I write this on the day known to most Americans as Halloween, but to some American Protestants as Reformation Day.

Many people—mostly Protestants, of course, but also not a few Catholics—talk of “celebrating” the Protestant Reformation. I am not one of them, because there is nothing to celebrate, though there is much to commemorate. Working from the Latin, to commemorate (“with memory”) means to keep something in memory or not to lose memory of it.

We commemorate 9/11 because we want to keep in mind the wickedness of the terrorism and the heroism of so many victims, police, and firefighters—but we don’t celebrate what happened on that day. We gladly would give up the heroism if we could have been spared the terror.

We Commemorate to Not Forget

We commemorate December 7, the “day that will live in infamy,” because it was the prelude to a long and costly war. Again, there was heroism, but we wish that heroism had never needed to be called up.

We commemorate Bastille Day and the October Revolution not because what came from them, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, were good but precisely because they were evil, and we want to remember that evil so that it won’t return in another guise.

We celebrate none of these unhappy events, but we commemorate them. Not to do so would be to become blind to human currents, to the greatest, if most tragic, events of history. We celebrate events that have uplifted the human spirit and the human condition: secular events such as Independence Day and sacred events such as saints’ feast days. We commemorate events we wish had never happened but from which we can learn lessons.

I see nothing to celebrate in the Protestant Reformation. It was the greatest disaster the West suffered over the last millennium. It brought theological confusion, political turmoil, and decades of war. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killed about three percent of the world’s population, the same proportion that died in World War II. The religious wars would not have occurred had the Reformation not occurred.

Earlier, a Reform

Much was wrong in the Catholic Church of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Personal morality was lax (though not matching today’s laxity), and corruption was widespread among the clergy and was particularly scandalous the higher one’s gaze went up the hierarchical ladder. One should keep in mind, though, that, however bad things were in the decades before Luther took out his hammer, they had been worse in the tenth century. If there were a few “bad popes” in Luther’s era, there were worse popes, and more of them, five or six centuries earlier.

The Church of the tenth century desperately needed reform, not revolution, though it might have fallen into the latter if reform hadn’t come about. But reform did come about, and the Church not only soldiered on but prospered. The result was the High Middle Ages, the era in which Catholic principles most effectively (but still inadequately) undergirded Western society.

By the turn of the 1500s, a once-again-complacent Christendom was in trouble. It again needed reform, but what it got was the Reformation. Luther, who was not much of a theologian, rejected some long-taught beliefs and offered a few novelties of his own fashioning. His counterparts elsewhere in Europe, such as Calvin and the English Reformers, did likewise. The result was a fissiparous Protestantism, the members of which were unable to agree among themselves on many doctrines and practices but could agree to oppose “the Pope of Rome.”

False Principles Lead to False Principles

Protestantism was grounded on false principles, among them the private interpretation of Scripture, but private interpretation didn’t stop there. Once you accept the principle that there is no human-connected authority to which you must give obedience of mind and not just of action (the divinely protected but all-so-human magisterium), you’re free to use private interpretation at will. It isn’t limited to Scripture. It extends to the whole of religion.

One man’s private interpretation gets reinterpreted by another man, who thinks he has achieved the final and pure understanding, only to be confounded by his successors, who claim that he claimed too much or too little. There is no stopping point, but there is a kind of law of religious entropy at work, and the tendency is toward simplification. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob becomes the God of the Deists and then the God of the philosophers.

It is no accident that a straight line can be drawn from Protestantism through the Enlightenment to today’s secularism. (The ancestor of secular humanism isn’t a vague paganism; it’s Puritanism.) By its inner nature, Protestantism is unstable. It was and is a hodgepodge. Much in it is true, but that truth preexisted in Catholicism. To that truth were superadded partial truths and even untruths, and that made the construct unstable.

Silver Linings Have Dark Clouds

By the end of the wars of religion, Protestantism seemed to have stabilized in several variants, but the stability was an illusion. The return of external peace unleashed centripetal forces within Protestantism, and the result was a long succession of offshoots.

The Anglican Church had broken off from the Catholic Church. The Methodist Church broke off from the Anglican. The Holiness churches broke off from the Methodist, and those churches have seen further splits. Such splits will not end, because there is a logic to further splitting. “That they all may be one” (John 17:21) has become “That they all may be multitudinous—and often at each other’s throats.” The acrimony directed at Rome also, with a few modifications, can be directed at Westminster or Geneva or Wittenberg.

None of this is to deny that many good and even holy people have come from or remain in Protestantism, nor is it to deny the invaluable work done by Protestant scholars, theologians, social thinkers, and everyday lay people. Most clouds have silver linings, but some eyes are capable of seeing only the silver linings, not the clouds.

A Reformation Was Never Needed

Richard John Neuhaus, the founding editor of First Things, had been a Lutheran pastor. He converted to the Catholic faith in 1990 and a year later was ordained a priest. He once was asked the reason for his conversion, and he replied he came into the Church because the Reformation no longer was needed. His comment diminished him in my eyes, because the comment was fatuous.

There never was a need for the Reformation. There was a need for reform, and the Reformation—despite its name—was not a reform but a revolt. It did not make the Church more of what it should have been. It made the Church into something else by making new churches.

One should celebrate Neuhaus’s entry into the Church, as one celebrates the entry of so many learned people who have become Catholics over the last three decades or so, but he offered a poor reason, even a false reason. I presume he proffered substantial and convincing reasons that I missed hearing about, yet it is this comment of his that has stuck in my mind.

It brings to mind a line from T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” (I don’t accuse Neuhaus, a good man, of treason; it’s just that the second half of this quotation is more than apt.)

It won’t do to say that, at some point, the Reformation ceased to be needed. It never was needed, and, like bad movements throughout history, it brought more grief than good. It was, and to a certain extent remains, a powerful historical force, one that we should keep in memory by commemorating it—but not by celebrating it. The difference is crucial.

Karl Keating is founder and senior fellow at Catholic Answers and is the author of several books, including Jeremiah’s Lament.

Every December, the secular, cultural celebration of Christmas overshadows the religious holiday on which it is based.

Essentially, the same thing happens at the end of October, when the way American culture celebrates Halloween overshadows All Saints’ Day.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with costumes and candy, but in the minds of most people, Halloween has become so detached from its religious roots that they have no idea where it comes from.

The old-fashioned word Halloween contributes to this. People may have an inkling that it’s short for “All Hallows’ Eve,” but that doesn’t help much—because they don’t know what a hallow is or what it means to celebrate the eve of something.

English has an unusual double-vocabulary, with many words based on Latin roots but others based on German roots. That’s why we have two words for so many things. One example is cat (derived from a German root) and feline (derived from a Latin root). The word hallow belongs to one of these German-Latin pairs. But it’s much less familiar to us than the parallel word from Latin: saint.

Hallow comes from the same root as holy, and a person who is hallowed is a saint—someone who has been sanctified or made holy. Thus, in the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Hallowed be thy name.” If we said that using words derived from Latin, it would be something like “Let your name be sanctified”—i.e., may people treat God’s name as something holy and thus honor the holiness of God himself.

The -een part of Halloween is similarly old-fashioned. “E’en” is a contraction of the word even, an older way of saying “evening.” Halloween is thus “All Hallows E’en” or “the evening of All Saints’ Day,” and it came to be celebrated as an early anticipation of the day that followed, the same way people celebrate Christmas Eve in anticipation of Christmas Day.

But why celebrate All Saints’ Day in the first place? Some of our Protestant friends object to the Catholic custom of celebrating certain saints and giving them special attention. Aware that there are liturgical days commemorating individual saints, they want to know why there aren’t celebrations for all the other people in heaven.

After all, in Revelation, John describes the population of heaven this way:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (7:9-10).

Don’t all those other people deserve recognition, too?

The answer is that they do, and this is why we have All Saints’ Day. Since there are only 365 days in the year, not every person in heaven can have his own liturgical commemoration, but they all should be recognized for the way they cooperated with God’s grace. Thus, All Saints’ Day was created to commemorate every last individual in heaven, even those whose salvation is known to God alone.

So if your departed grandmother is in heaven, even though she’s never been canonized, on All Saints’ Day, the Catholic Church commemorates her and the work God did in her life. She, too, has a place in the liturgical calendar, alongside the more famous saints.

Precisely when that day occurs will depend on which liturgical calendar you are using. In many Eastern Catholic churches, the commemoration of all the saints is held on the Sunday after Pentecost, which has a certain logic, since Pentecost was the event that led to the evangelization of the world and the salvation of so many souls.

In the West, November 1 became the date on which all the saints are commemorated. Sometimes people will try to tarnish this with pagan associations, claiming that it was based on the Gaelic holiday Samhain, as celebrated in the British Isles.

But All Saints’ Day didn’t originate in the British Isles. The reason November 1 was picked is that Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to all the saints and fixed its anniversary as November 1.

Later, Pope Gregory IV (827-844) extended this celebration to the whole of the Western Church. This led to the commemoration of the evening before as All Hallows Eve, and it led to the following day—November 2—being celebrated as All Souls’ Day, when we pray for all the souls who are still being purified on their way to heaven.

Though we disagree about various matters, both Catholics and Protestants say the Apostles’ Creed, and when we do so, we profess belief in “the communion of saints.” The celebration of All Saints’ Day is one of the ways Catholics live out this profession.

All Saints’ Day came to be a very important liturgical day, and today it is a holy day of obligation, meaning that Catholics must observe it by going to Mass, as they do on Sundays.

This makes All Saints different from the commemorations of individual saints. None of the saints living after biblical times are commemorated with holy days of obligation. However famous saints like Augustine, Aquinas, and Thérèse of Lisieux may be, they don’t have such an important day on the liturgical calendar.

But the whole body of the saints in heaven—sainted grandmothers included—does. The Catholic Church thus not only remembers individual saints; it takes seriously its profession of the entire communion of saints.

Jimmy Akin is a senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the host of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, and the author of numerous books including Evidence for Christ.

Martin Luther. The man who split from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. In the name of reform, he created his own church, which came to be known as Lutheran. For him, all Christians possessed the Holy Spirit, so they could interpret the Bible contrary to the pope. This has resulted in hundreds of divisions and denominations within Christianity. Unfortunately, many do not know Luther’s story, so this article will analyze the lead up to 1517.

Background to Germany

Mickey Mattox notes some important details that influence our understanding of Luther’s context in Wittenberg, Germany. Mattox says that that city constantly contested religious authority even before Luther. He cites the recent book by Natalie Krentz, who said, “Between 1500-1510 little Wittenberg had been placed under interdict by its bishop at least five times, usually because of conflicts over monies allegedly owed to the bishop.” This helps make some sense out of why the German people followed Luther’s rebellion so quickly.

Not only that, but prior to Luther, some Germans wanted more religion, a fresh energy or improvement in it, and better sermons. This is catalogued in the books Imperial Cities and the Reformation and Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages. This helps make sense of why Germany listened intently to Luther’s cry for reform.

Luther’s Early Life

Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483 to some harsh parents. Luther says of them, “The serious and austere life that they [his parents] led with me caused me to enter a monastery and become a monk” (92). Martin remembered taking a walnut from the kitchen and his mother subsequently beating him until she drew blood. On another occasion, his father whipped him to the point that he ran away from home (17). This might have influenced him later on.

In 1501, Martin left his parents and went to the University of Erfurt, where he was awarded his Master’s degree in 1505. After graduation, Martin enrolled in law school. However, he suddenly quit and went to the monastery the same year, which displeased his father greatly.

Legend has it that the reason Martin did this was because, while he was traveling, a lightning storm erupted (7). Martin thought he would die, and he promised God that if he did not die, then he would become a monk. When he survived, he chose to enroll with the Augustinians, a group of consecrated priests and brothers who attempted to follow the fifth-century Christian teacher, St. Augustine. Joining these monks seemed appropriate, since Martin’s teachers at the University of Erfurt were Augustinians.

Luther the Monk

Luther entered the monastery and made his final vows after less than a year of strict rules and study in 1506. He begged for food, prayed seven times a day, and continued to study.

During his time in the monastery, Martin was filled with anxiety over sin. Leppin says, “His view of Christ was colored with overtones of fearful expectation” (3). However, Luther’s problems of conscience were not out of the ordinary. Michael Root noted to me in an email correspondence that this scrupulosity was actually common to the “intense humility [and] piety common in the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century.”

Root goes on that “Gasparo Contarini, later a cardinal, [had a similar struggle] at about the same time as Luther. Unlike Luther, Contarini turned to the authority of the Church as an essential aspect of a resolution” (see the work of Hubert Jedin in In Kirche des Glaubens, Kirche der Geschichte. Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1. 167-80). Another contemporary of Luther, this time within the Augustinian order, Johannes von Paltz, “shared Luther’s despair over good works, but he saw a solution to this in the Church’s merciful institution of indulgences.” (Root cites this book by Berndt Hamm.)

In 1508, Luther earned a Bachelor’s in Sacred Scripture and in 1509 a Bachelor’s in the “Sentences,” which was a textbook of systematic theology by Peter Lombard. Luther was heavily trained in the ideas of William of Occam while in Erfurt. This teaching was called nominalism and “differed from the teaching of Thomas Aquinas” (Leppin, 4). This prompted scholar Joseph Lortz to say, “Within himself Luther wrestled with and overthrew a Catholicism that was not Catholic” (The Reformation in Germany, 1:200). In 1510, Luther switched monasteries from Erfurt to Wittenberg, and he earned a doctorate in Scripture in 1512.

While studying in the new monastery, Luther’s confessor was a priest named Staupitz, the vicar general of the Augustinians. He helped Luther see Christ as more of a consoling figure than a judging figure. Staupitz was a father figure to Luther in every sense of the term.

Staupitz potentially was the impetus for Luther getting into the writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Johann Tauler. Modern scholar Franz Posset argues that Bernard was one of the influences on Luther’s “faith alone” teaching later. Modern scholars like Steven Ozment argue that the “faith alone” idea has some roots in the German mystics as well, such as the Dominican Johann Tauler. Whatever position you take on Bernard and Tauler compared to Luther, there are points of connection and disconnection between them.

Staupitz saw potential in Luther and urged him to become a professor. Luther replaced Staupitz at the University of Wittenberg. This university was a rather new school, having been founded in 1502 by Prince Frederick the Wise, so it was presumably an exciting position for Luther to take. While teaching, the young German monk lectured on what he learned in his private research.

Luther the Professor

When he lectured on Scripture, Luther studied Paul’s letter to the Romans among other things, which would be significant later. Professor Luther in Wittenberg adapted well to this more active way of life at Wittenberg. Luther says in 1516,

I am a preacher at the monastery, I am a reader during mealtimes, I am asked daily to preach in the city church, I have to supervise the study [of novices and friars], I am a vicar (and that means I am eleven times prior), I am caretaker of the fish [pond] at Leitzkau, I represent the people of Herzberg at the court in Torgau, I lecture on Paul, and I am assembling [material for] a commentary on the Psalms (LW, vol. 48, Letters I).

What a startling number of activities! Luther was overseeing eleven monasteries! Franz Posset argues that Luther’s scruples were resolved while as a monk, and this quote seems to suggest as much.

