Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery!

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to explore seven of what I think are the most common misconceptions and myths about the Catholic Church and what the Church believes.

These are going to be some misconceptions that you may have heard before, ones you may in fact believe or may have believed.

I think it's important, whether you're Catholic or not Catholic, to know that these misconceptions are false.

I mean, after all, if you're going to accept or reject Catholicism, you should at least accept or reject it based on what it actually is, what it actually teaches, and not on a fictional version.

It would be a shame to make a decision that important based on bad information.

So, I want to look at misconceptions coming both from non-believers, like atheists, but also fellow Christians, like Protestants.

Number one on that list has got to be the idea that the Pope is always right.

This is partly our fault; we have a doctrine called papal infallibility, and if all you know is the title, it's easy to imagine that this means the Pope is never wrong about anything whatsoever.

If that was what we believed, it'd be super easy to disprove Catholicism.

You could say, Aha!

Look at this time the Pope was wrong about something.

In fact, this is kind of a long-standing joke among Catholics.

For instance, in the early 20th century or mid-20th century novel Brideshead Revisited by the Catholic author Evelyn Waugh, there's the character of Rex Mottram.

Rex is a Protestant who is in the process of maybe converting to Catholicism in order to marry his Catholic fiancée, Julia.

Along the way, he's meeting with the priest, and the kind of running gag is that Rex has a very confused understanding of anything about Catholic theology.

He's ready to say yes to anything, but he has a very funny kind of misconception about Catholicism.

At one point, the priest is pressing him on the question of papal infallibility, and I always am reminded of this scene.

I'm always tickled by it, and I'm going to share it in the hopes that maybe you'll find it as funny and illuminating as I do.

Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said, It's going to rain.

Was that ever going to happen?

Oh yes, Father, I suppose it didn't. I suppose there was no rain.

I suppose it'd be sort of raining spiritually.

Only we were too sinful to see it.

Like I said, I find that clip hilarious every time.

But okay, if that's not what it is, if papal infallibility isn't the belief that the Pope could go out and be a weather forecaster with 100% accuracy, what is it?

Well, it's part of this broader concept of infallibility.

The idea was described by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is in charge of helping to explain Catholic theology and Catholic doctrine, back in 1973, by starting with the idea that God Himself is infallible.

Now, God is literally infallible; He could be the perfect weather forecaster.

But He has chosen to bestow upon His people, the Church, a certain shared infallibility, which, notice the language here, is restricted to matters of faith and morals.

So, something like the weather—that's not a question of faith or morals.

So, okay, that's not it.

And notice also that this is something the people of God share in.

So, if all Christians just know that X is good and Y is bad, this is true and that’s false, we believe the Holy Spirit has led the people of God into that, whether there's been an official papal decree or not.

If everybody knows Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are Gospels that we should accept as inspired Scripture, it doesn't matter whether the Church has come out with an official pronouncement or not, because one level of infallibility works with the people of God, Christians kind of acting collectively.

Now, it's hard to always pin down kind of where that is, but you should notice already that the position of infallibility includes what we might call people infallibility, not just papal infallibility.

And it's clearly not about everything; we're not saying everyone is right about everything.

That wouldn't make any sense.

We disagree on all sorts of things, but the point is when we aren't disagreeing, when Christians are able to stand shoulder to shoulder and say, This thing is true, that is a very strong indication that it is true because God has led us into that truth, not our own human reasoning.

What does that look like for the Pope in particular?

Well, we're going to talk about the Magisterium, called the teaching authority of the Church.

Jesus Christ shares in the governance of the Church by His own will; He didn't have to do that with certain teachers.

There are clearly teachers within Christianity, and so when the bishops, we'll get to the Pope in a second, when the bishops scattered around the world are teaching a common doctrine in union with the Pope, the successor of Peter, and they present a doctrine to be held irrevocably, notice this: it's not that they think a certain thing is true, but that they insist this is a thing you have to believe.

It is presented as a doctrine to be held.

We believe that this is infallible.

So, notice it's not just everything on any topic; it's not even just everything on faith and morals.

