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.

A common objection to Mary relates to her “fiat” in Luke 1, as well as the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The claim is that Mary was unable to truly consent to the proposal of carrying God’s Son.

Essentially, it states that if the importance of Mary is due to her willingness to accept God’s invitation to carry his Son, and the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception is true that Mary was free from sin, then could she have really said no when God came to her? This would appear to invalidate “her” decision as not really hers. If the decision was never really hers, but God’s through her, then she no longer carries any basis for uniqueness, making the unique Catholic attributions superfluous and illogical.

Besides ignoring the historical, Patristic parallel to Mary, Eve, who also was immaculately conceived and yet was able to reject God’s will, this argument assumes a misunderstanding of how grace works. By virtue of being grace, a gift, grace cannot impose itself onto anyone. This especially includes the will.

Regardless of the means by which God does so, to condemn the basis of Christianity, God’s grace, as a mechanism for overpowering someone, especially the woman chosen to be Jesus’ mother, is an insult to the One whose essence, we believe, is love.

This common misconception of freedom puts our will against God’s will. It states that the more there exists of one, the less of the other. I have seen this misconception of freedom also applied to people in heaven, who apparently are less free because they cannot sin, and even applied to God, who is shackled by his perfect goodness and, therefore, not free to sin.

Freedom, like anything else that exists, has a formal cause and a final cause or purpose built into its nature. Christians have long recognized that freedom, because it is an operation of the will, is ordered toward goodness. Freedom works when it is used to seek or produce goodness.

A second important point about free will is that it is contingent. The physical limits to our freedom become evident when we try to fly. If our free will is contingent, then it exists, ultimately, only because of God’s will. Our will and God’s will are not two competitive realities. Human will, by its created, contingent nature, necessarily proceeds from God’s will. This means that our will also participates in God’s will to the degree that it conforms to God’s will.

Our will does not exist apart from God’s will, but works, is truly free, only when participating in God’s will. It still works in a limited sense when we reject God’s will and choose to sin, but this is because God has both an antecedent and a consequent will. The antecedent will is the primary thing that God desires. By creating and upholding our free will in the first place, God is willing that we be free to participate in or reject God’s consequent will, which is that we choose goodness. God will allow us, as a consequence, to reject goodness because this allowance is necessary for our will to be truly free.

As a brief aside, this means that although a person is always “free” to reject God’s will, which is what it means to sin, he exhibits greater freedom when he participates fully in God’s will, because God’s will created, and currently upholds and orders, that will for choosing goodness. A will that chooses goodness conforms more closely to its proper end, which makes it participate more fully in its cause, God’s will, making it more free.

One objection to this idea could be that it begs the question: the definition of goodness here is simply “doing God’s will,” and “God’s will” is “goodness.” However, in this circumstance, we are not saying it is good simply because God wills it—divine voluntarism—but that the actual final end of the will is goodness. Similarly, a hammer’s final end is hitting a nail. The hammer fulfills a metaphysical good by attaining its purpose. Separately, it is also true that God wills our ultimate good, which would be for a substance to participate in fulfilling its purpose.

Because God did not need to create us, or anything else, for that matter, this makes our free will a product of God’s grace. When we use our will, it is because grace is allowing it by upholding its existence. In fact, because it is God’s will that upholds our will, our will “works” better when it cooperates with God’s will. Similar to how gravity holds everything on earth in place, I work better when I cooperate with gravity. I am technically free to reject gravity and act against it to the degree that I can try to overpower it. Unfortunately for me, I would end up illustrating my inability to reject gravity in the very attempt.

When we use our will to not cooperate with God’s grace, it makes sense that we would call this sin.

Going back to Mary, if she was “full of grace,” as St. Gabriel calls her in Luke 1:28, then it would follow that her will was entirely free. Even those uncomfortable accepting the Immaculate Conception cannot deny that she is called, in that moment, full of grace, before the prospect of carrying God’s Son is proposed. If God’s grace is what frees someone, another prospect that no Christian should deny (see Rom. 3:24, 6:14; Gal. 5:1), then Mary’s fullness of grace could only make her more free to accept or reject God’s proposal. By cooperating with God’s will even further by accepting the invitation, Mary’s capacity for freedom expanded even more.

Like Eve, Mary was not only free to say no, but more free than any other human in history. This greater level of freedom is part of what made Adam and Eve’s sin so devastating. Like any sin, theirs was a free choice—it would not be a sin if it were not free—that enslaves.

Far from undermining Mary’s immaculate conception, her “yes” to this grave, literally awesome mission proves evidential for her immensity of grace.

Mike Schramm lives in southeastern Minnesota with his wife and children, where he teaches theology and philosophy at Aquinas High School and Viterbo University.

It has become a regrettable feature of American public discourse that tragedies, like mass shootings and natural disasters, are greeted by some public figures and commentators with mockery of the idea of prayer.

I seem to remember, some years ago, when Christian politicians assured the victims of some disaster of their prayers (“our thoughts and prayers are with the victims” and so on), non-Christian commentators would react angrily, saying that what the victims needed was food and shelter, or else that something should be done to mitigate such events in the future, like flood defenses or gun control.

It might, indeed, be reasonable to question politicians’ sincerity if they offer prayer as a substitute for action (see James 2:16), if that were really what was going on. Now, however, we seem to have moved on to a new phase, in which the idea of prayer in itself is ridiculed, because it didn’t save the victims. We have entered a dark place, where the principles of those scoffing at the Crucifixion have found their way into public discourse in a still majority-Christian nation: “Let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him” (Matt. 27:42).

As Catholics, we need to be able to respond to the misunderstanding, sincere or not, that lies behind this ridicule. The suggestion seems to be that if prayer worked, then Christians would not suffer any misfortunes. This is clearly not something that Christians have ever believed, as a glance at Scripture or the history of the Church confirms. On the contrary, those who pray best, the saints, have often faced great suffering and death, as Our Lord predicted they would: “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). Insofar as we are united to Christ in this life, we are united to his sufferings; it is in the next life that we can hope to share in his glory (2 Cor 1:5, 1 Pet. 1:11, Rom. 8:18 sicpassim).

Catholic spirituality gives great emphasis to this reality. Persecution is a mark of the Church, and the saints are subject to misunderstandings, calamities, sickness, and bereavement, often in an acute form. Nevertheless, ours is a joyful religion, because in these things we can find Christ. This is not easy for outsiders to understand, but let me say something about why we pray at all.

We are frequently encouraged to pray for things—petitionary prayer—but this is not the whole, or even the most important part, of prayer. Traditionally, prayer is divided into four categories: adoration, thanksgiving, contrition, and petition. Prayer itself is defined simply, in the traditional catechisms, as the lifting up of the mind and heart to God. Prayer is paying attention to God—placing oneself, as an act of will, in his presence. It need not involve words, and if there are words, they need not be our own; they could be the words of the Psalms, or the liturgy, or formal prayers repeated (for example, in the rosary) until we no longer think about the individual phrases, but employ them as a setting for wordless prayer.

An analogy with human relationships might be helpful. If we love and respect someone, and know that this person cares deeply about us, then we will want to spend time with him. Talking to such a person may help us, in a difficult situation, to calm down and clarify our thoughts, even if the other party doesn’t say very much. Whether or not we bring to such an encounter a practical problem to be solved, such conversations, as a form of communion with another human being, are good in themselves, and necessary to the maintenance and deepening of our relationship.

If we can take a non-transactional approach to human relationships that, as we might say, “feed the soul,” then we should certainly do so with our relationship with God. We spend time with God, we communicate with God, we thank and praise God, because it is good to do so, because the object of human life is the intimacy and union of will with God, which we approach in prayer and which will be perfected in heaven.

A non-believer may ask us if God communicates back to us. Some saints had “interior locutions,” or indeed visions, but for the most part, God’s communication with us is more subtle. A feeling, after prayer, of greater peace, of greater confidence in a planned course of action, of greater strength and courage, is common in the spiritual life. It is also a frequent experience that someone praying about a difficult problem may think of a way to deal with it, or find that circumstances change favorably, or find unexpected help becoming available. Readers can reject this or try to explain it away, but it is a fact about how devout Catholics and other Christians experience their lives.

God wants us to bring him our problems, to seek help at his hands, and to view all our consolations and successes in light of our relationship with him—that is, as blessings. On the other hand, if he wished to, he could solve all our problems in an instant. He could take away our sciatica or our troublesome mother-in-law; he could mend our car, or our roof, or make us win a lottery and become millionaires. The Christian life is punctuated, as we experience it, with God’s assistance, in large ways and small, but he does not simply solve all our problems. That is not how life works. We are in this world to work, to face difficulties, and to suffer, alongside all the experiences we may have of happiness and pleasure, because this is the path of our sanctification. This is the way we can give glory to God, to build up his kingdom on earth, and to unite ourselves with the example and sufferings of Christ.

Sufferings risked or undertaken voluntarily, or accepted with patience, are redemptive. This is why Christ suffered them, and because he wants us to be able to contribute to the work of salvation, He allows us, too, to suffer for the sake of others, to make up for the wrongs we and others have done. As St. Paul exclaimed, “who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:34).

God’s way of dealing with us is not like an indulgent pet-owner who wants his hamster to have plenty to eat and a comfortable environment. It is like a father who wishes his son to grow in maturity, to deal with obstacles, and to learn how to do the right thing even when that is difficult. God helps us, but what he helps us to do is to tread the path that Christ trod before us. It is a difficult path, but it is the path that leads to true happiness in this life, as well as to glory in the next.

Dr. Joseph Shaw has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and is the editor of The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press).

Many non-Catholics do not recognize the Eucharist as a sacrifice. It is just a remembrance to them, like how shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July is a remembrance of the American Revolution. One helpful way to correct this misunderstanding is to connect the Tamid sacrifice from the Old Testament to the Eucharist, along with Jesus’ ascension.

The Tamid sacrifice is briefly described in Exodus 29:38-43. That part of Scripture says that the high priest would sacrifice a lamb, some wine, and some bread on a fiery altar. Brant Pitre says the flour was baked into the shape of unleavened circular cakes, which already gives eucharistic overtones.

This Tamid sacrifice was considered the baseline and pinnacle of Jewish sacrificial worship. Gary Anderson says, “In the calendar of Israel’s festivals (Num. 28-29), the tamid is the baseline sacrifice to which all the additional festival sacrifices are added.” L. Michael Morales says, “All other offerings throughout the day were placed upon and constituted additions to the tamid ascension offering” (134). This was no random sacrifice, but one intimately familiar to the Jews.

There’s a rabbinic text from the Mishnah, “m. Tamid,” that gives a fuller description of how Jews offered the Tamid sacrifice (1.1-7.4, 582-589). Among the elements I want to highlight is how, during the Tamid, there was prostration, a priestly hand raising, a priestly blessing, a sacrifice, and a time for singing. Besides already giving eucharistic overtones, these elements connect to the Book of Sirach from the second century B.C., which provides us with an instance of the Tamid sacrifice helpful for this discussion.

Sirach describes the great and famous high priest Simon raising his hands and giving a blessing. The people bow down in worship and joy, or gladness (Sir. 50:20-21, 23). This implicitly refers to the Tamid sacrifice. Numerous arguments can be made for it, but due to space considerations, check out the works of biblical scholars like Fearghus Fearghail, M. Dennis Hamm, Curtis Mitch, and Scott Hahn.

Now, with Exodus 29, m. Tamid, and Sirach 50 in mind, let’s look at the Gospels. When Jesus ascends into heaven, he does so like the high priest during the Tamid sacrifice, per Dennis Hamm (215-231). Luke 24:50-53 says that Jesus lifts up his hands, blesses the apostles, and ascends into heaven. The apostles then worship him and return to Jerusalem with great joy, often visiting the temple. This language is comparable to the high priest in m. Tamid and Sirach 50.

Besides the obvious connection of Jesus raising his hands in blessing like the high priest in both texts, the theme of prostration is present. The apostles “worshiped” Christ (Luke 24:52), which probably involved prostration, like how either the priests (per m. Tamid) or the people (per Sir. 50) would prostrate themselves during the Tamid. The apostles are filled with “joy,” like how the Levites sang hymns (per m. Tamid) and the high priest prayed for gladness (per Sir. 50) during the Tamid. All of these things connect to Sirach 50, as Hamm notes, and commentators like “Deube, van Stempvoort, and Brown” do as well (218).

