Defending Catholicism

How to Discuss

  1. Remember Fulton Sheen’s words - "The enemies of the Church often do not hate the Church: they only hate what they erroneously believe to be the Church." (Love One Another)
  2. Argue against the facts, not the person. Time old negotiating tactic – put everyone on one side of the table against the facts so that it becomes an ‘us vs. that’ instead of ‘you vs. me’.
  3. Don’t look to win, look to plant seeds of light. “Arguments” aren’t won on our time frame, they’re won on God’s.
  4. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
  5. Poison story (Allegory/metaphor/whatever)
  6. FaceBook exchange (Colin’s story)

History

  1. Crusades (a.k.a. “Catholics bad, v 1.0)
  2. Catholics get a bad rap for this – not Christians so much, but Catholics. Hmmm…
  3. “And lest we get on our high horse…remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” (President Barack Obama).
  4. “Indeed, in the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it.” (President Bill Clinton)
  5. Catholics get the rap because the Pope called the Crusades.
  6. Motivations for the Crusades
  7. “It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. Every word of this is wrong.”(Source)
  8. Muslim conquests provoked a reaction. “The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.”
  9. Love of neighbor and of self – “Greater love has no man than this; to lay down one’s life for a friend.” (John, 15:13)
  10. Penance – the Pope offered men a chance to deny themselves and take up the Cross of the Lord.
  11. Inquisition (Lat. inquirers, to look into). What is heresy? How were priests educated?
  12. Three main Inquisitions – (1) Medieval Inquisition vs. Catharism; (2); the Spanish Inquisition; (3) The Roman Inquisition (now Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).
  13. Allegations of torture: Consider the times (trial by combat) and the Biblical precedent (Daniel and the lion’s den). These were last-ditch efforts often sought after by the innocent over the punishment of excommunication.
  14. Capital Punishment: how could the Church condemn anyone to death?
  15. The Church argued vehemently against putting heretics to death:
  16. In France Louis VIII decreed in 1226 that persons excommunicated by the diocesan bishop, or his delegate, should receive "meet punishment" (debita animadversio), [a.k.a. burned at the stake] (Source)
  17. Inquisitors were to root out heresy and perform appropriate measures, such as recommending for excommunication on down the list. Put in an impossible spot – find a heretic and lie, or tell the truth and possibly see them condemned to death. Remember – secular authority put them to death, not the Church.
  18. Numbers? What numbers? Anti-Catholic rhetoric cites huge numbers of people put to death by the Church, but there is no evidence for this. Extrapolation is not proof regardless of how passionate one’s belief may be.
  19. How did it work? This regularly began with a month's "term of grace", proclaimed by the inquisitor whenever he came to a heresy-ridden district. The inhabitants were summoned to appear before the inquisitor. On those who confessed of their own accord, a suitable penance (e.g. a pilgrimage) was imposed, but never a severe punishment like incarceration or surrender to the civil power. (Source)
  20. The dreaded Spanish Inquisition – oooohhh…scarrrrrryyyyy.
  21. What was it? Originally called into being against secret Judaism and secret Mohammedanism, it served to repel Protestantism in the sixteenth century, but was unable to expel French Rationalism and immorality in the eighteenth. (Source)
  22. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE CHURCH HATED/HATES JEWS OR MUSLIMS!!!!!
  23. Teaching false doctrine is heresy. Proclaiming one’s self to be Catholic yet worshiping other gods/practicing false religions is heresy.
  24. Conclusion – when you look at historical events from the side of Catholics, you see things in a different perspective.

Science

  1. The “Galileo Affair” (a.k.a. “Catholics bad, V 2.0)
    Heliocentrism (Modern Astronomy) vs Geocentrism (Ptolemaic system).
  2. Geocentrism states that the Earth is at the center of the universe. So there physical observations!!! Geocentrism was not the only theory in ancient times! Aristarchus of Samos (around 310-230 BC) held that the Earth revolved around the sun and that the stars were other suns, just further away.
  3. Ptolemy was pretty cool and seemed to have a good system going, so it was stuck to by much of the ancient world. Including Catholics. Go figure.
  4. Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho, and others began to observe different things about the sky above us.
  5. Galileo began stating WITHOUT A DOUBT that the Earth rotated around the sun. He was asked to state this as a hypothetical instead of a fact because science at the time could not prove this (technical stuff about parallax of the stars motion that requires modern instruments – very droll stuff).
  6. Turns out, THE CHURCH WAS RIGHT to put the brakes on because Galileo stated that the sun was the center of the UNIVERSE, not the solar system. Ooops…boy, would we have looked silly.
  7. Evolution: “Dr. Darwin Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Evolution.”
  8. “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. (Five Books of Moses)
  9. The Bible was not meant as a scientific manual – if that was what God wanted to give us, we’d have the best scientific manual imaginable. Instead, it is poetry, history, allegory, correspondence, food safety laws, and so on.
  10. “What kind of days these were is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!” (The City of God11:6).
  11. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God . . . does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the “project” of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities (In the Beginning, p. xx). (Source – the actual book)
  12. Evolution is a fact – just look at fruit fly experiments in high school! That said, remember that the Bible is all kinds of books rolled into one. Again, St. Augustine: “One doesnotread in the Gospel that the Lord said: ‘I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon.’ For he willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians.”
  13. Conclusion – Science and God are not in opposition, they are in full hand-in-glove cooperation.

Secularism

  1. Politics
  2. “Catholic Spring”
  3. “Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church” Additionally: “Of course, this idea may just reveal my total lack of understanding of the Catholic Church, the economic power it can bring to bear against nuns and priests who count on it for their maintenance, etc.” (WikiLeaks)
  4. Podesta’s response: “I’m a Catholic, I don’t recognize that email that we saw.” (Washington Post)
  5. Congregationalism is ground up; Catholicism is top down. We don’t get to vote on Truth; God decides, we follow.
  6. Culture Wars
  7. All About Sex
  8. “God, all this work keeping people from having sex, now I know how the Catholic Church feels.” (Family Guy, Emission Impossible).
  9. There are ten Commandments, two of which involve sex. We have eight others that are also important! Carnal lust is one of the easiest ways for Satan to influence us, so this may be why so many people focus on it.
  10. NFP, NFP, NFP. Did you know its science based? The same thing that ranchers use to determine fertility in animals…‘cause…you know…we’re also animals. The same God that created us created the rest of the animals; it is His prerogative to decide how we work.
  11. Gay rights, LGBTQ+, Gay marriage, etc. Seriously, the Catholic Church does not hate homosexuals – it abhors homosexuality in the same way that we condemn and abhor worshiping a false god/idol, lying, lusting, sex outside of marriage, not honoring one’s father and mother…get the picture?
  12. 2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
  13. 2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
  14. 2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
  15. Abortion – God help us all.
  16. Planned Parenthood is a lie. Going into a place pregnant and coming out otherwise without a child in your arms is the opposite of a parent.
  17. Margret Sanger, founder of PP, was a eugenicist and a racist who strongly believed in eradicating the “negro race” and those she deemed mentally unfit. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members”
  18. Scientifically, when does life begin? No, seriously, when does it begin?
  19. Later, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court rejected Roe's trimester framework while affirming its central holding that a woman has a right to abortion until fetal viability.[2] The Roe decision defined "viable" as "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid."[3] Justices in Casey acknowledged that viability may occur at 23 or 24 weeks, or sometimes even earlier, in light of medical advances. (WikiPedia). So, seriously, you don’t know when life begins? One second and it is viable, the next it isn’t? Which second? How do you measure it?