Why Did Peter Sink?

Around the year 300 A.D., a teenager named Agnes was killed because of a choice that rejected a culture that elevated sex and power over the wholeness of body and soul. She represented a major threat to a sick empire because she would not play along. And simply by using the word, “No,” like a pin she punctured a gaping hole in the puffed-up and bloated world that she lived in.

As punishment, Agnes was forced into prostitution and eventually murdered for not partaking in the expected behavior of her time. This is heroic. This is real heroism, not the Marvel kind, and not the self-declared kind done by those carry their sins on signs like a trophy.

The teenage Agnes stared down the peer pressure of an entire empire. This was not like a crafted Greta Thunberg media story. This was not manufactured by a massive marketing campaign that pretends to be a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness. This is not like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. This is not like a young Marlon Brando in The Wild One who is asked, “What are you rebelling against?” and replying, “What have you got?”

No, this was real. This was one single girl, saying “No” to personal sin in a fallen world.

By sticking to her convictions, Agnes was killed, but in doing so she gave the bully a black eye. The ego of a bully that celebrates sin never recovers from these kind of heroic refusals to submit. The courage of Agnes is pure and beautiful, and she is not the only one. There is also Philomena, Lucy, and the thousands of others all the way to Joan of Arc and Maria Goretti. A multitude of the early Christian martyrs were teenage girls. There are so many of them in the four-volumes of Butler’s Lives of the Saints that it should give you pause to ask: if Catholics hate women so much, why are so many of our churches and hospitals and universities named after them? Seems an odd brand of “hate” to dedicate buildings and millions of prayers to them. But let’s move on.

Agnes’ simple act needed no explanation or intellectual interpretation to understand. It’s power is in its simplicity. As Jesus said, don’t worry about that which can kill the body - worry about that which can destroy the soul. Death in this life brings you home if you believe in Christ. The body will follow the soul. We can worry about that reconnection later, in the last judgment. After all, governments and peer pressure cannot kill the soul. They can only kill the body and maybe delete a row in database. The modern “cancelling” does not kill the soul, because souls do not abide in the cloud or in databases. As for the body of Agnes that they thought they killed, it will be resurrected on the last day.

Agnes understood this perfectly well.

(Note: Is there anything more difficult to understand in Christian theology than “The Resurrection of the body”? Ok, fine, maybe “He descended into hell…” and “The Communion of Saints.” I will need to have whole series on the twelve lines of the Apostles’ Creed at some point.)

Here’s a prophecy:

A teenage girl has changed Christian history many times. Probably more than we even know. And another will be along to do it once again.

I suspect this will happen soon, once the youth tires of TikTok and other current fads, which all have the shelf life of a can of soup; it’s good for a few years, but then you forget about it, and eventually just throw it out. The only difference is that soup is actually good for your body. The sense of permanence that people have about our current cultural fads should give us all a good belly laugh.

Mary, the Mother of God, was also a teenager, who most famously changed the world. How did she do it? She said “Yes.” She said “Yes” to God, not to the world, the flesh, or the devil. So did Agnes.

Saint Agnes is another one of these teenagers from the early Church that rocked and shocked the world because chastity is always counter-cultural. The reason people resent and mock chastity is the same reason we resent anything: resentment masks our own guilt. Resent rhymes with repent. To all that you resent, you must repent. That’s kind of like a Johnny Cochrane line, one of OJ’s lawyers, who said “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

The increase in American anger over the past seventy years is in direct proportion to our sins, because the conscience knows our past, and we resent the outside world because we can’t resolve our sins alone. Did I say we? I mean “I”. “Me”. Let me stop projecting. Because of sin, I have the vitriol and blame, honor and shame, because if I cannot honestly forgive, I must have an outlet, and that outlet is fear, the resentment of institutions, God, and other people. I have to blame something to drown the conscience.

It’s not rocket science. This is why the most vociferous pro-abortion people have usually had abortions, and why the loudest conservatives against sexual immorality have an immoral sexual past of their own. National pride and Gay Pride are both forms of the worst sin, which is…pride. It’s so basic that it’s comical. If you merely read the Bible up to Genesis chapter 3, you can stop and know that sin leads to fig leaves. Sin leads to hiding, blame, anger, and suffering.

The modern declaration of “Don’t tell me what to do” is the new version of “I will not serve,” which is what the devil uses for a motto (Non serviam). Humility is the antidote, but who wants to hear about the way of the Cross? We don’t want to listen to the conscience. All of the noise in the culture is cranked up so that we can’t hear the “still, small voice.” But soon a St. Agnes will come along, and her little “No” to the culture, and her “Yes” to God, will pull the plug on the babbling nonsense coming out of the speakers. Only in silence can the conscience again be heard. This is why regret for what happened at the party only comes to the party-goer in the quiet of the following morning. (I will resist re-discussing the Prodigal Son.)

We tend to resent most what we ourselves have done, and if we never openly repent, it eats at the heart like acid. Did I say “we” again? I mean, “I”. Me.

Consider your most vocal online friends, and I would be willing to bet that what they are ranting about is a spiritual mirroring of their own sins, which they have yet to confess. Don’t laugh, because it’s difficult work to do, and it takes years, or a whole lifetime to process. Humility is the most difficult virtue. The onion is thick on so many lives grown in the inorganic fertilizer of the 20th and 21st centuries, where we have been told to love ourselves rather than to love God and love others. The cult of “self-love” is strong and it is an education that comes from the father of lies, not from God.

Sin is disorder, and we want order, and unless we address our sins, we remain disordered. In our strange attempts to find the good, we talk ourselves into sin. No one sins thinking it will lead to disorder. We sin with the hope that all will turn out well. No one lies thinking, “I reject God.” We lie to protect ourselves, thinking that it will keep us safe from harm, criticism, insecurity. But sin is like an illness that moves us away from the good, and becomes a disease that always results in tragedy over the long term, particularly if you persist in it until death.

Refusing to address our sins leads to strange outlets, and one way or another we want to take control, because we think we can order the world. Our woundedness terrifies us. Thus, control of people and the world is born of our desire to play God. And we are not God. Hence, what I hate is most often a symptom of sins I have never confessed, and the conscience is the one thing that cannot be controlled. I may be able to have some control over finances, friendships, family, companies, politics, food, news, sports, and even the weather, but I cannot control the conscience. Yes, I can pretend it’s not there, and even believe that I am not burdened by it, but I am, and the more I deny it, the harder I am trying to play God. This is exactly what the devil wants, and has always wanted of us all. The term “hard-hearted” used so often in the Bible is just what we call today “self-love”. But self-love is not healing if it’s merely a smokescreen for unrepented sins.

Modern culture yearns for authentic voices, but we doubt such a thing exists, and mock purity and weakness. The condemnation that erupts when we hear of someone’s error or fall is a massive chorus of people who have not addressed their own brokenness. No matter how many Oprah magazines or mindfulness sessions we attend, our sins will not be forgiven outside of Jesus.

So the sick culture coughs and ambles along like an angry tyrant. But another Agnes will arrive and the world of sex, drugs, and anything-goes will be stunned by her authenticity, by one young woman who refuses to agree to the lies about sex and power. And she will be martyred for her choice.

She already may be alive today.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

I was once watching Monday Night Football at an airport while I ate a quick dinner between flights, and a man from the UK asked me what exactly the teams were trying to accomplish on the field. Briefly, I tried to explain American football to him, and the ideas around moving the football ten yards using four “downs.” After a few minutes, he finished his beer and said, “It looks like a stupid game to me.” I laughed, since I didn’t really disagree. Most games are kind of odd, even stupid if you step back and really think about them. In basketball, we try to throw a ball through a metal ring. In baseball, we use a stick to hit a ball and then we run and touch things that we pretend have magic powers of safety. And whoever is good at these games, we treat like the gods of this world.

I didn’t point out to the English dude that rugby and cricket look just as stupid to me as American football did to him, because I assume there is far more nuance and art to those games, and I just fail to appreciate them because I grew up watching football and baseball. Once when I was in London, I watched cricket in a bar and observed people getting excited and, yes, it seemed ridiculous to me. Likewise, I don’t understand hockey, despite living in a state where many are obsessed with it. Hockey bores me, but I understand there is far more happening on the ice than I understand or appreciate, because many people assure me it is beautiful if you understand it. I know what they mean by that.

What we don’t understand, we like to mock. Especially if it has a border, or a fence around it. Sour grapes is a phenomenon that I’ve certainly known personally, where if I don’t understand something, I downplay it. Or perhaps, if I’m not allowed into something, I will consider it not worth striving after.

But for that which we don’t understand, we’ll mock it as stupid or childish. I’ve written about this a fair amount here, especially in terms of prayer, where the modern doubter mocks prayer as silly, while never giving it a try - a real try - and therefore never learning to understand or play “the game” of prayer. The funny thing is that we end up locking ourselves out of beauty when we refuse to try prayer, or when we actively mock what happens at a Catholic Mass.

There is a bad idea in the Church to make Mass more exciting, more engaging, and on this topic a longstanding debate over how the Holy Mass should be conducted has raged for a decades. Arguments over Vatican II can be found everywhere online, as the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo provoke fierce commentaries. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I have attended various Masses that seem to lack reverence, so I appreciate the complaints of the defenders of the Mass of the Ages, because when I first witnessed a High Mass, or Latin Mass, I thought I had walked into the wrong Church. I had no idea what was happening but knew that something was different, and that something had been lost in the reverence used in the Tridentine form of the Mass.

But I have not come to talk about Latin Mass here. I will save that for another day.

What I mean to focus on here is the Mass itself, and why it is neither intended to be entertaining nor should it ever be the main goal. If you want entertainment, you can watch Monday Night Football or the hundreds of available streaming services.

The Holy Mass is not entertainment, nor should it ever be considered as such. For anyone who thinks it needs to be more exciting, they are merely asking for trouble because that is a losing game. The world outside of the Church is in constant battle for entertainment and drama. We specifically go to the Mass for a meal with God, for non-competition, for communion. Now, I will say, it is always appreciated to have a good speaker who can deliver a good homily, but again…even that is not the main purpose of the Mass.

Religion cannot be entertainment. If your religion sees itself as a competition with the culture, where the number of people attending is the mark of success, it becomes just another sideshow, a form of entertainment, and one that will lose. In short, faith in Christ is not a popularity contest. I don’t even think faith can fully be authentic if you are only there because it’s cool, because Jesus assured us that people would hate his apostles and disciples. The cool people of the ancient world were the Herodians, the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadduccees, and they all got together and killed Jesus because he was a buzzkill to them.

The non-religious world has ample options for entertainment. Sex, money, power, victory, contests: now that’s what most people call entertainment. The Super Bowl is entertainment, a full deck of sex, money, power, and worship of pseudo-demigod athletes. It is the most pagan feast in the history of mankind. If that’s what you want, then go get it. But that is not what the Mass offers. The beauty of the Holy Mass is that you do not go there to get something, to be entertained. You go there to give something: you go there to give thanks. (For a good primer on how to attend Mass, watch Father Mike Schmitz’s Pray the Mass like never before. In fact, go watch his video and forget about this blog, if you want greater insight.)

Any religion that tries to be cool or trendy has a short shelf life. No one needs it. No one wants it. Fireworks are not needed. A thousand options exist already in trendy entertainment and fads. For anyone that believes the Catholic Mass must be more modern and hip, they have missed the point entirely. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Catholic Mass is about if you are attending in order to get something for yourself instead of to give yourself to God. Even the structure of the Mass walks this out for us if we pay attention. This is the Mass in nutshell:

1.) We bring our sinful selves and ask for God’s mercy, giving all glory to him.

2.) We listen to God’s word and try to understand the message.

3.) Then we recite our beliefs and offer gifts. Bread and wine comes forward and we donate money if we can.

Then we test our faith. Talk is cheap. And your money is no good from here on out.

4.) The act of faith in the Eucharist is where the leap must be taken, weekly.

5.) Then we give thanks for God. Eucharist means “thanksgiving.”

6.) We are commanded to go forth, to love God, and to serve others.

To observe the consecration of the hosts and step forward and say, “I believe this is the body of Christ” with your Amen - that is the test of faith. To believe that you have ingested the glorified and risen body of God requires a total surrender of the intellect and free-will. That is how faith is defined in the Catechism. (CCC 143)

This kind of surrender of self to God brings real freedom. Total freedom. The reason people who try to use LSD or alcohol fail to really get freedom is because they are like Evel Knievel trying to jump the Snake River in Idaho on a rocket-powered motorcycle. You can’t blast your way to God. Experiencing God cannot be bought or achieved with enough mind-altering experiences. The spiritual life requires the journey into the valley, into humility, and kneeling is the only way to reach God and know him.