Now let’s look at the Last Supper discourse in Luke 22. The Tamid offered bread, wine, and a lamb. What does Jesus, the high priest of Luke 24, offer? Himself, the “lamb of God” (John 1:29). He is like the Tamid’s whole burnt offering of a lamb to God that ascends into heaven (Luke 24:51). Not only that, but at the Last Supper, Jesus “took bread, and . . . gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’” Jesus the priest turns bread and wine, which the priest of the Tamid sacrifice offered, into the Lamb, which the priest of the Tamid also offered. In fact, when Jesus took the bread, he “blessed” it (Matt. 26:26), which John Bergsma notes is a priestly action. Jesus’s body is “given” like a sacrifice. His blood is “poured out” like a sacrifice. The Last Supper of Jesus connects to the Tamid sacrifice.

Hamm brings out a lexical connection between the Tamid and the Eucharist. He points out how, when Jesus offers the Eucharist and says to do this in “remembrance” or “memorial of me,” that “this is temple-talk, cultic language” (227). The Tamid was a “memorial.” Exodus 30:16 uses that exact Greek word to describe it. That word is a cultic word for the temple, which was where the Tamid was celebrated. However, what sets the Tamid apart is the fact that it involved bread, wine, and a lamb, just like the Eucharist in the New Covenant. This leads Hamm to say,

Within Luke’s narrative, these words present Jesus as establishing a new ritual parallel to (and contrasting with?) other cultic memorials such as the Passover sacrifice (Luke’s immediate framework) and the daily Tamid service. Thus, Jesus’ death by crucifixion, a literal giving of his body and pouring out of his blood, is here interpreted as an act of worship, a new memorial (227).

The Tamid sacrifice memorial of bread, wine, and a lamb are mirrored with Jesus the Lamb’s memorial of bread, wine, and the bloody sacrifice on Calvary (Luke 23), which ultimately ends with Jesus’s priestly blessing and ascension into heaven (Luke 24).

There are four more connections to make between the Tamid and the Eucharist. The temple liturgy of a high priest offering the lamb sacrifice mirrors the terms utilized in the early Christian conception of the Eucharist. The first connection is how the Jewish priest would give wine to the lamb to be slaughtered from a golden chalice (m. Tamid, 3.4, 584). That sounds like Christ the Lamb of God drinking wine while on the cross of his sacrifice (Luke 23), or when Jesus offers his blood to drink under the appearance of wine at the Last Supper (Luke 22).

The second connection is how the Jewish priest would sacrifice the lamb while facing the east (4.1, 585), and the early Church, as St. Basil the Great in the 300s says, worshiped God in the Eucharist while facing east, called ad orientem (66).

The third connection is where m. Tamid says that, after the prostration, the Levites would sing (7.3, 589). This connects to the Last supper, where Jesus and the apostles “sang a hymn” (Matt. 26:30).

Finally, the fourth connection is that there are three priests who assist the high priest during the Tamid service (7.1, 588). This is similar to how Jesus chose 3 disciples, Peter, James, and John, to be his inner circle (i.e. Lk. 9:28, Matt. 26:37, etc.).

There are numerous connections between Jesus and the Tamid sacrifice. The high priest in m. Tamid raised his hands in blessing amid the joy of worship, just like Simon in Sirach 50 and Jesus in Luke 24. The Tamid sacrifice per Exodus 29 contained bread, wine, and a lamb, just like Jesus’ Last Supper meal in Luke 22. Both the Eucharist and the Tamid sacrifice were considered “memorials.” The numerous connections between the Tamid and Jesus point toward the conclusion that the Eucharist is a sacrifice.

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.

You will occasionally hear someone cite Christ’s words in Matthew 19:9 to debunk the Catholic Church’s teaching on divorce: “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.”

The “except for unchastity” part is generally known as the Matthean exception clause, which is not found in any other record of Christ’s teaching on this matter (Mark 10:11-12, Luke 16:18, 1 Cor. 7:10-11).

The objection is that Jesus apparently agrees that if your spouse commits adultery (or some other sexual immorality), then you can legitimately divorce your spouse. Ergo, Jesus is more understanding and compassionate than the Catholic Church!

There are many good responses to this objection (see here, here, and here). And I wish to build upon them with my own answer: St. Matthew here is protecting the honor of John the Baptizer.

This is because John the Baptizer basically told Herod to get a divorce, to end his invalid marriage with Herodias: “For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her’” (14:3-4).

If Jesus prohibits anyone from divorcing his wife without any nuance, then it would seem as if Herod should remain with Herodias—an adulterous and illegitimate union at its very conception! On top of that, there would be a contradiction between Jesus and John: should Herod divorce or not?

Because of the Matthean exception clause, however, there is no conflict: Herod’s union was invalid from the start. The Catholic Church today would not regard such a “marriage” as valid, and so a “divorce”—or, more properly, an annulment—would be declared. After all, special care is taken in the Catholic Church to ensure that the man and woman in the union are eligible to marry. Herod and Herodias would have flunked.

To make things absolutely clear: Matthew 19:9 does not permit divorce because of adultery, but clarifies that a “marriage” contracted on illegitimate grounds—like the bride already being married!—can be lawfully undone.

Now, why should we think this is why Matthew has the exception clause in his Gospel? If we assume that Matthew drew from Mark to write his Gospel, then we see how much Matthew cared about John the Baptizer’s reputation and relationship with Jesus.

In Matthew, for example, John the Baptizer, like Jesus, condemns the Pharisees and Sadducees (3:7-10), whereas only Jesus explicitly opposes them in Mark. Matthew is showing that Jesus and John both opposed the Pharisees and Sadducees! There is harmony rather than disharmony between the two.

A close reading of Matthew also reveals how much he cared about John’s reputation. Jesus in Matthew explicitly tells us that John is Elijah the Prophet (11:14, 17:12-13), whereas Mark only gestures toward the connection (1:2-3). Matthew focuses more on the words of John than does Mark (e.g., Matt. 11:2-6). Matthew also has Jesus’ high praise of John (vv. 7-15), which isn’t found in Mark.

Of interest here is that we have precedent for Matthew resolving apparent tensions between Jesus and John the Baptizer. In Mark, Jesus is simply baptized by John without question. This is strange, because Jesus is clearly without sin and does not need to be baptized. Matthew, however, includes more dialogue between Jesus and John, which softens the tension:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:9-11)

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:13-17)

In short, Matthew has the exception clause not because divorce is okay if your partner cheats, but because invalid “marriages” like the one John the Baptizer condemned between Herod and Herodias should not persist. This is perfectly harmonious with Catholic teaching and makes perfect sense of Matthew’s Gospel.

Suan Sonna serves as the director of apologetics for the Diocese of Bridgeport and is currently pursuing another Master’s at Yale in Second Temple Judaism.

One reason that we might find it hard to believe the New Testament is because we don’t know what to do with all that talk about the devil and the demonic. Jesus drives out demons throughout the Gospels. For instance, St. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest, describing only thirteen healings, yet four of them (1:21-28, 5:1-20, 7:24-30, and 9:14-29) are exorcisms.

There are several reasons that we might struggle to believe in such accounts. Let’s briefly consider three possible objections before looking at how we might respond to them.

First, there’s the claim that belief in the devil is really an import from paganism. Elon Gilad argues in Haaretz that the Jewish belief in Satan derives from Zoroastrianism, which envisions the universe “as a battle ground between [two] opposing supreme gods[:] Ahura Mazda, the ‘wise lord,’ and Angra Mainyu, the ‘destructive spirit.’” Much of his argument is circular: for instance, he claims that the earliest biblical books don’t depict Satan but also argues that if a book does depict Satan, it must not be very old.

Gilad gets one thing right: there is an evil god of Zoroastrianism. That said, Angra Mainyu is said “to have existed ‘from the beginning’, independent of Ahura Mazda (i.e. he is coeval).” That’s not particularly similar to Satan, a creature created by God who then rebels. But still, Gilad is raising an important question: What should Christians make of the fact that many other religions do have a supreme evil figure?

Second, we might struggle with biblical accounts of possession and exorcism because such stories are common in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Lutheran theologian and New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann points out that we find similar accounts in non-biblical Jewish literature and in Greek literature, with authors like Philostratus and Lucian describing exorcisms. Bultmann argues that their common “stylistic characteristics” suggest that the New Testament description of exorcisms is really just “folk stories of miracles” that made their way into the Bible.

Third, there’s the idea that exorcisms are a belief of a pre-scientific age. The usual story goes something like this: back before we knew about disease or mental health, people believed that demons were responsible for physical and mental illness, but today we know better. Bultmann argues that “faith in spirits and demons” is “finished” by modern scientific knowledge.

Likewise, illnesses and their cures have natural causes and do not depend on the work of demons and on exorcising them. Thus, the wonders of the New Testament are also finished as wonders; anyone who seeks to salvage their historicity by recourse to nervous disorders, hypnotic influences, suggestion, and the like only confirms this. Even occultism pretends to be a science. We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.

Bultmann’s argument calls Jesus’ ministry into serious question, since it suggests that (1) Jesus falsely believed in demons because he was ignorant of things like disease or mental illness, (2) Jesus knew about disease and mental illness but encouraged the crowds in falsely associating these things with demons, or (3) the evangelists simply made up these healing stories. How could an all-knowing and good Jesus act as if demonic possession were a real thing if it isn’t?

In short, because demons, possession, and exorcism are all real things. As C.S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity, modern readers balk at this kind of talk: “I know someone will ask me, ‘Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil—hoofs and horns and all?’ Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is ‘Yes, I do.’” Simply put, neither modern science nor Rudolph Bultmann has actually disproven the ideas of possession and exorcism.

What all three of the above objections get wrong is that they’re too narrow. It’s true that Zoroastrians believed in a powerful evil spirit that was sort of like the devil. But so do cultures on every inhabited continent. Are we to conclude that the Israelites took this idea from all of them, too, or that they all took it from Zoroastrianism? Likewise, it’s true that possession and exorcism stories are found throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. But the same goes for cultures across the world, in both the ancient and the modern world, including places that have never been Christian. As Craig Keener explains in “Spirit Possession as a Cross-cultural Experience”:

Possession experience is not limited to either the [New Testament] or the ancient eastern Mediterranean world. One specialist, Erika Bourguignon, has observed that spirit-possession beliefs are geographically and culturally pervasive, “as any reader of ethnographies knows.” After sampling 488 societies, she found spirit-possession beliefs in 74% of them (that is, 360 societies), with particularly high ranges in the islands of the Pacific (88%) and 77% around the Mediterranean. . . .

Transcultural elements in fact include a biological element that cannot be reduced to (though may be patterned according to) cultural models. Studies reveal “an altered neurophysiology” during many possession states. While some anthropologists note that neurophysiological studies cannot resolve whether supernatural factors might supplement natural ones, it is clear that neurophysiological changes, including hyperarousal, do occur.

It’s worth stressing that these are cultures in which possession cases are still happening. Rather than electric lights and radios and modern medicine disproving these events, modern science reveals that something is happening on a neurological level, and it’s happening across cultures and continents, including in plenty of places that don’t believe in the Bible.

This is exactly what you should expect to see if Christianity is right about the devil and his demons. Think about it this way. The Christian claim is that there are powerful spiritual beings who do harm to human beings. If we didn’t find evidence of such beings in any other culture, that would point to this being a Christian invention. The fact that we do find evidence of such beings, throughout history and today, in places that have little or nothing to do with Christianity, is evidence of the truth of the Christian teaching.

That doesn’t automatically mean that each of these possession cases is authentic. Some of the cases of alleged possession are surely misdiagnosed cases of mental illness, after all. But the fact that some cases are misdiagnosed mental illness doesn’t mean that all of them are. After all, the fact that some cases of mental illness are misdiagnosed as physical illness, and vice versa, doesn’t disprove the existence of two distinct (but related) categories of mental and physical illness. What Christianity, and countless other religions, is saying is that there are in fact three distinct (but related) categories: mental, physical, and spiritual.

Jesus wasn’t oblivious to the fact that these three categories existed. As Matthew 4:24 puts it, when Jesus’ “fame spread throughout all Syria . . . they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them.” Some of those coming to Jesus had physical and viral problems, and others had neurological problems, but others had spiritual problems. And rather than debunking this idea, the fact that we find similar-sounding beliefs in Zoroastrianism, ancient Greek culture, and across the ancient and modern world suggests that it’s true.

Joe Heschmeyer is a staff apologist at Catholic Answers and the author of several books, including The Eucharist Is Really Jesus.

The slippery slope in the Netherlands continues to get steeper as the government recently announced that it participated in the legalized killing of a child. The Dutch health minister said, “At the end of 2025, the committee received its first report of life termination of a child between the ages of one and twelve years.”

Few other details are available about the case, so we don’t know if this is a kind of assisted suicide being provided for an older child who desired to end his own life or if it was simply an act of euthanasia against a younger child who would be unaware of the life-ending measures being taken.