It's things on faith and morals that are presented, and not just presented, but are presented as doctrines—specifically, doctrines that we have to hold.

As we're going to see in a moment here, a proper understanding of infallibility, which again, whether you agree with it or disagree with it, isn't that it's some kind of special oracle that the Pope or the bishops have.

It's instead a sort of divine protection from the Pope, a divine protection from the bishops.

I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute.

But that's the bishops now, and you can also see this in ecumenical councils or with the Pope.

So, in ecumenical councils, when an ecumenical council, again with the Pope, defines a doctrine to be held, that is a very clear instance of the Church acting infallibly.

Likewise, when the Roman Pontiff, again the Pope, speaks ex cathedra—that means from the chair, not literally a chair, just from his authority—when he's exercising the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, and through his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine, notice not just any doctrine, but a doctrine concerning faith and morals to be held by the universal Church.

So, if those criteria are met, then we're dealing with infallibility.

Now, specifically, you should notice something: there's a common thread here.

This emphasis on defining a doctrine to be held, or putting forward a doctrine to be held, doesn't have to be an actual definition, but it's something that you have to hold as a Christian.

So, why would those things be infallible?

Well, we can put the case maybe a little bit this way: Jesus tells us a couple of important things.

Number one, that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.

That's John 14:6. So, we have to hold to the truth, but we also have to hold to unity.

Jesus, at the Last Supper, the same place He tells us He's the way, the truth, and the life, also prays for His future followers.

He says, I pray not for these only, but also for those who believe in Me through their word, that is us.

So, what is His prayer for you and me?

That we will all be one, even as He and the Father are one.

Why?

That they may believe in us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. So, notice He’s saying we have to hold to unity, and it’s vital for the success of the Gospel that we do hold to unity.

Imagine how much more successful Christianity would be if we weren’t constantly fighting with one another.

So, we have to hold these two things, according to Jesus: truth and unity.

Now, there’s more than that, but those two are the ones that are going to be really important for us.

We can even put that kind of in the opposite direction.

If you reject truth, what happens?

Well, 2 Peter 2—St. Peter warns us about heretics who introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

So, if you reject truth for the sake of error, you are risking at least spiritual damnation.

But likewise, if you reject the unity of the Church, you’re also risking spiritual damnation.

St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, talks about the works of the flesh and lists them, including things like enmity, strife, dissension, and party spirit.

In other words, Christians who pit themselves against other Christians, Christians who break away from the unity of the Church.

He warns that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.

That’s an even clearer warning that that’s damnable.

So, you may not be a heretic; you may not be a schismatic.

So, here’s the kicker: if your teacher in the Church, your bishop, your Pope, requires you to believe a certain doctrine in order to be a Christian, what are you going to do?

Well, if that doctrine is erroneous, if the Pope says, By my infallible authority, I’m declaring this thing to be true, and it’s false, then every one of us has to say, Okay, well, I’m going to accept this false doctrine and become a heretic, or I’m going to break away from the Church and become a schismatic.

And Jesus told us we couldn’t do either of those things.

And remember, in John 17, when He’s praying for His future followers, He knows the future; He’s God.

When He’s praying for us and telling us to remain one, He knows about corruption in the Church.

He knows about unworthy bishops and popes, and He knows all of that stuff, and He doesn’t say, Okay, unless you really disagree, then go form your own Church.

He doesn’t say that at all.

So, that’s why we believe in infallibility, because it’s the only way to harmonize the biblical evidence.

Otherwise, you have this tension between truth and unity, and I think any Protestant who’s being honest will tell you they’ve experienced that tension.

Do we break apart, or do we stay one and just kind of fudge the differences?

Neither of those.

You don’t choose truth over unity; you don’t choose unity over truth.

You choose unity in the truth.

That’s the actual biblical message.

Papal infallibility, and more broadly the infallibility of the Church, makes sense of that.

But notice again, it doesn’t touch on everything; it touches on those things that are put forward as binding upon us as Christians.

Because if it’s just an offhand comment the Pope makes, if he’s doing an interview and he says something kind of weird, you can say, I think that’s vague, confusing; maybe I disagree with it.

I’m not out of the Church for that.