The whole idea of kneeling is to deflate the ego entirely, shoving it aside in favor of God. To be blessed by the Creator means submitting to him. I know a man who says, “I don’t kneel” and he has a very worldly idea of what God is, and as for me, I know that either I will kneel to God each morning and night, or God will kneel me. I’ve said this before on here: humility is when you kneel to God, and humiliation is when God kneels you. The resulting outcome is the same, but how you get tapped by God differs greatly in the choice.

Modern people don’t like kneeling. We’ve been indoctrinated to “believe in yourself.” But kneeling purposefully lowers reason and ego in order to elevate faith in God to the highest place in your mind, body, heart, and soul. The beauty of Catholicism is that you get to keep your reason, as science and the Church are fully compatible (don’t let people fool you about this) and by surrendering to God you get to love yourself as God loves you. This is the great paradox of faith and the rule of spiritual physics. In order to go up, you must go down. In order to be re-born, you must die to self.

In short, we go to Mass to give ourselves to God. But, lo and behold, in return, God gives himself to us. That is the only “transaction” I will ever need from God. Not money, not fame, not food, not my job, not my health, not people, not anything. All of that can be taken, and my prayer is that I will only stay close to God, and will do so through communion with Him in the Eucharist. You know, people should be clamoring to receive the host, the Eucharist, because it is God sharing himself with us. When you go to communion without the baggage of your intellect and free-will, you will know what it means to have the faith of a child.

When I stop trying to mold God to my plans, I am molded into His plans. This is letting go of everything but God. As for earthly things, we must think like Job, who after losing everything could still say: The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Bless the name of the Lord.

That is the daily miracle of the Mass. It is never to be entertained. Witnessing an irreverent Mass may be a leading cause of dying faith, because it’s like a bad sugary syrup that leaves you unfulfilled and feeling dull all over. If you go to Mass without knowing what is happening, you will be like the man from the UK watching Monday Night Football or me watching cricket.

This is why those who understand the Mass and believe do not like applause or cool new introductions to how worship is done.

Those who say, “I left the church because I wasn’t being fed,” never understood the Mass in the first place, because you don’t go to Mass to be fed by the priest’s sermon. First of all, the Mass is not about you. That’s critical to understand.

You go to Mass bringing what little you have, nothing but your sins and a willingness to believe, and deserving nothing you get fed by God himself. This is the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes in replay, every week, where we bring very little to the table, and God provides the rest.

If it’s entertainment you want, you can get a sermon on YouTube or from a podcast. There are many great ones to hear. But those speakers are not the Eucharist. Your computer or airpods cannot serve up a host to your ears at the end of a sermon. Nor can technology consecrate a host, since phones are not ordained in the only church that has the succession of the apostles. Body and soul are required for the mystery of the Mass. The Sacraments require an in-person experience. You cannot get the Eucharist anywhere else but at the hands of an ordained priest, who is in the line of grace from the apostles right up to today.

This is where people get off the Catholic bus. Transubstantiation? Laying of hands to pass on the power of consecration? What is this, a magic act?

No. That is the faith. That is the leap. That is the formula, that is not magic, but it works. “We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to touch.” (CCC 170)

We believe because it endures, it works, it lasts, and by placing faith slightly over our reason, we get to keep both. Keep your science and have your Eucharist, too, as long as faith edges out reason by a smidge. When faith takes the wheel, reason provides the navigation. It’s a beautiful thing to have both, but as soon as reason tries to take the wheel, the car goes off the road.

The world laughs at faith as backward and superstitious. But this is a faith that works and has lasted two thousand years. This is the faith that withstood horrors beyond our imagination in the first three hundred years, suffering martyrdoms beyond imagination. The rituals of this old religion exist for a purpose. There is a reason for the ritual. It is an act of faith. There is proof of its power to move people, as seen in the beauty of every cathedral and small town church. Entertainment was never the point. Sermons are not the bread of life. And entertainment ages badly. Go watch any comedy film from the 1960s or 1970s and see how funny it is now. (Spoiler: don’t watch them, they are no longer funny)

This is why devout Catholics don’t like clapping and hand-waving at Mass. This is why we like silence before and after Mass. Noise and clapping and hooting and hollering are fine elsewhere, like at your Bible study or a retreat or in evangelization. But not at Mass. Here’s a quote from Pope Benedict, a fellow who really understood the value of a reverent Mass:

Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation. (On the Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger)

But then why does it have to be so boring? Kids worldwide have wondered this while attending Catholic Mass. It’s boring when you don’t understand it. It’s boring when no one explains to you what it’s about. Consider how it feels to watch a sport you don’t know, like when Americans watch cricket or British people watch American football. What you see appears pointless, until you know what’s happening, and that every single word and action is loaded with symbolism and meaning.

Many people observe a board game being played with suspicion, but once they sit down and enter the game, the nuances become interesting. So like sports and card games, and other forms of entertainment, the Mass only makes sense once you start playing and understanding it. You have to play to appreciate a game, not read the rule book or watch in confusion.

However, sports and card games do not address the gaping, vacuous, never-ending pit in our hearts that seeks the ultimate purpose and meaning of our existence. Distractions can plug the void for a bit, but eventually you need something more. Something to hang onto when you are no longer playing but perhaps: staring at a bedroom ceiling at 4 AM or sitting in a hospital waiting room or after having a miscarriage or losing a pet or when you are drowning in anxiety or you can’t stop scrolling porn or keep yourself from drinking to inebriation.

The thing about sports and entertainment is that they don’t address the core problem. Moreover, they require a good deal of energy to stay in motion. The NFL has lasted over fifty years in America, which seems a long time. But it has only lasted because of immense marketing and sales efforts to make it cool and sexy. The moment the marketing fails, the TV contracts will fade, and the stadiums will empty. The bread and circuses of modern America only survive because of peace after World War II (at least within the country), our incredible affluence, and our desire to fill spare hours with distractions. Our efficiency has allowed odd things like the NFL to spring up and flourish, but like Elvis, it will eventually fade away.

Anyone who has worked in sales knows how hard it is, how much smoke and mirrors is needed, how much bending of the truth is required, to keep up the numbers, especially when you’re selling a bad product. The product, in the end, must sell itself. The NFL requires a marketing machine that the ancient world could not fathom. But there’s a reason so much advertising and endorsing and imagery is required, just as there is a reason that boring things like Arm & Hammer Baking Soda doesn’t need a lot of clever pitching. A person buys Arm & Hammer Baking Soda one time and it works, and then keeps buying the same product for forty, fifty, sixty years. Wealthy or poor, attractive or ugly, tall or short, college educated or “deplorable”: they all trust in Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and don’t need reminders plastered all over the TV or in their mailbox or on their phones.

Some things just work. It fulfills a need. Baking Soda doesn’t oversell its basic capability by promising that you’ll be taller or better looking, or that all of your dreams will come true. The NFL is selling that story. If your team wins, you win. If your team wins, you will be fulfilled. If your team doesn’t win, somehow you have lost. To be happy, your team must win. The NFL reminds me of the Bergens in the animated movie, Trolls, where the Bergens think the only way to be happy is if they eat a Troll. Likewise, I know people that may only be happy if the Vikings or Jets win the Super Bowl. You hear this line: “I can die happy if the Vikes win…” Give me a break. Go eat a troll.

Addendum: eating a troll is not like eating the Eucharist, for anyone who might like to link the idea. Receiving the Eucharist does not implant “happiness,” it brings us into Communion with God, and in eating the consecrated host we do not kill God, as a Bergen does to a Troll. God cannot be killed. We’ve already tried that, and it didn’t work because he popped back up on the third day. The Eucharist is the Risen and Glorified Body of Christ. Receive Him frequently, as frequently as you can.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

For the record, I don’t care about Han Solo or whether he shot first in the cantina scene in Star Wars. I care about Matthew. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Mark, too, and Luke, and John. It’s just that Mark didn’t shoot first. Mark shot second.

Like Mark Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral, it started with a line such as, “I’ve come to bury Matthew, not to praise him!” This scholarship to remove Matthew as the first Gospel writer started in anti-Catholic Protestant universities in Europe, using biased textual criticism that ignored all historical testimony in writing and Sacred Tradition.

But why would they do that?

Why would anyone do that?

Who benefits?

Let me beat this topic a bit longer…

First and foremost, knocking down Matthew to second or third very clearly elevates the Protestant argument against Peter as the first Pope and apostolic succession. This cannot be understated. If there is one position to attack on the Catholic Church, it’s to get the Papacy in check-mate, and when the direct assault of the Protestants didn’t work, a long “march through the culture” happened in the universities. Today we can observe the atheists like Bart Ehrman in lockstep with the Marxists. It makes for strange bedfellows. Since the workers of the world did not unite to overthrow capitalism and religion, a long atheist “march through the culture” is happening. (Spoiler alert: at the end these marches, guess who will still be there? Yes, the answer is the Catholic Church. This is not the first rodeo for the Church. There have been large, violent, and lengthy attacks before in the forms of the Arians, Nestorians, Albigensians, Islam, and a hundred others.)

As we watch the fragmentation of Protestantism, and the latest ascendency of what is becoming known as wokeness, we can observe a process of atomization unfolding. A scattering is happening. We can read about the annual splintering of the Baptists at their conventions. Even this week as I write this, the United Methodist Church will soon be no longer United but “Wedged” instead. On the other side, the unbelievers form factions that come and go, like the Masons, the humanists, the deconstructionists, the freethinkers, the “Brights” (the hilarious, brief attempt at a religion started by Richard Dawkins, which I was quite enamored with when I was fallen away and thought Dawkins was deep instead of ridiculous). These fads come and go, because none of them are from God. We are in the last days of the Masons because they were always just a reaction and a copycat. The humanists can’t get along, or even form a coherent set of ideas, because they worship the human, and that makes for seven billion gods. The woke are already destroying one another, as the head is now eating the tail. One thing that always plays out is the breakdown of unity among unbelievers.

It’s ugly.

It’s not beautiful.

It’s ugly…because it’s not from God.

The tragedy, however, in doing this teardown of Matthew, is that these well-intentioned Pope-haters (which is considered a virtue in some Protestant circles) managed to undermine all of sacred scripture, not just the parts that affect the Catholic Church. A nice summary of this long tragedy is in a book by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker called The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture. The obsession with scholarly insight into scripture did not elevate the word of God, it devalued it and ripped out the supernatural altogether. Yet the supernatural is still in there, despite decades of academic wrestling over.

Why does this research undermine the Gospel? Because if Matthew is written after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, when the Romans laid waste to all things Jewish, Jesus’ prediction about the temple being disassembled becomes really, really weak. If Matthew wrote this after 70 A.D., which all “modern” biased scholarship suggests, then it makes no sense.

As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Matthew 24:1-2)

Now, faithful scholarship believes Matthew was written between 42 and 68 A.D., which makes sense with this statement (and everything else above). However, scholars who lack faith place Matthew as being written after 70 A.D. and only that Matthew drew from “earlier sources,” but the problem is that the suspicion is already branded on the text and when scholars refer to “earlier sources” they are not referring to the Hebrew version of Matthew that tradition speaks about.

And here are the suspicions: 1.) That the prediction of the temple destruction was added after the fact to make Jesus look prophetic. 2.) That the pro-Catholic verses about Peter and the Sacraments were added later to shore up the case for Catholic authority. 3.) That all of the Gospel is dubious at best because so much time passed that an eyewitness account is impossible.

What I can never fully get my head around is this. The main argument for Mark being first is that…:

Mark is shorter.

The second reason is that Mark is…:

Mark is a weaker writer.

Both of these arguments can be turned around and argued against to say that Matthew was first because Matthew is longer and Matthew is a better writer. These arguments for “Mark shot first” are inventions and bear no weight whatsoever on facts, and you can argue it until you are blue in the face without it getting anywhere, and scholars have done just that. But somehow these arguments have great staying power because scholarship has anointed these two ideas with the ink of published papers. Never mind that the journals are biased toward “Mark shot first” to begin with. Never mind that you probably can’t get a job teaching Biblical studies if you objected to these arguments (read this fascinating article about 19th century German hiring and firing of those who didn’t toe the party line).

The following may come as a shock to the modern person who likes to “follow the science” and assumes that science and experts would never lie: scholars and scientists are every bit as prone to simping, scapegoating, and “dry-labbing” facts as are religious and business people, and correcting an error in scholarship or science is like turning a super-tanker around in the ocean; it takes a long time, and a lot of energy, and a lot of convincing, because usually no one wants to admit things are going in the wrong direction. There’s too much money, time, and sunk costs to change direction. The Titanic didn’t sink because an iceberg hit it. The Titanic sunk because it ran into an iceberg. The problem of pride in the mind and assumed perfection preceded the collision. The iceberg just happened to be the reality that smashed a false idea.