What we do know is that this is par for the course in the Netherlands and other countries that have embraced assisted suicide and euthanasia policies. In May of 2024, the Dutch government helped a physically healthy 29-year-old autistic woman kill herself. In Canada, assisted suicide accounts for one out of every twenty deaths, making it one of Canada’s leading causes of death, surpassing car accidents and even diseases like influenza and pneumonia.

That children are now the victims of euthanasia shouldn’t be surprising for two reasons.

First, these proposals always begin with the most tragic cases, usually of elderly patients who are dying from a terminal disease. Euthanasia advocates convince people that this isn’t really “killing,” but just “choice in dying.” However, once the suicidal camel gets his nose under the tent, there’s no principled reason to stop him from running out the back door and jumping off a cliff.

If it is moral to kill patients because they may have to endure six months of suffering before they die, then what about patients who don’t have a terminal disease and may suffer for six years? Or six decades? This naturally leads to calls for children to have the same “right” to avoid suffering that adults legally possess.

But what about adults and children who are too young or disabled to express a desire to end their life?

Normally, when people are suicidal, we do everything we can to help them out of that decision, even using physical force to restrain them. But to justify assisted suicide, society has to distinguish between “lives worth living” that render suicide a choice for the mentally ill and “lives not worth living” that only a mentally ill person would continue. In Nazi Germany, this kind of person was called Lebensunwertes Leben—life unworthy of life.

For those who relegate some human beings to this category, it makes sense to end those lives, even if they are incapable of asking to be killed.

Second, the euthanasia of children in the Netherlands shouldn’t surprise us because the reasoning that allows for killing these children also justifies so-called “therapeutic abortion,” or the killing of sick unborn children. Even people who oppose abortion as a form of birth control will acquiesce to its use on unborn children who will be severely disabled or not survive long after birth.

In trying to convince people that even these kinds of abortions are wrong, I ask them if we should kill a two-year-old who has become disabled or has suffered so severe an accident that he will die in a few months. Some will recognize that if we wouldn’t kill a two-year-old because he is sick, disabled, or dying, then we shouldn’t kill an unborn child for the same reason.

But some people take the perversely wrong lesson from this comparison. If we would abort an unborn child because of a disability, then why not do the same for a born child? Peter Singer boldly accepts this conclusion and writes the following in his book Practical Ethics:

At present parents can choose whether to keep or destroy their disabled offspring only if the disability happens to be detected during pregnancy. There is no logical basis for restricting parents’ choice to these particular disabilities. If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth, it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant’s condition than is possible before birth (66).

Singer gruesomely agrees with pro-life advocates that it is inconsistent to support abortion and not infanticide:

We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however, is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite: to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth. (See Singer and Kuhse, “On Letting Handicapped Infants Die” in The Right Thing to Do, 146.)

The solution to this evil is to unabashedly value every human being, regardless of things like age and health. That means we should resist nonsensical terms like “therapeutic abortion” as much as possible. Killing a sick patient doesn’t count as “therapy” any more than throwing a car into a junkyard compactor counts as “automotive repair.”

Pope St. John Paul II said this mentality is part of a “culture of death” that values efficiency over virtue. He said that in this culture, “a person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or lifestyle of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of ‘conspiracy against life’ is unleashed” (Evangelium Vitae 12).

This attitude is by no means restricted to children in the womb. In 1982, parents of a newborn with Down syndrome named “Baby Doe” withheld a common surgery to help the baby digest food. The case made national news and, even though the hospital fought the decision, the courts sided with the parents, who allowed their child to die five days later.

If Baby Doe had forty-six chromosomes in her DNA instead of the forty-seven people with Down syndrome possess, this would have been considered a heinous murder. But it wasn’t because the victim was disabled and had a life the courts considered “unworthy of life.” A week after Baby Doe was killed, columnist George Will offered a brilliant retort by citing the life of his own son who had Down syndrome:

Jonathan Will, 10, fourth-grader and Orioles fan (and the best Wiffle-ball hitter in southern Maryland), has Down’s syndrome. He does not “suffer from” (as newspapers are wont to say) Down’s syndrome. He suffers from nothing, except anxiety about the Orioles’ lousy start. He is doing nicely, thank you. But he is bound to have quite enough problems dealing with society—receiving rights, let alone empathy. He can do without people like Infant Doe’s parents, and courts like Indiana’s asserting by their actions the principle that people like him are less than fully human. On the evidence, Down’s syndrome citizens have little to learn about being human from the people responsible for the death of Infant Doe.

When Jonathan was born, doctors recommended that Will institutionalize him and expected him to live to be only about twenty. He has now lived over fifty years. He is one of many witnesses to the beauty of promoting a culture of life—the only culture that can act as an antidote to the creeping horrors of the culture of death.

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.

Michigan physician and U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is rightly catching flak for one odious comparison he made in a recent interview with journalist Jesse Watters. But a second, less reported one, was no less ridiculous.

The first, of course, was his response to Watters’s question about whether he supported the transgender agenda. On this subject, El-Sayed’s party is in the thrall of its most radical constituents. Even though clear majorities of Americans across party lines oppose sex-reassignment surgeries and chemical experiments for minors and oppose participation in women’s sports by biological males, El-Sayed knows he has to hew to the foursquare trans doctrine.

Thus, when asked if he supported the mutilation of boys’ genitals in the name of “gender-affirming care,” he turned the challenge on his questioner, shooting back, “Are you circumcised?” Watters’s flustered reaction allowed El-Sayed to posture as if he had dropped the mic with a brilliant and unanswerable counter: “Okay, so you should probably want to move on.”

(No, circumcision—which is performed on male babies as a Jewish religious rite today just as it was on Our Lord, and also on some gentile babies for perceived health or cosmetic reasons—is not the sinful act of mutilation, which destroys or damages the function of a bodily member.)

For obvious reasons, this exchange has gotten a lot of air. But at another point in the interview, El-Sayed offered another howler. When Watters asked El-Sayed, who is Muslim, about his past expressions of support for Sharia law in the United States, he replied,

Do you know what canon law is, Jesse? … canon law is the name for Christian law… Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else. Just like I hope nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion.

Did Watters know what canon law is? Even most Catholics couldn’t give an adequate definition, so probably not. It’s even less likely that El-Sayed knows—or cares, beyond making a false equivalence to advance a talking point.

To many viewers it might have seemed, however, that El-Sayed was actually making a strong point. Why are we only talking about Muslims imposing their law? Christians have a “law,” too. I just hope they won’t impose it on society just like we don’t want Muslims to impose theirs. Coming from El-Sayed, there’s both a gotcha element (Christians have been promoting their secret law all this time!) and a winsome plea for pluralistic tolerance.

Are the two laws comparable? Or are they as dissimilar as castration and circumcision?

Sharia is a broad term for codes of Muslim conduct, derived from the Quran, the example of Mohammed, and Islamic religious and legal tradition. There is no single expression of Sharia’s rules, which are filtered through different Muslim schools of jurisprudence, but they generally encompass a wide swath of human life: prayer and religious observance, marriage and family, legal rights and contracts, finance, diet, dress, myriad moral matters, and more.

In many countries that are predominantly Muslim, Sharia is deeply embedded into civil and criminal law, with its prescriptions, judgments, and punishments serving a governing function. In light of this, Sharia has become a flashpoint of controversy in certain Western nations where Muslim-dense locales experience conflict between local law enforcement, based on liberal Western values, and neighborhood Muslim councils dispensing gray-market Sharia judgments that often contradict those values.

The majority of these hot spots are in Europe, but as Islam grows in certain regions of the United States, there has been talk of measures to prevent that kind of “parallel justice” from taking root here. This was the context of El-Sayed’s defense of Sharia and Watters’s line of questioning.

Canon law, although in a few ways perhaps superficially similar enough to Sharia for a quick name-drop on cable TV, is radically different in many more ways that matter.

It is not “the name for Christian law” as El-Sayed claimed. First, because it is virtually unknown in Christian groups outside of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whereas variants of Sharia operate throughout the Muslim world.

Moreover, because calling it “Christian law” implies that, like Sharia, it covers many or most areas of Christian life and society. It does not. Canon law is inherently ecclesial and thus inherently limited. Its laws, or canons, regulate how the institutional Church governs itself: how dioceses, parishes, and Catholic associations are organized and operate, the ecclesial rights and obligations of the faithful according to their state in life, fine print related to the niceties of religious education and sacramental celebration, especially the sacrament of matrimony, and lots of eye-glazing procedural verbiage that most Catholics will never have to know.

Unlike Sharia, Catholic canon law is not about superimposing a full spectrum of doctrinal and moral teaching onto the everyday life of religious adherents. It is more like a thick binder of organizational bylaws.

Canon law’s jurisdiction is as limited as its scope. Where Sharia can expand to fill large roles in a state’s civil and criminal courts, canon law stays in its lane. Majority-Catholic countries don’t ban meat on Fridays (though they might have organic traditions of Friday abstinence). The Catholic immigrants who packed America’s urban ghettos in the early twentieth century didn’t go around dispensing back-alley annulments.

That El-Sayed’s first thought would go to a “canon law” that gets “pushed” on people says as much about his Sharia mindset as it does about his ignorance. Don’t be bullied by his phony whataboutism.

Image credit: Conlan Houston, via Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Todd Aglialoro is director of publishing for Catholic Answers Press.

In the Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the topic of miracles and says they were more common in biblical times because their testimonial power was needed to establish God’s various covenants. Aquinas did not deny that miracles had continued after the apostolic age. He even cites these later miracles as evidence for the truth of Catholicism: “Yet it is also a fact that, even in our own time, God does not cease to work miracles through his saints for the confirmation of the faith.” (SGC, 1.6.1)

This led early Protestants to ask, “How could the Catholic Church be in league with the anti-Christ if God had performed so many miracles through its saints?” The answer for some Protestants was that God didn’t perform these miracles— they were either pious frauds or demonic deceptions. Calvin called them “frivolous and ridiculous, so vain and false.” Other Protestants became skeptical of any post-apostolic miracles, even ones that occurred among Protestants.

Scholar Thomas Kidd describes how a woman named Mercy Wheeler was healed at a Protestant revival service in the 1740s from an infirmity that prevented her from walking. Kidd says that many Protestants could not believe the miracle really happened because

to eighteenth-century Protestants, miracles were too closely associated with Catholicism, and anti-Catholicism served as an essential component of British Protestant identity. Opponents of the revivals attempted to associate the revivals with Catholic superstition whenever extraordinary claims surfaced (“The Healing of Mercy Wheeler: Illness and Miracles among Early American Evangelicals”).

As a result, Protestants adopted the same skeptical attitude atheists have long taken against the miraculous foundations of the Christian faith.

Counterfeit Catholic Miracles?

Among Protestants, there is a debate over whether miraculous gifts have continued into the present or whether they ceased with the deaths of the apostles. An example of the latter view that strongly denies post-apostolic miracles is B.B. Warfield’s 1918 book Counterfeit Miracles. Warfield dismissed Catholic miracles as being the byproduct of people conditioned to believe miracles were common because of doctrines such as transubstantiation:

The worldview of the Catholic is one all his own and is very expressly a miraculous one. He reckons with the miraculous in every act; miracle suggests itself to him as a natural explanation of every event; and nothing seems too strange to him to be true (100).

Warfield explains away the healings at Lourdes as being the product of “suggestion” and dismisses medieval miracle stories as coming from “the thought of an age so little instructed in the true character of the forces of nature, and especially its deeply seated conception of the essentially magical nature of religion and its modes of working” (66). If you replaced “Catholic” with “Christian,” you might take Warfield for a “new atheist” like Richard Dawkins. Protestant author L. Philip Barnes summarizes Warfield’s various arguments against postapostolic miracles as deriving from the facts that

• They are alleged
• They are not well attested
• They come from secondhand sources
• They are supplanted by the advancement of non-miraculous explanations.

Barnes discusses the self-refuting nature of Warfield’s approach to miracles:

The problem, however, is that a number of these negative points would be equally telling if applied to some of the biblical miracles. For example, as Colin Brown has pointed out in his discussion of Warfield’s position, the raising of Lazarus, as reported in John 11, is not well attested, being recorded only in John’s Gospel, there is no corroborative evidence, other naturalistic explanations could be given, and so on. The point here is not to dispute the veracity of the story; it is rather to note that if the same considerations adduced by Warfield in his dismissal of post-apostolic miracles were applied to some biblical stories, then a similar negative verdict would be required in the latter cases as the former (“Miracles, Charismata and Benjamin B. Warfield”).

