Pints With Aquinas - How to Become Catholic! w/ Benjamin Handelman

Episode Date: November 13, 2021

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Hey, Matt Fradd here, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. If this show has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting us directly at pintswithaquinas.com.com. Or at patreon.com. Matt Fradd, when you do that, even for a dollar or $2 or $10 a month, you help this show to continue and to expand. We're flying people out every week to Stupendale, Ohio, putting them up in hotels, paying for debaters, upgrading our equipment, not to mention trying to pay people who work here at Pines with Aquinas. So any dollar amount would be a blessing to us. Thank you so much for considering. Benjamin Handelman, how are you, mate? Matt, how are you doing today? Good, good, good. You flew in from Arizona. I did. Although you just moved from California to Arizona. I was living in Los Angeles for about 17 years and then we just moved to California to Arizona. I was living in Los Angeles for about 17 years and then we just moved to the Phoenix area.

Cost of living, can't beat it. Is it true that there's a mass exodus from LA to? There is, but when it comes to this mass exodus, although the problem is a lot of people are still trying to move there. So you don't actually notice it, the property values are still going up. Sold my condo for way more than I paid for it.

Really? I could buy half of Steubenville right now. Right now, cash in hand. Do it, and just let your wife know you did it. Well, let's not talk about that part. Okay, yeah man, that's awesome. Yeah, that's terrific. So is Arizona housing going up significantly?

It is. From when I looked two years ago, when we originally made the decision, the houses are literally double in price. Wow. Yeah, Trent Horn got out right before the mass exodus to Dallas. And he said just in the little time he's been there over a few months, all the houses in his neighborhood have skyrocketed. We sold my condo in LA. It closed in October. And since then, there's literally been no houses

that I could buy. Like, there's just no houses on the market. In LA? Not in LA, where we are in Arizona. If we've had two houses came on the market and they literally sold within hours. So it's so hard, my family's kind of stuck in an apartment until the market opens up a little bit. Houses in LA going down?

No, they went up. What happened? During the pandemic, my condo, a two bedroom condo, gained $170,000 in value. Crikey. The fact that it gained 170 for a two-bedroom. It's nuts. You're so glad you're in Arizona?

I am, I am. It's a beautiful place, I like it a lot. It's beautiful, there's just so, you can do all the things you could do in LA. You can go to the same concerts, you can go to sporting events. Surfing's been a little more difficult. Maybe the surfing, but there's no traffic.

Yeah. I can get anywhere in the Phoenix area in half an hour. Are you and your wife just asking yourself why you didn't do this a lot sooner? Oh yeah, easily. I mean we're looking now and it's like we could have moved here 10, 12 years ago. Yeah. The original idea is my son was in a really good school and we wanted to wait till he finished and was going to high school

and then we found out there's just as good schools here. Maybe better. Yeah. So- And are people more chill with the masks and everything? Have you noticed in Arizona or not so much? and was going to high school. And then we found out there's just as good schools here. Maybe better. So we could- And are people more chill with the masks and everything? Have you noticed in Arizona or not so much? They are.

I mean, well, LA, you have to be masked regardless right now. Yeah. Even while you sleep, I don't know if you knew that. It's a new law. Nice. Just got passed. And I'm someone that's, I got vaccinated early because I didn't want to wear a mask anymore.

I hate it. And so I got vaccinated. And then literally the week after we moved, they had to put masks back on. And yeah, it's insane. In Arizona, there's no the only place that you have to wear them is if you go into like a hospital or something. It's like, you know, like if I were a Protestant, I would look at the scapula as some superstitious nonsense. The mask after having being vaxed or

natural having had natural immunity far exceeds the superstition of the scapula. There's a lot that concerns me about the whole situation on we've politicized it so people can't have honest discussions about what works and what doesn't anymore. Yeah on both sides. On both sides so on one side you have the mask even though you're vaccinated they want you to double mask and put the plastic shield right and then on the other side people are kidding double mask and plastic shield that's a thing that to me yeah what about a bike helmet over two masks see there you go and you need uh if you were really concerned you should do that i've talked to people that said we

should mask forever i think we should not only mask forever, but wear a scuba diving helmet. If you think humans are worth it, why not go all the way? Also never leave your house while double masking in a scuba diving helmet. Also board up all the windows. This could work, this could work. I'm just saying, if you really cared. There are, and at the same time.

And other ways to get, I just wanna get kicked off YouTube at this point. Can you tell? Not on my video, please. But's just gonna pay you, right? But on the other side, you had people taking like horse medicine just out of almost spite, it felt like. Don't say that Rogan was taking horse medicine.

I didn't say Rogan. There were other people that were like, oh, well, this is an ingredient in this medicine I buy for my horses, I'll just take that. And they were going to the hospital, not a large amount of people, obviously. Yeah, yeah. But that's the thing is where both sides are kind of yeah

Well people on the right sort of become callous to the fact that people are dying when my you know when my father passed away last year It was during one of the worst times so it was late July and he lived in Modesto, California in the Central Valley And so he got a sinus infection had leukemia and at that point, it's basically a death sentence. So we rush him to I'd like to apologize. And people who were wondering what was that sound? That was a wise phone sound. Now it's off. So sorry, leukemia. So he had leukemia, he got a sinus infection. And the timing he was just about to fly up to see his mother before, you know, before it fly up to see his mother before, it was gonna be his last chance to see her.

So they took him to the hospital and the ICU in the hospital was full of people already dying. So he spent his last weekend on this earth on a hospital bed in an open ER because it was the only safe place for him. I'm so sorry. So it's like you said, on one side we're too paranoid, on the other side we're too callous.