In praise of science, it usually will self-correct over time because sooner or later someone calls out the lie. The researcher who produces false results will be outed, even if it takes a century. However, Biblical scholarship is not biology or physics, so there is much more room for bias, just like in sociology or history or literary criticism, and the will of whoever is in power, whether it’s a king or department chair, can skew the results dramatically toward the desired outcome through wordsmithing. Even in hiring, the bias for the desired outcome of future research is accomplished, because if an academic researcher would like a job but shows inclinations against the status quo, then their application will be passed over. This is no different than the Church, where an atheist cannot become a priest. But the faith is laid out in full display in the Church, where the preachers and teachers must profess the faith. In academia, this is hidden. Under the guise of “free speech” there is anything but such a thing, and therein lies the problem: the lies. Thus is a bias and motive protected, fenced off, in the walled gardens of academia, and there is no place more fenced off in the modern world than the university. They are the modern Levites, the experts who hand down the truth. As we try to downplay Moses and religious ways, our modern academic experts act more like Moses on Sinai than Moses himself, even wearing lab coats in their TV interviews, or being interviewed in rooms with walls bearing diplomas for the lay people, or giving TED talks from on high to the plebes watching at home on YouTube.

So, back to the absurd argument of “It’s shorter.” If I want to argue that “Mark shot first” because “it’s shorter,” if I stare long and hard enough at Mark, I will find a case and enough evidence for the outcome I’m seeking. This is the beauty of textual criticism - it’s an interpretive dance based solely on internal evidence, and therefore a fantasy.

On the flip side, if I want to argue that Matthew is first because “it’s longer,” I can do that, too. After all, you can spin a text into whatever you like, if you just use internal evidence of the text itself.

The difference, however, is that a scholar most likely cannot publish the findings for an argument that “Matthew is longer, therefore first.” In secular academics, to get a job teaching such things, or to get accepted in a graduate program, is unlikely. This is the problem with modern academia; it is as rigid as the Pharisees in what you are allowed to say or believe. The book 1984 was written in an era of totalitarian governments, but today it applies very well to American universities and public schools, and this is exactly why so many teachers are leaving the profession. No one enjoys living a lie.

As a former English major, I will say this pointing at myself: This spin problem is why you never want English majors being the navigators for your nation. They can spin gold into straw very easily, but they cannot spin straw into gold. They can only spin. They spin and toil and undo things, but by and large they do not create anything. A career is made of unpacking and teasing out meaning, calling out prejudices, pointing out oppression - but never producing or making anything. Lit-crit and Biblical-crit at the modern university is full of morality, guilt, and finger-pointing, to the point that three modern academics were able to publish several hoax papers on grievance studies that were accepted mainly because of their use on ridiculous postmodern jargon. “The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called ‘grievance studies’, referring to academic areas where they claim ‘a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed… and put social grievances ahead of objective truth’.”

Now, with the humanities in free-fall, the jig is up on modern scholarship, since it’s reaching the tipping point, the last phase, where the head becomes too heavy for the body to carry it any longer. Now we reach the point in a society where the workers of the world unite, but not the way that intellectuals like Marx think. The workers unite because they are tired of pulling the cart and being told they are the evil ones.

So for the most part, I try not to worry about this long attack on Matthew. Jesus warned us not to worry. One thing is for sure: even if Matthew hadn’t written at all, and we were still simply rolling by oral tradition, the message of Christ would still be growing, because it is from God, and nothing on this earth, nothing in this world, can halt what is from God.

Jesus warned us about spinning and toiling, using clothing as an example, and clothing is even a metaphor in the Garden to hide our nakedness. Our reputations and opinions are kind of like clothing, where we fashion these elaborate fig leaves to cover ourselves. Jesus warns us to knock it off, and quit worrying: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.” He warns us about men of little faith: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”

So I should really just stop bothering about the fact that “Matthew shot first,” because I know that tradition tells us his Gospel was first, and having faith means trusting in Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church. I know that.

And yet, sometimes I let it bother me, because the real reason behind all of this is not a search for the truth, but the search for an outcome.

The obvious aim of this kind of scholarship from the start has been to undermine the Church, and it remains so to this day. Whether it comes from the cynicism of unbelievers or the broadsides of Protestants, the desired outcome is the capitulation of the bishop of Rome, a.k.a. the Pope, who is on the chair of Peter, on the rock of the Church that Christ founded. And clearly scholars will not destroy the church, because Jesus promised that the “gates of hell will not prevail against” his Church.

So they can certainly try to undermine it, but ultimately will fail, and they are failing now. It will play out exactly as every other attempt to destroy the Church, in that it will be messy, but the Church will remain when the dust settles, just as it has outlasted every other heresy and empire.

This campaign has produced thousands of papers and articles on the Synoptic Problem, which was not a problem at all until modern scholarship made it into one, in the same universities that brought us the sad philosophy and ideas that conjured 20th century Germany, China, and the Soviet Union, and all of the horrors. These things are not unrelated. The stoking of the “will-to-power” didn’t just happen in political nationalism and social Darwinism and Marxist revolutions. It happened most definitely in Biblical scholarship as well. Now, they meant it for bad, but as always, God will in the end, use it for good. This is how God deals with folks like Julius Wellhausen and Gottlieb Storr. He will do so with modern doubters too, like Bart Ehrman and his atheist disciples.

The funny thing about scholarship’s search for “truth” that wants to debunk Christianity is that they often end up organizing and collating information better so that new insights to Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition can be found. In other words, the unbelievers and anti-Catholics help faithful writers write better books on the truth of Christ. The anti-Catholics are like Joseph’s eleven brothers in Genesis that throw him down the well and sell him into slavery, only to find out later that Joseph ended up thriving while they starved.

In short, there was great incentive to crush Catholicism in Lutheran Germany from the time old Gottlieb Storr first whispered the idea of “Mark shot first” in 1786. For any philosophy aficionados, this connection will be interesting: one of Gottlieb Storr’s students was none other than Hegel, who was the muse of Karl Marx. You have to marvel at it really, how these connections lead down the path of unbelief. The mess we are in today is the product of a lot of cross-pollination and rebellion (I wanted to say inbreeding but that would be uncharitable). What’s interesting to me is these Hatfields and McCoys are actually all in the same family, as Protestant Storr begat unbelieving Hegel, and Hegel begat atheist Marx, and Marx begat Nietzsche, and Nietzsche begat Sartre, and Sartre begat Derrida, and Derrida begat Foucault, and Foucault begat the many-headed monster of wokeism. These are the names. This is how we’ve come to live in the book of Judges again in 2023 because “in those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 21:25) The path of denying that sin exists starts small, but balloons into the denial of God. In hindsight, this all should have been as predictable as a stock market bubble, but the prophets of doom, those annoying gnats, are never heard until afterward.

When Bismarck and company were consolidating power in Germany, this little snowball of Biblical criticism rolled, and rolled, and rolled, and the re-shaping of the Bible into a secular book has been so successful that when I attended a Catholic University for a year (from which I want my money back), I learned about “Marcan Priority,” which is a fancy way of saying that “Mark shot first.” I was also told that “We don’t know who wrote the Gospels.” Both of these statements are false.

If only that were the worst of it. The “Mark shot first” theory is not only taught in Catholic colleges. No, no, no. “Mark shot first” is taught in the American bishops’ official Bible footnotes, in the “New American Bible,” the NAB. The Bible translation itself is fine. It’s the footnotes that destroy faith. I am not alone in this feeling. Many others, like Jimmy Akin and Trent Horn to name just two of them, do not like the footnotes, or even the translation very much. You cannot read a page of Matthew in the New American Bible without the writer of the footnotes mentioning the hypothetical “Q” source (a document that doesn’t exist and was probably Matthew in Aramaic or Hebrew if it did exist). Further, the footnote author mentions Marcan priority, and Mark as the source.

So the footnotes of the New American Bible disagree with 1800 years of Tradition. How interesting. Someday I hope to learn who the author was of these footnotes.

The root problem here is a lack of a supernatural view of the Bible, of which I may do a whole additional series on, because it’s so important, but I can’t dive deeply on it here without getting way off track, as I tend to do.

This Bible, this New American Bible, with these heretical and faithless footnotes, is given to Confirmation students across America. It is everywhere. They are given out like a medal, a right of passage at Confirmation.

I’ve discarded mine. So should you. Get a Word on Fire Bible or Ignatius Study Bible instead, or if you don’t want a Catholic study Bible, get an ESV Study Bible that has faithful footnotes.

I guess I can breathe a sigh of relief here because most Catholics don’t actually read the Bible. (Score one for the Protestants. See - I don’t always pick on the protestors. Some of the Protestant study Bibles have better footnotes, far more faithful ones than the New American Bible).

Worst of all, the USCCB, the United States Catholic Bishops’ website, uses these same footnotes. I weep. Here I weep.

This is a travesty that must be uprooted and ripped out of the Church. I wrote a letter to the USCCB requesting that the footnotes be taken down, or better, printed off and used for kindling. (“But that’s book burning, you Nazi!”) Fine, let’s just delete them and use the Ignatius Study Bible footnotes instead. Now there is a Catholic study Bible that is faithful to the Scripture and the Tradition.

Again, the New American Bible is fine, but the footnotes must have been written by my liberal arts professors who hadn’t been to Mass in a long time - probably ever since they received their New American Bible with the footnotes about Marcan priority!

Matthew shot first.

As I’ve mentioned before, in the Bible, in the Commandments, and in the story of Creation, order matters, and the order of which the four evangelists wrote also matters greatly. The ordering of them in the form of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John doesn’t just roll off the tongue. It’s also the order in which they came to be on paper. And even if Matthew was translated from Hebrew into Greek, he was first, has always been first, and the early Church had no reason to pretend this was the case, unlike the scholars who tried to upend history by twisting words.

One thing that should be an immediate head scratcher for you is this: if Christianity started in Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified, effectively on Pentecost, and most of the initial arguments were with Jews and Christ’s followers, then why would Mark, written in Greek, be the first?

Warning: if you attend a university, almost any university, you will never hear these arguments. This is all hidden from you, as the modern Biblical scholars have buried these. In 1995, I was taught only Marcan Priority…at a Catholic college, of all places. The great thing about truth, however, is that it cannot be buried forever. My hope is that someday, just as the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by some kids throwing rocks in caves, that another jar will turn up in Israel, and inside it will be Aramaic Matthew, and all of this false scholarship, and I mean all of it, will turn to dust.

Matthew shot first.

The following is from a biblical site where people argue about these things, copied in full. (From https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com).

What are the arguments in favor of Matthean Priority?

External Evidence

* Matthew is almost unanimously testified as the oldest gospel by the church fathers. Clement of Alexandria even supported both Matthew and Luke as before Mark. This is significant because Mark is said to have founded the Coptic branch of Christianity in Alexandria, Egypt. If any place were to argue for Markan priority, Egypt would be the most likely. A sampling of the church fathers' testimony follows:

* Papias “Matthew wrote in Hebrew and others translated.” (HE 3.39.16)

* Origen said the first gospel was written by Matthew in Hebrew. (HE 6.25.4)

* Irenaeus (grandson in the faith of John by Polycarp of Smyrna) said the first gospel was written written by Matthew in land of Hebrews in their own language. (Against Heresies. 3.1.1)

* Eusebius — Matthew had first preached to Hebrews and wrote in their own language (HE 3.24.6)

* Jerome “Matthew was the first to compose in Hebrew and his text is still available in [library near Bethlehem].” He even challenged his critics to go see it if they doubted. (Lives of Illustrious Men ch. 3)

As the church rose out of the mission to the gentiles, it is interesting that the church fathers supported the Judaic gospel of Matthew instead of Mark. Also consider that they testify that Mark was the companion of the Apostle Peter in Rome which became one of the five sees of the early church (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, Egypt). Unless the tradition of Matthean priority were very early, it is unlikely that they would all arrive at it independently. In fact, the slight differences in their testimonies provide evidence that they came from different sources.

* Even though one of the main arguments for Markan priority is that Mark is shorter and "later authors would be more likely to expand than contract," such is not always the case (see, for example, the Reader's Digest Condensed Library). Summarizing a longer work is well known and has been for a long time. There are even ancient works which name their sources and state, "this work will be a shorter, more understandable account of the events than X."

* The Didache clearly relies on Matthew. While the date of this document is debated between AD 50 and AD 150, the earlier it is, the earlier Matthew has to be.

* When you examine second-century Christian writings, Matthew is quoted far more frequently than Mark. So is Luke. If Mark enjoyed a period when it was the only written gospel, it seems that it should have been more popular. Likewise, Matthew's Gospel enjoys a more central place in the second century liturgy than any other gospel or even Paul's epistles. (see, for example, Massaux's extensive treatment of the subject here)

Internal Evidence

I am separating textual evidence from internal evidence. The difference is that internal evidence will be themes or concepts while textual evidence deals with specific words and phrases.