Christ’s Resurrection and Marian Apparitions

One common atheistic explanation for the Resurrection is that the disciples hallucinated the risen Jesus. However, Protestant apologist Mike Licona says it would be a “mind-boggling coincidence” that every member of the twelve disciples would have the same predisposition to hallucinations, which makes group hallucinations essentially impossible.

However, if early testimony from groups of eyewitnesses is enough to show that Jesus was seen alive after his death, then why wouldn’t the same evidence be enough to show that Mary was seen alive after the end of her life in the form of Marian apparitions? Even atheists raise this point, albeit to discredit Protestant arguments for the Resurrection.

Hector Avalos says that Marian apparitions “form the closest parallel to the Jesus apparition stories. . . . Marian apparitions have been reportedly witnessed simultaneously by millions of people, but most evangelical apologists do not see that as proof that Mary is alive” (The End of Biblical Studies, 193).

Bart Ehrman provides similar evidence for Marian apparitions and makes this observation:

It is striking and worth noting that typically believers in one religious tradition often insist on the “evidence” for the miracles that support their views and completely discount the “evidence” for miracles attested in some other religious tradition, even though, at the end of the day, it is the same kind of evidence (for example, eyewitness testimony) and may be of even greater abundance. Protestant apologists interested in ‘proving’ that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary (How Jesus became God, 199).

I once debated an atheist on the resurrection of Jesus, and a member of the audience asked me, “What do you think of the miracle claims of Fatima?” This was a reference to the three children who claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. After they reported their encounter, a crowd of thousands gathered on October 13. Many witnesses claimed the sun moved in extraordinary patterns across the sky, changed in color, and that the ground and clothes that had been soaked by rain had become bone dry in a matter of minutes.

I said, “In some respects we have better evidence for the miracles of Fatima than we do for the Resurrection of Jesus. After all, the first account of Christ’s miracle was written several years later, but the first account of the Fatima miracle was recorded in Portuguese newspapers only a few days later.”

My opponent acted as if this was a damning concession, and it might have been—for someone who denies Marian apparitions. In fact, Protestant apologists who have looked at the evidence for Marian apparitions don’t dismiss them as hallucinations. Instead, they are convinced that the people involved saw some kind of extra-mental or actually existing phenomena.

Mike Licona addresses the evidence for Marian apparitions that Ehrman includes in his book on Jesus and says that Ehrman has not disproven Christ’s resurrection through these examples. That’s because, as Licona puts it,

[Ehrman] merely assumes without any argument that visions of Mary are hallucinations. He states that groups had seen her. He admits that many of those experiencing the visions were educated professionals, including doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, engineers, and lawyers. Even Muslims apparently saw her. And the person perceived as being Mary was even photographed.

Demonic Encounters?

It makes sense that Protestants wouldn’t explain Marian apparitions as something like an improbable group hallucination, since that would undercut arguments for Christ’s resurrection. Perhaps that’s why one popular Protestant response to Marian apparitions is that they are demonic impersonations of Mary.

Licona says, “Other supernatural forces, such as demons, could be behind some supernatural events in other religions.” This approach goes all the way back to the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation when authors such as Johann Marbach denounced stories of Marian apparitions as being encounters with the demonic:

She was a false Mary whom the Jesuits conjured up with the form and the appearance of the Holy Virgin Mary. [This they performed] through their sorcery and the company that they keep with the devil (Wondrous in His Saints, 195).

In my debate on the Resurrection with atheist Matt Dillahunty, I said we should operate on the assumption that reality is as it appears unless evidence suggests otherwise. Dillahunty refused to accept this principle, but doing so would lead to all kinds of radical skepticism. But if you do accept it, then it seems clear that it at least appears Jesus rose from the dead. And if that’s true, then one is justified in believing that conclusion unless evidence suggests otherwise.

Even during Jesus’ ministry, his critics rejected this principle by denying he was a wonder-working prophet of the true God. They said Jesus “casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Luke 11:15). In response, Jesus told them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided house falls. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?” (11:17-18).

In other words, claiming Jesus was diabolical violates basic principles of reason. Jesus’ healing of the sick and his firm commitment to serving the God of Israel means it at least appeared he was a prophet. In the absence of any evidence for Jesus’ demonic nature, such an explanation (on par with modern claims that Jesus was a technologically advanced alien) is a weak way of explaining away the historical data instead of providing a genuine explanation for it.

There’s also evidence against that claim, because we should ask: why would an agent of the devil use miracles to motivate people to adopt a belief system ordered toward rejecting the devil? If this explanation works for Jesus, then it works for Catholic miracles, especially Marian apparitions. When it comes to approved apparitions such as Fatima, one can ask why the devil would impersonate Mary to move people to join a Church whose members promise in their baptismal vows to “renounce Satan, and all his empty works, and all his empty show.”

Where are the Protestant Miracles?

Just as Protestants can be dismissive of Catholic miracle claims, Catholics can do the same regarding Protestant miracles when they ask, “If Protestantism is true, then where are the miracles of Protestant saints?”

First, the demand for specific miracles can mirror atheists who say that if Christianity were true, then there would be more miracles among Christians. In response, Christian apologists can say that we are in no position to say when God would or would not perform a miracle. The fact that some miracles, such as the Resurrection, did happen proves Christianity is true, no matter how many other Christians fail to perform miracles. Likewise, an absence of miracles among Protestants wouldn’t disprove Protestantism.

But Christianity at least has the Resurrection to vouch for it. What miracles did Luther or Calvin ever perform? St. Francis de Sales said, “No one should allege an extraordinary mission unless he prove it by miracles” (The Catholic Controversy, 9). There is no record of St. Francis performing miracles, but that didn’t prevent Pope Pius XI from saying, “Francis de Sales was given to the Church by God for a very special mission,” so this assumption is dubious (Rerum Omnium Perturbationem, 4).

Moreover, Luther and Calvin’s response to this objection parallels Aquinas’s explanation for why there was an absence of miracles after the apostolic age. Specifically, that the miraculous was primarily needed during the promulgation of divine revelation and became less necessary when revelation was just being transmitted from one generation to the next. Calvin said that because the Reformers were not giving any new revelation and were merely proclaiming the same Gospel given by Christ and the apostles, no new miracles should be expected. Or, as he put it:

In demanding miracles from us, they act dishonestly; for we have not coined some new gospel but retain the very one the truth of which is confirmed by all the miracles which Christ and the apostles ever wrought (Letter to the King [on the Clergy]).

The other problem with this claim is that some Protestants do claim to have performed miracles. Craig Keener’s two-volume work Miracles describes Protestant missionaries and pastors who were reported to have performed miracles such as healing people and even raising the dead. Some early Protestants even claimed that images of Martin Luther were “incombustible”—they would not burn even when thrown into fires being stoked with Luther’s books.

Granted, some of these stories and accounts are probably apocryphal, but that’s also true of some Catholic miracle accounts that were written centuries after the events allegedly happened. But to say no Protestant miracle claim is authentic because Protestantism is false would be to engage in the same kind of prejudice Protestants such as Warfield practice when they say no Catholic miracle claim could be authentic.

Does that mean miracles (or “mighty works” if we’re reluctant to always call such acts “miracles”) can’t tell us anything about the agents performing them? If these acts involve the suspension of the laws of nature, then, at a minimum, they tell us the agent’s message should be taken seriously because there is a supernatural power behind it. In some cases, this may be a malevolent power bent on deceiving people, as could be the case with some non-Christian miracles. But we shouldn’t rush to a demonic explanation unless evidence suggests it.

God may be the power behind the miracle, but his divine act does not constitute an endorsement of the miracle-worker’s theology. For example, the apostle John told Jesus, “Master, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he does not follow with us.” In response, Jesus said, “Do not forbid him; for he that is not against you is for you” (Luke 9:49). In other words, the exorcists who did not follow Jesus were ignorant of his identity, but that did not prevent God from giving them the spiritual gift of exorcism.

As a result, God may perform many miraculous deeds in order to confirm aspects of Protestant theology that all Christians affirm, such as the need to repent and believe in the gospel. But what is more difficult for Protestants to explain are miracles involving things such as the Eucharist or relics that seem to confirm not just Christian theology but distinctly Catholic theology. In that respect, if it appears that God is revealing that Catholic practices such as offering the Mass or veneration of relics have faithfully handed on what was first given to the apostles, then (unless evidence suggests otherwise) we should believe that is what has happened regarding Catholic miracles. Catholic philosophers Tyler McNabb and Joseph Blado make this point as well in the context of events such as Fatima:

We should expect that if a figure who represents a specific Christian tradition appears, then it would give credence to the truth of that tradition (assuming the figure does not denounce said tradition). For instance, if Martin Luther appeared with a message from God, then many would consider this to be evidence that the Protestant tradition is correct over the Roman Catholic tradition. Or if John Calvin showed up with a message from God, then this would serve as evidence that the Reformed Protestant tradition is correct over other Protestant traditions (and Roman Catholicism as well). Likewise, the fact that God chose Mary to reveal his message in a Roman Catholic context, that is, a context where heavy Marian devotion is both common and seen as biblical, gives us evidence that the Roman Catholic tradition is correct.

In conclusion, Protestants should not be dismissive of Catholic miracles lest their approach is used to dismiss biblical miracles as well. And Catholics shouldn’t crow about the alleged lack of Protestant miracles lest they undermine their own case. Instead, Protestants should be open to the existence of Catholic miracles and seriously consider what God may be revealing in these miracles, especially ones that occur in uniquely Catholic contexts such as the consecration of the Eucharist and apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Hopefully they will conclude that God has continued to bless his people with signs and wonders for the new covenant he has made with them through Christ’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

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.

Given its 2,000-year existence, the Catholic Church’s record on slavery has long been subject to analysis from external critics, who allege doctrinal error that they argue nullifies the Church’s claim to infallibility. In turn, internal critics argue that if the Church got it wrong for centuries on slavery, then “progress” is also possible on other moral doctrine—especially on matters of sexuality in general and regarding sodomy in particular.

Questions have been raised anew because of Pope Leo XIII’s brief treatment of slavery in his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (MH):

It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII [175]. . . .

Although there was not always consistency in practice—given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned—there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized (176).

In the related footnote 175, which references Leo XIII’s 1888 encyclical In Plurimis, Leo XIV writes, “Consider that, as late as 1866, the Holy Office distinguished between the immoral and moral aspects of slavery, without fully condemning it.”

Leo’s qualifying words “distinguished between the immoral and moral aspects of slavery” are important, because they convey that there are different types of slavery or servitude. Also important is that there has been “a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being,” illustrating that the Church has always gotten it right regarding the intrinsic moral evil of chattel slavery, in which human beings are treated as possessions, bereft of human rights.

Different Types of Servitude

Unfortunately, many people are misreading the pope’s new encyclical, including those who think the Church was late to the party—namely, for getting its doctrine right only twenty-three years after the U.S. Civil War ended, which legally ended chattel slavery in the nation, along with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.

To be clear, the Church has from its foundations condemned chattel slavery. My colleagues Trent Horn and Jimmy Akin, and our friend John DeRosa, have addressed the Bible’s treatment of slavery, including that of Jesus and the teachings of St. Paul in the early Church. In addition, historian Steve Weidenkopf has chronicled the Church’s record otherwise to the present.

When the transatlantic slave trade commenced in the 1400s, Pope Eugenius IV issued in 1435 his bull Sicut Didum. As Weidenkopf summarizes regarding chattel slavery,

[Eugenius] demanded that Christians free all enslaved natives of the Canary Islands within fifteen days; failure to do so would incur automatic excommunication. Thus, fifty-seven years before Columbus’s first voyage, the Roman pontiff unequivocally prohibited the enslavement of native peoples.

Critics counter with two bulls from Pope Nicholas V: Dum Diversas in 1452 and Pontifex Romanus in 1455. Although the bulls’ directives on slavery are certainly up for constructive criticism, Nicholas was not attempting to teach definitively, and thus the Church’s charism of infallibility was not in play, let alone nullified. Rather, as I told EWTN News after Magnifica Humanitas was issued,

One condition for infallible doctrinal pronouncements is that they must apply to all people at all times. The bulls from Nicholas V apply only “in a particular geographical situation in a particular time in history,” [Nash said], and . . . “we cannot treat every papal statement as if it’s an infallible declaration.”

Indeed, Nicholas V was making time-conditioned, prudential judgments, aimed at stifling the anti-Christian efforts of imperialist Muslims and others. Recall that Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in May 1453. Consequently, Nicholas’s directives should be understood as applying to prisoners of war, not chattel slaves, although human dignity must be respected in all circumstances.