Yeah, yeah. And honestly, we kind of see this in the church in some aspects too. This is one of those things where it's like, let's, can we just take a deep breath, let's have conversations, kind of treat each other that a mago dei, you know, we're both made in the image of God, we're both kind of looking out. We want what's for best

Let's let's do that and in his case, um His last I don't know whatever it is six seven months. It's a pandemic and he was recovering from leukemia He had a bone marrow transplant. It's not like dying sucky enough Right, you get to die in an open ER. That's terrible Well, they did send him home his last 72 hours basically because they couldn't do anything and we couldn't visit him Yeah, because of the nature of the emergency. So speaking of conversations

Over the last several years since we've been running pines with Aquinas We've had like lots of people naturally watching who say that they're Protestant or atheist. I even have a few, two I think, Muslim patrons and others who are kind of on the path to conversion. And there is now a story where at four in the morning I sent you a Marco Polo and had an idea. I forget the Marco Polo, so what did I say? So it's four in the morning. I naturally wake up early and so I see this Marco Polo come in and I'm confused and still out of it and It's a shirtless Matt Fred to be welcome shirtless. He's got his medallion everything. It was Fascinating and he's like have you and Matt's hair in the morning my time Well, yes, so it would have been like

You were in Georgia at the time. Yeah. So this was like, I think I saw it at two or three. Oh, wow. Yeah. So anyway, my hair. Your hair is like, it points like this. Yeah, it's like Kramer.

Kramer hair. And Matt's like doing this and he's like, have you thought about, you know, and you had this idea of what if you did like a Marco Polo group where you answered questions for people that wanted to know about Catholicism? So for those who aren't familiar, Marco Polo is essentially a video chat app and you can do groups of it. So you can have like 10 people part of the same group, yeah.

I almost compare it to, like if you're doing a group text on your iPhone, you can post a message, people can look at it when they want to, it'll be there and they'll be in order. Except it's short videos. And when I say short, anything from five seconds to some people are maybe a little long-winded and it'll be 27 minutes and you have to put it on the three times speed to get through it.

Yeah, this is cool. So I think the idea as we started talking about it, and of course Noah who's sitting out there, you guys are really the brains behind this thing you guys have taken it to you know a great place but the idea is that we talked about like cross the Tiber the Tiber being that river between Rome and the Vatican and the idea was that you would have different people at the helm of each group so if you had Muslim converts you would have a Muslim who converted to Catholicism. You had Protestants who were looking into converting. You would have a Protestant who converted to Catholicism leaving the group, answering questions. So yeah, how has it gone? How many groups do you have and what's it been like?

So we currently have six groups. We've had, we've got about 30 in each group right now. groups. We've had we've got about 30 in each group right now. Roughly 15 or 16 people have entered our CIA, including someone I'm actually sponsoring. 15 or 16 people. That's terrific. As far away as Australia. There was one Jessica was her name and she was in the group early on and they didn't say anything for six months. And a lot of people will join the last few questions.

Yeah. And then they're kind of done And then she joins us For a video chat and she's telling us she's an RCA She also told us about mouse plagues, which is as Matt knows is my favorite favorite topic Yeah, but so you have six groups six groups What are these individual and just so everybody knows they can go join this for free right now across the Tiber comm There's a link in the description below if you are a Protestant or a Muslim or an atheist or a Zoroastrian I don't know if you have a group for them yet

But you could you could go right now and join a group of other people who are in your exact position Who are discerning Catholicism and you're not going to be strong-armed. You're not going to be yelled at you're not going to be even preached at People who run these groups are just there to answer the questions and guide people So what are the different groups you have? So currently we've got as I said the six groups We do have a women's group. So we've got some women including Noah's wife Carrie who's wonderful Haley who's probably in the chat right now Yes Also answers questions in there and we do that So because some women may not feel comfortable some of the questions in a mixed group

Which is totally understandable. We've got one group. We call it Athanasius So I named them after Saints and so at the Athanasius group is where we file all the Orthodox or Eastern inclined people We've got most of the groups right now are focused on evangelicals by and large the people interested in having these conversations or evangelicals so the rest of the groups the Clement Aquinas all these other groups we have they're mostly for Baptist Calvary Chapel a couple of Lutherans not many and then some Anglicans who were former Say Presbyterians or Baptist that kind of they made the, right? They become Episcopalian or Anglo-Catholic.

What do you do if you get like a Mormon? Right now we're just kind of funneling them into the other groups for now until we kind of have, because there's three former atheists, there's a couple of Hindus. One, she's actually in London and she's in RCA right now. And she comes from a Hindu background. So that was actually fascinating to actually learn what are the challenges if you're coming from a Hindu background to become something like a Catholic.

So we have people in those groups. I actually do have someone who comes, he's a Indian Catholic. So a lot of people don't know this. In India, there's actually, for America, what we would consider a large number of Catholics. India's very large, so they're actually a small minority, about 1%.

But I've been talking to him about helping us answer questions because he at least comes from a background where he can better answer to some of those difficulties. And that's really the key is, if you're coming from these backgrounds, sometimes it's hard to get an answer that makes sense to you. I think of like if you're a Calvinist and a Catholic starts discussing grace,

they're gonna sound very strange. Like wait, that's not how grace works. Is that, that's not even what grace is. And a lot of it is a language issue. And not language as in English to Japanese, but language as in Catholic to Protestant, Catholic to atheist, Catholic to Mormon. The Mormons, and not to denigrate them in any way,

but they use a lot of the same words we do, and they mean very different things. So we need a Mormon person. If someone is a Mormon person that converted to Catholicism, we'd love to hear from them. They should also go across the spectrum. That's terrific. And you're a convert from?