* The fall of Jerusalem is completely missing from Matthew. This event rocked the Jewish world. Matthew, who so often points out when a prophecy is fulfilled, does not add an editorial comment to Jesus' prophecy that Jerusalem would be overthrown. Not a single "and this prophecy was fulfilled" about the fall.

Some have pointed to Matthew 22:7 as referring to the fall of Jerusalem as an event happening in the past. In fact, this verse is almost universally accepted as such. However, sending in troops and burning a city with fire were quite common ways of dealing with troublesome cities in the past. In fact, it is so common in Near Eastern, Old Testament, and Rabbinic writings that its occurrence here should not be thought to refer to a single event.

Moreover, for an after-the-fact prophecy, Matt 22:7 is very inexact. While the walls of Jerusalem fell, it was the temple that burned. In fact, post event "prophecies" do make this distinction.

We have overthrown the wall of Zion and we have burnt the place of the mighty God (II Baruch 7.1). [I.e. the temple. For this sense, cf. II Mace. 5.17-20; John 11.48; Acts6.14; 21.28; etc.]

They delivered ... to the enemy the overthrown wall, and plundered the house, and burnt the temple (II Baruch 80.3).

And a Roman leader shall come to Syria, who shall burn down Solyma's [Jerusalem's] temple with fire, and therewith slay many men, and shall waste the great land of the Jews with its broad way (Sibylline Oracles 4.125-7).

It seems to me that if this were being written post AD 70, then the prophecy would have been altered to distinguish the fates of the city and temple. Christians did come to see the burning of the Temple as God's judgment on the Jewish leadership, but the events do not correspond closely enough to require Christ's parable to be a reference to it or the wording to be an after the fact description. A final note on Matthew and the city can be found in Matthew 27:8 ("For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day."). Matthew seems to view the city as still intact when he writes that.

Likewise, the cryptic statement in Matt 24, "let the reader understand" need not mean the "this prophecy has been fulfilled." Whenever Matthew wants to say that a prophecy has been fulfilled, he says so (for example, Matt 1:22; 2:15; 2:23; 3:15; 4:14; etc).

I understand Matthew 24 to be referring to the parousia. Matthew states that the distress of those days will be followed immediately by the coming of the Son of Man (24:29). This did not happen in AD 70. If Matthew is trying to portray Jesus as an unmatched prophet, he failed by including material that did not happen.

* While Matthew contains a high Christology, this by no means means it has to be written after Mark who does not present such a high theology. (Easily explained if Mark's Gospel is meant for an audience who is new in the faith.) Paul's letters contain a high Christology, and most scholars date Paul (died ~64) before Mark (who they place ~70). Moreover, Paul's letters show that Christian traditions even earlier than his had a high Christology.

* The same can be said for Matthew's high liturgy. In fact, one of the verses that is brought out to show Matthew came late in the first century or beyond is Matthew 18:17 based on the word "church." However, this ignores that the Greek word used there, ecclesia, enjoyed wide usage in the Septuagint to translate qahal, "sacred assembly," and was used by diaspora Jews.

Textual Evidence

* There are a significant number of places in Matthew where the parallel account in Mark makes more sense to have been edited down than for Matthew to expand. It is possible to read Mark with the hypothesis that it came from Matthew and run into no redactional problems that challenge said hypothesis. However, reading Matthew as a redaction of Mark does cause such problems.

* There are places where Mark uses a certain word but Matthew does not, even though he used that word in other places (for example "pherein"). This makes more sense with Mark editing Matthew than of Matthew copying Mark.

* There are places where Matthew has phrases he likes and uses them consistently. Mark has parallels of most of these accounts and is very free in his translations of the phrases. It makes more sense for Mark to be free styling from Matthew than it does for Matthew to be forcing the phrase into his wording whenever he sees it in Mark. One of these phrases is opias de genomenes, found first in Mt 8:16 and Mk 1:32. Markan priority has to conclude that Matthew copied the form exactly as Mark had it the first time, then always and consistently used the same grammar whenever he found a similar phrase in Mark and introducing it himself in Mt 20:8 which has no parallel in Mark.

* There are places where Mark combines details from both Matthew and Luke. An example of these duplicate expressions can be seen in Mark 1:32 compared to Mt 8:16 and Luk 4:40.

Mk 1:32 When evening came, after the sun had set, they began bringing to Him all who were ill and those who were demon-possessed.

Mt 8:16 When evening came, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed; and He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were ill.

Lk 4:40 While the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to Him; and laying His hands on each one of them, He was healing them.

In these parallels, Mark combines the introductory phrases from both Matthew and Luke. In this case, Markan priority would require that Luke know of both Matthew and Mark and consciously choose to use the exact phrase that Matthew does not. However, if Matthew writes first and Luke second, there is no such problem.

* Matthew leaves semitisms in place where Mark smoothens them. This includes wording and patterns that Mark breaks. Yes, Mark has eight semitic words, but Matthew has many more semitisms (so does Luke, a plethora of semitisms). Many of Mark's semitisms seem to be added for drama while Matthew's flow naturally.

Adding to the semitisms are 12 times where Matthew (and Luke) uses the participle of a verb while Mark uses the past tense. Using a participle for the second verb in a set (and he answered, saying) is well-known when coming from a semitic language (all over the Septuagint) but is not used in normal Greek. Mark also uses these participles but not as often. It would be more likely to edit them out than to edit them back in.

Many more examples exist where Matthew and Luke agree with one another in wording and Mark is different.

* Matthew and Luke both record 8 healing miracles. Mark has 10. The two left out of both Matthew and Luke are the saliva miracles (Mark 7:32-35 and 8:24). Did they both decide to skip the same miracles independently or did Mark add them from another source?

More details can be found here and here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

Star Wars nerds have an argument about Han Solo, and whether he fired his gun first in the bar scene of “A New Hope.” There are t-shirts that say, “Han shot first.” I am here to tell you of a similar argument, one that has far greater importance and consequence for anyone that believes Jesus is God incarnate, also known as the Creator of the Universe. This one matters immensely because your spiritual life may depend on how you answer it, and the truth about this matters much in the founding of Christ’s Church. This question is about which Gospel was written first, and I am here to tell you:

Matthew shot first.

Matthew wrote the first Gospel.

He wrote it in Hebrew first before it was translated into Greek.

He wrote it before the year 70 A.D.

And it was Matthew the Apostle that wrote it, not some random Matthew from Accounting.

Why does any of this matter? Because for two centuries, people have been spending incredible amounts of ink to disprove this Tradition, because it undermines the Church.

According to Sacred Tradition, from Papias and Irenaeus, to Ignatius of Antioch, all the way to St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Matthew was known to be the first Gospel. This is documented in various writings from the Church fathers. The whole tradition of the Church said so for nearly two millennia. For a terrific read on this, check out Brant Pitre’s book The Case for Jesus which cuts through two hundred years of fog spewed from anti-Catholic scholarship and atheists. For anyone who attended college in the 1990s, brace yourself and be seated when reading this book. Much of what I learned in my freshman year of college turned out to be false, it’s just unfortunate that I can’t get a refund from Viterbo University for it. (Note: there’s a video series on formed.org of Pitre’s The Case for Jesus).

Matthew happens to be the Gospel with the most pro-Catholic references. But that is not the reason I believe it is important to believe that Matthew shot first. Not at all. Rather, it is the overwhelming evidence of history and testimony of the early church that indicates that Matthew, the apostle, wrote a Hebrew or Aramaic gospel first, and no one batted an eye about this claim until 19th century scholars decided that Matthew a.) didn’t write it all, and b.) wrote it much later, and c.) maybe didn’t even exist.

All of Christianity, for 1800 years, knew that the gospel of Matthew was written first, hence the ordering that we all learn as children: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Until the 19th century, in Germany’s “culture war” (Kulturkampf) against the Catholic Church, Matthew shot first. Then, magically, by textual criticism, in mostly Lutheran academic circles, suddenly Mark became the first Gospel.

You have to marvel at this sudden change, when you consider how much Catholics and other faithful talk about Jesus, and things related to Jesus, and anything that could possibly even relate to Jesus. People talk about Jesus and the Gospels like breathing air. But we are to assume that for 1800 years, no one had really thought about which Gospel was written first? And, stranger still, only when the Protestant era and Enlightenment humanism arrived did the topic finally come up?

I find it difficult to imagine that the early Church members, from bishops downward to the lowliest lay person, didn’t constantly discuss these things. Moreover, you have copies of Matthew scattered about the known world with “According to Matthew” written at the very top of the scrolls, indicating very clearly that the authorship was not in question. But suddenly in modern times, the question erupts: “Did Matthew really write Matthew?”

There is literally no copy of Matthew that does not have his name written at the top. Zero. The only question of authorship comes from those who do not want it to be written by an apostle and an eyewitness of Jesus’ life.

Further, there is not a single argument in the writings of the early Church that dispute that Matthew was written first. When scripture first started being read in liturgy, the Church would still have been almost entirely oral tradition. In other words, spreading the word of Jesus was not done by handing someone a Gideon’s Bible or leaving a pamphlet on the bathroom sink at the airport. No, the word, was all passed on by the spoken word, and through relationships. Anyone still remember relationships? This is hard to remember for us now, but relationships and human contact was a pre-Internet phenomenon when people got together and talked about things that really mattered to them instead of watching cat videos, sports, and porn by themselves.

In the early church, there was no printing press, and most people were illiterate. So if you wanted to learn about Christ, you had to talk about Christ with others, listen, repeat, retell, and revisit. No podcasts were available, no wordy blogs like this one. Yet clearly the copyists and the Church fathers knew that Matthew existed, wrote the first Gospel, and wrote it first. This is what is called Tradition in the Catholic Church.

It is beyond my ceiling of credibility to imagine that no one during the Apostolic era stopped to ask, or thought to discuss, or bent anyone’s ear about which evangelist wrote first, or who wrote it. We are to believe that we had to wait some 1800 years for English and German Protestant scholars to come up with these questions.

Now, I can watch just about any fantasy or science fiction movie and let my ceiling be raised to accommodate the director’s or author’s imagination, but I cannot imagine that no one said, “Hey guys, which Gospel was written first?”

In addition, the one Apostle who most certainly knew how to write was the tax collector, Matthew, who worked in Jerusalem and would have obviously needed to know multiple languages to merely do his job. Yet, we plant this stamp of doubt upon it and ask, “Did Matthew really write Matthew?” as if no one ever asked that question.

But there is good reason for enemies of the Church to argue that Mark shot first. There are extremely compelling reasons to take up this banner and fight against “Matthew shot first.”

The motive to remove eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life is strong on the atheist side of the fence, because it increases doubt and alleviates their conscience for not believing. If you push Matthew out to 90 A.D., then a sixty year gap from Crucifixion to writing the Gospel makes it more of a legend than a biography.

On the flip side, for Protestants, moving Matthew to a much later date elevates the argument against Peter as the first Pope. Matthew is full of references to Peter as the founder of Christ’s Church, as well as the Sacraments of confession and marriage being defined exactly as the Church still teaches them in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In both cases, the Church is attacked. This is nothing new, and every heresy and battle the Catholic Church ever faced comes from the same places, going as far back as Marcion, Pelagius, Arius, Celsus, and every other would-be Pope-slayer.

But here’s one of the funny things about all of those historical heresies: not one of them, not a single one, ever challenged the idea that Matthew shot first. This only came up relatively recently, starting in countries with kings and politicians that hated the Church, who were either Protestant or unbelievers.

But most interesting is that in both writing the author as Matthew and declaring the order with Matthew first, the early church had no motive or reason to lie about any of this, because neither the specter of atheism nor the idea of future Protestantism in the 16th century would have occurred to them.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how every scribe in the world wrote “The Gospel according to Matthew” on top of the scroll, when as this thing was spread out it was like feathers flying out of a pillow from a rooftop. Yet, we are to believe that every scribe who caught a feather was somehow in on a conspiracy to mask the authorship of some random writer by tricking everyone into believing that the apostle Matthew wrote it. Perhaps more amazing is the minor, miniscule errors in copying that the scribes made as this document flew around the world.

To follow this a bit more, we are to believe that those first Christians who were willing to preach in the streets and be martyred for proclaiming the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, had some kind of massive, Orwellian, bureaucratic memory-hole operation in place to bury any copy that could have unwound the conspiracy. This is beyond comprehension, because it assumes that rather than just trying to spread the word of Jesus, the apostles were master manipulators, like Machiavelli, or Iago from Othello, and somehow these fishermen cooked up a story so profound and so life-changing, that not only were they willing to tell it to everyone, but they were willing to be boiled, clubbed, beaten, stabbed, flayed, and crucified for it.

The “synoptic problem” was not a problem until it was a problem for unbelievers and Protestants, especially kings who wanted to have their own form of religion and morality, like every mythological cult that ever got started. The problem with allowing kings and power into your religion is that in that very moment, that instant, you’ve lost your religion. This is, essentially, what paganism is. It’s the hammering of God’s law and natural law to fit the goals of the king or the State. And re-writing history to remove Matthew is one of those methods of “winning” that modern kings and governments and academics have attempted to use.