The Holy Office’s 1866 Instruction

The Holy Office, today known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), does not have the charism of infallibility, which only the pope and the bishops in union with him possess in certain, limited circumstances. Still, the Holy Office’s pronouncements are normally issued with the approval of the pope.

In its 1866 instruction, the Holy Office responded to Fr. Guglielmo Massaia, the apostolic vicar of the Oromia region of Ethiopia. In its response, the Holy Office first makes a distinction between those who had been “justly enslaved” versus “unjustly enslaved.” Here again we see a distinction between someone whose enslavement is a result of some wrongdoing, and who is doing “his time” not in a prison, but in servitude, in contrast to someone who has been unjustly enslaved. Also, even for those justly enslaved, the Holy Office states,

It is altogether necessary that the seller is the legitimate possessor of the slave, and does nothing in the sale by which the life, morals, or Catholic faith of the slave to be sold be harmed.

Therefore it is illicit to sell a slave or in any manner give the slave into the ownership of any master who by a certain or probable judgment can be foreseen to be going to treat that slave inhumanely, or lead him to sin or abuse him for the sake of that most evil trade which has been condemned and strictly prohibited by the constitutions of the Roman pontiffs, especially by Pope Gregory XVI.

Likewise it is illicit to sell a slave, taking no account of the marriage rights and duties of that same slave. Much more illicit is it to sell a Christian slave to a faithless master, or even, where the danger of falling away is prudently to be feared, to a heretical or schismatic master.

The Holy Office also envisions that those unjustly enslaved can be ransomed by Christians and thereby freely commit to a form of indentured servitude for a period of time, and in which their various human rights would be upheld.

Despite the clear disclaimers by the Holy Office in safeguarding the human rights among those held in servitude in Ethiopia, Fr. Christopher J. Kellerman, S.J. writes,

The Holy Office’s language and theology sound almost exactly like the defenses of U.S. slaveholders. . . . Even if it became less popular over the years to refer to slaves as “chattel,” the new terminology and abstract definitions now popularly used could not cover the truth: slaves were still chattel. They were still moveable property to be used “for one’s own benefit” (169).

Kellerman equates—untenably—the undoubted chattel slavery of U.S. slaveholders with the provisions of the Holy Office’s 1866 instruction. With the backing of U.S. law, American slaveholders could—and indeed did—treat their slaves as chattel, mere property, whereas the Holy Office specifically upheld important human rights for those held in servitude in Ethiopia.

Implications for Other Church Teachings?

If the Church can “evolve” its teachings on slavery, as some misstate regarding the Church’s record on chattel slavery, what about other teachings—e.g., sexual matters? In a 2020 post on the website of New Ways Ministry, an organization that unequivocally opposes Church teaching on sodomy and the redefinition of marriage, Kellerman speaks of the Church’s “current teaching on sexuality,” as if it were not definitive and therefore could change. He adds,

Our current Catechism states, as a corollary to the Church’s condemnation of same-sex genital actions, that the “inclination” of homosexuality is “objectively disordered.” This teaching is highly problematic. . . . The Church’s current teaching drills into them that they cannot trust their own ability to recognize, give, and receive love.

In fact, the Church’s teachings on chastity, including regarding those who experience same-sex attraction (SSA), are part of Jesus’ teachings that set us free, now and forever (John 8:31-32; see CCC 2357-2359).

Even Leo XIII Has His Critics

In praising Leo XIII and his 1888 encyclical In Plurimis (IP), our present pontiff argues, regarding “the dignity of every human being,” that “it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized” (MH 176). Here, Leo XIV comments on all forms of servitude, not simply genuine chattel slavery.

Ironically, in part, Leo XIII disagrees with his present-day successor, specifically regarding non-chattel servitude. Fr. John Maxwell argues that Leo XIII “made selective use of a number of documents” from a dozen popes “to suggest that there had been a constant ‘anti-slavery’ tradition in the Catholic Church” (117-118; see IP 15-18). For example, Maxwell cites various cases in which popes authorized slavery as a punishment, such as a number of Crusade-era popes regarding Christians who had aided the imperialist Muslims of that era. Still, again, these are cases of just punishment for wrongdoing, not the unjust deprivation of human freedom.

One famous papal document that Leo XIII doesn’t cite is Pope Paul III’s 1537 bull Sublimis Deus, in which the pontiff formally, categorically, and universally condemned chattel slavery. In addition, contrary to what Maxwell reports, Fr. Joel Panzer cites various scholars to establish that Paul III’s prudential-judgment motu propio in 1548 “allowed servitude according to the just titles in Rome [alone], primarily for captives of war,” not unjust slavery, and because “the number of prisoners of war in Rome had increased markedly,” given military conflicts with the imperialist Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire (27-29).

As Panzer adds, Paul III issued his motu propio as a concession, and it must be read as the time-conditioned, geographically limited document that it is.

Further, in speaking of the Church’s formal teaching record regarding the intrinsic moral evil of chattel slavery, Leo XIII is on the mark, and so he makes his pronouncement without denouncing the aforementioned 1866 instruction of the Holy Office:

From the beginning the Church spared no pains to make the Christian people, in a matter of such high importance, accept and firmly hold the true teachings of Christ and the apostles (IP 7).

In summary, going back to her founder, Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has always formally taught against chattel slavery, while also authorizing prisoners of war, just punishment for other wrongdoing, and forms of indentured servitude at various points in its history. Those Church clerics and laymen who have acted contrary to the Church’s teachings have themselves to blame.

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

The brown scapular is one of the most recognizable sacramentals in Catholic life. Millions of Catholics have worn the small pieces of brown cloth as a sign of devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Yet the devotion raises an obvious question. The traditional scapular promise says that “whoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.” Is that really a promise of salvation? If so, what prevents the scapular from becoming a Catholic good-luck charm? Could an unrepentant sinner simply keep a scapular around his neck and expect to escape hell?

The answers begin with understanding what a sacramental is. The Catechism teaches that sacramentals are “sacred signs” instituted by the Church that signify spiritual effects obtained through the Church’s intercession. They dispose the faithful to receive grace and sanctify the various circumstances of Christian life (1667). Unlike the sacraments, sacramentals do not produce grace simply through the performance of an external action. Their purpose is to dispose us toward God and toward the grace he wishes to give us.

That distinction is essential to understanding the brown scapular. The scapular is not an amulet, and the cloth itself possesses no supernatural power. The Catechism explicitly warns against superstition when it says that attributing a magical efficacy to otherwise legitimate religious practices, including sacramental signs, is to fall into superstition (2111). A person who believes that a piece of cloth guarantees salvation regardless of how he lives is not demonstrating devotion to the scapular; he is misunderstanding the nature of sacramentals.

The brown scapular has its origins in longstanding Carmelite tradition. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Simon Stock in 1251 and gave him the scapular as a sign of her protection of the Carmelite Order. The familiar promise associated with the vision expresses Mary’s protection of those who faithfully wear the scapular.

The historical evidence surrounding the apparition itself is more complicated than popular presentations sometimes suggest, and Catholics are not required to treat the details of a private revelation as though they were revealed doctrine. The Church has nevertheless approved and promoted the devotion to the brown scapular for centuries.

That distinction between private revelation and the Church’s approval of a devotion is important. Catholic faith does not depend upon establishing every detail of every apparition. The Church’s approval of a devotion means that the devotion is compatible with the Faith and may be beneficial to Christian life. It does not turn a private revelation into a new article of the Creed.

The Church’s own description of the brown scapular helps explain what the promise means. The Vatican’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy calls the scapular a reduced form of the Carmelite habit and describes it as “an external sign of the filial relationship” between the Blessed Virgin Mary and the faithful. It signifies entrustment to Mary’s protection, recourse to her maternal intercession, and mindfulness of the primacy of the spiritual life and the need for prayer. The rite of enrollment in the brown scapular presents it as a reminder that in baptism, we have been clothed in Christ.

In other words, the scapular’s promise cannot be separated from the Christian life it signifies.

This is also why the traditional promise should not be understood as a loophole in the gospel. The Church does not teach that someone may deliberately reject Christ, persist in mortal sin without repentance, and then defeat divine justice by wearing a scapular. Such a belief would contradict the nature of a sacramental. The scapular is meant to dispose a person toward grace, not to excuse him from cooperating with grace.

This understanding is reflected beautifully in a 2001 message of St. John Paul II to the Carmelite Order. He explained that the scapular signifies both Mary’s constant protection and the awareness that devotion to her cannot be reduced to occasional prayers or external honors. Rather, Marian devotion must become a “permanent orientation” of Christian conduct, expressed through prayer, interior life, frequent reception of the sacraments, and concrete works of mercy.

That gives us a better way to understand the promise. Mary does not promise to save people independently of Christ. Rather, the scapular expresses the maternal protection and intercession of the woman who always leads her children to her Son. To wear it faithfully is to accept a particular spiritual relationship with Mary and, through Mary, to Christ.

The so-called Sabbatine Privilege requires similar care. The popular tradition holds that Mary promised special assistance to those devoted to the scapular, particularly in relation to purgatory. The historical papal document traditionally associated with this privilege, however, has long been regarded as inauthentic. At the same time, the Holy See has permitted the Carmelites to preach that the faithful may piously believe in Mary’s assistance to those who have lived in charity and faithfully practiced the devotion. The emphasis is therefore not on a magical escape from purgatory, but on Mary’s intercession for faithful Christians.

The distinction is worth making because Catholic sacramentals are not magical mechanisms. A rosary does not replace prayer. Holy water does not replace baptism. A crucifix does not forgive sins. And the brown scapular does not replace repentance, confession, the Eucharist, or perseverance in grace.

Instead, these material signs make spiritual realities tangible. The scapular reminds its wearer that he belongs to Christ and that Mary, his spiritual mother, accompanies him toward Christ. It calls him to prayer and fidelity precisely because he has placed a visible sign of that commitment upon himself.

So should we take the promises of the brown scapular seriously? Absolutely. But we should take them seriously as Catholics, not superstitiously. The scapular is not a divine loophole or a Catholic lucky charm. It is a sacramental sign of Mary’s maternal protection and a reminder of the Christian’s call to remain faithful to Christ.

The brown scapular does not tell us that we can wear our way into heaven. It tells us to live in such a way that, with the help of God’s grace and Mary’s intercession, we persevere in following Christ all the way there.

Shaun McAfee is founder and editor of EpicPew.com and the author of several books, including Filling Our Father’s House and Reform Yourself!

On Sunday, February 24, 2002, the Greenville News ran an article by Deb Reichardson-Moore. She wrote that the business of biblical translation can be dangerous, citing as evidence William Tyndale, whom she wrote “was burned at the stake for the heresy of translating the Greek New Testament into English in 1525.” She reported that today he’s known as “the father of the English Bible.”

Phrasing it this way makes it sound as if the heresy Tyndale was condemned for was the act of translating the Bible into English. This is a common mistake and often repeated. In fact, when doing a bit of research for this article, I came across several websites on Tyndale that said just this. One stated, “Translating the Bible was considered a heresy.” Another proclaimed that in 1408 a law was enacted that forbade the translation of the Bible into English and also made reading the Bible illegal.

Of course, anyone familiar with the history of the Catholic Church, which for 2,000 years has been preserving and protecting the Word of God, recognizes how ludicrous this is. It was only by the authority of the Catholic Church, which collected the various books of Scripture in the fourth century, that we have a Christian Bible at all. And it is only because of the Church that the Bible survived and was taught for the many centuries before the printing press made it widely available. All Christians everywhere owe it a great debt for that.

So what was the real reason William Tyndale was condemned? Was translating the Bible into English actually illegal? The answer is no. The law that was passed in 1408 was in reaction to another infamous translator, John Wycliff. Wycliff had produced a translation of the Bible that was corrupt and full of heresy. It was not an accurate rendering of sacred Scripture.

Both the Church and the secular authorities condemned it and did their best to prevent it from being used to teach false doctrine and morals. Because of the scandal it caused, the Synod of Oxford passed a law in 1408 that prevented any unauthorized translation of the Bible into English and also forbade the reading of such unauthorized translations.

It is a fact usually ignored by Protestant historians that many English versions of the Scriptures existed before Wycliff, and these were authorized and perfectly legal (see Where We Got the Bible by Henry Graham, chapter 11, “Vernacular Scriptures Before Wycliff”). Also legal would be any future authorized translations. And certainly reading these translations was not only legal but also encouraged. All this law did was to prevent any private individual from publishing his own translation of Scripture without the approval of the Church.

Which, as it turns out, is just what William Tyndale did. Tyndale was an English priest of no great fame who desperately desired to make his own English translation of the Bible. The Church denied him for several reasons.