As seen, Luther was incredibly smart. He received a ton of degrees and became a professor. He had the leadership abilities to be prior of eleven monasteries. He seems to have had an impressive footprint in Germany, which would make sense given the number of Germans who later followed him.

To summarize, Martin Luther came from a country that was struggling with the Church. He had a harsh upbringing, his education might not have been as Catholic as it sounded, and he struggled with the Faith. The rest of Luther’s life ended in an unfortunate way, and this is his backstory.

Luke Lancaster received his B.A. in theology at Ave Maria University and is working on his M.A. in theology at the Augustine Institute.

Catholics believe in communicating with the dead: we call it prayer. We ask the saints for their intercession, and we pray for the souls in purgatory. These are good practices to have in our daily prayer life, with special emphasis given on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.

Where do ghosts fit with Catholic teaching, and where does Halloween fit with Catholic practice? The two questions are not necessarily related, but in the USA they are both part of Halloween, so we can address them together.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following as its first definition of ghost: “the seat of life or intelligence: soul.” This helps to explain why the Third Person of the Trinity is sometimes called the Holy Ghost; it may sound strange to some in the twenty-first century, but its linguistic roots make sense.

In any case, the second definition from that dictionary is what interests us for Halloween: “a disembodied soul, especially the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness.” This is what is usually meant by the word ghost in our culture: the soul of a deceased person, operating in our physical world, in bodily likeness but without a living human body. I would expand that to include the idea of such a being operating invisibly, but having physical powers such as causing objects to move, making sounds (including voices), and disrupting electronics.

When we say that a human being has died, we mean only the body. The soul goes before Jesus for particular judgment, learning whether he will go to hell or heaven, or purgatory before heaven. When Jesus returns for the General Judgment at the end of the world, he will raise everyone’s body from the dead, to join the soul for eternal misery in hell or eternal happiness in heaven. Until then, human beings (almost all of them) are disembodied souls, so they do fit that part of the definition of a ghost. They do not, however, have any inherent physical appearance: just as our souls are not visible while our bodies are alive, neither are they visible after our bodies are deceased. Having said that, God can make exceptions and have deceased human beings appear as he wills.

Which of the three places—hell, heaven, or purgatory—would a soul come from, to do ghostly activity on earth? Certainly not from heaven: if God has a saint appear or speak to someone on earth, it is to give a clear message or to give inspiration, not to cause vague and pointless sights, sounds, or moving objects. The same is true of souls in purgatory: if they appear or speak to someone on earth, as has occasionally been reported, it is to give a message, ask for prayers, or give a warning about the sufferings therein.

This leaves the souls in hell. Could they return to earth to do evil, or at least to frighten and lead people astray? This seems to contradict the doctrine that the souls of the damned are in hell for eternity, without getting breaks to return to earth. Though some saints have had visions of hell, in Church teaching and tradition we do not find that particular human souls from hell return and act in this world. The Catholic Rite of Exorcism even warns the exorcist to beware that the devil might purport to be the soul of a deceased person.

That brings us to the angels: could what we call ghosts be good angels or demons? The short answer is no: the angels never had bodies to begin with, they certainly were never human, and so they are not disembodied souls of dead persons.

Angels do have the ability to take on a kind of appearance. St. Thomas Aquinas speculated that they do this by manipulating the air—something like a cloud. Though their appearance could be frightening, as when the angel appeared to the shepherds at Christmas, good angels would not appear for the sole purpose of frightening people. Nor would they randomly or pointlessly move objects, make sounds, or flicker lights.

On the other hand, fallen angels or demons might do any of these things. We should not be surprised if people looking for ghosts are, on some occasions, being fooled by demons. Demons might tempt these people to devote attention to pointless spiritual practices such as ghost hunting, or destructive spiritual practices such as communicating with the dead using boards, cards, or alleged psychic powers. In conclusion, in the rare cases where unnatural activity occurs that people attribute to ghosts, it could be the work of demons.

And now for Halloween: is it sinful to celebrate? This depends on what a person is doing. Some sinful practices have already been named, such as using cards or Ouija boards to communicate with the dead. Using devices to attempt to detect sounds or electrical impulses of disembodied souls seems to be the same, since they are still attempts at communication with the dead. Witchcraft, spells, curses, and other spiritual activities unconnected with God and his angels and saints are likewise sinful.

In a different category are the American customs common at Halloween. Wearing a costume is not sinful, putting plastic skeletons or fake tombstones or inflatable ghosts in one’s yard is not sinful, and trying to get a bagful of free candy is not sinful. The practice of dressing up as a saint is certainly commendable, and dressing as a murderer from a horror movie is certainly appalling. But we should not confuse wearing a costume of a witch or devil or ghost with false worship or false beliefs, any more than we equate dressing as a pirate with the desire to assault and pillage coastal villages. It’s all right to have a happy Halloween.

More importantly, have a blessed Feast of All Saints and Feast of All Souls.

Fr. Mike Driscoll is a priest of the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, and is the author of Demons, Deliverance, and Discernment: Separating Fact from Fiction about the Spirit World.

It feels like yesterday. I was sitting in my tenth-grade European history class, listening to the story of the Protestant Reformation unfold. Martin Luther was such a hero, I thought. He really stuck it to the Big Bad Catholic Church and saved true Christianity.

As a tenth-grader, I failed to understand the ramifications of this belief. If Luther was right, then the Catholic Church had been leading souls to commit idolatry for over a millennium, and Luther was a modern-day prophet of sorts, freeing millions from the lies and tyranny of the papacy.

Biblically, it is common for God to commission prophets in times when his people need to be shaken up and realigned with his will—especially when his people have fallen into idolatry. So was Luther a prophet, sent to do the same?

In 2018, Protestant Arnold Wheeler dedicated an article to this question. His conclusion?

The answer is absolutely, yes. . . . He certainly had the Holy Spirit’s guidance in the things he taught, and there can be no question that God raised him up to carry out a very special work for him at a critical time in Christian history.

This is unsurprising. In fact, all Protestants ought to agree with the historical fact that the Reformation was a critical turning point in Christian history.

Wheeler continues with an important distinction: “However, I think nearly all Christians would agree that Luther’s prophetic gift was not the same as that of the biblical writers, who spoke and wrote with God’s authority.”

Could we agree with this claim? Well, we can certainly agree that Martin Luther was not a modern-day Moses or Elijah. But could he be even a lower-tier prophet?

For someone to be a prophet of God, he needs to be speaking God’s words. After all, the word “prophet” comes from the Greek prophētēs, which can be translated as “spokesman.” A prophet is speaking on behalf of God.

Time does not permit a complete examination of all of Luther’s teachings and whether they align with the Word of God preserved in Sacred Scripture and Tradition. But what can be considered, and what is less subjective, is the markings of a prophet, and whether Luther possessed those.

Firstly, the Bible depicts prophets as being called directly by God. God appears to Moses in the form of a burning bush, conversing directly with him (Exod. 3:4). God calls Samuel’s name repeatedly in the Temple (1 Sam. 3:4). God speaks to Elijah in a whisper in a cave outside Horeb (1 Kings 19:12-13). Even in the New Testament, God appears to Paul and speaks directly to him (Acts 9:4-5).

Although having direct communication with God is not strictly necessary to be a prophet, it is a sure indicator that God is commissioning an individual to provoke change. Luther never speaks of any unique commission given to him by God. Instead, he bases his ministry on his conviction from simply reading Scripture.

Besides communication with God, prophets exhibited other signs—namely, public miracles. Moses parts the Red Sea in two (Exod. 14:21-22), Samuel calls upon God to make it thunder and rain (1 Sam. 12:17-18), Elijah raises the dead (1 Kings 17:21-22), and Paul heals a crippled man (Acts 14:10).

Even less significant prophets in the New Testament performed miraculous deeds. Take Agabus, for example, who foretells a great famine (Acts 11:28), which is fulfilled during the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius. He also prophesies later the arrest of St. Paul by the Jews (Acts 21:10-11).

God never expects his people to blindly trust that prophets are speaking the word of God. He accompanies their words with miraculous signs.

What miraculous signs publicly accompanied Luther’s ministry? Well...none.

According to Luther, for over a millennium, most if not all Christians fell into idolatry (at the very least, implicitly) due to Holy Mass: “This dragon’s tail, the Mass, has begotten a numerous vermin-brood of manifold idolatries” (Schmalkald Articles, Article II). He goes on, describing how the Mass’s connection with purgatory, relics, and indulgences is of the devil. But the beliefs and practices that Luther lists for condemnation were held explicitly by Christians from the beginning, with surviving written records to prove it from as early as the fourth century.

Regarding purgatory, Tertullian says, “We offer sacrifices for the dead”—that is, to expedite their progress to heaven, even after they have died (The Crown 3:3, A.D. 211).

Regarding relics, St. Basil the Great (329-379) describes how “he took up the relics with all becoming reverence, and has aided the brethren in their preservation. These relics do you receive with a joy equivalent to the distress with which their custodians have parted with them and sent them to you” (Letter 197, par. 2).

Regarding indulgences and temporal punishment, St. Augustine (354-430) writes, “Almsgiving must be used to propitiate God for past sins, not to purchase impunity for the commission of such sins in the future. For he has given no man license to sin, although in his mercy he may blot out sins that are already committed, if we do not neglect to make proper satisfaction” (Enchiridion, ch. 70).

Considering this, if Luther’s theology is correct, then God allowed his Church to be steeped in idolatrous errors and practices for over 1,500 years. This period is much longer than any other recorded span in biblical history where God fell silent while the Israelites persisted in idolatry. This seems out of character for the God we read about in the scriptures, who promises to send his Spirit to lead us into all truth (John 16:13) and to be with us always until the end of the age (Matt. 22:20).

And when God finally does speak after so long a silence, he uses someone who has no signs to show for it?

So what’s the final verdict? Martin Luther’s protest was fueled by spiritual forces, but these forces did not come from God. If he was a prophet, it must have been for someone else.

Emily Dinneny is a social media apologist for Catholic Answers and runs her own online apologetics platform, @Catholic.Converts.

Although I studied as much Hebrew as I could before my first trip to Israel, I ended up using it only at the Western Wall to tell people who mistook me for a local, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew.”

Everywhere else I went, it would have been more practical to speak Arabic. For the past three years, in fact, the most popular name in Israel for baby boys has been Muhammad, the name of the prophet who founded the religion of Islam in the seventh century.

Muhammad claimed to have recorded a revelation from God in what is now called the Quran (sometimes written Koran; it means “recitation”), the sacred text of Islam. The fundamental claim of this revelation is that there is only God (Allah) and that Muhammad is his prophet or messenger.

Islam teaches that it is the comple­tion of the revelation God gave in the Bible, and, accordingly, the Quran contains stories involving people such as Abraham and even Jesus (who in Arabic is called Isa).

Muslims are adamant that there is only one God and that God does not have a son. They say Jesus is not the Son of God but a prophet who, though he was born of a virgin, did not rise from the dead or proclaim himself to be divine. In fact, when our pilgrim group arrived at one holy site, we saw draped across from it a banner with Arabic verses from the Quran accompanied by this English translation:

O People of the Scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allah and his word which he directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from him. So believe in Allah and his messengers. And do not say, “Three”; desist—it is better for you (4:171).

But how can that be true if . . .

There’s No Reason to Trust the Quran

The late Christian apologist Nabeel Qureshi said he converted from Islam because he asked himself, “What reason is there to stand by the koranic claims about Jesus when all the other records disagree? The Quran was written 600 years after Jesus and 600 miles away. The only reason to believe the Quran is an a priori faith in Islam.” In his analysis of all the nonbiblical references to Jesus, Robert Van Voorst concludes of the Quran, “Scholarship has almost unanimously agreed that these references to Jesus are so late and tendentious as to contain virtually nothing of value for understanding the historical Jesus” (Jesus Outside the New Testament, 17).

In other words, because the Quran is so far removed from the historical events it purports to describe, the only reason to trust its testimony would be if it were the inspired word of God. But Muhammad never claimed to have performed any miracles that would vindicate his prophetic claims, so there is no reason to believe the Quran is inspired.

The Quran even admits that no sign or miracle had been given to confirm Muhammad’s message. Sura (Quran verse) 13:7 says, “[T]hose who disbelieved say, ‘Why has a sign not been sent down to him from his Lord?’”, to which God tells Muhammad, “You are only a warner, and for every people is a guide.”

The Quran does offer one proof for the validity of its own testimony. Sura 2:23 says, “If you are in doubt about what we have sent down upon Our Servant [Muhammad], then produce a sura the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah, if you should be truthful.” In other words, “If you don’t trust the Quran, try to write something better.”

Muslim scholar Meraj Ahmad describes this “argument from literary eloquence” this way: “[N]o one has been able to imitate [the Quran’s] unique literary form. [What] makes the Quran a miracle is that it lies outside the productive capacity of the nature of the Arabic language and literature” (“Literary Miracle of the Quran”).

Does it follow that just because something can’t be imitated it must have a divine origin? The works of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky are unique and inimitable, but that doesn’t mean God dictated them.

Second, despite Muslim claims to the contrary, the Quran is similar to other medieval Arabic works and, in some respects, even deficient in comparison with them. According to the late Iranian author Ali Dashti:

The Qo’ran [sic] contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries . . . illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. These and other such aberrations in the language have given scope to critics who deny the Qo’ran’s eloquence (Twenty Three Years, 48-49).

The Quran Contradicts Scientific and Historical Facts

Some Muslim apologists claim that the Quran contains scientific truths that wouldn’t be discovered for centuries and so could have only come from divine inspiration. But this requires generous and creative imposition of modern scientific knowledge on vague quranic descriptions of the natural world—for example, when it is said that the quranic verse about how God “creates you in the wombs of your mothers, creation after creation, within three darknesses” (39:6) refers to the linings of the abdomen, uterus, and amniotic sac.

Despite the arguments some apolo­gists make for its scientific accuracy, there are several verses that appear to contradict modern science. One of these is the Quran’s description of semen being created not from the testicles but “from between the backbone and the ribs” (86:7).

Texts like these do not necessarily disprove the Quran because, like the Bible, it might be a divinely inspired text that speaks through ancient worldviews and does not claim to assert modern scientific truths. But they do cast doubt on the idea that the Quran contains miraculous scientific knowledge that could have come only from God and that this is proof of its trustworthiness.

One of the most glaring inaccuracies in the Quran is not scientific but historical. Aside from mythicists who believe Jesus Christ never existed, Muslims are the only group who deny the well-accepted fact that Jesus died by crucifixion. The Quran says in Sura 4:157:

And [for] their saying, “Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah.” And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain.

This should make us seriously doubt the reliability of the Quran, because almost everyone, including non-Christians, agrees that Jesus was crucified and died. Skeptical Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan denies that Jesus rose from the dead, but even he says “he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be” (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 163).

In response to this evidence, most Muslims believe that God only made it appear that Jesus was crucified by putting someone who looked like Jesus on the cross in his place. In the seventh century, Mohammed’s cousin Ibn Abbas said this person was a Roman soldier named Tatianos or Natyanus. The fourteenth-century apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas claims that it was Judas Iscariot getting his comeuppance by being crucified in Jesus’ place.