But the motive of the Apostles motives was evangelism, as they were on fire with the Holy Spirit, literally, from Pentecost onward. Things were moving at a pace far too fast for creeping conspiracies, and the Word of God was spreading even without them, because as soon as they told someone, that person told the next, and the next, and the next.

It’s worth pointing out that the Apostles and early Church Fathers didn’t have TV or YouTube, so they had immense amounts of time to ponder these things, and they knew the scriptures, not to mention Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, far better than anyone alive today. They lived far closer to the oral tradition and the texts themselves, and St. Jerome even wrote that he saw and read from the Hebrew version of Matthew in Alexandria.

What scholars do with lines like that is find an error in the writing, unrelated to the claim, and then cast out the author as “unreliable.” Or they look to the motives and say, “This Church father was a propagandist for the Catholic Church.” This is classic hitman work, but if that is the case, then this cancel culture should be applied equally to modern scholarship, where if any error is ever made, the Ph.D. should be rescinded. As for who I would rather trust, I would take saints Jerome, Augustine, Papias, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Matthew himself over the 19th century anti-Catholics and 20th century atheists. After all, a lot of the Church Fathers and the Apostles died for their proclamations, and none of them, not one, cracked and cried out in the fires or at their beheadings, “You’re right, I lied. We all lied! In the seven weeks between the Crucifixion and Pentecost, we came up with a grand conspiracy, and we would say that Matthew wrote in Hebrew first, and that he wrote it after the Temple was destroyed so that we could make it look prophetic, and actually Matthew didn’t write it all, it was Matthew from Accounting - he wrote it! We hired a ghost writer, just please, please don’t kill me!”

No, they go to their deaths. They go boldly, without apostatizing or recanting. They die saying things much different than what I just imagined.

"Eighty-six years have I have served him," Polycarp said on his way to the fire, "and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my king and my savior?"

Ignatius of Antioch, dragging his chains, spoke defiantly to the Roman emperor Trajan. He said, “You are in error, emperor, when you call the demons of your nation gods. For there is but one God who made heaven, earth, the sea and all that are in them. And one Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God.” Church tradition even holds that Ignatius was the actual kid that Jesus held in the Gospel stories. (Mt 18:1-5)

In other words, guys like Ignatius of Antioch were alive when Christ was alive. He met Jesus. So here’s the dilemma, the choice: am I to believe a 19th or 20th century scholar who spent all of his time in a library reviewing fragments of paper and letting his imagination soar, or am I to believe the testimony of Matthew, Ignatius, Papias, Irenaeus, Jerome, Eusebius, Augustine, and all the others, who lived and died in the era when the Church was forming and when many were being slaughtered by kings and governors in professing that Jesus is the son of God?

I choose the latter. Sorry, C.H. Weisse. Sorry, Bart Ehrman. It requires more faith to believe anything that Ehrman claims than it does to believe in the Resurrection of Christ. Here’s the thing: these scholars have sacrificed nothing and only sown doubt, and led millions to the death of their faith. It is not difficult to destroy faith. It is difficult to be in the counter-culture and live a life of faith. Ehrman and the others may be searching for truth, but they are doing so in the darkness, willfully choosing to reject God, which is what God allows us to do. Each of us has the choice to turn toward or away from God, and the effort of scholars to spurn God requires that they reject hard historical written evidence in order to produce and uphold their faith in nothing. But then of course they must do this - when all you have is this world, and no spiritual life, it’s imperative that you recruit others to your worldview, because we all need our cheerleaders, and standing alone in the abyss without God is a lonely place to be. We get to choose our own hell, but some of us like Ehrman want others to choose it as well.

St. Thomas, the doubting apostle, was told, “Blessed are those who have not seen and believe.” (Jn. 20:29)

This is, of course, the great test, the final test, the one we get to answer on our deathbed. It’s the one that Ehrman and Dawkins have already answered, but could still change their mind. It’s the kind of final exam you really don’t need to study for, but you do need to prepare for it, because how you decide will crystallize your eternal state.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for me to believe is that we have several different writings from Church Fathers which mention that Matthew first wrote a document in Hebrew, but because we cannot find that document today, we assume it doesn’t exist. Here’s a news flash for modern people: paper crumbles. Time decays paper. If you don’t believe me, go find your grandmother’s photo album and inspect it. There’s this odd sense that if we don’t dig up the original draft that it didn’t exist, when we know full well that paper falls apart, and copyists had to copy and yes, even translate the texts. There is a reason scribes were called scribes, and that was to copy texts so they didn’t disintegrate. Yet many deny a Hebrew writing by Matthew exists because we haven’t found it.

But this leads us to the best part, the most fantastic and ludicrous thing of all about 19th century German scholarship and 20th century atheist scholarship, which has even bled over into Catholic teaching at universities like the one I attended. You cannot make up the next part, except that they did make it up…

Of all things that confound me, replacing this Hebrew version of Matthew, we have scholars who have invented a fictional document called “Q” for which there is no evidence, no scrap, not a letter of, but which is assumed to exist. So we have writings that mention Matthew’s earlier writing in Hebrew, which is discarded for a hypothetical document that is not mentioned anywhere, has never existed, and will never exist, that takes its place. We even have St. Jerome saying that he saw a Hebrew version of Matthew in Alexandria. We have testimony of eyes on the Hebrew version of Matthew. However, this fairy Q document has nothing, but is treated as if it were the first Gospel.

So the next time someone tells you that Matthew was written after 80 A.D., you should assume that they are referring to the Greek translation of Matthew, because there is clearly a Hebrew version of Matthew, of some kind, of some format, written long before that. Because if the scholars can “prove” that a Greek translation of Matthew was written after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, and that someone other than Matthew translated it, that’s not a terribly big deal. The point of massive significance is that Matthew wrote first, that Matthew wrote a Gospel, and he wrote it first in Hebrew. He was the only apostle that certainly had to be literate because of his occupation as a tax collector, and even if he dictated it to a scribe, that’s no different than any other author speaking to a secretary that types a memo.

It should come as no surprise that copies and translations had to be made, and my New Testament college professor acted as if the Gospels had to a.) either fall from the sky, b.) or had to have the finger of God directing the hand motion on the paper, or c.) if neither of the above happened, then it was just a game of telephone that only academics and the Jesus Seminar unbelievers could decipher. To this day, I am stunned, really beyond stunned, that a Catholic University was teaching and guiding students to read the output of the Jesus Seminar from the 1990s.

The same attack on Matthew has been done to the point of insanity on the books of Moses, with the same batch of motives, which is to reduce the sacred texts to “nation-building” lies, or worse, to deny the existence of Moses altogether.

When things come up like this you have to look at the motives of the scholars. To quote the Dude in The Big Lebowski, who quotes Vladimir Lenin, before his stoner mind drifts off: “You look to the person who will benefit…and ah…”

Walter Sobchak:

The Dude: It's all a fake, man. It's like Lenin said: you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know...

Donny: I am the walrus.

Who benefits from this scholarship that removes Matthew as author, as the first author, and pushes his writing back to 90 A.D.? It’s quite simple. Protestants and atheists benefit, and they benefit in different ways. The Church’s authority is undermined, which is what Protestants wanted, but funny thing about that, in their zeal for undermining Catholic authority, they undermined scripture altogether, because as soon as they finished their sprint around the track, atheists took the baton and ran so that today people don’t even believe that Jesus existed.

Now, I can go on for days about this railroading of Matthew, and I probably will, because one of the greatest attacks on the Church, sustained now for two hundred years, is this effort to force Matthew down from it’s chronological position as the first Gospel. The goal is multi-faceted. The attack has various prongs, but first of all, his writing clearly elevates the Catholic Church, and most of the scholars on this topic truly hated the Catholic Church. They still do.

Second, removing Matthew as an eyewitness account of Christ makes the miracles seem fishy. Hence, you get unbelievers like Ehrman calling it all a “telephone game” rather than eyewitness accounts of God in the flesh. What’s funny is that there is a telephone game happening, but it’s among academics starting in the 1500s right up until today in 2023.

Third, pushing Matthew’s writing to beyond the year 70 A.D. after the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, makes the prophecy of Christ about the temple destruction seem more like a statement from Captain Obvious than the Son of God. Moving the goal posts on the chronology of the Gospel writers has a clear motive, which is to remove the eyewitness nature of the accounts and play up the “telephone game” nonsense. There’s just one major problem with this,

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:1:1)

Peter and Paul were martyred before 70 A.D. So was this a vast conspiracy by Irenaeus and Papias and the various other writers to befuddle us all until we were blessed with Protestant German scholars and atheist academics? I think the QAnon people have a more plausible conspiracy theory than this one.

So who are we to believe? Some random professor today? Or Irenaeus, who was taught by Polycarp, who knew the Apostle John, who stood at the Cross during the Crucifixion? Which of these two people are more likely to have known when and by whom the Gospels were written? Here’s the pedigree of Irenaeus, who today’s random professor has written off as unreliable:

Polycarp was a bishop of the early church, a disciple of the apostle John, a contemporary of Ignatius, and the teacher of Irenaeus. According to Irenaeus, Polycarp “was instructed by the apostles, and was brought into contact with many who had seen Christ.” He lived from the latter half of the first century to the mid-second century. Polycarp was martyred by the Romans, and his death was influential, even among the pagans. (from gotquestions.org)

I choose Irenaeus.

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At the company where I work, an employee posted this on a public Slack channel for all to read:

“Catholics believe that they are actually eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus during communion. The priest says the magic words and the cracker and wine are magically transformed into the ACTUAL FLESH AND BLOOD of Jesus Christ. Ok, maybe I am stretching, but there is no denying that it is RITUAL cannibalism.”

Now, if this kind of language was used on any other religion or identity, the person would have been fired. If I had written a half-truth about Islam or sexual identity, I would be looking for work. But let’s be honest: this type of language is as common today as it was the day Jesus said the words we find in John 6. In fact, the Bread of Life Discourse and the Last Supper alert us to this mentality and misunderstanding even during Jesus’ ministry. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once said that anti-Catholic hatred is “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” But it goes much further back than that, literally all the way to Judas, as his faith stumbled after Jesus mentioned the requirements of eating and drinking of his body and blood. Normally a knife separates bread, but with Christ, the Bread is the knife. The Eucharist is central to faith and it separates people, whether they be non-believers or Christians. Even with the Catholic Church, it divides people, as many fall into the mistaken camp of “symbolism,” and everyone likes to quote Flannery O’Connor here, who famously said, “If it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it!”

Amen, Flannery.

But here’s the thing I want to talk about: my co-worker is halfway to the truth with his accusation. He’s just missing some very, very important distinctions.

He’s close to being correct with this insult, but misses the most important part of the Eucharist. Yes, the Eucharist is literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but it is the risen and glorified body of Christ. Notice that the saying, “He is Risen” uses the present tense.

From the first time Jesus mentioned that we must eat his body and drink his blood, it has divided people. The attack on the Eucharist has been going on since the Jesus’ first gave the Bread of Life Discourse, and Judas first turned away. The attack on the Eucharist goes hand in hand with persecution, and seems to resurface often, almost every time Christians are mocked or violated in the Lives of the Saints.

“They…accused us of feeding on human flesh like Thyestes and of committing incest like Oedipus, as well as other abominations which it is unlawful for us even to think of, and which we can scarcely believe ever to have been perpetrated by men.”

These same accusations are happening today. You can hardly go online without hearing that Christians are a bunch of inbred, ignorant fools. And as for the attack on the Eucharist, this has been happening since the first days of the church. This happened in the Reformation with Zwingli and many of his spiritual descendants. It happens now.

So as I said, my co-worker was close to being correct. There’s just one problem with his insult: it’s not cannibalism.

Because Jesus isn’t dead.

What my co-worker forgot, perhaps willfully, is that Jesus rose from the dead. It’s just such a fundamental error, but somehow people always miss it.

Jesus has never been eaten while dead.

He was not eaten on the cross after saying, “It is finished.” He was not eaten while he was in the tomb.

He was eaten as the Bread of Life at the Last Supper, while he was alive, and he is eaten now, after the Resurrection.

Never, not once, was Jesus eaten while he was dead.

People get all these images of The Walking Dead and zombies in their head, and miss the whole point, mostly because no one reads the Bible. But we should take note here - no one went into the tomb to eat him or try to drink his blood before it congealed. He experienced a real death on the cross and no one, not Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimethea, are recorded as eating him on the way to the tomb.