I was a Baptist. Noah was? Noah was Presbyterian. They should also do it and you're a convert from I was a Baptist. I know it was No, it's Presbyterian. Okay. So most people who run the group who are at the helm as it were of these small groups Are they converts? Almost everyone that's cool because you could better kind of resonate not only with the intellectual questions, but their emotional Exactly turbulence in having to convert I talked to the person runs RCA at the parish I attend just last week, and I was explaining to them what we do,

and I sent some of the videos and showed them some of the discussions, and the response I got back was, I had no idea these were concerns. Wow. So things like the papacy, they just see it so differently. If you were born into Catholicism,

it seems very natural to have a pope But if you were a fundamentalist Baptist, it sounds crazy Completely and unbiblical is how they would phrase it. Yeah, so a lot of times it's not that a cradle catholic can't answer the questions We do have a cradle catholic answering questions with us but If you were a protestant or if you you are a Protestant, you're just coming at some of these issues with a very different lens. And that's one of the things we want to address because a lot of times people will go to RCIA

or whatever their formation may be at their church and they don't have the same questions that may be the people who were joining just because they're getting married or whatever it is. And the person answering the questions at the church May just not be aware of some of these concerns may misspeak on them or just kind of quote the catechism and the catechism is Wonderful. We use the catechism But anyone who sat down to read the catechism knows that language is not there meant for you to just read it and oh, okay This is it. This is the teaching. Yeah is not there meant for you to just read it and oh okay this is it this is the teaching yeah so what else do you do across the Tiber com you have these

small groups and then you have monthly what else so we do two zoom chats a month one is a lecture in Q&A so we recently had Swan son on he did a lecture it was over two hours well lecture answering questions what a guy this is all free. Not a single person whoever joins with us will ever have to pay a dime. And they get to participate in these Zoom lectures. So on various topics. This most recent one was on the papacy. We're going to have one next week on the liturgy. Wow. We're going to have one after that on just the authority of the church, the magisterium. We've had ones on the Marian dogmas, ones on justification, different topics.

Are there common hangups that people have that surprised you, maybe that have more to do with the culture than doctrine? So there are, I would phrase it as, specifically with the Americans in particular, because Americans have this very much this independent streak. We don't like authority, we don't like being told what to do.

Yeah, especially when you have particular people at the helm. Right, so maybe, maybe if you're in Germany and you have a group of bishops that can be challenging to your faith at times, am I being cherished? Well, I think John Chrysostom said most bishops are going to hell, so you're doing better than him. Yes, well. Maybe worse, I don't know. John Chrysostom was also aishops are going to hell. So you're doing better than him. Yes.

Well, maybe worse. John Chrysostom was also a bishop. So maybe he has a little more authority to speak on that subject than I do. But there can be a difficulty with kind of like accepting that some guy across the ocean tells you what to do with your faith. I think of this past Easter for Lent, we weren't supposed to get the ashes drawn on our forehead we were supposed to get them sprinkled like at the Vatican they do and

There were a lot of people they were like, oh this this is breaking tradition and things like that and In America, it was a tradition here But in the other parts of the world, this was actually just the normal way they did things And a lot of people that were thinking of converting, they're like, well, I've got to listen to this guy in Rome who tells me how to live out my faith? Well, yes and no, but this is part of being a Catholic. And so you do sort of need to come to terms with the idea. So what's bringing them into the church,

or what's even getting these folks to be interested in Catholicism? So I think there's a few things. One of them, I know in my case, and I've talked about this before with you, there's inconsistencies with how some people argue against Catholicism. And when you start to question, Hey, why are there only 66 book in our Bible and the Catholics have 73? And you start poking and you find the Catholic answer makes more sense. Then you start to see it as a house of cards

and what else is gonna fall apart. On top of that, the liberal Christianity, and when I say liberal, we don't mean politics, we mean theologically liberal. There's a lot of the Protestant church at large. So whether it's mainline Protestants like Lutherans and the, was it ELCA is the liberal one. You see a split with the Methodists. Their church is splitting in half. The Presbyterians had a split. Or if

you're coming from a non-denominational church and you just got a brand new pastor with the you know the soul patch or the goatee and he's very hip and cool and then his theology is you know very thin you start wondering like well is this is this really Christianity this doesn't make any sense yeah now to be clear I'm not saying you won't find similar problems in other faiths but it's a way to start looking I see yeah yeah interesting stuff give us a story or two or some kind of glory story, as we used to say. So we have a few. I mentioned Jessica was one of my favorite ones.

From, is it Adelaide? Mm-hmm, yeah. So you Australians, I think. Yeah, that's my capital city, South Australia. So what happened with her if she doesn't mind you sharing? So I'll just be very generic, but it was that idea of she was in school, she joined the groups and didn't seem that interested.

We didn't hear from her for a long time. Now she's in RCIA. There's someone, Thomas in the Phoenix area, where he only had a couple of questions. And then he joined. We answered those. And now I'm actually sponsoring him in RCIA. And his wife is actually, she went from not being interested at all. She goes to a few church functions. Now she's talking about maybe joining the church. And her questions are very different than his. She's coming from a more secular understanding of faith, right? We have some people who, one lady who joined, she's from a Calvary Chapel background. Wonderful grandmother, many children, grandkids.

And a lot of her questions at first were very, what we like to call like stuff from Chick Tracks, right? Like the very, you know, oh, well, I heard the Church, the Whore of Babylon and things like that. And over time, she started to recognize that we're giving consistent answers, they do make sense. And she's not coming from that kind of like that internet person that kind of researches everything

and they're over-intellectualizing. She's coming from a very real place in the faith. Now, she's not a Catholic yet. I'm definitely praying for her daily if she's watching. But we've really seen a lot of growth. And at the very least one thing that's really good about these groups is people are really learning what Catholicism is because there's people learn about it the former Catholic meme right. I went to Catholic school

and suddenly they're an expert on Catholicism or they're learning from someone like a John MacArthur who was never a Catholic doesn't really understand Catholic teaching and he's kind of demonizing the faith. So we're able to cut through a lot of that demonization where even if someone doesn't join, at least they understand Catholics are their brothers and sisters in Christ, we can do things like work together. I think of, you know, if you've got a Planned Parenthood and you go out there to do a protest and you see a group of Catholics. You shouldn't be standing apart from them. We should be arm in arm together, kind of trying to fight these evils. Suppose someone's watching right now and they're like, okay, crossthetyber.com.