But since, as we’ve seen, the Quran (not to mention medieval apocryphal gospels) was written too late to be a reliable historical source about Jesus, “and since there is no evidence that it is divinely inspired,” it follows that there are no reasons to believe its testimony when it contradicts the established historical record. This may be why some Muslim scholars claim Jesus was indeed crucified, but not “to death.”

Some modern Muslim apologists, such as Shabir Ally and the late Ahmed Deedat, claim that God allowed Jesus to be crucified but that Jesus was “rescued” from death, and so he wasn’t crucified in that sense. But it seems implausible that God would wait to “rescue” his beloved prophet until after he had been tortured, crucified, and entombed. Also, most translators of the Quran recognize that the text makes a distinction between killing and crucifixion—and that it denies that either of these things happened to Jesus. The key passage in Sura 4:157 is thus rendered in most translations, “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him.”

The Quran Supports the Bible

Even if we grant a Muslim apologist that the Quran is without error and completely trustworthy, there is still a problem with the claim that we should deny Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Christ. That’s because the Quran tells us that the Gospels (in Arabic, the injeel) are a part of divine revelation and that we should listen to that revelation too.

Sura 3:3 says, “He has sent down upon you, [O Muhammad], the Book in truth, confirming what was before it. And He revealed the Torah and the Gospel.” The Quran says that Jews who do not follow the Hebrew Bible are like donkeys who carry heavy books but do not understand them (Sura 62:5).

Christians also are exhorted to follow the New Testament, or, as Sura 5:47 puts it, “[L]et the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed therein. And whoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed—then it is those who are the defiantly disobedient.”

But this creates a contradiction because, as we saw in earlier chapters, the Bible teaches that Jesus is fully divine. In response to this problem, Muslim apologists claim the parts of the Bible that contradict the Quran are either misinterpreted by Christians or that they are textual corruptions added to the Bible later and so not a part of Allah’s original revelation. In order to bolster their argument, they often appeal to skeptical biblical scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

I have addressed at greater length in other works Ehrman’s claim about the Bible’s textual corruption. Here, let us focus on how Ehrman’s own scholarship undermines the Muslim claim that the New Testament teaches only Muslim doctrines.

One Muslim apologetics website claims that in John 20:28 the apostle Thomas is not calling Jesus “God,” even though he says, “My Lord and my God!” Muslims say Thomas is saying only that Jesus is “like God,” because one ancient manuscript called the Codex Bezae omits the Greek direct article ho before the Greek word for God (theos). The website claims:

The predecessor of the Codex Bezae and other Church manuscripts do not contain the article “Ho” (“The”) in their text (Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 266). What this means is that this verse in its original form, if it is to be understood to be addressing Jesus (peace be upon him) himself, only addresses him as “divine” and not as the “Almighty God.” Thus, it is similar in meaning to the meaning conveyed when prophet Moses is described as being a “god” in Exodus 7:1.131.

So, according to this apologist, the absence of the definite article ho before the Greek word for God proves that Thomas addressed Jesus as a mighty prophet of God but not the mighty, true God himself. But this misuses Ehrman’s scholarship to support the view that the Codex Bezae records what John originally wrote.

Every other ancient manuscript records Thomas using the definite article and saying to Jesus, “The Lord of me and the God of me” [ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou]. New Testament professor Brian Wright points out that the Codex Bezae “is an eccentric manuscript and regularly drops the article,” so it probably doesn’t reflect the original reading of John 20:28.

Ehrman conjectures that the scribe who copied the Codex Bezae intentionally left out the article ho and kept theos in order to thwart heretics who claimed that Jesus and the Father were the same person.

So, this is just evidence that an overzealous scribe in the fifth century incorrectly copied previous manuscripts, not that those manuscripts or the original text of John 20:28 does not affirm the divinity of Christ. Moreover, as Wright points out, even if the original text lacked the definite article before theos, he shows that the Granville Sharp Rule (see below) would apply, thus making it undeniable that Jesus is identified as theos, or the one God, in this verse. (“Jesus as Theos: A Textual Examination”).

In fact, the Muslim apologist’s reliance on Bart Ehrman will come back to haunt him, because elsewhere Ehrman states, “[T]he Gospel of John—in which Jesus does make such divine claims—does indeed portray him as God” (How Jesus Became God, 4).

If the Quran says we can trust the revelation God gave to St. John, and John describes Jesus as being God incarnate, then we should conclude that Jesus is not just a prophet that God sent to be a forerunner to Muhammad. He is instead the God who sent all the prophets and now comes to manifest himself to us—or, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us:

In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power (1:1–3).

Sidebar 1

How Show Faith Can Be Said to Echo the Quran

Scholar Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that the Quran says only that the Jews did not kill or crucify Jesus. They thought they did, but it was really God who ordained that Jesus would be crucified, using the Jewish authorities to accomplish his will. This idea is even reflected in Acts 2:23, which says Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” to be “crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

Reynolds admits that this view of the crucifixion is a kind of litmus test for Muslim orthodoxy and that almost all Muslims hold that Jesus did not die on the cross (“The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?” Bulletin of SOAS, vol. 72, no. 2 [2009), 237). This kind of exegesis, though, can be helpful in introducing open-minded Muslims to the reasonableness of the Christian faith by showing where it “echoes” the Quran.

This doesn’t mean that we should contradict Christian doctrine, only that we should remove as many unnecessary obstacles as possible to someone coming to believe in Jesus Christ as our God and Savior.

(See also “Islam and the Crucifixion” by Ali Ibn Hassan on catholic.com.)

Sidebar 2

The Granville Sharp Rule

This rule holds that when two singular common nouns are used to describe a person, and those two nouns are joined by an additive conjunction, and the definite article precedes the first noun but not the second, then both nouns refer to the same person. This principle of semantics holds true in all languages. For example, consider this sentence:

“We met with the owner and the curator of the museum, Mr. Jones.”

In the preceding sentence, the definite article the is used twice, before both owner and curator. The curator is obviously Mr. Jones, but the owner could be a different person. Did we meet with one or two people? Is Mr. Jones the owner of the museum as well as the curator? The grammatical construction leaves the question open. However, the following sentence removes the ambiguity:

“We met with the owner and curator of the museum, Mr. Jones.”

In the second example, the definite article the is only used once, before the first noun. This means that the two nouns, joined by and, are both in apposition to the name of the person. In other words, Mr. Jones is both owner and curator. The Granville Sharp Rule makes it clear that we are referring to the same individual.

Trent Horn is a staff apologist at Catholic Answers, the host of The Counsel of Trent podcast, and the author of several books including Salvation is from the Catholic Church.

The four Gospels depict Jesus as a man living in Roman Palestine in the first century. This presents a problem for those who would like to say he was nothing but a mythological figure, and they argue that the Gospels are not really the biographies they appear to be. Instead, Mythicists claim that they are allegorical works that only have the appearance of historical narrative.

Often, they will say that the Gospels contain rewritten stories from the Old Testament that are allegorically applied to the figure of Jesus. Originally, it was known that the Gospels were not works of history, they claim, but this knowledge was lost, and people came to regard them as biographies.

The Bible does contain passages that are allegorical rather than historical, such as the parables told by Jesus. A parable is an allegorical story used to teach spiritual lessons, but it is not a historical account. If Jesus says, “There was a father who had two sons,” it is the wrong question to ask, “Ooh! What were their names?”

The Bible even contains whole books that are allegorical. For example, Judith is an extended parable about God’s deliverance of his people. We know this because the author of Judith communicates this to his audience. The first verse says that the story took place “in the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh.” But this is a dead giveaway. Everyone in the ancient world knew that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Babylonians, not the Assyrians, and that he reigned in Babylon rather than the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. The author is thus intentionally combining the two great nations that had conquered God’s people.

In 721 B.C., the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and in 587 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar conquered the southern kingdom of Judah. By combining the two in the very first verse, the writer of Judith immediately telegraphs that what his audience is about to read is an allegory. The story then centers on a conflict between a general sent by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians, and a woman called Judith, whose name means “Lady Jew” and who is thus a symbol of the Jewish people.

This would be like reading a story in which a heroine named Miss America fights a general sent by Adolf Hitler, king of the Russians. You would know immediately that it was an allegory about America and its historic enemies.

Ancient authors made clear to their audience what kind of literature they were reading. So if Mythicists wish to claim that the Gospels are allegories, they will need to provide evidence that the Gospels signal this to the audience.

They sometimes argue that events in the Gospels are rewritten accounts of things in the Old Testament, so the audience would have recognized that they were allegories. For example, Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses. Both figures

• had to be rescued as children from a death order given by a king,

• spent time in Egypt,

• came out of Egypt,

• encountered notable bodies of water (the Red Sea in Moses’ case and the Jordan river in Jesus’),

• spent time in the wilderness (forty years in Moses’ case and forty days in Jesus’), and

• delivered God’s law from a mountain (Sinai in Moses’ case and in the Sermon on the Mount in Jesus’ case).

These parallels are not in dispute, and they’ve been recognized for centuries. The question is: why does Matthew include them? The answer is obvious: he’s telling his audience that Jesus is the prophet like Moses that God promised in Deuteronomy 18. That is the message Matthew is trying to send.

He’s not paradoxically combining elements in historically impossible ways to signal an allegory, like the author of Judith. He’s sending a simple and straightforward message: Jesus is the promised prophet like Moses. Just because the authors of the Gospels are sending a message, that doesn’t mean that the message is “This is an allegory.”

Let’s look at another example. Mythicists have claimed that the story of Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law in Mark 1 is based on the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath in 1 Kings 17. But how similar are these stories?

In 1 Kings 17, there is a drought in the land, which has caused a famine. God tells Elijah to leave Israel and go to a pagan woman living in Zarephath, who will feed him. When he meets the woman, she is gathering sticks, and he asks her for a drink of water. He also asks her for a small cake of bread, but she says she is gathering sticks to build a fire so she can use the last of the flour and oil she has to make food for herself and her son. After that, they will die of starvation. But Elijah tells her that if she feeds him, the supply of flour and oil she has will not run out until God again sends rain. The woman complies, the food miraculously does not run out, and Elijah stays with her and her son many days.

Now let’s look at Mark 1:

And immediately [Jesus] left the synagogue, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever, and immediately they told him of her. And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her; and she served them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered together about the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him (vv. 29-34).

This is not remotely the same story:

• There is no drought or famine.

• Jesus does not leave Israel.

• Simon’s mother-in-law is a Jew, not a Gentile.

• The Gentile woman is a widow, but Mark doesn’t say anything about Simon’s mother-in-law being a widow.

• Also, she isn’t starving; she’s sick.

• The miracle is one of healing, not the multiplication of food.

• The miracle that Elijah performed was private, and he didn’t miraculously make food for other Gentiles; rather, they brought other sick people to Jesus once he healed Simon’s mother-in-law, and he healed them, too.

There is no way that someone reading about the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law would remember the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath and think, “Oh! This is just a rewritten version of that. The author is writing an allegory!” Mark is writing this story to tell us something, but the message isn’t that his Gospel is allegorical. It’s that Jesus has power over sickness.

This shows the lengths Mythicists go to when interpreting texts. The only real similarity between the two stories is that a prophet helps a woman with a problem. But that happens all the time in the Bible. Jesus himself does it more than once in Mark alone! (See Mark 5:25-34 and 7:24-29.) You need more than that to say that one account is a rewritten version of another and even more to argue that the latter account is an allegorical version of the former.

The Gospels simply do not contain the kind of clues needed to tell the audience that they are reading allegories.

Scholars from the early Church down to today, whether Christian or not, have rejected the Mythicist interpretation of the Gospels. If Mythicists were right, others throughout history would have recognized their allegorical nature. Instead, they have recognized them as what they appear to be: biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, not allegories about a mythological figure.

Jimmy Akin is a senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the host of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, and the author of numerous books, including Evidence for Christ.

It’s often assumed that the doctrinal cause of the “Great Schism” between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox was the papacy, the filioque, or some combination of the two. However, few are aware of the fact that the Latin West’s use of unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist, as opposed to leavened bread, was among the central reasons the Eastern Orthodox initially gave in defense of their schism.

As the Eastern Orthodox scholar Edward Siecienski remarks, “it is a historical fact that the debate over eucharistic bread, and not the filioque or the power of the pope, was the immediate cause of the schism that eventually split the Christian world” (116). Siecienski even documents how, from the eleventh century all the way until the fifteenth-century Council of Florence, the use of unleavened bread was included on nearly every list of “Latin errors” that the Eastern Orthodox came up with (8).

Although this issue is (almost) entirely absent from modern Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue, it nonetheless remains a theological point on which Eastern Orthodoxy has rested its credibility. Here, I seek to prove that this historic Orthodox critique of Catholicism is both historically and theologically unsound. I’ll also reflect on what this means for the claims of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Most scholars locate the origin of this dispute over leavened versus unleavened eucharistic bread in the New Testament. This is because the question largely depends on what kind of bread was originally used by Jesus at the Last Supper. This then raises questions about “the dating of the Last Supper,” a subject that’s complicated, because the dating appears to differ between “the Synoptic Gospels’ consideration of it as a Passover celebration” and “the Gospel of John, according to which it took place just before the Passover Festival” (4).

Here’s why that matters. Since Matthew, Mark, and Luke clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal (Matt. 26:17-18, Mark 14:12, Luke 22:7-8), at which no leaven could be present (cf. Exod. 12:15), one may conclude that the Eucharist was originally celebrated with unleavened bread. However, since John can be read as locating the Last Supper on the day before Passover (13:1; cf. 18:28, 19:14), and since the word used for the eucharistic “bread” is ubiquitously ἄρτον (arton), which is the word for “common bread” and not “unleavened bread,” one may just as easily conclude that the Eucharist was originally celebrated with leavened bread.

So which is it?

Since this subject “is easily the most disputed chronological issue in New Testament studies” (251, Kindle ed.), addressing all of the different perspectives and nuances would require a full-fledged academic article. However, thankfully, Brant Pitre has already treated the dating of the Last Supper at length in chapter 4 of his book Jesus and the Last Supper, from which I will draw for the remainder of this article.

Mark 14:12 and Luke 22:7-11 clearly teach that the Last Supper was held on the evening after the Passover lambs were slain, which is 15 Nisan on the Jewish calendar (it will be important to remember that, in ancient timekeeping, “one day” is not necessarily twenty-four hours, but rather any cycle of sunlight and darkness. Thus, the Passover lambs were slain in the afternoon on 14 Nisan, and the Passover meal was eaten that same evening, but since it was the evening, it would be considered 15 Nisan). As such, if John 13:1 really says that the Supper was held the day before, on 14 Nisan, this is a blatant contradiction. However, Pitre points out that there’s a problem with this “contradiction hypothesis.” Namely, it fails to take into account the different senses in which the word “Passover” was used in first-century Judea.