But if I’m required to believe in a thing, then either I’ve been put into an impossible catch-22 of having to choose heresy or schism, or that thing is true, and the reason I’m being required to believe it is because it’s a true part of the Gospel.

Okay, that’s the first thing I wanted to clear up, because I think that’s a very common one.

We’re going to shift gears pretty dramatically here because the second myth is this idea that the Catholic Church is anti-sex.

We hate sex, we hate pleasure, we hate anything like happiness, right?

Well, there are a few things you should know that make you kind of question that belief.

Number one, I mentioned this actually in last week’s episode, but Catholics—traditional Catholics anyway, like the Latin Mass Catholics—will say they have the highest birth rate of any major group: higher than Orthodox Jews, higher than Mormons, higher than Muslims.

Devout, practicing, especially traditional Catholics have a tremendously high birth rate.

Now, I don't know if you know how that happens, but it pretty clearly is tied to sex.

You can't simultaneously say, Why do you Catholics hate sex?

and have all these kids.

Those two things don't really make sense together.

But more broadly, we just want to say this: sex is important, but it's important not just because it's an emotionally influential or physically pleasurable experience, but also because this is a way that new life is created.

So, it's not enough that you just be thinking about yourself and your libido, or even about the person that maybe you love or maybe you lust for.

You also want to think about the fact that there may be children brought into the world through this.

It makes sense for a healthy approach to sex to be one that treats it very seriously—not because it's evil, but because it's powerful.

Now, I want to say, what about the connection then to happiness?

Do we just hate sex and happiness?

It’s funny because there’s actually a good amount of data on this point, and it turns out if you listen to the Catholic Church, you will be happier, and in fact, you will have a better sex life.

I know people don’t often say that, but it is true, and we have data from this.

For instance, in the Journal of Sex Research from last year, 2023, there’s an article called Religiosity, Sex Frequency, and Sexual Satisfaction in Britain.

Britain has better data, but you could extrapolate this to other countries as well.

Also significantly, Britain is a little bit less—well, a good deal less—Christian in terms of devotional practice than the United States.

It also doesn't have the same kind of puritanical heritage, so you would expect that everything that you're going to hear here would be, if anything, more true in the U.S. example.

And you’ll see that a little better when I get into some of the data, some of the research.

So, what did they find?

Well, the researchers had two hypotheses.

Number one, they suspected that religious people would have less sex outside of marriage.

Turns out that's true.

Number two, they hypothesized that religious people would actually be happier with their sex lives, and it turned out that's also true.

So, as they put it, in accordance with our first hypothesis, among single, non-cohabiting individuals, the more religious had less frequent sex compared to their less religious peers.

Yep, that makes sense.

If you think it's wrong to fornicate, you're less likely to fornicate than someone who's like, I'm great with fornication.

But the more surprising thing is, despite this, those who attributed greater importance to religion and religious beliefs reported higher satisfaction.

Notably, this includes both happy married people but also people who aren't having sex and are content with that.

These are single individuals, but they're not incels; they're not involuntarily celibate.

They're voluntarily celibate, at least for the time being.

Those people are also happier.

So, married or unmarried people who were striving to practice the Christian sexual ethic were happier, and this was especially true among women.

But we find that the flip side to this is that higher approval of casual sex or sex without love was also found to be negatively associated with sexual satisfaction for both men and women.

So, what we can say is this: we live in a culture that, broadly speaking, treats sex as something trivial, something we just do casually.

You can watch almost any movie, almost any show, and get a strong sense of that because that's the kind of entertaining, salacious content that keeps eyes on the screen and keeps moviegoer dollars, right?

Like, this is sex sells.

But that message that sells isn't true.

The idea that you can go out and just live a life of pursuing casual sex and be happy, we can say by the numbers isn't true.

And again, you can't just blame that on puritan guilt because this is Great Britain, which has much less of any kind of puritanical influence.

Rather, it's like, No, no, the secular gospel of free sex is just actually unfulfilling.

Now, this is actually part of a broader trend, which is that religion is tied not to people being miserable, but actually being much happier than their non-religious peers.