What do I do when I get there? So we have a, you'll join a boat, you'll put in your name, what faith background you're from. This is very important for us because one, as much as we love our Catholic brothers and sisters This is not For them Catholics. You're already in. Yeah, you should be going to your priest good We're not meant to replace the church the internet can't baptize or confirm you so if you're a Catholic We don't we love you. God bless you go somewhere else. That's good. I like that

So we want to hear your faith background so we can properly hate this person's coming from the earth We don't want you. We love you. God bless you. Go somewhere else. That's good. I like that. So we want to hear your faith background so we can properly, hey, this person's coming from the Orthodox background. I love that. So these different groups are called Boats, and so you sort them in. That's wonderful. Across the Tiber.

I love it. And they'll submit on this form. We'll reply with an email. Currently the focus is Marco Polo. As I said, in addition to the Marco Polo groups, we do one lecture Q&A a month We also do a zoom hangout once a month as well where we just sit and chat about mouse plagues the faith Yeah, whatever the case may be. What if someone's like, okay, I'm kind of interested in Catholicism, but I don't know if I wanna you know, maybe some is afraid that you're gonna be just sort of like

arguing them into the ground strong- arming as I said earlier. So I also came from a Protestant background and I totally get it. And one of the things I love is the church teaches the Protestants are our brothers and sisters. They are not an alien faith, they're not some other religion, we love them. If you're an atheist or a Mormon or a Jehovah's

Witness, and we've had a few come from those backgrounds, you're still made in the image of God and we love you. So we're not here to argue with you, we're not here to debate you, we're not here to bully you or trick you into becoming Catholic. If you come to us, you have honest questions, we're gonna give you honest answers, we're gonna make sure we're using proper sources like the catechism and the church fathers, magisterial documents. And if you, look, if you don't wanna become Catholic,

that's okay. If you're there to honestly learn about the faith, we're happy to honestly teach you the faith. That's cool. And I suppose at the end of the day, if they're joining a group, it's like what, 10 or 15 Protestants against the one Catholic who's leading the boat.

So if anything, you're the one who feels ganged up on maybe at times. It can feel like that sometimes, especially if talks maybe get away from you. Right. But again, if we're having these conversations and we're doing it in charity, right. That's always the key is we need to be looking at each other. Hey, I'm not here to be your enemy. I'm here to just help you understand better. Good stuff.

Well, okay. what we wanna do now is I wanna step out of the way and we wanna have Chester, and I'll let him introduce himself once he sits down. Have you guys actually answer questions from those in the live chat and those on Patreon? You might wanna pull that out and make sure that we've got some questions.

That'll be kind of fun. So kind of putting you on the spot here. You don't know what these questions or objections are ahead of time. Not yet. So I'm gonna step aside and Chester, I'll let you sit down and chat and introduce yourself. I joined Cross the Tiber at the start of this year.

I'm a Roman Catholic seminarian from the diocese of Dallas, Texas. And I'm our cradle Catholic in the group who is learning along the way all the concerns that Protestants have that I've just never thought of or even considered as topics to be discussed or perspectives that are just very different than my own. So that's something that I've benefited so much from from this group is learning the types of questions that I take for granted having been kind of

raised in the faith with the vocabulary. And one of the other things that we do like to focus on when we answer these questions is it's not just about giving knowledge, right? We're not here to win arguments, right? It's about making sure we're speaking to the person. If it was just about giving knowledge out, I could just send a link to a Catholic Answers article or a Catholic Encyclopedia, but it's the idea of we're talking to people and we want to make sure those answers, and Chester's wonderful at this, that these answers are pastoral. We're dealing with people where they are and that's kind of a key.

We're not here to argue. If someone comes at us combative, we can step back and take a break, kind of talk this through. Right. Yeah, because one of my main concerns, especially as someone who's in the process of formation for the priesthood, is my job and our job as Catholics isn't to be just to be right. Our job is to really accompany people, walk with them, share their pains and their joys. Because if I tell someone something that is technically correct, but in a way that makes them hate truth, I'm gonna have to answer to God for that at the end of my

time or it's where and you know the excuse of well I was technically right isn't gonna be good enough if I said it in a hateful way that made them hate God. So I've got questions now, if you're ready. So the first question here, this is from Rowdy Upchurch, and he says, why does the church spend so much money on making things look beautiful instead of spending that money on something like helping the poor? And that is a challenging question.

Part of, I think, the way I would begin to respond to that is the church spends a lot of money on trying to help the poor. And that is something absolutely worth doing. Some of my greatest joys I've had in the ministry that seminary formation has allowed for me has been working with the poor, working with the homeless, going out and working in communities devastated by hurricanes that have come through. So this is a real part of the church, but it's also not the only part of the church.

The church isn't just a group of social workers who like to talk about Jesus along the way. Our primary purpose is and will always be the salvation of souls because we are serving Christ. Working with the poor and for the poor is an integral and important and scriptural part of that, but it's also not the only thing. We want to teach people how to pray. We want to help people truly grow closer to Christ, a real meaningful relationship because it's not just an intellectual group, empty group of emotions we're going through, this is part of our journey being more Christ-like, striving to reach, you know,

that thing for which we have been made. And beauty helps. Beauty helps elevate the mind, beauty helps elevate prayer. It doesn't, it's not like a magic spell. It's not going to guarantee, you know, pretty music and pretty architecture isn't going to just make your prayer suddenly be better, but it can help and it can testify in its own special way. And it's also for people who are artists, that is a way of praising God. That is their way of offering the talents and skills that God has given them back to God by making these beautiful things that help people think of him. Certainly, you can think of Michelangelo, for example. The world wouldn't have most of his works if he wasn't being sponsored by the church.