During this time, the word “Passover” could mean one of four things:

1. The Passover lamb — sacrificed in the afternoon, on 14 Nisan

2. The Passover meal — eaten in the evening, on 15 Nisan

3. The Passover peace offering — offered and eaten during 15-21 Nisan

4. The Passover week — 15-21 Nisan, the seven-day feast

The meaning of any particular use of the word “Passover” therefore depended on its context. With this in mind, let’s look at John 13:1, which says that the Last Supper began “before the feast of the Passover.” According to many modern commentators, “the feast of the Passover” here refers to 14 Nisan, the day the Passover lambs were slain. However, Pitre points out that this contradicts the way the Old Testament speaks about “the feast” of Passover. Consider this passage from the Book of Numbers: “On the fourteenth day of the first month is the Lord’s Passover, and on the fifteenth day of this month is a feast. Seven days shall unleavened bread be eaten” (28:16-17).

The Lord’s Passover was indeed on 14 Nisan. However, “the feast” of Passover took place afterward, on 15 Nisan. That this was still believed by Jews of the Second Temple period is further shown by the Book of Jubilees:

Remember the commandment which the Lord commanded you concerning Passover, that you observe it in its time, on the fourteenth of the first month . . . so that you might eat it during the night on the evening of the fifteenth from the time of sunset. For on this night there was the beginning of the feast” (49:1-2).

Once again, we see that Passover (the slaying of the lambs) takes place on 14 Nisan, but the actual “feast” of Passover happens that evening, on 15 Nisan.

Thus, when St. John says that the Last Supper began just “before the feast of the Passover,” we see that he’s placing it at the exact same time as the Synoptics: in the late afternoon on 14 Nisan—i.e. after the Passover lambs were slain, and “just before” the evening of 15 Nisan. If this is the case, then one can see how John is actually highlighting the Last Supper as a Passover meal, just like the Synoptics. John begins his Last Supper narrative by placing it right before “the feast,” showing “the supper” that happens immediately afterward to be the Passover feast itself (13:2-4).

Pitre documents how there are several more details in John’s account of the Supper that make sense only if it is a Passover meal—the reclining posture of Jesus and the disciples (13:23-25), the dipping of the morsel by Jesus (vv. 26-27), giving alms during the festal meal (v. 29), the last-minute purchase of something for the feast (vv. 29-30). These are all highly unusual behaviors for an ordinary dinner, but they’re exactly what we would expect during a religious festival like Passover.

Once we understand this context, we can easily see how John 18:28 and 19:14 don’t contradict the Synoptics, either. John has already informed us that the Passover meal took place at the Last Supper, on Thursday evening, and so when he speaks of “the Passover” being eaten after our Lord’s passion on Friday (18:28), he must be referring to the Passover peace offerings that were eaten every day of the celebration.

Likewise, when John says our Lord’s trial took place during “the day of preparation for the Passover” (19:14), he’s certainly not contradicting his own chronology. Instead, Pitre points out that the Greek really says that our Lord stood before Pilate on “the preparation of the Passover,” not the “day” of preparation “for” the Passover. This is significant, because the Greek word “preparation” simply was the first-century Jewish word for the day before the Sabbath—Friday! This can be seen explicitly in Mark 15:42: “It was Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath,” and Luke 23:54: “It was the day of Preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning,” and even Josephus’s Antiquities (16.163): “[Jews] need not give bond on the Sabbath or the Preparation for it.” Far from proving that John’s chronology contradicts the Synoptics’, John 19:14 actually demonstrates that they are identical: the Crucifixion took place on “the Preparation of the Passover”—that is, the Friday of Passover week, meaning the Last Supper took place the day before on “the feast of the Passover.”

Therefore, the teaching of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is that the Last Supper truly was a Passover meal. But that isn’t all it was. On the night he gave himself up for the life of the world, our Lord did more than just celebrate an ordinary Passover. On that glorious night, Jesus showed his apostles how they were to open his sacrifice to all generations of Christians through the Most Holy Eucharist, and he taught them to do this using unleavened bread.

We know this because according to Exodus 12:15, God’s people were, by divine law, forbidden to consume leaven during the entire week of Passover. Contrary to popular sentiment, Jesus and the apostles were no lawbreakers. It therefore follows that not only at the Last Supper, but even after the Resurrection, when Jesus broke eucharistic bread with his disciples on the road to Emmaus, he must have been using unleavened bread (Luke 24:13-35).

Acts 10:9-16 indeed attests that it was only after Pentecost that the apostles started gaining awareness of certain Old Covenant ceremonial laws being relaxed, and a Jew being told to eat leavened bread during the very week when God’s law forbade just that would have been around as scandalous as Peter being commanded to eat unclean animals (Acts 10:13). Thus, the fact that none of the disciples raised questions about the kind of bread being consumed at the Last Supper or on the road to Emmaus strongly supports the thesis that it was unleavened bread in both cases.

At this point, we can circle back to a popular Eastern Orthodox argument in favor of the “apostolic origin” of leavened bread in the Eucharist: the fact that the New Testament exclusively uses the word ἄρτον, “common bread,” in reference to the Lord’s Supper, instead of ἀζύµους (azymous), “unleavened bread.” Given what’s been shown above, we know that the usage of this word in the Last Supper narratives, and even in Luke 24:30-34, was not intended to mean that leavened bread was being used in the Supper. Since all leaven had to be removed from the house in preparation for Passover week (Exod. 12:15), ἄρτον could only have referred to unleavened bread in those contexts.

Indeed, something Pitre discusses in his book is how the New Testament connects the bread used in the Last Supper to the “bread of the presence” spoken of in Leviticus 24:5-7 (see 120-147). This could shed light on why the Evangelists referred to the Eucharist as ἄρτον rather than ἀζύµους. Despite the Septuagint (Exod. 25:30, 39:17), and even the New Testament itself (Matt. 12:4, Mark 2:26, Luke 6:4) using the word αρτος, “common bread,” to describe the old covenant “bread of presence,” we know from Leviticus 2:11 that it had to be unleavened, since no leaven could be offered in the presence of God. This is something that all ancient Jewish commentators noticed and agreed on (e.g., Philo, Special Laws2.158-61; Josephus, Antiquities 3.255; Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 5a.). Thus, if the bread of presence could simply be called “common bread” in the first century, even though everyone knew that it was unleavened, so too could the Gospels refer to the eucharistic bread as ἄρτον without thereby denying that it was unleavened.

As Edward Siecienski explains, it likely wasn’t until “after the second and third centuries, [that] Christians became more scrupulous about differentiating ἄρτον (bread) from unleavened bread in order to distinguish their rites from those of the Jews.” The fact of the matter is, there really isn’t anything significant about a first-century Christian referring to the eucharistic bread as ἄρτον. Although later generations of Christians would add significance to this word and connect it exclusively to leavened bread, this isn’t something that Jesus and the apostles did. This is why it’s important for us to distinguish between noble Christian practices that developed early versus truly apostolic traditions.

Indeed, St. Paul’s teachings on the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians almost definitively prove the Catholic position on unleavened bread being the original and apostolic matter of the Holy Eucharist. I expand on this more here.

Ben Bollinger is a convert to Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy. He has an undergraduate degree in theology and computer science from Elmhurst University, and runs his own Substack page.

In the secular historical attack, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) is the symbol of European greed and genocidal imperialism. In reality, Columbus was a man of his time—a devout Catholic with an interest in evangelization, motivated by religious and personal goals.

During his lifetime, Columbus’s achievements were criticized and downplayed, and he waned in the public memory until preparations to celebrate the quadricentennial of his first voyage were undertaken in the United States. Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants embraced him and revived his memory, but the man and his motivations became lost in a political, societal, and cultural conflict, anchored by the secular historical attack, which culminated in slandering him as deliberately genocidal—a harbinger of destruction, enslavement, and death upon the happy and prosperous people of the Americas.

Russell Means, a leader of the American Indian Movement, characterized this sentiment with his opinion on the explorer: “Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent” (40). Other critics liken Columbus’s voyage to opening a new front in the Crusades as that movement to the east became impossible with the rise of the Ottoman Turks.

In the United States, the vitriol directed against Columbus produces annual protests every October with the observance of Columbus Day. A growing movement wants to abolish Columbus Day as a federal holiday, and several cities already celebrate instead “Indigenous Peoples Day.” Columbus has become a Catholic symbol of the modern Western world’s obsession with a sanctimonious, victimhood-focused narratives rooted in anti-Catholic bias.

The real story of Christopher Columbus and his voyages to the New World begins in Portugal, with the actions of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460). Henry studied ocean currents and wind movement to improve navigation for sailing ships and sent Portuguese vessels and sailors down the West African coast, seeking a trade route to India. He also invented the caravel, a light ship that was perfect for long-distance, uncharted exploration.

Henry and his sailors inaugurated the great age of explorers finding new lands and creating shipping lanes for the import and export of goods, including consumables never before seen in Europe. Their efforts also created intense competition among the sailing nations of Europe, each striving to outdo the others in finding new and more efficient trade routes.

It was into this world of innovation, exploration, and economic competition that Columbus was born. A native of the Italian city-state of Genoa, Columbus became a sailor at the age of fourteen. He learned the nautical trade sailing on Genoese merchant vessels and became an accomplished navigator.

Finally, in May 1486, he secured a royal audience with King Fernando and Queen Isabel of Spain. The queen was intrigued by Columbus’s proposal to seek the east by going west. The explorer requested a patent of nobility, the titles of admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy and governor of all discovered lands, and ten percent in dividends of all future trade for his daring trip. Isabel agreed, and queen and sailor signed an agreement in April 1492.

Columbus embarked from Spain on August 3, 1492, with ninety men on three ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. The crew comprised mostly Spanish sailors, with no soldiers, illustrating that the voyage was bent on not conquest, but exploration.

After thirty-three days at sea, Columbus’s flotilla spotted land (the Bahamas), which he claimed in the name of the Spanish monarchs. Columbus’s modern-day detractors view that as a sign of imperial conquest. It was not; it was simply a sign to other European nations that they could not establish trading posts on the Spanish possession.

On this first voyage, Columbus also reached the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. He stayed four months in the New World and arrived home on March 15, 1493. The Santa María ran aground on Hispaniola, so Columbus was forced to leave forty-two men behind. He ordered the Spaniards to treat the indigenous people well and especially to respect the women, but he discovered on his second voyage that his order had not been heeded.

Columbus made four voyages to the New World, and each brought its own discoveries and adventures. Columbus left on his second voyage in September 1493 with a fleet of seventeen ships and 1,200 crewmen, including five missionaries. The third voyage was the most difficult for Columbus, as he was arrested on charges of mismanagement of the Spanish trading enterprise in the New World and sent back to Spain in chains (though he was later exonerated). Columbus’s fourth and final voyage took place in 1502-1504, with his son Fernando among the crew. The crossing of the Atlantic was the fastest ever: sixteen days. The expedition visited Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica and was marooned for a time on Jamaica.

Most modern accounts of Columbus’s voyages mistake his motives by focusing narrowly on the “what”—usually pecuniary or political—rather than on the “why” behind his expeditions. Columbus embraced the Catholic worldview of his age. In a letter to King Fernando and Queen Isabel in December 1492, Columbus encouraged the monarchs to “spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem” (vii). And so his primary motive was to find gold . . . but to finance a crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims and fulfill the conditions he believed were necessary for the Second Coming of Christ! [1]

Columbus considered himself a “Christ-bearer” like his namesake, St. Christopher, and believed that the evangelization of all peoples was a condition for Jesus’ return. His first words to the people of Hispaniola illustrated his focus on evangelization: “The monarchs of Castile have sent us not to subjugate you, but to teach you the true religion” (27). The explorer recognized that the native peoples of the New World required catechesis and was angered by the chief missionary who accompanied his second voyage, who believed that baptism with no further instruction was sufficient for the new converts. In a 1502 letter to Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492-1503), Columbus asked the pontiff to send missionaries to the indigenous peoples of the New World so they could accept Christ. Columbus desired the evangelization efforts in the New World to continue after his death, and he established an evangelization fund in his will to finance missionary efforts to the lands he discovered.

Columbus’s interactions with the indigenous peoples of the New World generate significant interest among modern people and are the foundation of much myth-making from the secular historical attack. Contrary to the popular myth, Columbus initially treated many of the native peoples with great respect and friendship. He was impressed by their “generosity, intelligence, and ingenuity” (see Delaney, 97). He recorded in his diary that “in the world there are no better people or a better land. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest speech in the world and [they are] gentle and always laughing” (107).

Columbus demanded that his men exchange gifts with the natives they encountered and not just take what they wanted. He enforced this policy rigorously: on his third voyage in August 1500, he hanged men who disobeyed him by harming the native people.

The secular historical attack posits that Columbus sailed to the New World intent on the enslavement of the native peoples. That myth is widely believed and difficult to eradicate despite the evidence in the historical record.

Columbus had no plan to enslave native peoples when he began his expeditions, but circumstances during the second and third voyages drove him to implement harsh measures, “including enslavement of Indians captured in military actions when there seemed no other way to restore order. But this was not a policy intended to establish a regime of slavery” (see Royal, 66).

Columbus’s views concerning the native peoples changed over the course of his multiple voyages based on his interaction with the various tribes and with unruly Spanish settlers. He was a brilliant sailor, navigator, and fearless explorer, but he was not an able administrator. He was not a violent man, but he utilized violence at times when his poor leadership led to preventable crises. His intentions were good, as his contemporaries, including Bartolomé de las Casas, who knew him, maintained, but he made critical errors in judgment from which the indigenous peoples suffered.

Columbus and his actions in the New World are not immune to legitimate criticism, but the use of this daring explorer, who fundamentally altered world history, as a Catholic target to attack the Church and Western history is a travesty of justice. There is no doubt that Columbus was a complex man, and his actions in the New World reflected the complexities of his experiences and the time in which he lived. He is neither the saint nor the genocidal fanatic portrayed by different groups with their own agendas in the modern world.

Read more on the Catholic black sheep of history in Canceled, available for sale in the Catholic Answers shop.

[1] Near the end of his life, Columbus compiled a book, Libro de las profecías (Book of Prophecies), about the connection between the liberation of Jerusalem and the Second Coming of Christ.

Steve Weidenkopf is a lecturer of Church History at the Christendom College Graduate School of Theology and the author of The Glory of the Crusades and The Real Story of Catholic History, from Catholic Answers Press.

In the opening minutes of the 1990 Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October, Soviet submarine captain Ramius (played by Sean Connery) enters his private quarters to discover his ship’s political officer (the bizarre Communist hybrid of a Marxist chaplain and professional snitch) poking through his belongings. Ramius asks why his privacy is being invaded, and the political officer responds, “There is no such thing as privacy in the Soviet Union, Comrade. It’s antithetical to the collective good.”

“Collective good” or “greater good” sometimes get thrown around as justification for making sacrifices (or, more often, forcing others to make sacrifices) for the “benefit” of society. This is often conflated with the Catholic idea of the common good, and that is unfortunate.

The common good is a key part of the Catechism’s “mission statement” for governments: “It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies” (1910).

Christ made a clear distinction between political and religious authority when he commanded us to “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.” In some ways, paragraph 1910 from Catechism is the inverse, stating what Caesar must render unto us. Therefore, unpacking the term “common good” is crucial for understanding what the Church teaches is the proper role of government. This is not just an academic exercise; it is important for evangelization.