First, it saw no real need for a new English translation of the Scriptures at this time. In fact, booksellers were having a hard time selling the print editions of the Bible that they already had. Sumptuary laws had to be enacted to force people into buying them.

Second, we must remember that this was a time of great strife and confusion for the Church in Europe. The Reformation had turned the continent into a very volatile place. So far, England had managed to remain relatively unscathed, and the Church wanted to keep it that way. It was thought that adding a new English translation at this time would only add confusion and distraction where focus was needed.

Lastly, if the Church had decided to provide a new English translation of Scripture, Tyndale would not have been the man chosen to do it. He was known as only a mediocre scholar and had gained a reputation as a priest of unorthodox opinions and a violent temper. He was infamous for insulting the clergy, from the pope down to the friars and monks, and had a genuine contempt for Church authority. In fact, he was first tried for heresy in 1522, three years before his translation of the New Testament was printed. His own bishop in London would not support him in this cause.

Finding no support for his translation from his bishop, he left England and came to Worms, where he fell under the influence of Martin Luther. There in 1525 he produced a translation of the New Testament that was swarming with textual corruption. He willfully mistranslated entire passages of Sacred Scripture in order to condemn orthodox Catholic doctrine and support the new Lutheran ideas. The Bishop of London claimed that he could count over 2,000 errors in the volume (and this was just the New Testament).

And we must remember that this was not merely a translation of Scripture. His text included a prologue and notes that were so full of contempt for the Catholic Church and the clergy that no one could mistake his obvious agenda and prejudice. Did the Catholic Church condemn this version of the Bible? Of course it did.

The secular authorities condemned it as well. Anglicans are among the many today who laud Tyndale as the “father of the English Bible.” But it was their own founder, King Henry VIII, who in 1531 declared that “the translation of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be utterly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people.”

So troublesome did Tyndale’s Bible prove to be that in 1543—after his break with Rome—Henry again decreed that “all manner of books of the Old and New Testament in English, being of the crafty, false, and untrue translation of Tyndale . . . shall be clearly and utterly abolished, extinguished, and forbidden to be kept or used in this realm.”

Ultimately, it was the secular authorities that proved to be the end for Tyndale. He was arrested and tried (and sentenced to die) in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1536. His translation of the Bible was heretical because it contained heretical ideas—not because the act of translation was heretical in and of itself. In fact, the Catholic Church would produce a translation of the Bible into English a few years later (The Douay-Reims version, whose New Testament was released in 1582 and whose Old Testament was released in 1609).

When discussing the history of Biblical translations, it is very common for people to toss around names like Tyndale and Wycliff. But the full story is seldom given. This present case of a gender-inclusive edition of the Bible is a wonderful opportunity for Fundamentalists to reflect and realize that the reason they don’t approve of this new translation is the same reason that the Catholic Church did not approve of Tyndale’s or Wycliff’s. These are corrupt translations, made with an agenda, and not accurate renderings of sacred Scripture.

And here at least Fundamentalists and Catholics are in ready agreement: Don’t mess with the Word of God.

Matthew Newsome is a deacon and serves as the Catholic Campus Minister at Western Carolina University, his alma mater.

A common argument for the Resurrection goes like this: Jesus rose from the dead because the disciples willingly submitted to torture and martyrdom instead of recanting their belief in Jesus’ resurrection. If they were just making up the story of the Resurrection, we’d expect them to admit it once it looked as though they were about to be killed. This argument is often summarized as “Who would die for a lie?” or “Liars make poor martyrs.”

But there are three issues I must address when it comes to using this argument.

First, we must be clear that this argument is not meant to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. It’s not trying to prove the existence of anything supernatural. Instead, it is a part of the general argument for Christ’s resurrection.

The main evidence for the Resurrection is that people who were in a good place to know if Jesus rose from the dead say that this happened. Once we prove they did say this (and that resurrection claims aren’t later legends), we have to show that they sincerely believed it (they weren’t frauds) and what they experienced took place beyond their own minds (they weren’t hallucinating).

That means “Who would die for a lie?” doesn’t prove that Christ rose from the dead; it just proves that the apostles weren’t frauds, and thus it makes a part of the case for the Resurrection rather than the whole thing.

Second, one might object that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, also endured persecution and risked death. Does that mean that Mormonism is true? Do Muslim suicide-bombers prove that Islam is true, since they would never “die for a lie”?

Remember: martyrdom doesn’t prove that a belief is true—it just proves that the believer is sincere. Modern day martyrs, Christian and non-Christian, are probably quite sincere. But unlike the apostles, they aren’t in a position to know if the belief they are dying for is true or not.

As for Mormonism, Joseph Smith could have been sincerely mistaken and caught up in 19th-century Protestant revivalism. Or he could have been a charlatan willing to take certain risks in order to gain earthly rewards. For example, whereas the apostles weren’t known for using their status to acquire sexual partners, Joseph Smith used his position to acquire dozens of “spiritual wives,” some as young as fourteen years old.

Moreover, whereas we will see evidence of the apostles accepting martyrdom for their beliefs, no such similar example exists for Joseph Smith, who died in a shootout using a gun smuggled into the jail where he was being kept for trial—hardly what one would call a willingness to submit to martyrdom.

Finally, we shouldn’t place an undue emphasis on the apostles being martyred. We can show that the apostles were sincere simply in that fact that they risked tremendous suffering and death to proclaim the Resurrection. It isn’t necessary to prove they were actually martyred.

This is important because it isn’t as easy as you might think to prove that the apostles (except for St. John) were martyred.

For many of the apostles, the accounts of their martyrdoms come from sources written one or even several centuries after their deaths. Although the Church may be able to recognize a sacred tradition transmitted through these accounts, skeptical scholars are much more willing to dismiss them as legends. The definitive treatment of this issue is found in Sean McDowell’s book The Fate of the Apostles. McDowell is a Protestant Christian, and even he finds exceptionally strong historical evidence for the martyrdom of only four witnesses of Jesus: Peter, Paul, James the son of Zebedee, and James the Brother of the Lord.

But the fact that all the apostles risked persecution, and some of them definitely were persecuted, without pursuing comparable earthly rewards, à la Joseph Smith, is strong evidence of their sincerity.

First, Jesus’ public preaching about himself led to suffering and death, so it was rational for the apostles to assume that the same thing would happen to them if they preached Jesus’ message.

Second, we have the firsthand accounts of St. Paul, who describes his own suffering at the hands of the Jewish leaders. He says he experienced “far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death” compared to other Christians. He also says,

Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches (2 Cor. 11:24-28).

Not only does Paul say he was scourged and almost killed, but he admits that before his conversion, he himself used to persecute the Church. In Philippians 3:6, he says he was “a persecutor of the church,” and in Galatians 1:13, he writes, “For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.”

Third, we have the accounts of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles that describe Peter and John being brought before the Sanhedrin (ch. 4) and the apostles being scourged for proclaiming the Resurrection (5:40). And for more on persecution, there is Acts 8:1-3 says that after the stoning of Stephen,

on that day a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen, and made great lamentation over him. But Saul laid waste the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.

Fourth, we have testimony from the Roman historian Tacitus that says that during the time of the great fire in Rome, or A.D. 64, which was when the apostles were still alive, Emperor Nero persecuted Christians. He writes,

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.

All of this evidence shows that the original apostles would have, at a minimum risked suffering and even death in order to preach the gospel. The best explanation for their actions is that they sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead. So we must ask: what caused them to have this steadfast belief in spite of seeming defeat?

Most critical scholars who study the Resurrection (even though they don’t believe that it happened) do not question the disciples’ sincerity. Gerd Ludeman says, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ” (What Really Happened to Jesus?, 80).

And the Jewish scholar Paula Fredriksen says, “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.”

Once we show that the apostles didn’t “die for a lie,” we are in a good position to defend the glorious truth that they, at the very least, risked death for instead.

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.

Gavin Ortlund insists that St. Epiphanius of Salamis (fourth century) did not affirm the assumption of Mary. Rather, the saint condemned the Collyridians, a group that venerated Mary and affirmed her assumption.

Epiphanius was, according to Ortlund, thoroughly agnostic about Mary’s fate, as the saint admitted, “No one knows her end” (Panarion 78, 23, 9). However, Epiphanius did write the following:

And if I should say anything more in her praise, [she is] like Elijah, who was virgin from his mother’s womb, always remained so, and was taken up and has not seen death. She is like John who leaned on the Lord’s breast, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” She is like St. Thecla; and Mary is still more honored than she, because of the providence vouchsafed for her” (79, 5, 2).

One could argue that Epiphanius affirmed Mary’s assumption here.

But Ortlund rejects this interpretation. He even says that “such an effort seems to reflect the contemporary dogmatic need, not a fair-minded interest in Epiphanius’s meaning.”

He has two reasons.

First, Epiphanius clearly affirms that no one knows what happened to Mary, and so it would not make sense for him to abruptly land on a position. Second, Ortlund argues that Elijah, John, and Thecla are likened to Mary in terms of their common holiness but not in what is specifically attributed to each of them. Sure, Elijah was a perpetual virgin and assumed into heaven, but that doesn’t mean Epiphanius is applying that to Mary.

Ortlund uses this clever parody to illustrate his interpretation: “George W. Bush was a president who served with honor, just like his father, who presided over the final years of the Cold War; and Ronald Reagan, who oversaw a resilient economy; and Jimmy Carter, who fought for disease prevention and human rights abroad.”

Ortlund has constructed a string of presidents and relative clauses where “no one could insist from such a sentence that George W. Bush must have presided over the final years of the Cold War (particularly when they don’t interpret the subsequent two relative clauses this way).” He says that his reading “makes sense since an assumption is not the common thread between the three figures (Thecla, for example, was not assumed); instead, the common thread is honor and godliness.”

This is easy to answer. Consider first this counter-parody: “John F. Kennedy was like Abraham Lincoln, who was married to one wife and assassinated in a tragic fashion (true of both men); he was like Theodore Roosevelt, a true athlete and soldier (true of both); he was like James Garfield (both died in their forties).” This “counter-parody” is closer to what Epiphanius was intending and runs into none of the problems that Ortlund raises for the Assumption interpretation.

For instance, there is no danger of attributing an assumption to Thecla, as Ortlund complained. Thecla is not like Mary in being assumed, because that’s not how Epiphanius is likening her to Mary. Any good student of early Christian texts (Acts of Paul and Thecla) should know that Thecla (like Mary) was betrothed and chose to remain a perpetual virgin instead. The connection is obvious, since Epiphanius defended Mary’s perpetual virginity. Indeed, no one is claiming that the Assumption is the link that all three (Elijah, John, and Thecla) share with Mary.

Rather, the relative clauses (who . . . ) are specifying how Elijah, John, and Thecla are specifically like Mary. The same holds true in my counter-parody: here is how Roosevelt is like Kennedy, but the way that Roosevelt is like Kennedy is not automatically the same as how Garfield is like Kennedy (but I could rewrite the parody so that is the case).

I mention this technical point, because Epiphanius does teach that an assumption event connects Elijah and John to Mary.

Consider how Elijah was a perpetual virgin, as Epiphanius taught of Mary. Why would Epiphanius pick a similarity between them, and then randomly sever the connection right before “and was taken up and has not seen death”? This is unnatural.

Moreover, non-Catholics scholars like Stephen J. Shoemaker, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on Mary in early Christianity today, agree that Epiphanius affirmed the assumption of Mary, as “here he rather unambiguously proclaims that Mary, like Elijah, ‘was assumed and has not seen death.’” It is unambiguous.

The same holds true between John and Mary. Aside from the fact that Mary could have leaned on Christ’s breast (as John did), since mothers tend to show affection to their sons, Epiphanius says not long afterward that John too “by his own prayer— or rather, by receiving the grace from God—he made an awesome thing of his falling asleep” (Panarion 79, 5, 3).

Remember that the assumption of Mary is preceded by her own dormition, or falling asleep (or dying?). Shoemaker writes, “Here Epiphanius refers to the various traditions of John’s ‘metastasis’ and the miraculous removal of his body from this world at death that had already begun to circulate by this time.” Since Epiphanius affirms the dormition and assumption of John as well, the connection between John and Mary is much more specific than mere common holiness.

Admittedly, Ortlund acknowledges that he differs from Shoemaker, but (to my knowledge) I have not seen Ortlund address Shoemaker’s well-researched arguments.