Yeah, no, that's true. And, you know, it's not an end in itself, and it can be. So if people are, and that's a real challenge that we do have in the church sometimes, is people think beauty, beautiful necessarily means better all the time. And if it's just beauty for the sake of something pretty to look at, then it becomes its own end, and then that's how you start falling into real trouble. So our next question is from Joshua Fowler, and he says, what is the point of going to confession? The point of going to confession is to reconcile ourselves, and rather be reconciled. Because when we go into confession we have this place where what we really encounter is God's love and mercy. And it's a harsh place and we kind of get scared sometimes going there when we think

about it just from the mindset of I have to go into this, you know, small space and tell someone I don't know the things that I'm most sensitive and nervous about. But then when you realize what you're actually doing and you receive from Christ, not just some random person, but from Christ, an acknowledgement and explicit forgiveness for those sins. And to be fair, these are serious sins. They're going to confession to confess the things that you have done, not that can hurt God in the sense that God is going to be injured by you, but that does damage your real relationship

with Him. These are offensives. These are offenses that you have committed and you are receiving forgiveness and being instructed on, you know, what you can do as a penance to not make amends as in make everything okay, but as God's way of offering you, do this as a way of, you know, starting a path towards justice, some measure of a wrong has been done, so here's a right, and at the end, you should be growing closer to Christ through this. And we also have what I feel is clear command in Scripture, right?

You have James 5 where he says to confess. You have the end of John where Jesus says. I think this is an important thing to consider as well in this question. The point, if you want to go, why do we go? It's because we're told to go. All the sacraments of the church, you know, we teach and believe wholeheartedly are instituted by Christ for the benefit of the church. They're not willy-nilly things. These are things that you need to do, but in the benefit of the church. They're not willy-nilly things. These are things that you need to do, but the point of it is always salvation of souls. We want to grow closer to Christ. We want to reach what we've been made for, and we can't do it by ourselves,

and we can't do it because of ourselves. So the next one we have is from Susan Schwertner. Hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. My apologies, Susan. She said, my niece's husband says our mass looks like a cult ritual. I've never heard that before, so I was taken by surprise and didn't know how to answer.

A cult ritual. I suppose it would depend on kind of the background because if you're coming from a background that doesn't have rituals at all, everything is going to look like a cult ritual. But we can kind of backtrack and say, you know, what's the purpose of ritual? What's the purpose of, you know, these signs and symbols? And the answer is they're supposed to be signposts. They're supposed to be signposts, they're supposed to be guidelines.

The danger inherent in every system that has rituals is that they can become empty and purely symbolic. And I think you do realistically see that in a lot of Catholic churches today, where you have people who are, you know, doing the sign of the cross, going up for communion, and they're not thinking twice about any of it, and that is not what the ritual is for for communion and they're not thinking twice about any of it, and that is not what the ritual is for at all. The ritual is supposed to be like the mass itself is supposed to be instructive. You're supposed to be learning. You're supposed to be praying those prayers, listening attentively to what the priest is

saying, realizing that, you know, when you do this sign of the cross, you are marking yourself, you know, with that symbol of salvation, the symbol of, you know, the cross and the resurrection and everything you hope for it. you know, with that symbol of salvation, the symbol of, you know, the cross and the resurrection and everything you hope for it. When we stand and sit and kneel at different times, it's because we are showing respect and reverence to the different things that are going on in the liturgy. And these gestures matter, but they're not the point.

They point themselves to something higher, kind of like a signpost. And like the comment we had earlier about, you know, these beautiful churches and all these things, I think the rituals are beautiful. But if you start only looking at them instead of looking at what they're talking about, what they're pointing towards, then you have idolized them. And that's, that's the danger. Certainly. And something, as you mentioned at the beginning that really depends on the background someone's coming from. So if someone's coming from an atheist background,

this is a question where we do have to kind of shift how we're answering it in the way you did. If someone's coming from a Baptist background, it may be they don't see their Sunday service as a ritual, even though if you go to their Sunday service, it's going to be a specific set of things. They do three songs, they do prayer, they do a 45-minute sermon, and then maybe once a month or once a quarter they'll do

communion after that, they'll do an offering plate, they'll do some more music. That in itself, it may not seem like a ritual, but it's just as much a ritual. It's just a different kind. Not that those things are bad. We do those things in Catholic mass, but that's something that's also important to consider is when we're answering questions, we really do have to speak to the person, get to know where they're coming from. The next question is from Noah Anderson. He says, How do you effectively trace the beginnings of the church to Jesus?

As I think that's the root of any argument for Catholicism. Seems obvious to me, but articulating it to people who fundamentally reject it is so difficult. One thing I do wanna say about this, and online I see this a lot, is people go, well of course you need to be Catholic. Jesus Christ founded our church. Chuck Smith founded Calvary Chapel in 1970.

Don't you wanna go with Jesus? And what sometimes that people with that answer, it's not wrong in a technical sense, but what they don't understand is a person coming from a Calvary Chapel or if they're Methodist, you know, they don't look at John Wesley that way or if they're Lutheran, they're not looking at Martin Luther that way. They see the church as something fundamentally different than a Catholic would. A Catholic sees the church as the literal Catholic church, whereas most Protestants would actually see it as kind of the invisible body of believers. That's a different discussion and I want to be careful that we're not like

spending too much time on the one answer. But as far as the historical part of it, can you answer to that, please? Well, yeah. So when we look at historical arguments for the church, the benefit is that the church has a lot of history. We have a lot of documents we can trace back to councils and early church writings, you know, apostolic tradition. We can look back to writers like Justin Martyr, Clement, who was pope, I think about the third pope of Rome, we can look back to writers like Justin Martyr, Clement, who was Pope, I think about the third Pope of Rome. You can look at things like the Didache. And these documents frequently also include descriptions of their rituals.