Many people get spooked by terms like common good and social justice because they have been hijacked by those pushing totalitarian or Marxist ideologies that undermine justice and human dignity under the guise of religion or compassion. The terms might be a barrier to spreading the gospel if people dismiss Catholicism out of hand because they erroneously believe that it stands for something that it actually opposes.

Fortunately, the Church fleshes out three guiding principles that direct our thought and discussion and help us understand and share with others what the common good actually means.

Three Features of the Common Good

The Catechism, in paragraph 1906, defines the common good as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”

The Church then elaborates on three key features of the common good, starting with the assertion that it “presupposes respect for the person as such” and that “public authorities are bound to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person. Society should permit each of its members to fulfill his vocation” (1907).

The good of the individual is bound up with the good of the community, and not in opposition to it. Although we are made to be in communion with one another, our value, dignity, and worth do not come from being a part of a group or a collective, but rather from being made in God’s image and likeness. As Pope Leo XIII put it in Rerum Novarum, “the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them.” The practical upshot is that the State exists to serve, not be served, and that it must defend things such as “the right to act according to a sound norm of conscience and to safeguard . . . privacy, and rightful freedom also in matters of religion” (CCC 1907).

Secondly, the Church teaches that “the common good requires the social well-being and development of the group itself” and that those in authority must “make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (1908)

The Church does not command that those in government directly take on these tasks, but rather that they make the conditions for their achievement possible. For example, Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum does not rule out the possibility of direct government aid in extreme circumstances, but he clearly warns against the State trying to solve all problems, and he views children’s parents (and particularly their fathers) as the ones responsible for providing for their needs:

It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children . . . should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life (10).

“The social well-being and development of the group itself” supports and is then fed from the respect for individual rights, and allows for the fulfillment of those rights. It’s been said by many that human rights are individual rights that can be realized only in community with one another. The better protected and realized individual rights are, the more developed the community becomes, and the more it flourishes.

There is then a similar symbiotic relationship between the second pillar of the common good and the third, which is the requirement for “peace, that is, the stability and security of a just order. It presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defense” (CCC 1909).

In our fallen world, good things can be maintained only with effort. This often entails fighting against forces and people who would destroy them. This is why Catholics are not reflexively pacifists. Parents must be ready to protect their children from physical and spiritual dangers. Local communities protect their residents from those who would steal or destroy the fruits of their labor. Nations defend their sovereignty from aggressive powers. In the same way that the rights of individuals are simultaneously the aim of and are fully realized by the development of the community as a whole, so too the development of the community is the goal of and fosters the maintenance of peace. It is not just, fair, or compassionate to sit idly by and not oppose those who would harm the innocent. The order of peace makes possible the other elements of the common good.

The Rubber Hits the Road

So what are some things that the State is intended to do to maintain the common good? The Church says that to maintain the common good, those in government must work to

• provide for the common defense (CCC 2308-2310, 2265);

• foster economic initiative through stable currencies, implementing just and moderate taxation, and defending private property (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 351-357, CCC 2402-2406, Centessimus Annus48);

• defend the rights of all, but especially keeping an eye to the poor and those on the margins (CCC 2237; Compendium 182-184, 355);

• defend the rights of conscience and religious freedom (CCC 1907, 2106-2109, Compendium 421-423); and

• respect the appropriate authority that the family, civic institutions, and ultimately the Church have in society (CCC 2207-2213, 2209, 2211; Compendium 209-214).

How this is to be done in each case and in different times, places, and contexts, especially in a world where tradeoffs and unintended consequences must be weighed in serious decision-making, is beyond the scope of this article and probably beyond the scope of a book. The Church says the lay faithful have the responsibility of working out the answers in a moral way in their own communities (Gaudium et Spes 43).

What we can say about what Caesar ought to render to us, at all times and in all places, is that the State has a clear mission: to promote the common good. This entails maintaining peace and justice, as well as the development and healthy growth of society as a whole. Both of these aims are connected to and not in opposition with the dignity and vocation of each individual. The common good is common to all, not an abstract “collective good” divorced from the dignity of individual human persons.

It is a tragedy when people recoil from talk about the common good because they associate it with manipulation and totalitarianism. We must help them see what the Church actually teaches. We can start by separating it from terms like collective good or greater good that can mask either an intentional or inadvertent subordination of an individual’s dignity to the power of those who control the State. We can show how the Catechism’s emphasis on individual dignity and rights that flow from being made in God’s image bear very different fruits compared to the “collective good” of Soviet commissars. Hopefully we can better clarify this in our discussions and political actions to make our communities and nations stronger and be a witness to the Truth, and by so doing invite others to him.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Michael Schmiesing currently serves as the Director of Advancement for the Steubenville Catholic Schools in his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, where he resides with his wife and children.

Everybody knows about stories of ghosts haunting spooky old houses. Catholics are familiar with apparitions of the saints. There are also forbidden practices like going to a medium.

What each of these has in common is that they involve one form or another of contact with the departed.

But none of these is the most common form of contact. Around half of the people you know have had an experience they have never described to anyone. Maybe you’re one such person.

The experience goes like this: Someone close has died. It may have been a parent, a spouse, a child, or a friend. Then—days, weeks, or decades later—that person suddenly shows up. He’s present for a few moments, and then he’s suddenly gone again.

In a 1985 study, 54 percent of participants said this had happened to them, but they had never told another human being about it until a researcher asked.

Those who have these experiences sometimes wonder whether they’re losing their minds, and they keep quiet for fear that everyone else will wonder the same thing. As a result, these experiences are seldom discussed, and only with people who are close and trusted.

Researchers call these experiences after-death communications, or ADCs, and they are an increasing subject of scientific study. To understand them, we have to be clear about what they are and how they differ from other, similar experiences.

Suppose you go into the hospital and suffer a cardiac arrest; then the doctors restart your heart. Technically, everything you say to anyone after that is an after-death communication, since you clinically died and then got revived. But most of us wouldn’t call the conversations you have after you get out of the hospital after-death communications.

There are also ways that communication with the dead is supposed to happen through a person or a thing, such as going to a medium or using a Ouija board. ADC researchers typically consider those mediated experiences different phenomena. They focus instead on cases where the living person isn’t trying to receive a communication from the next world. ADCs are spontaneous—they’re just something that happens.

That brings us to a pretty standard definition: ADCs are spontaneous and direct forms of apparent contact with the deceased. They are spontaneous because no one is trying to make them happen. They are direct because nothing is mediating them, like a human medium or a device of some kind. For my purposes, that includes telephones. (Believe it or not, telephone calls with the dead are reported, but they’re a subject of their own.)

ADCs are also different from deathbed visions. Lots of people who are nearing death report communications with deceased relatives who come to welcome them into the afterlife. But what happens on a person’s deathbed is different from the after-death communications people receive as part of their normal lives.

Similarly, apparitions of saints and ghosts in haunted houses aren’t included. They typically involve someone that you didn’t know, whereas ADCs typically involve someone who was close to you in life.

How common are ADCs? Exactly how many people have them isn’t clear. In her 2011 dissertation A Systematic Review of Research on After-Death Communication, Jenny Streit-Horn reviewed the literature and estimated that between 30 and 35 percent of people in America report having had one at some point in their lives. She also estimated that 80 to 85 percent of people who are grieving have at least one during the first year of bereavement.

How can both be true? One factor is that not everybody enters the grieving category. In a marriage, either the husband or the wife is likely to die first, and parents tend to die before their children. So some people die first and never go through the grieving process. But Streit-Horn discusses a larger factor: many people forget the ADCs they’ve had, particularly if they weren’t strong, dramatic ones.

There are other estimates. Between 2018 and 2020, a team that included a researcher named Evelyn Elsaesser conducted an international study with an online survey in English, French, and Spanish that got about a thousand responses. A summary of the study by Elsaesser and her colleagues, Investigation of the Phenomenology and Impact of Spontaneous and Direct After-Death Communications, published in 2020, estimates that 40 to 50 percent of people have experienced one or more ADCs.

The research to date indicates that a broad swath of people have them. They can be members of any religion or of no religion. They may be somewhat more common among older people, which makes sense because older people know more people who have died.

Women report them much more frequently than men, but many researchers think this is a data reporting artifact and that men may have them just as often. They just don’t talk about them as much.

Most people who have ADCs have more than one. In the international study, only about 10 percent reported having a single ADC, whereas 80 percent said they had more than one.

Streit-Horn found the reluctance to talk about them throughout the literature. She writes that “many people have expressed hesitation and even fear regarding having the experience and/or sharing it with others.” She also notes that “the studies on ADCs related to bereavement generally arose from professionals’ and researchers’ surprise at observing the ADC phenomenon in the absence of any observed mental illness.”

That’s really important to know. Having an after-death communication is not a sign of mental illness. It’s a normal experience that a large percentage of the population has, particularly in the active grieving phase after someone has died.

Why do these experiences happen? The two principal reasons appear to be to comfort the living and to deliver messages.

The research shows the comfort. The international study asked whether the ADC gave people comfort and emotional healing, and 73 percent said it did. 61 percent said it made it easier to accept the person’s loss. And 91 percent said they treasured the fact that they had had the experience or were very glad they had had it.

The messages are the other reason. In their summary on the international study, the researchers write,

Regardless of the type of ADC, the very essence of these contacts is the message that is perceived. . . . Each message is obviously unique because it is addressed to a particular person and shaped by a common past and a common history. However, we can schematize the contents because, in their essence, the perceived messages are relatively homogeneous.

Reassuring messages basically reassure the living that the deceased loved one is fine: “I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” Reaffirming messages are affirmations that they continue to love us and that we will be together again: “I love you, I will always be by your side.” Resolving messages deal with unfinished business, like settling old conflicts and offering apologies.

Why should a Catholic care about any of this? Because ADCs are basically apparitions of people we know. Instead of having an apparition of a major saint—like Jesus or Mary—people have apparitions of those they love, who typically show up to tell them they love them and that they’re happy and okay in the afterlife.

The Christian faith acknowledges that God can let people have communication with him, with the good angels, and with the saints. We refer to these as visions and apparitions, among other terms, and they are gifts from God.

Some Christians believe that such visions are not for our present age, but that’s a minority position within Christianity. And with 40 to 50 percent of the population reporting after-death communications, that’s very significant evidence that these experiences are for today.

So an after-death communication is a spontaneous and direct experience of contact with someone we knew who has died, and something like 40 to 50 percent of people have had at least one.

Image credit: “Medieval ghost” by Gallowglass, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Jimmy Akin is a senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the host of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, and the author of numerous books including Evidence for Christ.

Every pope since Pope John Paul II has made God’s mercy a hallmark of his pontificate. Pope Leo XIV, who began his pontificate less than two years ago, is just getting started.

After greeting pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, the Holy Father briefly referenced Divine Mercy Sunday in his Regina Caeli message, noting that it was founded by John Paul II. “The Sunday Eucharist is indispensable to the Christian life,” he continued. “It is through the Eucharist that our hands become the hands of the Risen One, giving witness to his presence, mercy, and peace.”

Leo has not been shy about invoking God’s mercy. When he closed the Holy Doors of St. Peter’s Basilica at the end of the Jubilee Year on January 6, he noted that “the gate” of God’s mercy will never be shut; God “will always sustain the weary, raise up those who have fallen,” and offer “good things” to those who place their trust in him.

God’s Eternal Mercy

Divine Mercy isn’t new, but the Catholic Church’s emphasis on it is. God has always loved us with an incomprehensible passion. He is always ready to forgive us if we only turn to him with our whole heart, especially when we trust Jesus with fearless abandon.

Catholic teaching holds that mercy is God’s greatest attribute. We can’t fully understand who God is without reflecting on his mercy—his radical love, forgiveness, and kindness toward those who don’t deserve it, which is to say all of us! Justice means giving us what we deserve. The truth is that we all deserve hell. However, mercy goes further, offering what we truly need: second chances, healing, and hope.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that “God reveals his fatherly omnipotence by the way he takes care of our needs . . . above all by his mercy” (270), and more directly, that “the gospel is the revelation in Jesus Christ of God’s mercy to sinners” (1846).

Scripture teaches that God forgives those who truly repent and turn back to him: “If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing” (1 John 1:9). This promise is echoed in Acts 3:19, which calls us to “repent . . . and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away,” showing that conversion opens the door to God’s mercy and forgiveness.

The Catechism emphasizes that no sin is beyond God’s forgiveness if we turn back to him with a sincere heart. It states, “There is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive. . . . There is no one, however wicked and guilty, who may not confidently hope for forgiveness, provided his repentance is honest” (982), underscoring that God’s mercy is always greater than our sin.

A Time for Mercy

This message took on special importance in our time through a young Polish nun named St. Faustina Kowalska. From 1931 to 1938, the young mystic experienced powerful visions of Jesus, who spoke to her about his mercy and asked her to share that message with the world. He entrusted her with a remarkable mission: “You will prepare the world for my final coming.”

Faustina didn’t travel the world or preach to the masses. Instead, she followed Jesus’ instructions to commission a painting of him as she saw him—with red and pale rays coming from his heart—with the words “Jesus I trust in You” at the bottom. Faustina wrote about her experiences in a diary, describing her conversations with Jesus and his call for people to trust him. Her diary has become one of the most important spiritual works of modern times.

Faustina’s message may not have gained traction without Pope St. John Paul II. As the archbishop of Kraków, he opened her cause for sainthood in the 1960s. Later, as pope, he continued to shepherd her cause, finally canonizing her on April 30, 2000, as the first saint of the new millennium.

In a despairing world, John Paul declared, no one is too far from God to be forgiven. “There is nothing that man needs more than Divine Mercy,” he said in 1997.

Following in his footsteps, Pope Benedict XVI taught that God’s mercy and justice are not contradictory, but complementary aspects of divine love, with mercy as the supreme, crowning attribute that fulfills justice. In his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi, he taught that “grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. . . . Both justice and grace must be seen in their proper relationship to each other” (44).

Then came Pope Francis, who surprised many by how forcefully he focused on mercy. During his Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, churches around the world opened special Holy Doors as a sign that God’s mercy is open to everyone. Francis also encouraged people to go to confession so they could personally experience God’s mercy.

When Francis canonized Mother Teresa during the Year of Mercy, he hailed her as an “icon of the Good Samaritan,” calling her a model and “generous dispenser of divine mercy.”

With Pope Leo, it’s clear that the Church’s focus on mercy isn’t going away. In fact, I believe that it will grow stronger, because Jesus has made it clear that the Magisterium is to play a central role in preparing the world for his final coming.

Leo mentioned Faustina’s apparitions in his address to Polish pilgrims to Rome in February, and in last year’s apostolic letter on the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, he wrote, “In the face of disasters, wars and misery, we bear witness to God’s mercy to those who doubt him only when they experience his mercy through us.”

It’s fair to expect that the American pope will continue to emphasize Divine Mercy because, as John Paul II taught, it’s what the world needs most.

Justice vs. Mercy

Some Catholic pundits believe that the world needs more of God’s justice. Justice will come. We must first try to wrap our minds around the fact that God’s love for his people is simply beyond us. The Lord’s love for us—demonstrated by his death on the cross—is simply not logical. It’s a supernatural love.