Thus, Epiphanius deliberately chose Elijah, John, and Thecla, because each of them shares similarities with Mary. Epiphanius is uncertain about how exactly Mary died (although Panarion 78 can be read as only concerning the manner of Mary’s death), but it seems to me he made an educated guess that Mary was assumed into heaven like Elijah (and John). Just as we might say that “nobody knows what happened, but I think this is what happened,” and this is not incoherent, we can see with fair eyes that Epiphanius found the Assumption to be most sensible explanation of Mary’s fate.

Suan Sonna serves as the director of apologetics for the Diocese of Bridgeport under Bishop Frank J. Caggiano.

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Many years ago, when I was a college sophomore and, though a cradle Catholic, wholly disinterested in and even skeptical of the Church’s singular claims to truth and authority, I had two such encounters, in fact, that changed my life.

One was with an issue of This Rock magazine, as the flagship print publication of Catholic Answers was then called (in a reference to Matthew 16:18, where Jesus declares that Peter is the rock upon which he would build his Church). I had never seen anything like it. It was deeply faithful and full of knowledge, but it was also sharp, funny, joyful. It exuded—and transmitted like a virus—a countercultural pride in being Catholic. I had never experienced that feeling, but I knew I wanted more of it.

The other was the book Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating, the founder of Catholic Answers. In the same tone and style that I found in This Rock, it took on the anti-Catholic personalities of its time and the anti-Catholic myths and falsehoods that had been around for centuries, and skewered them. And it didn’t just push back against all the errors and biases and accusations—it replaced them with well-reasoned Catholic truths, grounded in divine revelation and historical Christian belief and practice.

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Sometimes it really does seem there’s something about Mary.

Last year, Protestant (Episcopalian) influencer Austin Suggs released videos and articles describing his reservations about Catholic Marian doctrines, saying they are effectively the most central concern he has with the Catholic Church. Suggs—who I should note is one of my favorite modern Protestants because he is a true ecumenist and not a controversialist—argues that Marian dogmas seem to lack biblical support, that some forms of Marian devotion seem to risk obscuring Christ’s singular salvific role, and that Catholic dogmas effectively create a “doctrinal maximalism,” whereby acceptance of Marian dogmas becomes a test of communion.

Suggs is not unique in this concern. Reformed thinkers such as Michael Horton, R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, and James White have all asserted their opposition to Catholic Marian theology on the grounds that it is unbiblical and obscures the unique role Christ plays in the salvific economy. And a lot of former Protestants who are now Catholic, including Scott Hahn, Francis Beckwith, Thomas Howard, Steve Ray, and Marcus Grodi, are on the record saying that the Marian dogmas were a significant obstacle to their own consideration of the Catholic Church. (They also now all unequivocally cite Mary as integral to their faith.)

If you want a point-by-point response to Suggs’ concerns about the biblical (and early Church) warrant for Catholic Marian doctrines, that already exists, thanks to many diligent Catholic apologists, including the always good work of Dave Armstrong. That is not my particular concern here. Rather, I’d like to talk more broadly about the curious phenomenon that is Protestant aversion, if not antipathy, to Marian dogmas.

As a former Presbyterian seminarian, I can relate. When I was a Reformed evangelical, Mariology was perhaps the biggest and easiest target when it came to criticizing the Catholic Church. Go look for verses in the New Testament that explicitly say that Mary was conceived without sin, that she was assumed into heaven, or that she was crowned queen of heaven. You won’t find them. Catholic proof-texting of Marian dogmas are all implicit and inferential—the angel Gabriel said Mary was “full of grace” (Luke 1:28); St. John describes a woman “clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12:1-6). Such verses certainly could point to Catholic doctrines of Mary. But the most persuasive means of doing so is not so much exclusive biblical exegesis as it is wedding them to Patristic sources and the traditions of the post-apostolic Church.

To acknowledge this is not to undercut the Marian dogmas, but to acknowledge a reality about a lot of historic Christian doctrines: Scripture can be cited to support them, but the reason Christians in the twenty-first century believe them has as much to do with extra-biblical factors such as tradition, ecumenical councils, and the hermeneutics and theology of later theologians. The word “Trinity,” for example, never appears in the New Testament; in vain will you look for a verse or collection of verses that explicitly uses the Nicene-Constantinopolitan trinitarian language now accepted by Catholics, Orthodox, and many Protestants.

That doesn’t mean the Trinity is unbiblical, or merely a product of the fanciful imaginations of later Christians. Rather, it illuminates the fact that the formulation of Christian doctrine has been a centuries-long process, involving contentious debates over biblical interpretation, Patristic theologizing, and even rational reflection. We look back at early ecumenical councils as if they were givens, but they were in fact quite controversial, drawing new, unprecedented lines in the sand regarding who was truly Christian and who was heretical. Sorry, Nestorius, Apollinaris of Laodicea, Eutyches, and Arius—Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon say you’re wrong.

Given this, there are a few salient issues per Protestant heartburn over modern Marian dogmas. The first is this: on what grounds does the Protestant reject ecumenical councils that affirm Marian dogmas—not only Ephesus and its celebration as Mary as theotokos (“God-bearer”), but also Constantinople II’s Aeiparthenos (“ever-virgin”), Second Nicaea’s approbation of the veneration of Marian images, and Vatican II’s re-affirmation of Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven? The Protestant requires an explanation for why certain councils are normative and others are not. And if the answer is simply that some councils taught biblical theology and others didn’t, well, that provokes the question of whose biblical theology.

That leads to the next inflection point: as much as Protestants assert that Marian dogmas are unbiblical because they are not explicitly described in the text, if we all acknowledge that we subscribe to beliefs that that are also not explicitly found in the Bible, the crux of the matter is whether we have grounds to argue that Mariology is unbiblical. For if the Marian dogmas are not found to conflict or contradict the teachings of Scripture (especially as understood by the early Church or ecumenical councils), then one must ask, what’s the hang-up?

The oft-cited Protestant argument that Mary in some manner distracts from or obscures the worship of Christ is, I think for any Protestant who actually studies the Catholic Church and its theology and praxis, quite demonstrably proved wrong. The Catholic Church is built upon the sacramental life, and all of the sacraments, all of them, are quite explicitly centered upon Christ and his grace, not Mary. Go to a Mass and tell me Mary is distracting everyone from Jesus. Again, the focus of the rosary is quite obviously to meditate upon the mysteries of the life of Christ and his salvific work. Any attention directed towards venerating Mary is done because of Christ.

Are there somewhere out there Catholics who, poorly catechized, treat Mary as in some sense co-equal to Christ, and worthy of veneration absent his grace? I’m sure—you can find people believing all manner of foolishness. But they do so in explicit opposition to what the Church teaches about Mary. One might as well say Protestantism is erroneous simply because evangelical radio host Harold Camping falsely predicted that the world would end in 2011.

Thus, when a Protestant contemplates the Marian dogmas, he needs to consider: what is their fruit? When you read Scott Hahn or Peter Kreeft, do you come away thinking, “Man, those former Protestants-turned-Catholics really have allowed Mary to obscure their worship of Christ and love of Scripture!”? Do Catholics who pray the rosary daily seem to be more holy or less holy, more or less devoted to obeying and loving Jesus?

I don’t doubt that Mary is a serious obstacle for Protestants. She certainly was for me. But Protestants should take a step back and ask, “Why is this such an obstacle for me?” You may realize that the answer stems from an inherited historic Protestant aversion to Mary that has very little to do with Scripture or the early Church. And if Catholic converts from Protestantism across the world consistently recognize that Mary, far from being a distraction, actually helps Catholics draw deeper to Christ, that might suggest the real origin of that Protestant aversion.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at the New Oxford Review. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity.

Dear Drabby . . . or Drewby . . . or dear Drew Babby,

How am I supposed to raise a huge family when nobody can afford groceries? How do you do it?

Love,

天主教兔 (Catholic Rabbit)

* * *

The Catholic faith meets grocery affordability where it intersects with how to sustain a family—likely a large one, given the Church’s proscription against sterilizing ourselves and/or killing our babies.

My wife is one of Hannah’s children, which makes me Hannah’s son-in-law. We’re raising six kids under eight, and we love doing it. We’re affording groceries. And we’re hoping God blesses us with many more (kids and groceries).

How do you do it? The answer, I propose, comes out of one basic principle. The practical tips come after.

Disclaimer: I mean here only to share what’s working for the families I know. There are a thousand reasons why this or that reader might insist it wouldn’t work in this or that case.

The Principle: Family Togetherness

Over about ten years of childrearing, I have found that the cost of groceries is inversely proportional to the amount of time families spend together.

Is this Boomer “eat at home” finger-wagging? Sort of, but don’t put the cart before the horse. It is good for husbands and wives to be together, and it is good for children to spend time with their parents. Adam exults upon beholding Eve, whom God made specifically as a partner for him (Gen. 2:18-22). Marriage with children is a symbol of the triune God. So families should prioritize and pursue togetherness even before cost-consciousness comes in.

That said, togetherness does help with grocery bills. Bulk-buying, preparing family meals, three squares instead of endless snacking—these can all be considered the fruits of prioritizing family, not just budget hacks.

The families I know make major life decisions with this perspective in mind. Consider the modern lifestyle: father, mother, children separated all day at work and school. Eating separately costs more. So do convenient breakfasts and dinners.

As for major life decisions, homeschooling brings back the children, and working from home brings back the parents. Usually this means Mom earns a lot less, but by no means works less, than Dad. Opportunities open up for communal meals, and spending drops.

People don’t stumble into this kind of lifestyle. It is uncompromisingly intentional. Is it hard to effect sometimes? Yes. Will there be trade-offs? Of course. But this post is about grocery affordability, and the families I’m talking about spend less on groceries.

The Nitty-Gritty

I get it—the thought of feeding six, seven, eight kids is intimidating. But remember that kids don’t spring up all at once. By the time you need to figure out how to afford six, you’ll already have figured out how to afford five, and before that four, and on and on all the way down. Call it the Lagomorphic Rule, or Belsky’s Law of Bunnies.

Nor do you have to go full “homeschool” or “work from home” to bring costs down. Instead, try even one of the bullet points below. Either we do them or Hannah’s other relatives do.

• Why get the formula when the milk is free?

• Protein and fat. When food satisfies the stomach, you need less of it.

• Soak and ferment. Beans, nuts, and grains are more digestible when they’re prepared right. Kids will tear through a bag of Pepperidge Farm’s stuff, but one sourdough bagel works all morning.

• Learn how to make bread, ice cream, kombucha. Churn your own butter. Mill your own flour.

• Food-train the babies. A week or two of loving attention and persistence knocks out enduring bad habits like throwing or rejecting food (i.e., wasting your money).

• Stamp out picky eating. Our kids eat everything—salads, organ meats, sushi, exotic cheeses, you name it—because we withhold sugar until two years old.

• Cloth diapers. Disposables are mind-blowingly expensive. And then . . .

• Cloth toilet paper. People do this. Much cheaper than actual paper. Cleaner, too.

Yes, groceries cost money, but be encouraged. The fear of affording kids didn’t stop me and my wife from having them, and we are overjoyed. It doesn’t have to stop you, either.

Drew Belsky is Catholic Answers’ content editor and manager of Catholic Answers Magazine Online.

This past weekend, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey grossed over a quarter of a billion dollars. Even conservative commenters are praising the film and encouraging people to see it.

But not me. I will not see this film in theatres.

I refuse to support the propaganda that is intrinsic in the film’s casting of Elliot Page, AKA Ellen Page, to play a male Greek soldier (who wasn’t even in Homer’s Odyssey). Page is a “transgender man”—that is, a woman pretending to be a man after having subjected her body to gruesome mutilation. I cannot in good conscience spend money on something that will lead impressionable children into thinking irreversible sex change operations, including the removal of breasts and genitals, is a healthy decision just because a Hollywood celebrity did it, and they see this celebrity in a film everyone is fawning over.

To be clear, I do not think Christians sin or are bad people if they decide to see The Odyssey. After being force-fed CGI-superhero slop for over a decade, I understand the desire to see a bona fide film. I just hope those Christians will take a minute to see where I’m coming from in wanting not to be part of the box office numbers for this one.

Transgender propaganda endangers more people than just the youths who are tempted to adopt transgender identities. When people who identify as transgender are not affirmed in their identity, they often threaten violence. You can see that in this clip from several years ago, when Ben Shapiro debated Robert Tur, the guy who filmed the OJ Simpson chase, who later pretended to be a woman named Zoey Tur. When Shapiro asked Tur about “his” chromosomes, Tur threateningly put his man-sized hands on Shapiro’s shoulder and said that if he kept that up, he’d be going home in an ambulance.