For those who have forgotten, Jesus was only dead for a short time. He’s alive now, even more than he was at the Last Supper. Here’s a take on it that may help folks like my co-worker:

“The early Church…was accused of cannibalism….  It’s not cannibalism.  He’s not dead.  He’s alive in glory with power for us…” In order to practice cannibalism, the cannibal must kill his victim, and then the cannibal’s body converts the dead flesh into his own living flesh. That’s not what happens when we consume the Eucharist. When we receive Holy Communion, Christ remains alive. We don’t change Him into us. On the contrary, He transforms us into likenesses of Himself. We become like Him whom we consume, and in so doing, we become the selves God intended us to be. (Apology Analogy)

This is mostly a problem of how we view space and time, because we struggle think of it outside of our limited, finite brains. God lives outside of space and time. Jesus is God. The risen Christ lives outside of time and space, seated in heaven. “God’s life has no end (it’s interminable), and that he possesses all of that life all at once (in a simultaneously-whole manner). He does not experience it moment-by-moment, the way we do. God’s life thus is not spread out over time the way ours is, meaning that he is outside of time.” (For more reading on the theological view of time and space, please read Jimmy Akin’s three-part series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 or listen to Trent Horn’s podcast. I’m trying to distill it down a bit here, because to understand the Eucharist, the key point is knowing that God, the Creator, lives outside of time and space).

It’s critical here to point out something that is so obvious that almost no one ever points it out.

At the Last Supper, Jesus was not dead.

He was alive when he said, “This IS my body.” In the Bread of Life Discourse, before the Last Supper, Jesus spoke on this in detail. He even repeated it to drive the point home, telling his followers that we must eat his body and drink his blood to have eternal life. There is nothing metaphorical about it. This isn’t like him saying, “I am the vine” or “I am the living water.” We get exposition on the metaphors from Jesus himself, but in John 6 and at the Last Supper, he hammers this point home.

So if you believe that Christ is the son of God, and you reject the Bread of Life Discourse as metaphor, and call the words of the Last Supper nothing but a symbol, then you are thinking too small about God. A man living in time and space may have limits. A God that enters that same time and space does not. If we think of Jesus as dead in the Eucharist, then why would we waste our time on it? No, he’s alive. The reason the Jesus prayer says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He is a living God, not a dead one. Thomas Jefferson and Richard Dawkins can have their dead Clockmaker God. I am not interested in that God, because, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, that God does not matter to us living here in matter. The only God that can change your life is the one that knows the number of hairs on your head. I feel that one of the biggest impediments to belief today is a bad concept of God, because once you turn and see him as a Living God, then every event in life begins to make sense.

It’s the point of the Resurrection, in case we forgot. Jesus did not stay dead. He defeats death by rising. Rigor mortis and decay sets in for our bodies when we die, and he died a real death, but then took up his life again just like he said he would. So he’s not dead. The Resurrection really is forgotten, I think, because what it means is that death does not contain our souls, nor in the end will it even claim our bodies. We tend to just think of the Resurrection as some kind of fairy tale, but the believers of the last two thousand years did not build beautiful and immense cathedrals for Little Red Riding Hood, who died and was cut free from the wolf’s belly. No, they built them for a living God who loves each of us and can give us spiritual re-birth here and eternal life after our body dies.

I think the flatness of deism crept into our Enlightenment brains, because if God is not alive, then why would we care about him?

He is the Creator of the universe, the author of all things, who knows your little league batting average and where your first kiss took place. He knows your weaknesses and burdens. He is alive. That is the Creator and Living God that I understand and love, and he has shown his infinite mercy for us in coming into this story, this world, this game. “Oh, we say, then why did he create this game with all this suffering?” I don’t know. But knowing that he is alive and with us changes the game, the entire game. In our age of gaming and puzzles, I don’t know how this hasn’t caught on yet, because we love games. If he has indeed written each of us into this story, he has a purpose for each or us, and to win this game we must cooperate with his grace, and to me, rejecting his words on the Eucharist means turning away from Him, Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. Rejecting the Eucharist is treating God as if he was the absent Clockmaker God, and I reject that entirely. He is the living God, and he is alive in the Eucharist. The creep of doubt and half-hearted faith starts with the rejection of the Eucharist.

Wasn’t it exactly after Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse, that many disciples left him? Do you see the parallel? Crowds abandoned him because they couldn’t deal with his crystal clear teaching about the Eucharist. Jesus announces Judas’ path to betrayal. Judas had doubts about the Bread of Life at this point.

After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.  Jesus said to the twelve, “Will you also go away?”  Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life;  and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was to betray him. (Jn 6:64-71)

So there is no surprise when someone attacks the Eucharist that they were looking for something more than Jesus. He wasn’t enough. Judas wanted a king, a social climber, a celebrity. His faith is gone because Jesus isn’t popular and powerful. Thus he lacks the gift of faith. Judas and those who leave demand a greater sign from Jesus, which is a game Jesus will not play, as he says that if we won’t believe Moses and the prophets, or the miracles he has already performed, what will we believe? He literally just fed 5,000 people right before the Bread of Life Discourse.

So if someone says the Eucharist is “a cracker blessed by magic,” then that is his or her own testimony before God. We must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling before God. Thus there is no reason for me to be upset with those who say cruel things about the Eucharist, because if Jesus is our model for living, we should notice he did not get angry at those who departed from him. The lost sheep always are most in need of forgiveness. For goodness sakes, even on the cross, Jesus prays for those who know not what they do. He only seems to get sad when they leave, or beat him, or mock him, or crucify him. Profaning the Eucharist is the most shameful act we as humans can do, and yet people do it brazenly thinking they have overcome God, spiritually cutting off their nose to spite their face.

The amazing and beautiful thing is that even after we do all of that to him, he still wants us to come back. He still loves us. I have done all of those things to Jesus, denying the Eucharist, denying his divinity, mocking his name. In my own falling away, I said things much like my co-worker, and I have crowned Jesus with thorns of mockery, calling his life a hoax, a myth, a fantasy, a crutch. The only hoax, myth, and fantasy in the end became my truth about the world, heaven, and hell. I was the fraud, not Christ.

Then he asks his next question to the apostles, saying, “Do you also want to leave?” And that is when Peter shows his faith, where grace floods over him, and he submits his intellect and will to Jesus.

“Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” (Jn 6:68-69)

In my life, I have read those lines before. I had heard them before. But there came a night in my life when they were no longer words, but a fact as sure as the sunrise. I cannot read those lines without feeling like I am there. This response from Peter are convicting lines that cut to the heart. He knows. He has looked everywhere else. He knows that Jesus is God. How? I don’t know. But he knows. And so do I.

When you put that question to yourself, you will have to answer it. When Jesus asks, “Do you also want to leave?” what will you say? Will you deny that he is the Bread of Life? Will you follow him? Or is something else your master?

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This has all happened before. It is happening now. It will happen again. Our command is to endure, as those who came before us.

And he said to them, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 6:34-38)

The Church did not last 2,000 years by crumbling under duress, or abandoning Jesus in favor of the world.

In our age of the Victim Olympics, where both Christians and non-Christians try to claim to the prize of the Most Outcast, Most Vilified, and Most Excluded from society, I’d like to share a story from history, from the year 177 A.D., that may be helpful in putting into perspective what anyone in America in 2023 has suffered, Christian or otherwise.

This will seem extreme at the outset, but will make sense once I read this story from the second century, and I’m just going to say it: we have no idea in America what it means to suffer for Christ. We have no idea what heroes of the faith look like any longer. We just haven’t seen it happen in our lifetimes. We think we do, but we don’t. People in Nigeria and Nicaragua are witnessing this kind of conviction in Christian witness today, but Americans are not, and thus we take it for granted what has been done for us.

Most of us haven’t been tested. Not yet. Yes, we’ve been tested in ways, but not like the people I’m about to tell you about. I’ve had struggles, but not like Blandina and Attalus.

My point in re-telling this event from history is to remind us of the tradition that we inherit, that we mostly ignore. We sit comfortably in the 21st century and grumble at the obligation to attend Mass, where we can openly receive the Eucharist. No one is there to stop faithful Catholics from gathering in groups. No one is rounding us up. These are luxuries that we ignore. These luxuries were bought with blood, and the first 500 years of the faith have stories that would make the disturbed author of Game of Thrones wince.

What we are led to believe right now is that the persecutions of Mark Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley emperors are like the persecutions of Diocletian and the Roman Empire. This story I’m about to read is actually from France, where the budding church was being brutalized. If anything, this story should assure you that the deletion of an imaginary online life is nothing like what the early Christians suffered. They were meeting in secret out of love for Christ, and changing hearts and minds in flesh and bone meetings, one soul at a time.

Now, these moderns “cancellations” should be of concern, because they do indeed mirror what happens repeatedly in the history of Christianity, especially in the early stages of persecution. But in America we are not yet reliving anything remotely close to what was happening with early Christians, meaning those who lived before we even had a New Testament. We are only at the stage of the early Soviet Union so far. Words are being re-defined and scapegoats are being sculptured, but so far the only deaths are virtual.

But these martyrs met in the flesh and told the story of Jesus to one another, risking their necks to do so. There was nothing virtual about their secret meetings, nothing meta about their willingness to do anything to keep their faith alive, nor was there anything simulated about the path they took on their journey from social outcast to martyrdom. Let’s walk through this example from Lyons in the year 177. The first part should sound very familiar. This is from Butler’s Lives of the Saints, volume 2.

Saints Pothinus and his companions, the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne (A.D. 177)

The persecution began unofficially with social ostracism: "We were excluded from houses, from the baths, and from the market; and with popular violence-stoning, plundering, blows, insults and everything that an infuriated crowd loves to do to those it hates. Then it was taken up officially. (p 454, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol 2.)

This parallels what we see today, ominously, but not surprisingly. Social ostracism is underway, as Christendom is now seen as the enemy. But is this anything new? It’s not. It’s anything but new, it’s the way it always begins.

Witnessing to your faith is now a good way to lose your job, to lose your friends, and most likely, to lose your internet accounts, and maybe even your money as banks have now joined the game of cancellation. It is routine where I work to hear some kind of mockery of faith and to hear exclamations of “Jesus Christ” in anger. The name not only means nothing to most people in the IT world, it’s something to be openly joked about.

However, as anyone who finds Jesus knows, careers don’t satisfy. Money does not fulfill you like God does. God alone satisfies, as Thomas Aquinas said. Money, friends, reputations, and jobs? Those are just nice-to-haves. They are not must-haves. There is only one must-have and that is faith in Jesus Christ, because he is the redeemer and path to salvation. The one who understands that redemption would be a fool to throw it away, and would be raked with regret to abandon the one person who ever saved them. But as we continue through this, we can recognize that there is much more to lose than friends or internet accounts.

The story continues with an attack on the Eucharist, as has been going on since the Jesus’ first gave the Bread of Life discourse, and since Judas first turned away. The attack on the Eucharist goes hand in hand with persecution, and seems to resurface often, almost every time Christians are mocked or violated in the Lives of the Saints.

“They…accused us of feeding on human flesh like Thyestes and of committing incest like Oedipus, as well as other abominations which it is unlawful for us even to think of, and which we can scarcely believe ever to have been perpetrated by men.”

These same accusations are happening today. In my next post, this is the topic, because where I work in 2022, the same accusation has been made. This “Catholics are cannibals” is one of the laziest attacks on Catholicism possible, but it makes for good scandal, so every generation trots it out, and every generation of Catholics have to explain it. The Eucharist may be the most hot-button issue of all time, because it requires faith, which is the whole point.

This has been going on since the beginning, where even St. Paul said those who did not believe in the Eucharist could not receive Communion. This is a never-ending line in the sand for Catholics, because the Eucharist is the “YES” to the whole Paschal Mystery, which is the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Acsension. The linkage from the Last Supper to being seated at the right hand of God all flows through the Eucharist.

For anyone throwing the accusation of cannibalism around today, you can bet with certainty that those people have never read, possibly never even heard of, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The charges of incest and cannibalism go way back for non-believers. Why? Because it’s great slander for sensationalism. It still gets much tread today. People love a scandal like that. Those who haven’t heard it clutch their pearls and exclaim, “What? Catholics eat people. Lord save us!”

And you can hardly go online without someone associating Christians with inbreeding. So these same charges from 177 A.D. are happening today. These accusers would probably be shocked to learn that the practice of inbreeding and incest actually went away because of Christianity, as the Church outlawed it in sixth century, making it extremely strict, so much that it had to loosen the rule in the 1200s because…well, let’s not go down that rabbit hole. I’ll just leave a link if you want to read Canon Law and it’s history on Consanguinity.

Social ostracism and mockery of the Eucharist is just the beginning of this story. So let’s go back to the year 177 A.D. and follow along what happens next in attempts to kill off Christianity in France.