Divine Mercy, in a sense, refutes Pelagianism, the heresy named after Pelagius, a fifth-century monk who taught that human beings can achieve holiness and salvation through their own efforts, without the need for God’s grace. The Church rejects this idea because it contradicts core Christian teaching about sin and grace. Pelagianism denies the reality of original sin and the absolute necessity of grace. Catholic teaching holds that we are wounded by sin and depend entirely on God’s grace, especially through Jesus Christ, for salvation.

Divine Mercy challenges us to ponder God’s mercy more deeply, to abandon ourselves to it, and to incorporate it into our own lives. As we forgive, we will be forgiven.

In the end, the message Jesus gave Faustina is one of hope. It reminds us that no matter how far we’ve strayed, Jesus longs for us to come back. No one is beyond God’s love.

If we can incorporate this teaching into our own lives, even in small ways, it will transform us and the whole world.

Patrick Novecosky is a seasoned Catholic journalist, editor, author, and speaker with nearly two decades’ experience informing and inspiring audiences across North America.

My work at Covenant Eyes entails helping to educate the Church on the problem of pornography. It is understood, even if not always said explicitly, that more often than not, the use of pornography is accompanied by masturbation. It is also true that masturbation is a separate sin that deserves its own treatment, and that is the purpose of this article.

Whereas “the Magisterium of the Church and the moral sense of the faithful” have been quite certain about the evil of masturbation, portions of the world see masturbation as a good or even healthy behavior. Some intelligent people and mainstream online sources allow for and even recommend masturbation for various reasons.

Because masturbation is grave matter, when done with full knowledge and full consent of the will, masturbation constitutes a mortal sin (see CCC 2352). Therefore, various claims in favor of masturbation deserve a Catholic response, so in this article I will offer a Catholic response to some claims that are made in favor of masturbation.

First Claim: Psychology and sociology show that masturbation is a normal phenomenon of sexual development.

Response: It may be that masturbation is “normal” in the sense of being common. However, it is not “normal” in the sense of being the “norm” or “standard” for how the sexuality of the human person should be expressed.

Sexuality is the means by which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts proper and exclusive to spouses, and this means must remain open “per se” to the transmission of human life. Sexuality is for spouses to become one flesh and procreate.

Masturbation uses sexuality in a way that excludes procreation and union. The Vatican document Persona Humana says that “whatever the motive for acting this way, the deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty. Intercourse that is not interfered with through any type of contraception is properly called normal and natural because that is the act our sexual faculty is created for by God. Therefore, the Church teaches that masturbation is evil and always gravely immoral.”

Second Claim: Masturbation is natural, and everybody does it.

Response: The word “natural” has several definitions. One definition of “natural” is “arising easily or spontaneously,” and an inclination toward this behavior does arise easily and spontaneously within many people.

However, masturbation is not natural in the sense of the natural law—that is, of conforming to the nature of what sex is for. Therefore, masturbation is not natural because it violates the nature of sex as unitive and procreative, and in violating the nature of sex, it violates the natural law.

Third Claim: Masturbation is not condemned in the Bible.

Response: Persona Humana addresses this claim directly: “Even if it cannot be proved that Scripture condemns this sin by name, the tradition of the Church has rightly understood it to be condemned in the New Testament when the latter speaks of ‘impurity,’ ‘unchasteness,’ and other vices contrary to chastity and continence.”

Catholics do not follow sola scriptura, so the condemnation of an action by the Magisterium is sufficiently binding even if it were not condemned by name in Scripture. However, some sections of Scripture allude to masturbation more directly. God condemned Onan for “spilling his seed on the ground” in Genesis 38:9, which is where we get the term onanism, which the moral theologian Fr. Dominic Prummer says in his Handbook of Moral Theology can be either conjugal onanism, which is contraception, or solitary onanism, which is masturbation (411), since both of these acts essentially “spill the seed on the ground.” Also, my friend Dave Armstrong, in this article, shows how an argument could be made that Jesus actually had the sin of masturbation in mind when he said, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it out and throw it away,” since he is recorded saying it almost right after teaching that one who “looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Fourth Claim: Masturbation can be acceptable if it is not paired with lust, since masturbation and lust are not technically the same.

Response: From a Catholic standpoint, this is incorrect. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines lust as “disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure” (2351). Then it says, “Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.” Masturbation brings about sexual pleasure apart from its procreative and unitive purposes; therefore, it always entails lust, even if it does not entail sexual fantasies about another person.

Fifth Claim: Masturbation is healthy. It serves as legitimate self-care and stress relief.

Response: I am not a doctor, so I will not attempt to respond to this with health claims, but it seems reasonable that the effects of sex have health benefits, and it is fitting that the marital act would have health benefits, which are legitimately enjoyed by those who are married.

But since masturbation is intrinsically evil, which means it is wrong apart from the intention of the person doing it and any other circumstances, masturbation is not a morally acceptable way to obtain any potential health benefits associated with sex, because good ends do not justify immoral means.

Sixth Claim: If I am addicted to masturbation, it is not a mortal sin for me.

Response: This may be true, as the Catechism points out. It says, “To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability.”

However, the existence of a difficult-to-break habit or an addiction should be a cause not for complacency, but for urgency. The above quote names the factors that must be considered to “guide pastoral action” and not just to judge culpability. Something must be done to help the person whose culpability is reduced.

Further, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) says in its response to pornography, “Create in Me A Pure Heart: A Pastoral Response to Pornography,” that “the moral culpability of an addicted person may be lessened depending on the circumstances, but the situation is particularly grave. Addictions are very hard to overcome, and help is needed to regain one’s freedom” (29). If someone gets to a place in his life where each instance of masturbation is not a mortal sin due to diminished freedom, each instance still is objectively serious because it is harmful to the user’s soul and brain, and it is harmful to the people being used in the accompanying pornography or in the thoughts of the person who is engaging in masturbation.

The Catechism, in paragraph 1793, says that even when responsibility for evil committed is lessened, “it remains no less an evil, a privation, a disorder.” Also, “one must work to overcome the errors of moral conscience,” and from this it can be inferred that we must work to regain freedom when we discover that we have an addiction.

Each commission of the sin of masturbation is also harmful to the loved ones of the user because that person is being less than he can be for his loved ones, his family, and his community.

This is not included here to increase shame, but to speak truth and offer adequate guidance toward the freedom we all are offered in Christ. The love of God, neighbor, and self that we are called to must inspire us to work to eliminate masturbation from our lives. Whatever freedom we are unable to regain while alive will need to be regained in purgatory.

IMPORTANT NOTE: While we may be able to recognize a bad habit in ourselves, it is not recommended to self-diagnose addiction. I recommend leaving diagnosis to a mental health professional.

Seventh Claim: Any stimulation of the genital organs qualifies as masturbation.

Response: In the Catechism, the sentence that describes the essence of the problem of masturbation is separated from the description of the act. Therefore, the definition is “the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure outside of ‘the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.’”

It is accepted by many moral theologians that married couples may engage in activities that might fall under the above definition as preparation for the marital act. Since such acts take place within the “sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation is achieved,” such acts are not considered masturbation according to most moral theologians (see here, for example).

Eighth Claim: If the man’s fertility needs to be tested, it is necessary to masturbate to obtain a semen sample.

Response: The USCCB published guidelines for Catholic couples in a document called “Reproductive Technology Evaluation and Treatment of Infertility: Guidelines for Catholic Couples.” In their list of reproductive technologies in disagreement with Catholic teachings, “obtaining a sample of seminal fluid by masturbation” is first on the list.

Among the technologies compatible with Catholic teachings, “seminal fluid samples can be obtained from a non-lubricated, perforated condom after normal intercourse.” So there is a way to meet this legitimate need that does not involve the immoral means of masturbation.

The world offers many reasons to make people believe that masturbation could be acceptable or even necessary for them. However, the Church has made clear that masturbation is not morally acceptable for any intention or under any circumstances.

This list is not meant to compound shame for anyone who struggles with this behavior. Instead, it is meant to encourage my fellow Catholics that we do not have to accept the stories of the world that portray the teachings of our Church in a negative light. Further, the teachings of the Church can be lived out with joy.

Some of the needs that lead people toward this behavior, and toward pornography use, can legitimately be met in other ways. Our sexuality and chastity are a great gift from God that increase the human population and help us to love God and others. Seeing clearly behaviors such as masturbation and pornography use for what they are and eliminating them from our lives, though not easy, are important and worthwhile steps to a holier and happier life.

Theo McManigal is a Byzantine Catholic, and he is the Catholic Church outreach specialist at Covenant Eyes.

Popular culture generally considers surrogate motherhood to be a noble feat by the surrogate and a desperate but morally acceptable decision by the paying party. But that’s a flawed conclusion, based on incomplete information and untested assumptions. Our current culture tends toward sentimentality rather than thoughtfulness when someone is crossing moral lines to fulfill a vehement desire.

There are two types of pregnancy that “surrogacy” describes.

1. The surrogate who carries the embryo has no genetic relationship to the child that was implanted in her womb. The child was created through a doctor’s combining of two donors’ genetic material. At birth, the child will be immediately surrendered.

2. The surrogate carries a child who was made using her ovum and the genetic material of a man who is not her husband. She agrees to surrender the child immediately upon birth.

The Catechism’s paragraph on surrogacy applies to both:

Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus) are gravely immoral (2376).

Why “gravely immoral”? Because in both cases, the child is reduced to a commodity in a transaction. Every child has the right to understand himself to have been conceived within the context of a father and mother dedicated to each other in marriage, and both dedicated to him as their child, who is a gift from God. By its nature, surrogacy precludes that right. He is thus denied the respect and dignity that is owed to every human being as a creature made in the image and likeness of God. In a very real sense, the child is being purchased—and just as slavery is gravely immoral for the way it assumes that human beings can be bought and sold, so too is surrogacy.

Not only does surrogacy mistreat the child, but it also involves a misuse of the surrogate’s body, as she becomes a for-profit incubator. Her consent in this arrangement does not make it moral (any more than consensual sex is for an unmarried couple). We cannot sell our bodies, and we should not try to.

A few years ago, it was posited that women could sign advance directives, declaring that if they were in a brain-dead state, their bodies could be used as surrogates. Wards of pregnant, unconscious women would exist, like such that has heretofore existed only in horror films. The proposition generated backlash, but conscious surrogacy has all of the same moral problems: the exploitation of the body is the same, the consent still exists (albeit beforehand), and the technological process is identical.

The entire procedure of surrogacy is fraught with moral perils. Being impregnated by a lab technician is morally repugnant, for it vitiates any semblance of ordinary and natural procreation, as well as mocking the marriage covenant. This union is betrayed when a third party becomes part of the procreative process—a process never to be obviated, however earnest one’s desires to the contrary. The sexual act within marriage is an offering of both spouses to each other, and it is through that union of love and voluntary, mutual self-donation and receptivity that the child has a right to be conceived. On the other hand, the sourcing of gametes, as the Catechism puts it, “infringes the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ ‘right to become a father and a mother only through each other.’”

Moreover, grave sins accompany every step of the procedure. The gametes are obtained through masturbation by the men, while the women must be subjected to aggressive and dangerous hormone treatment to induce “super-ovulation,” followed by a dangerous surgical procedure to extract the ova. Multiple embryos are often chosen in the surrogacy process so as to have a grouping from which to select the “best candidates.” If multiple embryos implant successfully, and one of the parties does not want multiple births, the unwanted children are subjected to “selective pregnancy reduction.” This adds an extra layer of evil, as human beings are killed and treated as waste, receiving neither burial nor acknowledgment.

To have conception take place in a laboratory, where the life of the embryo is entrusted to doctors and biologists away from his parents, so that the scientists can enact a type of dominion over the origin of life, is gravely contrary to man’s dignity. The child becomes the sum of technological engineering rather than the fruit of marital love and its bond. By this process, the child is treated as a science project.

The admittedly painful and unwelcome truth is that the desire for a child is not a medical condition, nor does that desire confer a right to acquire a child by any means. That might sound harsh to a couple struggling to conceive a child, but our desires do not give us the right to infringe upon the dignity and the rights of other human beings. A child is a gift—an incredible gift from God. That child has the right to be born as the fruit of the marital love and commitment by his parents. Married couples have a right to perform the acts that are ordered to procreation through conjugal love, but not to force a certain outcome.

Scientific technology that breaks the bonds of the marital embrace offers the prospect of “child as science project” or “child as lifestyle accessory” to unmarried couples, unmarried individuals, and groupings of people who cannot constitute a true marriage (whether natural or sacramental) because they are of the same sex. In such cases, not only are the dignity of marriage and the child offended, but the right of the child to have both a mother and a father in his life is infringed.

Those who have been involved in surrogacy—as surrogates, donors, doctors, lab technicians, etc.—should make use of the sacrament of reconciliation after they have an understanding of the grave sin they took part in. Involvement in surrogacy is not beyond God’s forgiveness. Repairing the fracture that sin makes in our relationship with Christ can be a first step in healing and moving forward with his grace.

Sometimes “assisted fertility,” including various forms of surrogacy, is offered to couples suffering the real pain of infertility. These options are expensive, dangerous, and immoral. Labs have a financial incentive to dangle a hope (however tenuous) before a couple in pain and often great emotional distress. They are desperate.

So what can be done? Some OB/GYNs say that with proper treatment, many couples can conceive naturally, but that is not nearly as financially beneficial to the labs selling surrogacy. Adoption is a legitimate option. And sometimes, when all legitimate options are exhausted, disciples of Christ may be asked to carry a heavy cross, up to and including the cross of infertility.

Sarah Cain, known as The Crusader Gal, is a political and cultural commentator who makes regular videos about the decline of the West, and she writes Homefront Crusade.

Another day, another beloved Christian IP bastardized by Hollywood?

That sure seems to be the reaction in some quarters after news dropped that the coming film reboot of The Chronicles of Narnia would feature the versatile Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan.

Some of it was in line with the reaction to Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in his megahit epic The Odyssey. How, in an age of strictly policed ethnic and sexual correctness in the entertainment biz, can you get away with a decidedly un-Greek Helen or a female-voiced Aslan? That you could say in either case that “it’s just a story” seems to address neither the double standard nor the violence done to the source material.

There doesn’t seem to be any indication that Aslan will be visually depicted as a lioness, or that he will have a mane but insist on ”she/her.” And no word that Streep’s voice will be digitally lowered to a male register. Aslan will still be the King of the Jungle, only with the vocal timbre of a seventy-seven-year-old lady who wears Prada. Some Twitter wags were quick to call him “Translan” and write off the whole thing as cheap culture-war propaganda.

Elite culture’s double standards and impish needling of conservative pieties will always be with us, and to me, the squirt from getting worked up about it usually isn’t worth the squeeze. And so ordinarily I would add this outrage to the pile and move on.

But I think there’s a deeper problem worth noting here—because Narnia is not just a story, and Aslan is not just a character.

When Cambridge don and popular Christian apologist C.S. Lewis began writing the Narnia books, beginning in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he found immediate commercial success but also criticism, notably from his friend and collaborator J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings author, known for his own meticulous world-building, was dissatisfied with what he considered haphazard details in the Narnia mythos.

