Patience; I’ll get to that tweet presently. But first things first. At a general Audience in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II delivered a catechesis entitled “Priests Do Not Have a Political Mission.” (For those who don’t know, a catechesis of the pope during a general audience is part of the ordinary Magisterium of the Church. It belongs to the pope’s teaching authority.) The entire text is worth reading, but here are a few highlights. Jesus never wanted to... Read more
It will not do,” John Calvin cries, “to say that the only ground on which we obtain forgiveness of sins is in the mass, because it has been already purchased by the death of Christ.” Protestants love false dichotomies: The Mass or the death of Christ; as though they are different. But no. The Mass is the death of Christ. It is not, as I pointed out in the last segment, a new death of Christ, but the same... Read more
Alegion of Taylor Marshall’s defenders seem to have picked up this claim from the false prophet himself: Demons speak the truth during exorcism; for they are compelled to by the power of Christ. One perhaps should be grateful they are attributing this truth-telling to the power of Christ rather than the demons’ native honesty. Small favors. Howbeit, it’s really a claim that demons never lie at all. For look you: When exactly do demons speak to us except when... Read more
Very early in this chapter, John Calvin is already making claims that are painfully easy to disprove. He has grown desperate. “What is the direct aim of the mass,” he cries, “but just to put Christ again to death, if that were possible?” I’m glad he admits it’s not possible. That’s a first. Just before this, Calvin claimed that the Mass “overthrows the cross of Christ,” but nowhere says that that’s not possible. As Calvin grows more wreckless in... Read more
Some years ago, I came across an audio file of part of the exorcism of Anneleise Michel. Probably I had just watched “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and was curious about the true story. Things like that interest me, but I don’t recommend you get interested; the audio, even in a language I could not understand, unsettled me. After Taylor Marshall recorded a ninety-minute podcast promoting things the demons said during the exorcism, I thought: Wait. Demons are liars.... Read more
Back in 2015 I wrote an article for Epic Pew on the topic of what infallibility does not mean. I pointed out there that the only real reason for the Church to have a definition of infallibility is to “to distinguish between levels of epistemological certainty and between what is divine revelation and what is not.” It still seems to me that’s true. The definition out of Vatican I possibly is of use to theologians and apologists. But it’s... Read more
Note. This is a long-awaited continuation of a series that I began in December 2014 on John Calvin’s claims about the Mass in Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Calvin made wild claims; but he got people to believe them, even today, which is wilder. This one–the Mass banishes the remembrance of Christ’s death!—is easily disproven for anyone who bothers to read the text of the liturgy. (Or even:... Read more
On Twitter, Fr. Frank Pavone—who, to my knowledge, has neither repented nor been disciplined for putting a dead fetus on an altar and filming a propaganda video for Donald Trump—wrote this: “There is an immigration crisis, the 1st immigrant is the unborn child. There is a #Crisis at the border of the womb. They are not being detained or deported, they’re being #dismembered. We’re not going to be able to welcome an immigrant when we can’t welcome our own... Read more
Yesterday my very excellent fellow Patheos blogger Mary Pezzulo asks: What Must a Christian Do For the Helpless?. Her answer is that we must “conform ourselves to Christ” and what he would do. When we see the helpless, we must live in imitation of Christ; the imitation of Christ is not just for when we are feeling pious at adoration. Still less is it for when we take to our blogs and defend, neither Christ nor the helpless, but... Read more
This myth is peculiarly intractable despite the fact that it is also peculiarly easy to refute. The claim is an anachronism, like saying Bill Gates invented the telephone when you can find telephones existing well before Gates was born. If we can find an instance of the Church referring to itself as “the Catholic Church” before Constantine lived, we can disprove the claim. And so we do. To mention just one place, we find it in Ignatius of Antioch.... Read more
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