When these things were made public, all were exasperated against us, including some who had formerly shown friendliness. . . The fury of the mob, the governor, and the soldiers fell most heavily upon Sanctus, a deacon…, on Attalus, who had always been a pillar and support of the Church, and on Blandina, a slave…When we were all in fear, and her mistress according to the flesh, who was herself an athlete among the martyrs, was apprehensive lest Blandina should not be able from bodily weakness to make her confession boldly, she was endued with so much power that even those who in relays tortured her from morning till evening grew faint and weary. All marveled how she could possibly survive, so torn and broken was her body. But in the midst of her sufferings she seemed to derive refreshment and peace from continually repeating the words, "I am a Christian, and nothing vile is done amongst us.” The deacon Sanctus also endured cruel torments with unflinching courage. To all questions that were put to him, he only replied, "I am a Christian." When all the ordinary forms of torture had been exhausted, red-hot plates were applied to the tenderest parts of his body until he appeared a shapeless mass of swollen flesh. Three days later, when he had revived, the same treatment was repeated. (p 455, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol 2.)

There was…a woman named Biblias, who was known to be frail and timid. Subjected to torture, however, she woke as it were from a deep sleep, and directly contradicted the blasphemers, saying, "How can those eat children who are forbidden to taste the blood even of brute beasts?” From that moment she confessed herself a Christian and was added to the company of the martyrs. Many of the prisoners, especially the young and untried, died in prison from torture, from the foul atmosphere and from the brutality of their gaolers, but some who had already suffered terribly and seemed at the last gasp, lingered on, confirming the rest. Bishop Pothinus, in spite of his ninety years and manifold infirmities, was dragged before the tribunal amid the railing of the populace. Upon being asked by the governor, “Who was the God of the Christians,” he replied, "If you are worthy, you shall know." Thereupon he was beaten, kicked, and pelted until he was nearly insensible. Two days later he died in prison. (p 456, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol 2.)

…Maturus, Sanctus, Blandina and Attalus were exposed to the beasts in the amphitheatre; Maturus and Sanctus ran the gauntlet of whips, endured mauling by beasts, and bore everything else that was done to them at the suggestion of the people. Finally, they were placed on the iron chair and roasted until the odor of their scorched flesh filled the nostrils of the crowd. But their courage never faltered, nor could Sanctus be induced to utter a word except the confession he had made from the beginning. After they had throughout that day supplied not merely the varied entertainment demanded in the games, but a spectacle to the world, they were offered up at last in the sacrifice of their lives. But for Blandina the end had not come yet. She was hung from a stake, to be the prey of the beasts let loose upon her. The sight of her as she hung with outstretched arms like one crucified and the fervor of her prayers put heart into the other combatants. None of the animals would touch her; so she was taken back to prison to await a further contest. Attalus, a man of note, was loudly called for by the crowd and was led round the amphitheater with a tablet borne before him on which was written “This is Attalus the Christian.”

…

From the outset the confessors had given extraordinary evidence of their charity and humility. Though ready to give an explanation of their faith to all, they accused none, but prayed for their persecutors like St Stephen, as well as for their lapsed brethren

And then what happens? Surely all of those Christians who ran in fear, or abandoned their faith, stayed hidden, right? This type of spectacle of torture that pleased the crowd surely made every other Christian cower in fear.

No. The opposite happens. It encourages others, as they see plainly the faith in the heroic fallen, a faith far greater and more meaningful than anything the secular power could offer, and something worth infinitely more than this life here on earth, as dying for Christ’s name echoes in the words and actions of Jesus himself as he told his followers exactly what was to come: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends….It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you…If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first…you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you…If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you…And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me…Whoever hates me also hates my Father.” (Jn 15:13-27)

A doctor then stands up, and by doing so enters this river of torture, abandoning everything. Suddenly his reputation, his career, his family, his good name no longer matters.

Those who had formerly denied now boldly confessed Christ and were added to the sacred order of those who bore witness. Only those few remained outside who had never been Christians at heart. A physician named Alexander, a Phrygian by birth, was present while they were under examination. He had lived many years in Gaul and was well known for his love of God and for his boldness in spreading the Gospel. Standing close to the dock, he so openly encouraged the prisoners that no one could fail to notice him. The crowd, incensed at the profession of Christianity by those who had previously abjured, raised an outcry against Alexander as the instigator of the change, and the governor asked him who and what he was. "A Christian," was the reply. He was summarily condemned to be thrown to the beasts.

And there’s more. The defense of the faith and the Eucharist continues. The woman named Blandina undergoes ongoing torture and her children are killed before her.

Attalus, when he was being roasted in the iron chair, exclaimed, "This is in truth a consuming of human flesh-and it is you who do it. We neither eat men nor commit any other enormity!" "After all these", continues the letter, "on the last day of the single combats, Blandina was again brought into the amphitheater with Ponticus, a boy of about fifteen. They had been compelled day after day to watch the torture of the rest, and were now urged to swear by the idols. Because they refused and set them at naught, the multitude pitied neither the age of the boy nor the sex of the woman. They exposed them to all the torments, endeavoring unsuccessfully from time to time to induce them to swear. Ponticus, encouraged, as the heathen could see, by the exhortations of his sister, nobly endured every torment and then gave up the ghost. The blessed Blandina last of all, like a mother of high degree, after encouraging her children and sending them on before as victors to the King, hastened to join them-rejoicing and triumphing over her departure as if she had been summoned to a marriage-feast instead of being cast to the beasts. After the scourges, after the wild animals, after the frying-pan, she was thrown at last into a net and exposed to a bull. When she had been tossed for a time by the beast, and was completely upheld by her faith and her communing with Christ as to have become insensible to what was being done to her, she too was immolated, the heathen themselves confessing that they had never known a woman to show such endurance." The bodies of the martyrs were cast into the Rhone that no relic or memory of them might remain on earth. But the record of their glorious victory over death was quickly borne over the sea to the East, and has been handed on by the Church throughout the ages.

The martyrdom of the rest took various forms. In the beautiful words of the letter: "They offered up to the Father a single wreath, but it was woven of divers colors and of flowers of all kinds. It was meet that the noble athletes should endure a varied conflict, and win a great victory that they might be entitled in the end to receive the crown supreme of life everlasting."

Notice, before I wrap this up, that these martyrdoms were not done to be part of the “cult of martyrdom,” where people rush into the fire because it became cool. The “cult of martyrdom” is not from God, but rather the devil, because as soon as it becomes fashionable to be a martyr, it stops being martyrdom. But in days where Christianity is the enemy, like it’s becoming again now in America, witnesses to faith will arise, like Blandina and Attalus. Another Alexander will step into the breach. God doesn’t play our games. He doesn’t pursue being “cool” or seeking worldly status. He ignores those things. The martyrs that get celebrated are the ones that had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, who clung to God in the great storm of their life as representatives of the faith, to show others that the things of this world do not matter, not when compared to the joy of finding peace with Jesus.

A comparison in the Bible is made to silver or gold being purified in the fire. The “dross” leaves the gold or silver when it is heated into liquid and cooled into pure bullion or coins. The dross gets burned away in different ways for different people, as we each have a temperature that we can handle, and God knows exactly that temperature, and will only give us what we can endure. Your temperature is likely much lower than Blandina and Attalus. But recall the words, “By your endurance you will gain your soul.” That is the call to cling to Jesus when everything else burns away, and everyone gets that opportunity, to stand in the furnace, whether it is dramatic or not.

Yes, some people’s dross may be getting burned away by the social ostracism of their workplace, or by getting kicked off of Twitter or Facebook or TikTok. Corporations are asking us to bow to idols and many have done so. Burning away the dross is an ongoing process, as you are conformed to the life of Christ. Mockery and social ostracism and forced agreement is certainly the beginning, and a harbinger of more to come.

What else is new?

The current culture may even be a blessing to Christians in many ways, because it puts us into the same situation as Abraham, who was called out of his homeland. He had to make a choice. To follow the culture or to follow God. That is yet our choice today, the very same as Abraham.

A calling comes to those who God chooses, as the sheep hear his call. “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” (Jn 10:27) Being called out of New York, Los Angeles, or Silicon Valley is a gift. A step in opposition to the culture is the first step toward God, in joining his fold. Even getting kicked off a social media platform can set you free from the chains of technology, and ultimately, the lies of media. Few people today realize the immense campaign against Christianity that has taken place, but once the light strikes you, the billboards and alarms appear everywhere. Only through a massive, coordinated effort has the message of Christ been diluted, and still it rings out to those who hear the call.

Technology gave anti-Christians a tool that Nero, Diocletian, Lenin, and Mao would have loved to have in suppressing the Word of God. They resorted to murdering Christ’s followers, but it is far more effective to talk a person out of his or her faith, than to create martyrs. This is why the main effort now is to silence anyone who speaks the doctrines of the Church, of Christ, because the only other option is to kill them, and that is bad public relations. The bloody option has been tried over and over and failed miserably, and will fail again. One martyr makes a hundred new Christians, like the many-headed Hydra of Greek myth. Many nations have tried the killing spree as the solution to ending the message of Christ, and it has proved ineffective. Governments throughout time have tried to kill the idea of Christ dying on the cross to take away our sins by killing the followers. The governments of Rome, the Ottomans, France, the Soviets, Mexico, and countless others have tried to murder Christ - right up to today in Nigeria where the threshold of genocide has been passed.

The message of Christ persists, despite the massive efforts of the sword. The greatest error any Christian ever made was to think the message of Christ would be delivered by the sword, and any leader that ever claimed otherwise was as confused then as those today who claim that Jesus didn’t command chastity. The spin of Jesus’ words changes with the desires of the era, thus when the lust for conquest and gold seized the minds of men, the false Gospel of the sword seemed a good tool for bringing civilization to savages, just as America has done with the Gospel of democracy, which is yet another false Gospel. So today, the intention of the enemies of the Church is to silence it, to ostracize it, to make it appear evil, because that is all the enemies have. In their attempts to silence and ostracize, they don’t realize that the truth always comes out. It cannot be suppressed by the sword, but neither can it be silenced by the government, for the moment it is prohibited to be Christian, the sheep will again hear his voice. In short, there is no way to suppress God, because, well, he’s God. If God wanted for this to play out through violence, he would, and Jesus even says so.

“Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Mt 26:52-53)

St. John in writing the apocalypse echoed this, mentioning that prison and death must sometimes be the way that we adhere to God:

“Let anyone who has an ear listen: If you are to be taken captive, into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” (Rev 13:9-10)

The culture we have now pretends to have sheathed the sword and is trying to defeat the message of Christ with words, with arguments, and often with well-dressed lies and shiny campaigns. To make matters seem worse, we have fallen men and women in the Church, which is not surprising for anyone that understands The Fall and Original Sin. But every tool in the box is being used now to stifle and remove the full message of Christ from society, and to the unbelievers, silence means victory.

The silencing of Christians is the name of the game, not the killing of them. The cancelling of them is the cure. But this will also fail, as this method, too, has been tried time and time again. While the culture attempts to delete and cut out the parts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that don’t fit with the marketing of “Sex sells” and “To each his own,” Christianity is once again having the dross purified from it, and new saints will emerge. The problem with knowing that Jesus is the truth is that everything else that is being sold becomes a cheap trinket, and only those who do not know Jesus would make that trade. The knife of the cancel culture will end up cutting its own arteries because it is wielded by a maniacs, not a skilled surgeon. Napolean and Diocletian and every other emperor has tried and failed, so the internet activists sitting in their houses who can’t leave their phones for five minutes certainly aren’t going to succeed where armies failed.

But as for us who know that the victory is already won, we are free from the honor and shame culture that is re-emerging. No matter what lies and tales are told, the truth stands. This is why merely saying that an unborn baby is a person, a human being, sets the maniacs ablaze with hate. A simple truth such as that exposes the fragility of the lies. In the same way, saying that “God created them male and female” is the new flashpoint, because it is true, for all ages and all people who ever lived.

The mob rule taking shape in America precedes a much larger battle ahead, as spiritual blindness releases the scapegoat mechanism from its pen. But we should fear nothing because God has already won. Our reputations are not our bodies, nor our souls. Reputation is like a third entity that Jesus clearly was willing to let die. In fact, he was even willing to let his body die. What was the one thing he taught us to worry about? Losing our eternal soul. Our bodies are good, but they will be resurrected in the last day. The loss of our reputation can lead to infinite gains. Losing the body, if done for Christ, can do the same. But losing the soul - that is what we must fear losing the most. That is the only one that separates us from God. So in our decision making, the question must become: will the choices I make today draw my soul closer to God, or push me away?

The idea of “cancelling” is just another term for scapegoating, blaming and shaming a perceived enemy for words or ideas. Even the use of word “cancel” speaks much of our age of indifference, as if people were just magazines. But the idea of cancelling does give us a major clue about what our online lives really are: they are not real. In fact, if we are giving an ordering, or primacy, to what matters in life, reputation should be at the bottom of the list, at least if we listen to the words of Jesus (and actually read it and not just the hippy Lebowski version of Jesus). Soul is first. The salvation of souls is why he came here. He did not come to save reputations, otherwise he might have come as Nero. Soul has primacy, then the body, then, time and weather permitting, we can have our reputation. But only if it is ordered to the two Commandments, which have the all-important order of loving God first, and loving others second.