Tolkien was also famously touchy about allegory—fiction that points to something else, a kind of transparent parallel meaning—and constantly repudiated attempts by fans and critics to make his characters and stories mere stand-ins for some religious or historical or political concern.

It must have seemed to Tolkien that Aslan, a powerful being who arrives in the world from afar and gives his life to ransom a traitor, only to be resurrected and to raise others from the dead before leading his people in a great battle, was allegorical straight to the nose, an obvious stand-in for Jesus, and that the whole story was a fairytale retelling of the gospel. And maybe that’s how Lewis meant it, at first.

But, as the Narnia canon grew to seven novels, Lewis buttoned down the mythos. He would never aspire to Tolkien’s levels of detail, but gradually he filled in the gaps of his fairytale universe and gave the whole thing a satisfying and mostly coherent epic arc. And [SPOILER FOLLOWS] most importantly of all, he let it be known that Aslan was not a symbol of Jesus, but the Lord himself, by another name and in a different incarnation.

And this is why feminizing Aslan on the big screen is so problematic. In his divine nature, God has neither a body nor a sex, but, according to the Second Person of the Trinity, God became and remains man.

The knife-edge balance of this central mystery of the Faith took centuries of early Church debate to get just right. It would have been easier to have settled on any number of sensible-sounding heresies: the divine Jesus only appeared to have a human body; or he was some kind of divine-human hybrid like a Greek hero of old; or he was the greatest creation ever, but no God. But the Fathers, still glowing with the apostolic energy and knowledge just a few generations old, made sure to preserve the revealed truth in its fullness: a divine person took to himself a full human nature; God and humanity uniting without confusion or change, without separation or division.

It’s no less important to get all this right today than it was in the fourth century, because the very identity of Christianity rests on its historicity and specificity. Jesus wasn’t born once upon a time; he was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod. He wasn’t killed by vague bad guys in the mists of prehistory; he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, fifth governor of Judea, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius. And the Word was not made flesh in the abstract, a mere avatar of general humynity; he became man and a man, human of the male sex.

Christianity’s enemies and would-be reinventors, some of whom make movies, hate all this specificity. They prefer Jesus the infinitely malleable concept just like they prefer man and woman of infinitely fluid “gender.” A female-voiced Aslan/Jesus subtly pushes both: nudging viewers toward a gnostic Christology untethered from history and the flesh, and toward a gnostic anthropology in which sex, gender, and the body (including the body’s voice) are not aligned by necessity but can be recombined at will.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the witch Jadis postures as both a queen and a creatress when in fact she is a fraud and usurper—a mortal using deceit and coercion to claim divine prerogatives. This was the sin of our first parents, and its echo reverberates still.

Image credit: Original image by Dick Thomas Johnson, via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Modified/remixed by Emily Dinneny.

Todd Aglialoro is director of publishing for Catholic Answers Press.

I was recently presented with a topic about which I had never given much thought: someone taking a long time for confession, resulting in other people being unable to receive the sacrament because the priest has to leave the confessional.

This is a pastoral topic, not one of doctrine, so there is no right or wrong answer or solution. As pastoral circumstances, by definition, can vary from place to place, there is no overall better or worse practice. The following are simply my thoughts as a priest ordained more than thirty years ago and currently serving as pastor of two small churches in the rural Midwest.

First, a few thoughts for my brother priests. We need to provide convenient and consistent confession times. Regarding consistency, we must begin on time and stay through the scheduled ending time; we never know when a person may come at the last minute. As for convenience, Saturday before the evening Mass is the old standard, but if we have two such Masses in two different places, there may be zero time for confessions at the second place. If possible, we may try to be available for about fifteen minutes at the second church; this would be greatly appreciated by some of the faithful. First Fridays and First Saturdays are good for additional confession times, both to encourage devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary and to provide an easy way for people to make a habit of monthly Confession.

When it comes to the penitent, there may be several reasons for taking longer than usual for confession. For the person going through an unusual (for him) difficulty, or the one who has been away from confession for years, priests know we need to give them time, and those in line will just have to wait. We can gently guide them to leave out extraneous details, but they may have the mental or emotional need to include some such details. On the other hand, if the penitent has gone to confession recently and (to be blunt) talks a lot, there is nothing wrong with helping him to stay on the track of simply naming sins without lengthy background information. In all of these situations, we can invite the person to make an appointment and tell him we will be glad to take more time with him.

To facilitate such appointments, I encourage my brother priests to give out their cell number freely, including having it in the parish bulletin and on the parish website. I know some priests think this is problematic, but I think such worries are unfounded. For more than a dozen years, I was a full-time chaplain at a hospital. I gave out my cell number all the time, including to the patients in the mental health unit. There were only a few occasions when I had to block callers, and that is easy to do with the modern smartphone. The same goes for our email address: we should have one in the bulletin and on the website so we can be contacted easily. Again, abuses are easy to redirect to the spam folder, and I don’t think people should have to fill out that annoying online form to arrange an appointment for confession.

My thoughts for penitents who are going to take more than a few minutes can be seen in the above paragraphs. Those who have been away from the sacrament for years may be inspired by the Holy Spirit to go to confession without having planned, and they should feel free to take more than the average amount of time. The same goes for the person in some kind of spiritual crisis. On the other hand, they may feel more comfortable making an appointment and knowing that the hour with the priest is theirs, with no line waiting outside the door. For those who go routinely, keep in mind the idea of confessing mortal sins in kind and number, venial sins as desired, and no need for extraneous details.

Finally, we look at the penitents waiting in line who are becoming annoyed or upset as the minutes tick by, and it becomes clear that they are not going to get to confession this time. Their frustration is understandable: the forgiveness of sins given to us in this sacrament is so great that we cannot help being disappointed if we thought we were about to receive it, only to be turned away as confession time ends and Mass begins. When this happens, they should go to a pew and take a few minutes to make a good act of contrition. They can also add a prayer for the person who has taken a long time in the confessional; we don’t know what he is going through. If they are at Mass and were unable to confess mortal sins, they should not receive Holy Communion; they can make a spiritual Communion, asking God for the grace they would have received.

Resolve to go to Confession the next time that is possible, or at least practical. After leaving the church, get online and look for other times and places for confession.

And don’t be scrupulous. Remember: God is not looking for ways to condemn us. He loves to forgive our sins and to give us grace. A failed attempt to go to the sacrament of confession is still a moment of grace, so don’t turn it into a failed opportunity for patience and charitable thoughts toward a fellow penitent.

Fr. Mike Driscoll is a priest of the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, and is the author of Demons, Deliverance, and Discernment: Separating Fact from Fiction about the Spirit World.

Over the centuries, Catholics and Protestants have defended their claim that their own belief system is the one Jesus founded. One side is necessarily mistaken, given that the systems teach contradictory things on important doctrines such as the Eucharist, baptismal regeneration, the nature of the Church, whether you can lose your salvation, and justification by faith, to name a few. Both sides agree that these are “essential” doctrines, and therefore we must be sure whose version of them is correct.

We don’t need profound theological discussions, beneficial as they are, to establish important points based on the plain words of Scripture or a working understanding of how unity and connection are maintained. Can Protestants justify their positions on some critical issues?

The Visible Nature of the Church

We know that Jesus founded a Church. He explicitly says so in Matthew 16:18. The Greek word ekklesia, translated as “church,” is used only here and in Matthew 18:17 (twice). It means “assembly” or “those called out,” and in either case, the meaning involves something visible, because it refers to a group of people.

In Matthew 18:17, Jesus tells his disciples that when they encounter a “brother who sins [against you],” appeal to his sense of decency, one on one. If that doesn’t work, bring another person or two into the loop. Finally, if that doesn’t work, Jesus says to “tell the church.” It is necessarily something visible; otherwise, Jesus’ directive makes no sense.

For many centuries, “church” was defined as a visible entity whose members held the same doctrines under central leadership. And for good reason. Jesus wanted the whole world to belong to it: “Make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). To do that, you need to identify it. He further says you become a member via baptism, and he affirms the unity of doctrine when he speaks of “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (v. 20).

But Protestants changed the meaning of “church” to a non-visible entity—all believers who are connected spiritually through faith in Christ—and in the process also changed its constitution. Ever since Martin Luther advanced his own teachings, Protestantism has repeatedly morphed into a hodgepodge of beliefs. Although Protestants tout expressions like “unity in essentials,” they don’t agree on what those essential teachings are or what they mean.

So what drove the change? To justify their break from Jesus’ Church, Protestants redefined church. Now they don’t have to show any connection to a visible, historical organization with central leadership. For them, problem solved, and existence justified.

But imagine another kind of expansive organization, like the AAA Motor Club. The Protestant version would have local offices connected under the general idea of roadside assistance, but if you visited several of them, you would discover that their membership rules differ and the assistance provided varies. To find clarity about policies and benefits, you search out the central office, only to be told there isn’t one, because each branch set itself up. And yet each branch asserts itself as the best representation of what AAA stands for. Not surprisingly, you would walk out of any local office confused and frustrated.

Can Protestants justify why they made a dramatic change in the meaning and constitution of “church” so long after Jesus founded it, and on whose authority the change was made?

Break in Historical Continuity / Ecclesial Lineage

In breaking from Jesus’ Church, Protestants ruptured their historical continuity to it via a new set of doctrines, one not tied to “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Or, in the words of St. Paul, “another” gospel (Gal. 1:6-8).

I recently had an online discussion with someone, and I pointed out that the Catholic Church has an unbroken chain of succession through twenty centuries back to Jesus and the apostles. His response was essentially, “So what?” The reply blithely misses the crucial nature of this aspect of the Church. It is how one identifies which twenty-first-century Church is the direct descendant of the one Jesus established, and since he has only one bride and only one mystical body to which he is connected (Col. 1:18, Rev. 21:9), this is a sure way to identify it.

Imagine going online to an ancestry website, inputting your information or supplying your DNA, and the website uncovers your biological ancestors back through multiple generations. If there was any uncertainty about your ancestors’ identity, such research puts it to rest. The biological lines of connection are proof positive of continuity and relationship between you and your ancestors. Of course it matters.

Can Protestants justify why they ruptured continuity with the historical Church, creating an alternate, “illegitimate” family line in the process?

The Biblical Canon

Luther asserted that the Bible contains sixty-six books, not the seventy-three found in Catholic Bibles. His reasons are beyond the scope of this article; here, all we need to be concerned with is that a seventy-three-book canon became settled at the turn of the fourth century. Five times the canon was defined by the Catholic Church, and in each case, it was the same list of seventy-three books.

Luther failed to see the inherent contradiction between his position on the canon and the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, whereby Scripture is the sole, infallible rule of faith for Christians. If his smaller canon is correct, and if he did not “restore” it until the sixteenth century, then for an astounding 1,100-plus years, the Church was guided by an erroneous standard. Christians may have believed something inaccurate or neglected to believe something that was true. Based on Protestants’ own rule, this is an enormous problem.

Can Protestants justify how the Church gave doctrinal guidance for 1,100-plus years based on a faulty standard? Did the Holy Spirit allow it to lead all believers into spiritual darkness?

Jesus’ Promise to Be With His Church

Here, we take Jesus’ words at face value. We don’t need deep exegesis of the original Greek, because we are not dealing with complex theology. We are dealing with Jesus telling the apostles, “I will not leave you orphans” (John 14:18) and “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Jesus assured them he would never abandon them or leave them without his guidance. And since his Church is his mystical body, whom he equates with himself—“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4)—it is inconceivable that Jesus could ever back out of his promises or fail to protect his bride.

Again, we have a significant problem. Protestants say the Church became doctrinally corrupted and “lost” the true gospel, and Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli came along to restore it. In other words, Jesus allowed his mystical body (1 Cor. 12:27) to become separated from him as the head (Col. 1:18), and he relied on humans who were never invested with his authority to fix the problem.

Imagine you owned a family business with a proprietary product. The business has existed for a long time, and your family has faithfully passed down this product from one generation to the next. Along comes a family member who decides to rebel, leaves home and breaks all ties, disparages everything the family product represented, and sets up shop elsewhere, claiming that the original family product was faulty, so he had to create his own version of it.

Can Protestants justify how they “restored” the gospel, meaning Jesus promised something he couldn’t deliver when he said he would always be with his Church?

Can Protestants justify their spiritual authority, meaning Jesus allowed a break in the chain of command so clearly shown in Scripture and went contrary to it?

The Guidance of the Holy Spirit

Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit after his ascension (John 14:16). He assured the apostles that “the Holy Spirit . . . will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (v. 26). The integrity of doctrine is again affirmed by Jesus as being characteristic of his Church.

Some say the apostasy mentioned in Scripture (2 Thess. 2:3) is evidence that the Church would indeed fall off the rails. However, our understanding of the apostasy must square with Jesus’ promises and the Holy Spirit’s guidance. The only way to do this is to affirm that the apostasy refers to people who fall away from Christ or his Church—perhaps even in large numbers—not the Church falling away from Christ. The former can happen in light of Jesus’ promises; the latter cannot.

Can Protestants justify how the Holy Spirit needed men to “restore the gospel” because he failed in his task and allowed Jesus’ Church to lapse into error?

Without convincing answers to these questions, how can Protestants be sure that they themselves are not following a distorted belief system?

Joel Peters has over forty years’ experience in Church ministry and has been a Catholic high school educator (in the theology department) for over twenty-five years.

Catholics wonder why some priests and parishes are reluctant to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday in particular and the related devotion in general. After all, who wouldn’t want mercy?

Well, receiving mercy from our Lord Jesus Christ means recognizing your sins, especially any mortal sins. That’s a big ask, because it not only requires repentance, including humbly navigating the sacrament of confession, but also an ongoing commitment to growth in holiness, and thus embracing our cross as Christ did his (see Matt. 16:21-27).

Similarly, there’s resistance among some priests and parishioners to praying the St. Michael Prayer after the Masses they offer daily, because that requires recognizing the devil for who he really is: a powerful fallen angel who desires our damnation—especially that of priests, given the salvific power Jesus has given them. We need to act accordingly. That too is a challenging ask, including because we live in a modern world that mocks such belief.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen understood all of these realities well, which is why he spoke and wrote so insightfully on the demonic and the God-given weapons the Church has to combat Satan and the other fallen angels. (The Church is beatifying Archbishop Sheen on September 24 in St. Louis.) Sheen especially hones in on the devil’s hatred of the cross, the sacramental re-presentation of Christ’s one sacrifice of Calvary in the offering of the Mass, and eucharistic adoration, the great fruit of the Mass.

Sheen reflects on the devil’s three temptations in the desert, with which Satan seeks to divert Jesus from his redemptive mission (Matt. 4:1-11). Sheen calls them “shortcuts from the cross.” For example, in tempting Jesus to “command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matt. 4:3), “the evil spirit was saying, ‘Start with the primacy of the economic! Forget about sin!’” “The vision of social amelioration without spiritual regeneration has constituted a temptation to which many important men in history have succumbed completely,” Sheen adds, referencing communist dictators in particular. Yet what such leaders and the devil promise inevitably concludes in despair: “The dictator gives bread; God does not, because there is no God, there is no soul; there is only the body, pleasure, sex, the animal, and when we die, that is the end.”

