Catholic Answers Focus

Defending the Faith can take an emotional toll. Rather than turn to bitterness, the person who engages with those who attack the Faith will be most effective with some distance and calm. Psychologist Dr. Ray Guarendi offers tips on how to gain this distance and calm.

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Mike Aquilina, author of Africa and the Early Church, explains the African roots of much of what we now take for granted in Christianity. His work reminds us of an age when Christianity spread quickly in all directions so that before the Muslim invasions, a fruitful Christianity had taken root in Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Eritrea, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

 

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Once again, legislatures in some states are considering bans on the seal of confession. We asked the chaplain of Catholic University of America, Father Aquinas Guilbeau, to explain why we have the seal, and why breaking it won’t to anyone any good.

 

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Anti-Semitism is the bigotry that never rests. And these days, there are Catholics in the public sphere once again proposing degrading ideas regarding Jews. How is a Catholic to understand Catholic/Jewish history in a way that comports with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Joe Heschmeyer joins us.

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, joined this time by Joe Heschmeyer, and we’re going to talk about a somewhat difficult topic for Christians to discuss, one in which we prob...

Faith or works or faith plus works or just lots of good works? How are we justified before God? Tim Staples explains the Catholic understanding of the role of grace before all else.

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome again to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and Tim Staples here with us again, this time to talk about justification. When we think about the things that divide Catholics and Protestants, justification’s always one of the top, maybe the top among those. And I was thinking I might say...

What is religious freedom? Did the Church err about religious freedom at Vatican II? Michael Lofton from “Reason and Theology” tackles one of the great controversies of the council.

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome to Focus the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic Faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host. And this time we talk a bit about a controversy within the Catholic Church one that good apologist or good defender of the faith would want to have some familiarity with because different Catholics and, and, and those in the Catholic orbit who may ...

Why is it so difficult to explain the Sacrament of Confirmation? And why does the Latin Church seem to offer it just at the wrong time? Simone Rizkallah digs into the controversy.

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, and one of the things we need to live better, understand better and defend better, so we’re going to cover all three in this episode, is the sacrament of confirmation. Well, one of the reasons we have to defend it is there’s a general lack of unders...

With the strident morality of modern movements such as “Me Too,” it would seem that relativism has been replaced with moralism. Well, maybe not, says Karlo Broussard in his latest book, “The New Relativism.” In this episode, he explains how moral outrage is often a cover for an entrenched relativism.

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, and Karlo Broussard is our guest. He’s got a brand new book out that you can get over at shop.catholic.com or...

Having started from scratch himself, John Martignoni explains how to get started as a Catholic apologist.

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith, I am Cy Kellett, your host. And we get asked a lot, how do I do what you all do? Not talking about me specifically but about the folks around here, this whole apologetics thing. Many people are interested in being better at defending the faith. I think, in large part, that comes from lived experience that the faith is under assault in many places. Some people w...

Dr. Craig Turczynski, the former director of in-vitro fertilization, andrology, and hormone assay laboratories at Louisiana State University Medical Center-Shreveport explains how IVF is done, and why it raises grave moral concerns.

CORRECTIONS:

1. The number of IVF procedures annually is about 250,000 not 250.

2. Cytoplasmic transfer is taking cytoplasm from a young woman’s egg and injecting it into the infertile woman’s egg. It is not injected into the woman. 

Cy Kellett:

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers’ podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic f...