern people lived for the Faith. Being an authentic Catholic had always been a choice, but in the late twentieth century, it became only a choice.
The Catholic Church had always had a lot of institutions, but nowadays, it is considered only an institution, even if a holy one.
When a person becomes a Catholic, whether baptized as a child or as an adult, he joins the body of Christ as member of a parish, which is a subtly different thing from a member of a church. Parishes are geographic regions assigned to the pastoral oversight of a bishop, who delegates authority over individual parishes (or sometimes multiple parishes) to his priests. In most cases, the parish church is synonymous with the parish, but, unlike in most Protestant traditions, whether one chooses to go to a local church or prefers an option farther away, that person technically belongs, spiritually, to the physical place where he dwells.
To the untrained eye, the parochial system appears to be about as institutional as anything gets—but in fact, because the parish exists to transform ordinary man into sacramental man, the parish is super-institutional. It is a mark of heavenly citizenship on terra firma. Here we may to the example of ancient Israel, and how the Catholic Church is both the fulfillment and continuation of God’s choice of one chosen nation, one promised land, and one dwelling place on earth in the Temple.
The identity of the Catholic parish is described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in two different places. In paragraph 2179, we read that “a parish is a definite community of the Christian faithful established on a stable basis within a particular church,” and “the pastoral care of the parish is entrusted to a pastor as its own shepherd under the authority of the diocesan bishop.” If I have not stated it plainly enough throughout this chapter, let me put straight now: the Catholic Church is a people, a people in a place, and a people in every place. But there is one more all-important element, and the Catechism describes it in paragraph 2226: “The parish is the eucharistic community and the heart of the liturgical life of Christian families.”
Eucharistic. Community.
Although there are precisely seven sacraments of the Church, the Church itself has the essential character of an overarching sacrament. It is where the body of Christ receives the body of Christ—where Christ, who is “all in all,” dwells where I am, and also where Christ is present in full to a brother Christian in a faraway parish in a faraway land. As Jesus says, “I tell you, something greater than the Temple is here” (Matt. 12:6).
What we have here, then, is not just one super-institutional focal point for a relatively small nation of God’s people. Nor do we have in the Church merely an institution with a universal spirit of inquiry shared among people in different cities and countries. Rather, the Catholic Church is the experience of the common destiny of man—eucharistic man—transformed into Christ by Christ, living in a present that intersects with eternity. In every parish, in every home, in every institution, and in every heart, Jesus is Lord.