So, Pew Research looked at the U.S. and several other countries back in 2019, and here are some of the findings: they said more than a third of actively religious U.S. adults—36%—described themselves as very happy, compared with just a quarter of religiously inactive or religiously unaffiliated Americans.

That’s a pretty big gap.

So, if you think about going from 25% up to 36%, you’re looking at an increase of 11%. From 25%, 11 more than that is almost half as many more.

Maybe that’s confusing math, but if you think about it in a group, well, anyway, you get the stats, right?

You get the way these numbers work.

I don't want to give you more confusing numbers, but the point there is there's a statistically significant difference showing that religious people are happier.

Now, you might say, Okay, that's just the U.S. No, across 25 other countries for which data is available, actively religious people report being happier than the unaffiliated by a statistically significant margin in almost half of the countries.

That’s not just more; that’s a big enough gap that they can say it’s statistically significant.

So, a big gap, and they’re happier than inactive religious adults in nine of the 25 countries.

You can actually see the numbers there on the screen if you want to take a look at them, and you’ll find this is just an across-the-board sort of pattern.

It gets more interesting because they say the gaps are some of the places you don’t see the same size kind of gaps, but you do see a pretty common pattern emerging.

In some cases, the gaps are really striking.

For instance, in Australia, 45% of actively religious adults say that they are very happy, compared to only 32% of inactive and 33% of unaffiliated religious people.

So, there’s a marked happiness boost by being actively religious, which is totally contrary to the whole Church hates pleasure, Church hates happiness sort of thing.

No, the Church is showing you a way to be happier and be more pleased, including being more pleased with your sex life.

Strikingly, also, there’s not one country in all the countries they looked at in which actively religious people are significantly less happy than others.

Again, significantly meaning like statistically significant margins of error.

In many countries, they acknowledge there’s not much of a gap.

So, you have basically two scenarios: in some places, there’s not a clear happiness gap; in other places, including the U.S. and Australia, there are these pretty big happiness gaps.

There’s never an unhappiness gap.

There’s never a place where being a devout Christian means you’re more miserable than your secular peer.

You’re either about the same level of happy or you’re much happier, and that includes in the U.S. So, this myth that the Church hates sexual pleasure or hates sex or hates happiness is absurdly false and is quite contrary to the data.

Speaking of data, what about this idea that the Church is anti-science?

If you’ve run in any kind of secular or especially like atheist or new atheist kind of crowds, there’s a good chance you’ve heard this: Oh, you know, these unreasonable dogmatists who are just driven by faith and they hate reason.

And chances are, if you press people on this, they’ll point to exactly one concrete example from Catholics.

I mean, they might have some of like evangelical Protestants who don't like evolution or something like this, but usually they'll point to one example: Galileo.

And I'm not even going to get into all of the details of the Galileo trial or why it's really controversial or complicated.

I just want to say it's absurd to base a critique of a 2,000-year-old institution with a billion people on the alleged maltreatment of one scientist.

To go from that to saying, Oh, the Church is anti-science, seems to be pretty obviously a demonstrably absurd generalization to draw from one example.

If your sample size is one, you can't draw much from that.

Let's broaden the sample size.

Right now, just while we stay in the realm of astronomy for a second, 33 Jesuits have lunar craters named after them.

That’s just the Jesuits, just the Society of Jesus, and they have lunar craters named after them.

Why?

Because they were all influential priest-scientists who were so impactful in the field of astronomy specifically that they wanted to honor them with craters on the moon, which is pretty cool.

Now, you’ll find different numbers on it because it turns out there are differences in terms of who’s in charge of naming lunar craters, but in terms of the official names, there are about 33. Some people put the number a little higher at 40; either way, 33 is the most conservative number I saw.

Add to that the fact that the Vatican has one of the world’s most influential observatories, which is a super weird fact you may not know: the Catholic Church has actually invested a fair amount of time, money, and research into making sure we have better astronomical equipment and has run this with these brilliant priest-scientists.

Today, that’s just astronomy, though, because of Galileo.

But if you broaden that and say, What about other fields?

You have fields like genetics, which was, oh by the way, a field founded by a Catholic priest, Gregor Mendel.