And I mean, you hone in on some of those and like you can pretty much do a one-to-one comparison between some of the Eucharistic celebrations that they were doing in the first hundred years of the church, side-by-side with what the modern Catholic mass or divine liturgy looks like, and you can kind of line them up and go, oh, we're still doing that, the kiss of peace is still around. There's, you know, the soar some quarter, the lift up your hearts, that's still around. And we're talking more than 1500s, 1600 years of just continuously doing exactly that. And I realized that kind of highlights

the liturgical side of things. But the liturgy then ties directly back into the teaching about the faith because especially for the first thousand years, the liturgy is what taught people what they believe. It's that ancient, you know, what we praise, what we believe, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. And we have those same writers who are talking about their rituals and everything, are also talking about how you have to be in communion with the bishop, how you have to be following

your priests, that the deacons need to be men of good repute, and how their job is to take communion to the sick and the homebound, which clearly they have to be doing that because that bread is something special. It's not just bread. They're making a big deal to take it from the meal to the homestead. So I mean, you have all these types of things. So when you start looking in at the historical documents that way, you look at early Christianity, you find that the liturgy looks very similar to what we're doing now, and they treat it in much the same way. And then you look at the same people who are talking about that are also talking about

the church structure, the bishops, the clergy, and the faithful being involved. Yes, it's true. And to speak directly on the liturgy, something I'd like to, anyone that joins now, this coming Thursday we're actually doing a one of those lectures I mentioned. It'll be specifically on the liturgy. It's Father Paul Hedman. He's a brilliant priest. We're actually really excited to have this talk. So one of the things we do in these Zoom lectures is he'll be giving a talk, let's say half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, and then he'll do a Q&A so that if you're there, if you're a Protestant wondering, why do I care about the liturgy?

Who cares these rituals and all these things? You can jump in and ask that question. If you have specific questions, you'll be able to ask him directly and get a specific answer. The next question I have, this is from David Augustini, and he says, in a nutshell, why be Catholic? How do you counter that their various meeting services and a cafeteria view of Christianity, etc. is missing what God asks of us? So this is actually something in one of the groups we've had a lot of questions like this. Like, well, if we're all brothers and sisters in Christ, why do I need to be a Catholic?

Why can't I just be—if a Protestant is not denied the mystery of salvation, if an Orthodox person is still receiving valid sacraments, why convert? Yeah, the in a nutshell why be Catholic question always gets the in a nutshell because it's true answer, which is never very satisfying, but it's the case of we want to be Catholic because we love Christ, and this is where we have found him, and when we look into it with the most loving and reasonable ways that we can try to strive after him and study what we truly believe he has left us, this is where it takes us. And that's a lifelong journey. I mean, conversion is not – when we talk about conversion, in one sense there's just converting to be Catholic. But conversion is also a lifelong process of progressively for the rest of our lives

dying more to self, conforming more to Christ, falling more in love with Christ, and that's ever seeking more truth, ever seeking deeper prayer, ever trying to surrender more and more, reliant on Him the whole way. So you know, why be Catholic for love of Christ? Certainly. The next question, and in some ways this is kind of related to this general question. This is from Julia Paul. So end quotes she has, so you believe that if you aren't baptized, you'll go to hell,

end quote. I have a lot of evangelical friends that love the Lord and believe in him that aren't baptized, or even if they are, it wasn't a necessity. It was just an optional proclamation of faith. So first, I want to address a couple of things about this difference between Protestants and Catholics. So this idea that baptism doesn't do anything, generally it's going to originate with Zwingli, one of the reformers, and this idea that it's a symbol.

So first I would point to passages like John 3-5 that I think are pretty clear that baptism is more than just a symbol. You also have the Didache, which is a first century document talking about how baptism's necessary. But what's also happening in here is kind of a misunderstanding of when the church says that Protestants are, again, quote, not denied the mystery of salvation, because we have a fundamental different understanding of exactly how salvation works for Catholics, it's not a one-time thing but a process that occurs over your whole life.

We also have the idea of baptism of desire and how that may factor into this question. So these are the kind of things we have to normally think about. We may pull up the catechism, so we get an exact, hey this is kind of a tricky question, let's pull up what the catechism says and get that exact wording So we make sure we're answering them knowledgeably But in general with this question, can you go ahead and speak to this idea that I've got an evangelical friend He was baptized. Maybe he wasn't baptized with the right intent or He doesn't think baptism matters. So he didn't get baptized. It's just a symbol. Why does he need to do it?

Though to be clear, every Baptist I've ever met, they do think baptism is important, and once you're a Christian, they do heavily encourage you to get baptized. This is not a minor thing to them. They don't think it's just some willy-nilly thing that maybe you have to do as a Christian. So I hope my Baptist friends understand I'm not trying to denigrate their understanding of baptism. But if someone is from a Christian tradition where they just don't think baptism, communion, and these things are important, how would we answer that? I can hear my sacramentology

professors, you know, raring to go off on that one the Where we would start with that is realizing that there tends to be a very strong difference in the way the last especially 300 years has understood sign and symbol versus I Don't know the three thousand years that preceded that where the idea of something being a symbol did not mean that it was an empty symbolic gesture with no value. So certainly for the first thousand years of the church, without interruption, there was never an idea that, you know, a symbol was simply, you know, an empty copy or replication that

doesn't actually convey any reality to it. That's a novel invention. It's very commonplace now, so it's hard to believe that it's a novel invention, but that's that would be incomprehensible to the early church. But so we want to start with that, where these signs, when they talk about, because they do talk about signs and symbols in the first thousand years, but they don't mean merely, you know, like text on a page that doesn't actually convey a reality. They mean when you do something, it does something. When you do this gesture, it does something. So now, normally here is where I would pull up a

copy of the Catechism and just kind of go through line by line and explain and draw out little bits and pieces on baptism, but the church would say, quoting Christ, that you know, what you're supposed to do is repent and be baptized. It would look at, you know, St. Peter who says, you know, what you're supposed to do is repent and be baptized. It would look at, you know, St. Peter, who says, you know, if you all want to become, you know, Christians, repent and be baptized. You know, and you can find specific differences depending on where you are in Acts or in, you know, St. Paul's letters as to are they getting baptized before they become believers? Are they getting baptized after they become believers? But they getting baptized after they become believers?