The Cross and Its Sin-Atoning Shedding of Blood

Sheen often cited Sacred Scripture to illustrate the efficacy of Jesus’ one sacrifice of Calvary: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22). Whereas Old Covenant sacrifices were done in obedience to God and provided limited atonement, only the blood of Jesus suffices in blotting out the sins of all mankind. “As the New Testament says,” Sheen comments, “all of these things were done in figures and symbols. . . . The true Lamb had come and for only one purpose; to shed blood in expiation for the sins of the world” (emphasis added).

Sheen thereby explains the Incarnation: why Jesus became man. “Satan tempts through the flesh. Therefore, the Son of Man came in the flesh in order to conquer Satan on his own ground. The Son of God appeared for the very purpose of undoing the devil’s work.” Indeed, by becoming man and through the cross, Jesus broke Satan’s grip on the world, says Sheen, citing St. Paul:

On that cross he discarded the cosmic powers and authorities like a garment; he made a public spectacle of them and led them as captives in his triumphal procession (Col. 2:15).

St. Peter was initially “willing to have a divine Christ but not a suffering Christ” (Matt. 16:21-23). “He was called Satan because the essence of Satanism is temptation from the cross. Anyone who tempts Christ from the cross is Satanic.” Yet, in time, Peter would come around, as we are called to do, in witnessing to Jesus as the Savior of the world who atoned for our sins by embracing the cross (Acts 3:11-26; 5:27-32).

“The cross is the greatest basis of unity in the world,” says Sheen. “It drives men together when everything else drives them apart. The cross unites the friends of Christ and it also unites his enemies.”

The devil can appear as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14), yet he can be quickly found out by his refusal to acknowledge Jesus. St. Padre Pio used this divine method when Satan appeared to him disguised as his priest confessor, and the saint was suspicious of his true identity. “Say, ‘Praise Jesus!’” Pio exclaimed. The demon refused and vanished. Similarly, as Sheen notes, the devil cannot mimic the redemptive wounds Jesus received on the cross:

In an old legend, it is said that Satan appeared to a saint and said, “I am the Christ.” The saint confounded him by asking, “Where are the marks of nails?” Satan may appear in many disguises like Christ, and at the end of the world will appear as a benefactor and philanthropist—but Satan never has and never well will appear with scars.

The Power of the Mass and Eucharistic Adoration

In the Mass, the merits of the sacrifice of Calvary are re-presented and offered anew, as heaven and earth become most profoundly one. Having failed to stop the cross, Sheen says, the devil takes aim at the faithful in general and priests in particular to lead them away from Christ through neglect of prayer, especially faithful participation in the Mass and the reverent reception of Holy Communion:

Neglect! We do not lose our souls simply by doing bad things. We lose our souls by omission. . . . If someone has taken poison, and the antidote is brought to him, it does not make a difference if the antidote is thrown out of the window or whether he simply neglects to take it. The poison is operating and will have its effect.

Besides offering Mass every day, Sheen credited the power of his priesthood to his daily holy hour before our eucharistic Lord Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, a discipline he maintained for sixty-plus years. Whereas priests and laymen may doubt, Sheen notes, the devil does not, which is why his most infernal act is called the Black Mass. “A consecrated host is absolutely essential for a black Mass,” says Sheen:

We may be lax in our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, but Satan is not. Scripture tells us Satan believes [James 2:19]. Satan believes in God, in the divinity of Christ, in the Eucharist, in the Church, and yet believing, he would destroy. This is why we pray the holy hour.

Realizing the temporal demands of the laity, Sheen recommends, if at all possible, a holy hour inclusive of daily Mass, and, in any event, fifteen minutes of daily prayer (not necessarily before the Blessed Sacrament) to maintain and deepen the interior life. (However, I submit that’s further reason why we should make adoration without exposition much more available at parishes everywhere, given the undeniable benefits of drawing near to our eucharistic Lord Jesus.) But for priests and religious, Sheen counsels a non-negotiable daily holy hour, and he exhorts priests not to count their daily Mass and also to make a continuous holy hour instead of breaking it up, e.g., into fifteen-minute intervals:

I have never known a priest, a brother, or a sister, who left the Church who made a daily hour. And there will never be one because they live so close to [Christ], and he will not let them go.

Finally, Sheen tells a humorous anecdote regarding when he fell asleep one afternoon before the Blessed Sacrament at a church in Paris. In referencing the plight of Ss. Peter, James, and John in the Garden of Gethsemane, Sheen reminds us of Christ’s mercy—and yet also that we need to remain vigilant in our lives as his disciples:

I went to the Church of San Roque at two o’clock. I was tired and sat down, and I woke up at three, right on the dot. I said to the Good Lord, “Did I make a holy hour?” My angel said, “Well, that is the way the apostles made their first one. We’ll take it.” The point is never just skip it: never, never, never, regardless of the difficulty.

The quotes from Archbishop Sheen are taken from his talks and writings, including as compiled in Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: On the Demonic, edited by Fr. Dave Tomaszycki (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2024).

Tom Nash is a staff apologist at Catholic Answers and the author of several books, including The Biblical Roots of the Mass.

Once, I was driving to a Catholic summer camp for a speaking engagement in an area without cell phone service. I relied on the car’s GPS unit, though my doubts multiplied as it took me down a featureless dirt road. I then stopped the car and saw the unit display the following: “No Satellite Connection—Indoor Mode.”

I estimated I had gone at least fifty miles in the wrong direction, and a wave of panic swept over me as I looked at the “no service” bar on my cell phone. I reset the GPS unit and saw my estimated arrival time: 6:57 P.M., or three minutes before I was scheduled to give my talk. Thankfully, the hosts understood, and everything worked out. But it worked out only because I realized I had made a huge mistake, stopped what I was doing, turned around, and went the other way.

I share this story because this is the first thing a sinner must do in order to be saved. And there is a word for it: repent.

The Greek word we translate as “repentance” is metanoia (the verb “to repent” is metanoeo), and it means “to change your mind.” Metanoia’s Hebrew counterpart is tshuva, which means “to return.” For example, God told the people of Israel, “Repent and turn away from your idols; and turn away your faces from all your abominations” (Ezek. 14:6). So when Jesus says, “Repent [metanoeite] and believe in the gospel,” he is basically saying: change your mind about sin, and return to God by believing the good news!

So, in order to be saved, we must repent. Repentance means not just running back to God, but running away from anything that would keep us from God. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul laid out a list of sins that would keep people from inheriting the kingdom of God. He said, “neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you” (1 Cor. 6:9-10).

Let that sink in. Paul is saying that these Christians repented from sins like robbery, adultery, and engaging in homosexual conduct. Even if the desires still remained in their hearts, they no longer committed these sins. Why? Paul gives us the answer: “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” He makes this even clearer in his second letter to the community, saying, “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

Before I was baptized, the priest asked me, “Do you reject Satan? And all his works? And all his empty promises?”—to which I solemnly responded, “I do.” These are the traditional baptismal vows, and they show that a person has repented and now wants God’s salvation. But what makes it hard to preach the gospel today is that people don’t think they need to be “saved” from anything.

The first step is repentance: to recognize that we are lost without God, and we are doomed to an eternal death apart from him because we lack his grace, which makes us alive in him. We must turn away from anything that would lead us away from God and then turn to God in faith.

We won’t make progress as evangelists if we share the Christian faith only as a kind of “self-help” program that takes you from “okay” to “A-okay!” Indeed, one thing that makes it hard to preach the gospel today is that people don’t think they need to be “saved” from anything. As far back as 1946, Pope Pius XII said, “Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.” Christianity doesn’t seem like good news unless you think the ugliness of your sins constitutes bad news.

But it’s also tempting for Catholics to fall into a kind of Protestant legalism and treat repentance and the gospel as a transaction: I repent and give God faith, and he gives me salvation. And although it is true that salvation comes from repenting from sin, believing in Jesus, and receiving Jesus through sacraments like baptism and the Eucharist, the Catholic view is more familial than forensic. It’s not a legal transaction; rather, it is about being joined to God’s family through baptism and—when we have turned away from God through consciously chosen grave sins—being reconciled through the sacrament of penance.

My favorite image of this form of repentance and salvation comes from the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15). Remember, the son was able to waste a bunch of money in a foreign land because he demanded his inheritance before his father’s death (v. 12). He basically told his dad, “I wish you would drop dead so I could get what’s mine and live the life I’ve always wanted.” When we sin, we say the same thing to God: I wish you didn’t exist so I could do whatever I want with my life. And then he almost starves to death in a foreign country, far away from his family.

Because of what he’s done, the son thinks his father will never welcome him home. At best, maybe he could return as a slave and not starve. But the father, who is our Father in heaven, was always waiting for his son to return. Jesus says, “While he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.”

That’s my favorite detail in the story: that the father saw the son “while he was yet at a distance.” As a father of three little boys, I know that if they ever ran away, I would never stop looking for them. The father of the prodigal son probably went to the edge of his land every day to stare at the horizon and see if his son was on his way. When his son did appear on the road, he was probably downcast, slowly shuffling to the house, preparing his “apology speech.” But his father would have been smiling ear to ear and running as fast as he could to embrace him.

That is how God feels when we repent, or return home. That’s why Jesus said, “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). And it is that attitude we should always recall so we can have hope rather than fear when we “turn around” and head to confession . . . even when it is a sin we’ve confessed “a thousand times.” Because God, our heavenly Father, is waiting on the road to meet us.

Trent Horn is a staff apologist at Catholic Answers, the host of The Counsel of Trent podcast, and the author of several books including Salvation Is from the Catholic Church.

The Church Triumphant consists of all the members of Christ’s body who have been saved and who are now rejoicing in the beatific vision. Every member of the Church Triumphant belongs to the Catholic Church.

But what about non-Catholic Christians who truly love Jesus? What about devout members of other non-Christian religions? What about morally upright agnostics who, through no fault of their own, have not received the gift of faith in a personal God? Is there no hope for them just because they aren’t explicitly Catholic?

Although the baptism of water is the ordinary sacramental means by which the redemptive merits of Christ are applied to the soul, our merciful God does provide a path to heaven for non-Catholics. The Church teaches that such people can be saved, based on several scriptural references—namely, Matthew 10:32, Matthew 10:39, John 14:21, Luke 23:42-43 (the Good Thief), and 1 Timothy 2:3-4. The 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia says, “It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that when the baptism of water becomes a physical or moral impossibility, eternal life may be obtained by the baptism of desire or the baptism of blood.” As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments. . . . Baptism of blood, like the desire for baptism, brings about the fruits of baptism without being a sacrament” (1257-1258).

Baptism of Desire

When circumstances prevent baptism by water, an explicit desire for the sacrament can substitute for it, meaning that the effects of the sacrament are conferred upon the soul. The desire may also be implicit, expressed through an act of perfect contrition or love for the Lord, by which the soul becomes disposed to receiving sanctifying grace from God. Such a soul would implicitly desire to have received the baptism of water if the opportunity had ever arisen.

Jesus promised justifying grace for acts of charity or perfect contrition in John 14: “He that loveth Me, shall be loved of my Father: and I will love him and will manifest myself to him.” And “if any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and will make our abode with him.” Even someone from a non-Christian background who, despite limited or unclear understanding through no fault of his own, genuinely seeks to follow the divine will as perceived through his conscience may possess the baptism of desire.

Baptism of Blood

Ludwig Ott in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma writes, “Baptism of blood signifies martyrdom of an unbaptized person, that is, the patient bearing of a violent death or of an assault which of its nature leads to death, by reason of one’s confession of the Christian faith, or one’s practice of Christian virtue” (2.I.4.2). This extraordinary act infuses sanctifying grace into the soul and wipes away sin, granted as a special grace because it represents the ultimate expression of love, mirroring Christ’s passion: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). For this grace to take effect, the martyr must have at least attrition for past sins. (Attrition refers to sorrow for sins that arises primarily from shame, negative consequences, or fear of punishment. Contrition, on the other hand, is sorrow for sin that stems from true love for God and the regret of having offended him.)

Regarding both the baptism of blood and the baptism of desire, we must clarify that the prior baptism of water of a non-Catholic Christian is already valid. The Catholic Church generally recognizes Protestant baptisms as sacramental, provided they are performed using water and the trinitarian formula (“I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”) with the proper intention. Therefore, the baptisms of blood and desire don’t apply to non-Catholic Christians. However, if such Christians die outside full communion with the Church, through no fault of their own, if they are properly disposed to the reception of God’s grace, then their souls can be saved.

So if non-Catholics can be saved . . .

Why encourage them to become Catholic? There are two main reasons.

First, although it’s true that non-Catholics can be saved, it’s also true that following Christ as a non-Catholic is less efficient for salvation. Since the Catholic Church was established by Christ himself and contains the fullness of truth and the means of salvation, it is more efficient in empowering optimal Christian living and applying Christ’s redemptive merits to each individual soul (through the sacraments).

A good analogy to illustrate this is fast food versus healthy food. Someone with resilient genes might live to the age of eighty eating only cereal for breakfast, hamburgers and French fries for lunch, and hot dogs for dinner. (He also might not, and in fact, it’s likelier that he won’t.) But a healthy diet would have enabled him to live to ninety, and more importantly, the person’s energy level and quality of life would have been better. In the same way, being a Christian in the Catholic Church is more conducive to high-quality Christian living (and ultimately salvation) than being a non-Catholic Christian.

Another analogy is poor coaching versus good coaching. A talented athlete may be able to achieve some degree of excellence without a good coach, but even in this optimal scenario, he would probably have enjoyed much more success with a great coach. This is because excellent coaches know how to bring out the best in their athletes, enabling them to reach their full potential. The Catholic Church is a better “coach” than any group that lacks the sacraments and adherence to key doctrines.

There are holy and exemplary non-Catholics. They truly love Jesus and their fellow man. There are also plenty of Catholics who are terrible Christians. Similarly, some healthy people thrive on mediocre diets, and some sickly people barely survive on excellent diets. But in general, a healthy diet is more conducive to quality of life, just as the sacraments and the fullness of truth more effectively facilitate optimal Christian living.

Second, aside from considerations of what’s better for us, we need to think of what’s more pleasing to God, which is obedience to his will. In the Old Testament, God was very clear about how he wanted to be worshiped. His chosen people lived by detailed rules, feasts, and rites. God didn’t just tell them to follow the Ten Commandments. He also established a specific way for the Israelites to worship him, as part of the Old Covenant.

In a similar way, Jesus Christ established a New Covenant through the Church that he founded, and he wants Christians to follow him in this Church.

Yes, there are plenty of good non-Catholic Christians out there. But this doesn’t indicate that following Christ outside the Catholic Church is better for God. It’s not what God prefers as the proper way to worship him. Furthermore, the baptism of water is preferable to the baptism of desire or of blood, since it’s the ordinary means God has given us and thus the only one in which we can be perfectly assured of membership in his Church. “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5).

Joseph Freymann is a professor of apologetics and computer science at Catholic Polytechnic University.