Or you have Big Bang cosmology; the Big Bang was proposed first by a Catholic priest, Monsignor Georges Lemaître, whose name I’m sure I’m butchering.

He was a Belgian Catholic priest and a contemporary and kind of peer of Albert Einstein.

And this is nothing new, though.

You go back a ways, and there’s a little bit of weird body trivia: there’s one part of the body named after a Catholic priest, and it’s a part of the body no Catholic priest has.

It’s the fallopian tube.

The fallopian tubes are so named after the Catholic priest who discovered them; he was an anatomist, Fallopio, or Fallopius, depending on which language you use for his name.

So, the point is there’s this long-standing academic tradition where the Church has not only embraced science but, in many cases, invented entire fields of science and pioneered them.

Not only that, but the grand irony of this is that almost all of the major older universities are religious ones.

Now, in the U.S., that was often Protestant universities like Harvard and Yale, but especially if you go into Europe and look at the original universities, these were without exception founded by the Catholic Church.

In the Encyclopedia of Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine, Michael Schenk, in the article on universities, points out that when we talk about universities, there’s some dispute about one particular Moroccan madrasa and whether that should count as a university or not because it was like an Islamic school of studies.

But most people don’t count it, and so they’ll say the University of Paris, which was founded around the year 1200. Some people put that slightly later, like 1208 to 1215; it doesn’t matter.

It’s clearly a medieval Catholic institution of higher learning.

Significantly, when the bishop and the chancellor of the university would get into fights, the head of the university would appeal to the Pope over the bishop’s head.

This helped create a sort of precedent where the Pope was actually fighting for academic freedom from the meddling of the local bishop.

As Schenk points out, the masters of the University of Paris often won with the aid of the papacy.

This wasn’t just true against the Bishop of Paris but also against the Commune of Bologna.

So, this created this important precedent.

Even our concept of academic freedom, ironically, comes from the fact that the papacy was fighting to make sure that the universities remained autonomous, self-regulating bodies, even though they were also officially clerical institutions.

They didn’t want the local bishop, with whatever his biases and blinders may be, to have an excessive amount of influence on that.

So, where is all this coming from?

Is it just a coincidence that the Catholic Church has been such a pioneer in the sciences for literally centuries?

No, it’s coming out of a particular way of viewing the world—a view of the world that not every religion shares.

It’s captured really well by Pope St. John Paul II in the encyclical Fides et Ratio, which means Faith and Reason, in which he writes, Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth, and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know Himself—so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

So, that’s the idea: we believe faith and reason are paths to a deeper understanding of God, reality, and ourselves.

If you have that view—and this is what the Catholic Church has always taught—then it makes sense that you’re going to take the idea of the university very seriously, that you’re going to take the idea of reason very seriously, and that you’re going to take the sciences very seriously.

So, this idea that because Galileo got into a church politics fight, therefore we just ignore all of those hundreds and hundreds of years of history of literally creating the Western university and pioneering entire fields of science, and say, Oh, the Church is anti-science, is simply not accurate.

It is an absurd extrapolation from one example.

Okay, I'm going to move now from myths that I hear more from atheists to now myths that I hear more from Protestants.

Chief among those, this is going to be number four on our list, is the idea that Catholics added books to the Bible.

This is demonstrably untrue.

It's true there are seven books in the Catholic Bible that are not in the Protestant Bible.

These are all Old Testament books.

It's not true that the Catholic Church added those in the mid-1500s, as the Protestant claim often goes.

Rather, we can see, for instance, back in the year 397, the Third Council of Carthage describing which books are considered canonical scripture.

If you read its Old Testament list, it has the disputed books.

Now, you might say, Well, the Third Council of Carthage?

That’s not an ecumenical council; that’s a regional North African council.

True, it’s an influential one, though, because St. Augustine is there.

It also points out that this clearly wasn’t a response to the Reformation.

Clearly, you have Christians in the 300s who are convinced these 73 books are the books of the Bible.

That’s not some 16th-century response to Protestantism; that’s early Christianity.

It doesn’t have to be an ecumenical council.