But you have these guys who were baptized by John the Baptist, who actually have to get rebaptized because his baptism wasn't good enough. So obviously there's something significant to baptism. There's no way around it not being something that everybody has to do. At the same token, we also recognize that for reasons or reasons beyond the individuals control they may not actually have the opportunity to be baptized. Case in point, character there being the so-called good thief on the cross next to Christ. I mean, we don't know that he wasn't already a follower of Jesus, but we assume not because

it doesn't – the interaction between the two seems like a first interaction, but he could have been a follower, could have been baptized. It's not the point. Christ tells him either way, you know, on this day you'll be with me in paradise. There's that sense of a true profession of faith is still good, but Jesus still also commands people to get baptized. And so what that comes back to is are these sacraments necessary? Yes. Is God bound by those sacraments? Catechism specifically addresses that. God is not bound by the sacraments, but at the same

time, and it's not just like some privileged way that's it's good but optional, it's he says do this so do it. If you don't, for reasons outside of your control, you know, is that a guaranteed you're going straight to hell? No, the church doesn't say that. It just says this is the only way we know for sure is the path of salvation because that's what Christ commanded. And can he save outside of that? Absolutely. He just doesn't reveal that to us as to how. So we're going to do two more questions and we'll try to do these ones a bit quick. So the first one is from Liam M. Dolan saying, my roommate always asked me why it's

necessary to ask for the intercession of saints when we can pray to God directly. For him it's not so much whether an issue of we can pray to them or they can hear us, but just why if you can pray directly to God? For the same reason that I ask, you know, my friends to pray for me, same reason I pray for my friends, it's salvation. Put it this way, the church is not about you individually and Jesus, and pretty much in no one's life in Scripture is it them and Jesus. All of the Apostles were called to a community together. All of the church lived in a community together. Even on the road to, you know, Emmaus, it was two guys walking side by side when Jesus shows up. He spes, you know, were two or three are gathered in my name, I am there with them.

We are in this together, we need each other's support, we are not meant to be one-off lone ranger, you know, lone wolf types. Is it necessary to pray to the saints? No, but it's not about necessity, it's about being part of this community, being part of this church, and this church involves those of us striving here on earth and those of us who are triumphant in heaven. So the last question, and this is from Derek, and I'll go ahead and take the first part. So Derek says, the relationship between justification and sanctification specifically in relation to Romans. So I'm going to kind of extrapolate from his question because it's one that generally comes from a

specific background that's dealing with the issue of faith and works or faith verse works. So the first thing I would point to is that Paul and James are not writing in opposition to each other. And you have James 2 and you have Romans 3 and 4 and they're in the same scriptures. They're both equally true and valid. So if they seem in conflict, the idea of the story of Abraham taking Isaac up, and Paul tells us that this is an act of faith not works,

and James tells us that this is an act of works, not just faith, how does this go together? And what I would point to is, and I've just, so if it seemed like I was staring at my phone, it's because I was pulling up the verses here. It's because he was. I was. So in Romans three twenty eight, and this is a verse that's often used by those who see this as an issue of justification and salvation. And in particular, often those of an evangelical bent may see this as an issue that separates us from Christianity, that if you see justification as involving works in any way, they believe you're not a Christian because of verses like this, verses in Galatians. So in Romans 3 28 it says,

For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Now that's true. So one thing I'd like to point out there though is he says works of the law, not all works ever. And then we read the next verse, or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of the Gentiles also. So that's interesting. Why would he juxtapose this idea of doing works of the law or being Gentile? Well, what's happening here is Paul is not talking about doing any good deed ever. Paul is talking about literally following the law. So it makes sense that Abraham doesn't follow the law because the law doesn't exist in his time. And he's talking about Abraham being justified outside of the law as in

Abraham wasn't Jewish because the Jewish people didn't exist yet. And in this passage what he's saying is are you justified apart from works of the law? Well, the works of the law are what make you Jewish. In the first century, they didn't see race the way we do these days. The idea was if you were Jewish, that meant you were circumcised and you were practicing. And if you were a Gentile, then you were not doing those things. So what Paul's addressing here is the idea of if you need to become Jewish, not if you need to be living out your faith. And that's the kind of thing I'd want to lean on there is this idea of it's not about faith and works or faith verse works. It's a faith that's lived out. And we see this in other passages like Galatians 5-4.

Chester, correct me if I'm wrong. No, I have to pull it up. Where Paul talks about faith in love, right? He talks about, I guess I could pull up the verse, but he talks about how they're dealing with a question of are you circumcised or uncircumcised? It doesn't matter. So it's Galatians 5-6. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. And to be clear, this is an ESV translation. I am not using a Catholic Bible to give this answer.

Paul's talking about a faith working in love. The circumcision or uncircumcision doesn't mean do you do any good works at all ever? He's saying are you Jewish or not Jewish? That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're Jewish or not. What matters is that you have a faith in Christ that's working through love. And so again, it's not about faith or works. It's about a faith that's lived out. And if you're living out your faith,

works are gonna be involved. And the last thing I'll mention here before we close up is that we don't necessarily have the same language when we're talking about these things here. So some Protestants, and not all, certainly Lutherans are going to see this question a little bit different than Baptists, we're going to see it a little bit different than Anglicans, maybe Methodists. If you're an atheist, this is all completely alien to you.