Indeed, it’s not hard to find posts on social media arguing that “transphobes” deserve to die, as can be seen in memes that include guns and other acts of violence against those who reject transgender ideology. Most “transgender humor” is just fantasies about murdering people who disagree with transgender ideology. And sometimes the fantasies become reality.

Liberals who support LGBT ideology understand the concept of avoiding a film for the ideology it promotes. If Christopher Nolan had casted a famous white supremacist in his film, they would pan and boycott, regardless of the film’s artistic merits, because they prioritize winning the culture wars over supporting objectively good culture.

There is another parallel here. White supremacy is evil because it perpetuates a lie related to biology: that some races are morally superior to others. Likewise, transgender ideology is evil because it perpetuates a lie related to biology. Pope Francis said, “Today the ugliest danger is gender ideology, that cancels out differences.”

People have told me Page is in The Odyssey for only a few minutes, so it isn’t a big deal. But that’s always been the winning strategy for those who want to upend cultural norms.

In 1989, two gay advertising executives published After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s. The authors said the LGBT community shouldn’t lead with over-the-top debauchery, but rather present an image as close to normal as possible and shame people for not accepting it. With The Odyssey, we are seeing the same tactic: it isn’t an over-the top casting decision, like Dylan Mulvaney playing Helen of Troy, but rather a subtle thing. It is easier to move people gradually to accept that “transgender men are men.”

Now, some people may ask me, “Are you not going to ever see a film if it has a self-identified gay person or a transgender person in it? Are you against men playing women in the time of Shakespeare?”

To answer the second question first: yes. It was silly that in Shakespeare’s time, characters like Juliet were often played by a young boy because it was illegal for women to perform on stage. In general, actors shouldn’t dramatically differ from the character they portray unless there is a legitimate artistic or story-driven justification for it.

But casting Page in The Odyssey is solely meant to push this kind of propaganda. I have no interest in supporting that.

I would ask Catholics who go and see The Odyssey: where are you going to draw the line? Imagine if Christopher Nolan teamed up with Judd Apatow to make an Oscar-worthy sequel to the 2007 film Juno, where “Elliot” Page reprises “his” role as a mom who had a teen pregnancy. Say the film got a 99 on Rotten Tomatoes. Should Catholics go see it because it’s “pro-life” and “epic”?

The only way to make a successful stand against transgender insanity, or any insanity, is to confront it. In the case at hand, Christians have made progress in reversing society’s acceptance of transgender ideology. According to Gallup, “in 2021, 46 percent found it morally acceptable, and 51 percent found it morally wrong. Today, those numbers stand at 38 percent and 57 percent, respectively.” Much of this was brought about by Christians courageously and graciously exposing the insanity of transgender ideology, which tries to make things like grown men exposing their penises in female changing rooms totally normal. But when we pretend transgender actors are like any other actor and not part of a hideous Frankenstein-esque industry, we erode this success in winning over the culture.

It’s also incumbent upon Christians not to cover evil with euphemisms. For example, instead of “choice,” we need to call abortion what it is: the dismemberment of children. Instead, of “pride,” we should talk about the disordered nature of sodomy. Ephesians 5:11 says, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” We need to have the same attitude with transgender ideology.

When I told my oldest sons, who are still in elementary school, about what was done to Ellen Page’s body, they were horrified. They had no desire to see the film (and they can see R-rated films if they are genuine art), because it just reminded them of this grotesque procedure performed on one of the stars.

I hope not just fellow Christians, but anyone who is firmly committed to the nature of reality will continue to normalize what is normal, and not patronize that try to gaslight 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.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you—like a monastic equivalent of Indiana Jones—were rooting around in a dark, dusty library somewhere, and you suddenly came across a manuscript that nobody had read in hundreds of years?

Wouldn’t it be cooler if the manuscript came from one of the greatest Church Fathers and a Doctor of the Church?

Wouldn’t it be cooler yet if the manuscript gave the Father’s thoughts on one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible?

Well, something pretty close to that has happened.

In 2024, Christian Tornau—a Latin scholar and professor at the University of Wurzburg—got a phone call.

The call came from an employee of a monastery association who wanted to know if Tornau could look at a twelfth-century manuscript housed in a monastery in Poland.

The manuscript contained six sermons by St. Augustine—one of the greatest Church Fathers.

Tornau found that four of the sermons were already known to scholars, but two of them were new. They were previously lost works of Augustine that nobody had read or recognized in centuries.

But now Tornau was faced with a new question: Were they real?

There was some reason to suspect them. The fact that the manuscript was from the twelfth century was unusual. Scholars would normally expect a work of this type to have been created in the eighth or ninth century.

But Tornau was able to determine that the manuscript might be a copy of one from an abbey in Saxony. An old catalogue from that monastery lists a work with the same headings as the recently discovered one, so we have a plausible chain for how the twelfth-century version was copied.

Tornau brought in other scholars to see what they thought, and in 2025, a summer school of over twenty Latin scholars was held in Vienna to consider the find.

Their conclusion was unanimous: The sermons are genuine. “The style, humor, and content also clearly indicate that the sermons in the manuscripts were actually written by Augustine,” Tornau said.

Now a critical edition of the sermons is being prepared, and it’s scheduled to be published by the end of 2026.

How significant is the discovery? It’s not as momentous as some others. For example, in 1990, thirty previously lost sermons and other writings of Augustine were found.

But the two new sermons deal with one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible.

Specifically, they deal with 1 Samuel 28, which features the account of King Saul consulting the medium of Endor. This figure is sometimes called the “witch” of Endor, but that’s not what she is. The Hebrew refers to her as a ba’alat obor “mistress of ghosts”—that is, a woman who inquires of the dead. In our terms: a medium.

The reason Saul consults her is that he is terrified of an invading Philistine army. He wants to know what he should do, but God is not picking up the phone. “When Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets” (1 Sam. 28:6).

In his desperation, and even though he’d previously forbidden mediums in Israel, Saul has his men find one, and he has her call up the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel. But Samuel can’t help the king, and he tells Saul that he’s going to die.

So even though the Israelites were forbidden to consult mediums, God apparently allowed it to happen in this case.

That’s the source of controversy about this text. Because of the prohibition on mediums, some authors have held that it wasn’t really Samuel appearing to Saul, but a demon pretending to be him. Others have held that—by God’s permission—it really was Samuel. The Church Fathers are split on which it was and offer both opinions, though the text makes it clear.

The inspired author of 1 Samuel never mentions demons and repeatedly refers to the spirit as Samuel. He also uses the factive verb “know” when he writes that “Saul knew that it was Samuel” (1 Sam. 28:14). Factive verbs indicate that the author agrees that something is a fact. It’s the difference between saying, “John knew that it was raining outside” and “John believed that it was raining outside.”

The inspired author of Sirach agrees, saying, “Even after [Samuel] had fallen asleep, he prophesied and made known to the king his death, and lifted up his voice from the ground” (Sir. 46:20).

So what does Augustine say about this text in the two new sermons? We’ll have to wait for the critical edition to be published for the details, but we know a little already.

The first of the sermons was preached on a Sunday, and the second was preached the following Wednesday. In the first, Augustine noted how difficult the text is to interpret and mentioned possible views. He then let his audience consider these matters until Wednesday, at which point he evaluated the options and gave his own tentative opinions.

A press release from the University of Wurzburg states,

The story raises a theological question: “Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This in turn opens up the theodicy problem: how can an omnipotent God allow this or is he not really omnipotent?” says the Latin scholar. There are two interpretations in theology: Either it must be a [demonic] deception on the part of the witch, or God allowed the incantation to warn Saul of certain death.

The sermons play with these interpretations. “The first was preached during the Sunday service and ends with the theodicy question and the interpretations. It was not until the second sermon on the following Wednesday that the options were weighed up,” says Tornau. The church audience was therefore given a certain amount of freedom to form their own thoughts on the biblical passage.

I really appreciate this. In my own work, I always try to sketch the range of possible opinions on a question, noting their strong and weak points, and then let people make up their own minds. I’ll tell you what my opinion is, how confidently or tentatively I hold it, and why, but I let people consider the arguments and decide for themselves.

Seeing Augustine showing the same confidence in his audience rather than just dogmatically telling them what they mustbelieve on debatable matters warms my heart.

While we’re waiting for the texts of these sermons to be released, we can get some idea of what they say by consulting Augustine’s other writings.

He was one of the most prolific Church Fathers, and he discussed 1 Samuel 28 multiple times. He discussed both the demonic and the “really Samuel” theory. His conclusions were tentative, and they seem to have shifted.

The scholar K.A.D. Smelik holds that, by late in Augustine’s career, he favored the “really Samuel” view, and Augustine mentions that—in doing further research on the passage—he found and took seriously the statement in Sirach (On Eight Questions of Dulcitus, 6).

What position Augustine comes to in the two sermons may thus depend on the stage of his career in which they were written.

However, there is another issue the sermons apparently engage: Was King Saul saved? On the idea that God allowed Samuel to appear to Saul and warn him of his death, how did Saul react? According to Fox News:

Augustine’s sermons show him weighing the possibility that King Saul repented and was ultimately redeemed after hearing Samuel’s prophecy. . . .

The interpretation of Saul being saved is the “most remarkable element” of the new sermons, Tornau told Fox News Digital.

“This is unparalleled in Augustine and in ancient Christianity in general, where we find a very negative image of Saul,” said Tornau. “Augustine suggests it . . . and clearly takes it seriously.”

The professor noted that Augustine may have independently developed the idea that King Saul repented and was ultimately saved after hearing Samuel’s prophecy, or he may have been influenced by Jewish rabbinic interpretations that viewed Saul more favorably.

“In any event, it is indicative of Augustine’s [independence] of mind and his willingness to think everyone, even those who appear most evil, [are] capable of salvation through the grace of God,” he said.

When the texts of the two sermons are finally released, I’ll be very interested to see what Augustine has to say about the demon hypothesis—but even more interested to see what he has to say about Saul’s salvation, which has implications for the salvation of even the greatest sinners.

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.

The promise (or threat) of “Christian nationalism” is becoming increasingly discussed, yet no one seems to agree on what Christian nationalism is. So, before we can explore if Catholics can support this view, we first have to settle its definition.

Critics of the idea usually define it in terms of Handmaid’s Tale fever dreams, depicting religious leaders as directly controlling the government and instituting irrational, downright evil policies—like turning women into slaves. Defenders of this idea can be found across a wide spectrum, with a few unhinged people in the mix. For example, some Protestant Christian nationalists may advocate for public displays of Catholic worship to be banned; certainly, this would be a non-starter among Catholics.

But the most prominent defenders of Christian nationalism put forward a fairly minimal definition that most Catholics could support.

Stephen Wolfe, for example, defines it as “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.” Andrew Torba says it is “a spiritual, political, and cultural movement comprised of Christians who are working to build a parallel Christian society grounded in a Biblical worldview.”

As a Catholic, I could agree with these goals, though I personally lean more towards “Catholic integralism,” which roots authority on moral matters in the Catholic Church’s teaching rather than on amorphous Christian principles.

Does that mean I want a theocracy that oppresses other religions? Not at all. The Second Vatican Council taught that religious freedom “has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” When Pope Leo visited the European nation of Monaco this year he said:

You are among the few countries in the world to have the Catholic faith as a state religion. This faith places us before the sovereignty of Jesus, who calls Christians to become in the world a kingdom of brothers and sisters – a presence that does not cast down but raises up, that does not separate but connects, always ready to protect every human life with love, at any time and in any condition, so that no one is ever excluded from the table of fraternity.

Christians might disagree about where to draw the line between outlawing evil and merely using social customs to shame it. Still, we should be able to agree that, as a society, it is better to aim for people to live good lives and not merely pleasurable ones. So, here’s a simple argument in favor of “Christian nationalism”:

1. All laws are based on ethical systems.

2. Some ethical systems are better than other systems.

3. Christian ethical systems are better than secular systems.

4. Therefore, laws should be based on Christian ethical systems.

There’s nothing wrong with the state publicly acknowledging that Christianity is not like every other religion. In fact, Christianity’s unique ability to explain why there are any moral obligations at all and why all human beings have equal dignity results in the best outcomes for the state. Thus, it makes sense for the state to adopt at least some of those principles in its laws so that it best protects human dignity and promotes human flourishing.

So, what kind of Christian state would I want to live in?

How about one where it’s illegal to dismember babies in the womb? Or illegal to create them in labs and sell them even to unmarried men through commercial surrogacy.

A state where sperm donors don’t father thousands of children who will never know their father. Where porn that destroys children’s minds and their families is basically illegal, especially AI content involving children, which some judges argueis protected under the First Amendment.

Above all, it would be a state where the highest value isn’t liberty, but God, who is the Good itself.

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.