Nonetheless, you do have an ecumenical council in the Middle Ages that jumps in on it again before the Council of Trent, when Protestants will sometimes claim the books were added.

The Council of Florence in 1442, about 40 years before Martin Luther was even born, has what’s called a Bull of Union with the Copts.

So, a little bit of context: the Catholic Church is trying to reunite with the Eastern Orthodox and the Coptic Church, and one of the things they’re having to make sure they agree on is which books belong in the Bible.

So, they list which books belong in the Bible, and lo and behold, it’s the exact same 73 books that we find in Catholic Bibles today.

It doesn’t match the Protestant list.

So, instead, the Protestant reformers removed seven books.

Whether you think they were right or wrong to do it, at least let’s be honest about the facts: these 73 books were recognized at both a local and an ecumenical level, and not just by Catholics.

We find representatives from the Orthodox and the Catholic side saying the same thing.

We don’t find anybody there saying, Actually, there are just 66. No. So, what happened?

Greg Salazar, in an article in the Protestant magazine Table Talk, argues that Protestants stand with the New Testament writers in affirming that only those books that were in the original Hebrew canon have canonical authority.

Now, I’ve already done a couple of episodes on this topic, so I’m not going to get super in the weeds, but you should know two things.

Number one, there isn’t an organized Hebrew canon at the time of Christ.

Different Jewish groups have different books that they think belong in the Bible, and in fact, if you read the Jewish Talmud, you’ll see debates about which books do and don’t belong in the Bible for literally hundreds of years after the time of Christ.

So, that’s the first point.

Second, the early Christians did not, in fact, including the New Testament writers, believe that we were tied to the Hebrew Old Testament.

How do we know that?

Because overwhelmingly, they quoted from the Greek Old Testament, which included the books that Protestants now reject.

And at times, these differences make a big difference.

So, just to give you one example: in Hebrews chapter 10, one of the prophecies about the Incarnation quoted in verse 5 states that when Christ came into the world, He said, Sacrifices and offerings Thou hast not desired, but a body hast Thou prepared for Me. You might say, What’s He quoting there?

Well, He’s quoting the Greek version of Psalm 40, verse 6. The problem is that line is not found in the Hebrew version that Salazar claims is the one the New Testament authors believe in.

In the Hebrew version, it says, Sacrifice and offering Thou didst not desire, but Thou hast given me an open ear.

Now, it’s true Jesus is totally obedient to the Father, but His coming into the world seems to be a prediction of His Incarnation.

The quote in Hebrews 10 is only found in the Greek version, and there are plenty of places that are like that where the Greek is preferred when there’s an actual difference between the Greek and Hebrew, and at times it matters quite a bit.

At the time, remember, Scripture is still being written until the time of Christ.

There’s no reason that the people in the New Testament would have thought, Oh, well, the time of Scripture is over.

It wasn’t over; that’s why there’s a New Testament.

So, this idea that, Oh no, they just believed in the books that were in the Hebrew canon, is doubly false.

They used the Greek, and there was no organized Hebrew canon at the time.

Okay, so that’s the fourth myth.

The fifth is the idea that Catholics worship Mary.

If you’ve talked to Protestants objecting to Catholicism, this is something that comes up a lot, and I even hear it from well-meaning Protestants who are like, So, why do you guys worship Mary?

And the answer is, we don’t. But to understand this, you have to know a biblical distinction that many modern Christians have lost: prayer and worship are not the same thing.

How do we know this?

We know it from the New Testament.

For instance, in Luke 18, Jesus reminds us that we ought always to pray.

Where do we pray?

Anywhere and everywhere.

That was true in Jesus' day, and everybody knew that.

The Pharisees are out there praying on the street corners; they’re praying in the synagogues; they’re doing all that stuff.

And Jesus actually criticizes them in Matthew 6 for that—not because they had to be in a certain location, but because they’re purposely choosing public places.

But if you’re supposed to pray anywhere and everywhere, what about worship?

Well, it’s very clear from this conversation with the Samaritan woman that worship is something distinct and it has a certain place.

At the time, that place was the temple in Jerusalem.