If you're Mormon, this means something different. So this comes back to wanting to speak to the individual. In this case, I believe the person asking the question is Seventh-day Adventist, so it's going to be kind of similar to the Baptist understanding. Is faith just belief, or is there more to it? And this, I could rant on this for an hour and a half because I have on this very channel, so feel free to look up a question about justification and my name when searching the pines with Aquinas channel. But it's this idea that faith isn't just belief. It's more than that. It's about trust. It's about loyalty.

Another word you might use and some Baptists do, it's allegiance. So that would be the last one we're going to answer today. We actually have one from the chat that I wanted to give you. We do. Great. This is from Kevin O'Connor who's an atheist in China and he's saying, why do most atheists on cross the Tiber convert? Is there any argument that's very effective or is it for a variety of reasons? So most of the people we're dealing with are from a Protestant background, and that's natural because we're Americans.

And while certainly not everyone we're dealing with are Americans, there's several Australians, there's some people from England. We have one wonderful person. She's in Norway where basically everyone she knows is an atheist other than herself. Two things that I've heard. One, I believe it's called materialism and it's the idea that there's no objective truth only the reality and it becomes very hard to see the world in a way that isn't cynical when you're kind of coming from this background. If nothing's objectively true, we're just clumps of cells and all of these things, then why is it wrong for me to harm you in some way? Certainly there are secular humanists that work these issues out, but a lot of people will look at this issue or those

arguments and say, well, you know, if there's a reason I should be a good person, I have this innate sense of morality in me that must come from somewhere, means something. So that's one area. There's also, one person has been kind of interested based on just the argument that, where did the universe come from? So as Catholics, we're not generally speaking Young Earth Creationist. It's an allowed position, but I'll be honest,

I believe it's a minority position in the church in the 21st century. Especially since, you know, Big Bang Theory came from a Belgian Catholic priest. Exactly. So the idea is something must have caused things to exist. I want to be brief here, but whatever happened, so if it's the Big Bang, well what caused the Big Bang? Apologists will often refer to this as the uncaused cause. That language comes from much older than modern apologists.

It may be Aquinas that used that term, maybe someone else. He's drawing on Aristotle there. Certainly. So whatever that uncaused cause is, and we're just looking at a basic level. If you look, someone like Trent Horn may discuss like the different levels of apologetics. So the very basic level for is just a theistic perspective. Are there beings or a being outside that created us? The next level would be why would you choose Christianity? And the third level would be why be Catholic specifically? But just looking at that base level, I believe that there's some pretty solid arguments for there being an uncaused cause. Something had to start everything.

You must have an uncaused cause somewhere in the mix there at some point in time. And let's start there and let's just call that God for the sake of argument and then move forward with the discussion. Yeah, I feel like that's probably the starting point for most of them is just a something has to is maybe the sense of part of it's maybe even a desire that it's true, but there's the sense of something has to last longer than this. What is it? And there's that search.

Ultimately, we would call that true philosophy, love of truth. There's a search for truth and that sometimes leads to things that you can't necessarily explain but can still believe in. Certainly. Anything? We're good? So I'd like to thank everyone for the questions. We hope that you've received these questions. Like we're trying to be charitable here. We're not trying to lecture you.

Because we're not talking directly to you. It may come across that way, and if it does, my apologies. But the idea is each of these questions, if we want to go deeper, one, I'd recommend you go to crossthetyber.com and we can kind of address your specific situation because, as that question was from an atheist, I'm not getting that question if I'm talking to a Hindu person or a Muslim or if I'm talking to a Protestant. At the same time, if a Protestant comes to me as a question about faith, that looks very different than a Muslim asking a question about faith or an atheist coming to us with a question about faith. And so we want to make sure we're speaking

to you guys, we're addressing your exact questions. I appreciate everyone being here asking the questions. It's great getting a question from an atheist, so thank you, Neil, because the other questions were from patrons and they're going to be a little bit more, I guess, specific. Chester, you have any last things to say? Yeah, my last thing that I would say is that we as we mentioned before, this is a lifelong process. This is a journey. And the purpose of, you know, program like ours is not to have, you know, some authoritarian guy in a, you know, black outfit with a collar telling you what you should do or else. It's we understand that this is challenging, that there are real struggles and that there's faith involved, there's outside pressures, family, a world that kind of frowns upon all

of us who are searching for faith at all. So the purpose of this is to just learn the truth And even if where that takes you is just, I at least now know what the Catholic Church actually teaches is true from, you know, from them, from their own sources, from people who are living it out every day. And, you know, we have troubles with that. You have difficulties or challenges.

We can talk about that. We can go more in depth into that, but we want to at least make sure that people who are engaging in this quest for truth out of a love for Christ, or maybe even just a desire to find him, are getting quality, solid, orthodox Catholic physicians on it. And even if that person doesn't convert, the important thing, as you mentioned, is that at least they're getting the truth. We're telling them what the church actually teaches, and if that's not enough for them, at least it's the truth. It's not something they

heard from a pastor that doesn't know anything about Catholicism or something they read online from some random person on Twitter or a, again, my favorite, the I went to Catholic school and, and then they say whatever. We even have people, so Matt often mentions someone named Derek who's sitting somewhere distantly behind me and hopefully can hear me talking about him. But Derek's a great example of someone that is still really struggling with these questions. And he's leaning orthodox. And that's OK. We're not rejecting Derek. We hung out with Derek all day yesterday, bought him drinks. He gave us a ride places. It's OK. If he's looking at it and he goes, you know, I'm just not convinced. We're still going to love you and accept you for who you are. And you're still welcome to stay with us and continue asking questions. Yeah it's a it's a

process obviously we have a genuine a genuine desire that everyone would become Catholic because obviously we believe it's true. Certainly. But we're also not going to beat you with sticks or harass you for not for not in, especially not right away. Well, I may still harass Derek, but for different reasons at least. Thank you very much.