The Samaritan woman asks Him, she says, Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, Mount Gerizim, and you say that in Jerusalem is a place for men not to worship.

So, the temple in Jerusalem is what’s meant there, of course.

So, notice we don’t have to get into all of the weeds here; there’s clearly a difference between this thing called prayer and this thing called worship.

So, if you say, Oh, Catholics pray to Mary; therefore, they worship her, you’re conflating an important biblical distinction.

Worship can include prayer, but prayer is not automatically worship.

Another way we can see that is that prayer is conversation; prayer is speaking; it’s requests.

Worship is giving something to God: adoration and particularly sacrifice or offering.

It’s the offering of something to God.

In the Book of Revelation, in Revelation 22, I often hear this passage used against Catholics who, you know, oh, we allegedly worship angels or saints, Mary, whatever.

They’ll say, Well, don’t you know in Revelation 22 the angel tells John not to worship him?

And sure enough, that’s true.

John talks about having seen this incredible heavenly revelation, and then he falls down to worship at the feet of the angel.

The angel says to him, You must not do that.

I am a fellow servant with you and your brethren the prophets and with those who keep the words of this book.

Worship God.

Great!

So, we should only worship God.

But notice in the prior 21 chapters, John had been having a pretty protracted conversation with an angel, and the angel doesn’t say, Whoa, you’re not allowed to talk to me; only talk to God.

No, it’s clearly okay to talk to the angel; it’s okay to ask things of the angel.

It’s not okay to worship him.

Now, you know this with people in your life.

You can go to a brother Christian for prayers, and no one’s accusing you of idolatry.

Oh, why do you think you have to go to that idol, Jerry?

Why don’t you just go directly to God?

And if they do say that, they’re ridiculous.

We know there’s a difference between going to somebody and worshiping them.

Well, if that’s true of other human beings here on Earth, and it’s true, as we see in the Book of Revelation, of angels, it’s also true of other human beings in heaven who are in the presence of God.

That doesn’t make it idolatry.

Let’s keep on the theme of worship.

The sixth myth is that Catholics worship idols because, after all, we have religious statues.

The idea is, okay, this is just like what pagans were doing.

Now, leave aside the number of ways this might misunderstand paganism.

It doesn’t matter for our purposes; let’s just call out the fact that religious imagery is not idolatry.

There’s a huge distinction biblically.

How do we know that?

Plenty of places.

First of all, again, this idea of what is worship: it’s not just a matter of having an image; it’s worshiping an image.

Having an image is not just biblically permitted; it’s even biblically commanded at times.

For instance, in Exodus 25, God says to make two cherubim of gold before the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant.

Now, occasionally you’ll have people say, Well, that’s okay because God commanded it.

Well, look, if it’s idolatry, God can’t command idolatry without commanding evil.

So, clearly, it’s not idolatry just to have two giant golden statues of angels that people are bowing down in front of as they worship before God in the Ark of the Covenant.

But moreover, this is not a stand-alone kind of example.

Solomon, when he’s building the first temple, is not told these are exactly the images you’re allowed to have.

Instead, 1 Kings 6:29 says that he carved all the walls of the house round about with carved figures of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers in the inner and outer rooms.

There’s representational art, including art of the cherubim.

Again, this is seemingly okay.

St. Paul in the New Testament says to the Galatians, O foolish Galatians!

Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?

Now, it’s a mysterious line.

We don’t know how this was depicted before their eyes; they clearly weren’t present at Jesus' literal crucifixion.

So, is he speaking just vaguely and metaphorically, or is he saying that somehow he visibly represented the crucifixion to the Galatians, which is what he literally is saying?

Either way, it seems pretty clear that he’s not of the view that depicting Jesus Christ as crucified before someone’s eyes would be an act of idolatry, or else he’s claiming to be an idol maker, which he was not.

The point there is that the mere presence of images is not sinful.

The mere presence of religious images is not sinful.

Worshiping images is sinful.

Now, you might say, Well, shouldn’t we avoid all images in case it leads to worship?

But look, you can worship anything.

You could worship another human being, and you go back in history and see that people did things like worship the emperor.

That doesn’t mean we have to get rid of our neighbor because I could potentially worship him.

It doesn’t follow at all.

The continual teaching of the Church is that religious imagery can actually help us focus the mind and lead to our contemplation of God.

All right, and now for the seventh and final common myth: this idea that in Catholicism you’re supposed to save yourself through good works, and particularly through good works apart from faith.

You’ve got to do enough to kind of earn a relationship with God.

That is terribly wrong; that is heretical.

That’s something the Catholic Church has actually condemned over and over again.

For instance, in the Council of Trent, we’re specifically warned that sure, it’s true that much is attributed to good works in Scripture.

If you’re actually reading the New Testament without a lens that says faith alone, then you’ll notice that Christ makes a lot of promises that seem to indicate that works will be rewarded.

That if you give a drink of cold water to one of the least of these, you won’t lose your reward.

Something is being promised to good works.

Nevertheless, the Council of Trent warns, God forbid that a Christian should either trust their glory in himself and not in the Lord, whose bounty towards all men is so great that He will have the things which are His own gifts be their merits.

In other words, even when you’re being rewarded by God for doing something good, don’t think this is because of you apart from God, because all you’ve done is respond to the graces God has given you.

So, in none of this are you able to work apart from grace alone.

That’s simply the truth of it.

Whether we’re talking about faith or whether we’re talking about good works, this is flowing from divine grace.

It is only by grace that you’re able to believe, and it’s only by grace that you’re able to do any good works.

So, you have no basis for boasting; you’ve got no basis for trusting in yourself.

This isn’t some new thing the Council of Trent was saying.

If you go all the way back to—it's another one of these regional councils—but the Council of Orange in 529, one of the ways it’s responding to Pelagianism is by reiterating that you cannot maintain that God awaits our will to be cleansed from sin, because instead, even our will to be cleansed comes to us through the infusion and working of the Holy Spirit.

So, even when you say, You know what?

I’m going to go be in relationship with God; I’m going to initiate contact with God, you can only form that thought because God has already put it in you.

God is always the one who initiates.

God is always the one who prompts; He’s always the one who gives you the graces, even the graces necessary to respond to His prompting.

One of the citations for this, which I think is an excellent one, is Philippians 2:13, in which St. Paul reminds us that God is at work in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

So, whether it’s your desire or your action, all of that is coming from God.

So, this idea that we have to initiate is not just heretical; it’s impossible.

Only God can initiate contact.

It’s true we have a role in responding, and it’s true God promises to reward that, but even our response is only made possible because of His divine initiative.

Okay, I know this one, by nature of the topic, is all over the place.

There are seven different subjects, and I’m sure there are many more misconceptions and myths that we could have explored.

But my goal here, to go back to Rex, is to make sure that we’re not saying weird and crazy things that we’re struggling with about Catholicism.

For instance, these ones: Look, Father, I don’t think you’re being straight with me.

I want to join your Church, and I’m going to join your Church, but you’re holding too much back.

What do you mean, holding too much back?

I’ve had a long talk with a Catholic, a very pious and well-educated one, and I’ve learned a thing or two.

For instance, you have to sleep with your feet pointing east because that’s the direction of heaven, so if you die in the night, you can walk there.

Now, I’ll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but do you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven?

And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a cardinal?

And what about the box you have in the church porch where if you put a pound note with somebody’s name on it, they get sent to hell?

Mr. Martin, I’m not saying there may not be a good reason for all this, but you ought to tell me about it.

Now, let me go and find out for myself.

Who can he have been talking to?

Did he dream it all?

Cordelia, what’s the matter?

What a chump!

What a glorious chump!

Cordelia, it was you!

Oh, Mummy, who would have believed that he would have swallowed it?

I told him such a lot besides about sacred monkeys in the Vatican and all kinds of things.

So, in short, there are no sacred monkeys in the Vatican.

You can't walk away to heaven if you die facing east.

The seven misconceptions that you heard today are common misconceptions that just aren't true.

I don't want you to be a chump; I don't want you to be duped by lies about the Catholic Church, and I don't want you to accept or reject Catholicism on the basis of anything other than the truth.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.