The most notorious scapegoat of all time went by the name of Jesus Christ, and he showed us how to suffer, how to experience a reputation ruined, how to absorb the spread of lies, the false accusations, the mockery, and even whips, beatings, and crucifixion. Much of the time, the death of our reputation is the step we need to be re-born in the spirit, because reputation clouds what truly matters. Our ego, our self, is what gets in the way. You might even say that if we are not getting cancelled from Twitter or Facebook, we are not using those evangelization tools correctly, because the Christian message will not be praised if it’s told properly and with boldness. The only Good News that is from Jesus and the apostles is the one that will get you killed, which is why the Church continues to be so hated.

After all, how much more clear could Jesus be? He warned us. “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first…you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you…If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you…And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me…Whoever hates me also hates my Father.” (Jn 15:13-27) So whenever the question to go left or go right arises, the right answer is to go up, to lift your eyes to the cross. Jesus preached chastity, poverty, transformative suffering, and even in the face of all that, love for your enemies. That is the answer, the same as it was for Jesus, as it was for the first martyr in St. Stephen, for Peter, for Paul, for Blandina and Attalus, and for us today. When the mobs come from the left or the right, the answer is to carry the cross as Jesus did, and not cave in to the ways of this world, because the freedom that Christ brought is to not fear physical death. Rather, we must fear spiritual death, which is separation from God. “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear of the online mob is the beginning of eternal punishment. The Christians who came before our era suffered far more - economic exclusion, slander, alienation, and horrific torture - so that we can sit in our churches and complain about a ten minute homily being too long.

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In recent posts I’ve been down on technology, but before I go off and join the local Amish community, I want to discuss one of Aesop’s fables. This one is called The Dog and the Wolf. Here’s the story:

A starving wolf meets a healthy dog and compliments him on his sleek appearance. The dog describes his life of ease and invites the wolf to join him. As they go on their way, the wolf asks why the fur about the dog's neck is worn away. The dog replies that it is merely caused by the collar he has to wear at home. The wolf then leaves, declaring that a full belly is a poor price to pay for liberty. (link)

Aesop’s lesson is: “Better starve free than be a fat slave.” OR “There is nothing worth so much as liberty.”

Could there be a more real world example of this exchange than in dogs themselves that we see today? Pets today are in a strange state. Comfort and ease has proven a slippery slope for those first wolf pups, as the table scraps they consumed led to a transaction that could never be undone. The temptation to lay by the fire has resulted in pugs and chihuahuas being dressed up in costumes and carried around in handbags. Suffice it to say that future generations will look back at the American moment in history in confusion, as pet obsession must be one of the strangest episodes in human history.

I can just imagine the history textbooks in the future showing a picture of Paris Hilton and her handbag animal, or of Boo the Pomeranian (the World’s Cutest Dog, R.I.P.), as exemplars of the values of early 21st century America, as an era of surplus that allowed a massive unhitching of the mind from reality. That modern marvel is less about dogs than the people that own them, but one last distraction: I recall in my history textbooks such sidebars like Marie Antionette’s cake or the debauchery of Roman binge-and-purge parties. Surely a dog dressed up as a flower or hot dog would make a good visual instruction of what Americans valued most.

As history repeats, we see that same story of the Dog and the Wolf. The wolf struggles, but never has to wear a sweater or booties, nor does a human follow him around with a leash. The wolf doesn’t have to listen to a human talking to it, or wonder why the person is waiting to pick up his poop as soon as it reaches the grass.

This fable is about free-will and two different kinds of freedom. Moreover, this fable is about which master do you serve, and it throws one of the great questions into the mix, as who you choose to serve.

What do you serve? What do you choose to do with your time and days? To what have you surrendered? Where does your money go, or what are you saving for?

You must surrender to something, because that’s what free-will entails. You cannot be a wolf and a dog at the same time. As always, you cannot go both left and right. You cannot go both up and down. Choices must be made. This problem teleports us right to Jesus in his words: “Man cannot serve two masters.” The wolf can be fat and warm by serving the human master, or live true to its nature but be free and hungry. Likewise, if you surrender to God, you reject the world and give up its table-scraps. If you surrender to the world, you reject God but get to lay by the fire. In either case, only one option can be selected.

What the wolf sees is that if he surrenders to comfort, he is rejecting his purpose. Every choice requires a selection, and making a choice means making a rejection of the alternative. If you surrender to perceived pleasure, you are rejecting a perceived pain. But sometimes our perception of what is pain and what is pleasure is in error. That’s the never-ending game we play. How can we avoid suffering? But the more important question is this one: How do we perceive or receive suffering?

The great trick here is being pulled on the dog. What is perceived as an escape from pain and struggle does not actually remove pain and struggle. The trade off for table scraps results in being kenneled or leashed for about twenty-three hours a day while the pet owner lives out his or her life. The perceived “freedom from suffering” leads to a new kind of suffering, and it’s a spiritual suffering because the essence of the dog’s purpose gets buried inside. A dog that is a pet is never truly a dog, because every instinct the animal has is scolded or molded as the owner desires. The dog has the shape of a dog, the mind of a dog, but must live out an artificial non-doggy lifestyle. The instinct thumps in the heart of a dog when the doorbell rings or when the urge rises up to hump a pillow or when a suburban rabbit darts out from behind a garden gnome. But none of these actions of the dog are allowed. The only action allowed is the adoration of the master in exchange for a treat, as that is the transaction that has been signed and agreed to between pet and pet owner. In trading one part of dog-ness, that of the desire to eat, all other parts of dog-ness have been given up and suppressed.

Now, when Aesop was writing, I can only assume that people were not trying to fulfill their dog’s life as if it were a human child. I don’t think the Greeks were spending thousands of dollars on pet hotels and medical insurance, and building elaborate dog parks and doggy daycare centers so that the dog could attempt to have the best of both worlds, of both dog-ness and pet-ness. (I should note that in Chapter 8 of Plato’s Republic there is a curious paragraph about how in late-stage democracy, right before democracy devolves into tyranny, Socrates mentions that “pets begin to take on the likeness of their mistresses” and that animals in the street will not be ordered to move out of the way for people, as animals have been elevated in status to that of people and everything is “bursting with liberty.” This may be prophetic for us today, as at Halloween there are many pet-owners with matching outfits of their dog. Just recently I saw a dog in a cart at the grocery store where a child is supposed to be. Plato predicted 21st century America because he and Socrates had lived in a similarly declining society.)

The Dog and the Wolf fable is a relevant parable for our time, because as technology has satisfied our every sensory desire, we now suffer the spiritual malady of slavery to comfort.

One thing that fascinates me in this respect is the nature-lovers that I know. The rednecks and the hippies are so close to one another, but they just don’t realize it, and one tends to think of the other as a monster, or a fool. The “Bambi-killer” and the “tree-hugger” both understand something very deep in our instinct. They are both trying to remove the collar of modernity and technology. They are both trying to un-modern themselves. If you could sew them together somehow, you have the hunter-gatherer. More specifically, together they are the wolf, choosing the kind of freedom that brings suffering, but a suffering that fits our nature. Hunters will choose to go off-grid in a pilgrimage for an elk or bear. Eco-gatherers will seek out thirty day hikes on desolate trails. This is an attempt to take off the collar, as many hunters and gatherers live on cul-de-sacs and sit tethered to desks, basking in the unnatural light of screens that suck their soul. Spiritual ennui and lack of meaning is the suffering today.

To insert Jesus here, in all cases, the question of suffering is not “Why is there suffering in the world?” but rather this one: “Suffering is real. Now what am I going to do with this suffering?” I’ll refer you to Father Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron to tell you the meaning of suffering. But in summary: Jesus came to transform suffering. He did not come to end suffering. Not yet. He came to show us the redemptive part of suffering. Once you understand that this is possible, your perception of suffering is completely inverted from what modernity tells us, from psychology to marketing to internet influencers. They are clueless as to what Jesus accomplished on the cross, because they have an inverted worldview compared to Jesus.

The simple commandments to “love God, and love others” never contained any promise of zero suffering. The saying, “You deserve to be happy” is not from Christ. If you think that’s what he meant, please refer to the brutal death of Jesus himself and his immediate followers. He does not take away our suffering, he takes away our sin. This is the important distinction to understand, and if you don’t believe in sin then you can never understand the message. A pre-requisite to the Gospel is knowing that you are a sinner, and as our academic and marketing experts keep taking things known to be sinful off the shelf, this leads many people away from the joy of finding the message of the Gospel. Why? Because if you don’t think random sex or lying or cheating or hating or presumption or despair is a sin, how on earth can you understand what Jesus is doing for you spiritually? The message that “he takes away our sins” only makes sense at all if you realize that you have sin to take away. A lifetime of slogans and campaigns elevating the self and denying any wrongdoing gives cataracts to us. We are way beyond seeing the speck of dust in another’s eye while ignoring the wood plank in our own, because we think we have no sin unless “it affects someone else.” Among the things no longer considered a problem are masturbation, watching porn, getting drunk, and getting high because we have been duped into the belief that “if it doesn’t hurt anyone else, how is it bad?” This is despite the fact that all of those things most certainly hurt ourselves and every relationship we touch. Since nothing is deemed profane now, we see no need for healing, which is the root word for “savior.” Instead, the enemy of our lives becomes discomfort. Whatever upsets our feelings or blocks our desires is the modern definition of sin. It is not our own thoughts or actions at fault, it is those who differ in opinion. We can lust all day long and no longer consider it adultery, and you can claim to be Christian and at the same time completely ignore this:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:27-28)

The only way a professed Christian man can allow his hand and eye to scroll porn on his phone, after knowing those words from the Gospel, and if he is not making an effort to stop scrolling by seeking confession and doing frequent examination of consciences - the only way this is possible, is if his profession of Jesus as God is said without belief. In other words, he can only be scrolling porn if he is merely professing faith for expediency and social acceptance. Because if you know and truly believe that Jesus is God, then those sentences from Matthew should convict you where you sit. A man can only be professing faith in Christ as the second person of the Trinity and simultaneously scrolling porn without remorse if he is lying about the profession of faith. This goes for various sins, but the most prevalent among men today is this addiction to porn. And many, many men with this problem will bemoan the state of the world in regards to other sins, while the plank of Matthew 5:27 juts out of their eyes, as their “harmless act of scrolling” causes the slow death of their marriage, as it withers and dies while they scroll in the night.

I failed to understand why regular Confession (and doing a proper examination of conscience before stepping into the Confessional) was important until I began to understand that what sins you must keep admitting in confession becomes a burden and saying them out loud every month or week is a great incentive to stop doing the thing you wish you wouldn’t do. I’m reminded of Jim Carrey who plays a lawyer in Liar, Liar. When he has to take a phone call from a criminal client who is once again in jail, he screams his legal advice into the phone: “Stop breaking the law, a*****e!” When you hear yourself going to confession time and again to admit a fault that you just can’t quit, eventually it begins to register, that I need to clean up my side of the street. I tire of cleaning the same street of the same garbage that I myself put on the street. Speaking the words out loud to someone else, even if the sin can be absolved, is an enormously powerful incentive to stop breaking the law. God’s law, that is. Part of the miracle of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is that the grace of God grows, and even if it takes years, or decades, if you keep trying, you will stop doing the thing that is so difficult for you. Prayer, Confession, Eucharist. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

“In this world you’ll have trouble, but take courage, take heart.” This allows us to give our selves up as an offering to God - just like he did - without making sense of all suffering. I feel like most miss this point. In taking away our sin, we are then free to be our true selves. We can drop all the fig leaves we wear, which are all elaborate ruses to hide our fear and our pride, to cover our wounds.

In the fable, the wolf is naked. No collar means no fig leaves. The wolf chooses his true nature. Thereby, the wolf lives a kind of redemptive suffering, while the dog chases a mirage: a life without suffering. There is no life without suffering. Obviously, wolves in real life don’t know they are choosing a redemptive suffering, but the wolf in the fable is not about a wolf; he is a stand-in for us, for humans with free-will who face the choice of comfortable slavery versus purposeful living. This should set off Old Testament alarm bells because the entire book of Exodus is here. The exact struggle being faced in the desert is the desire to return to the comfortable slavery of Egypt. And lastly, might I add, that non-believers never get bent out shape when animals start talking in Aesop, but they sure get irritated when the serpent talks in the Garden of Eden. I have many thoughts on why that is, but I’m already off the beaten path.

I’ll just leave a link here for the Catechism paragraphs 385-409. It says a lot, and fills in the gaps of this problem that I’ve left out regarding the decision over who with our lives we choose to serve.

Speaking of what we choose to serve, the wolf and the dog both have it wrong. Why? Because neither of them gets to the heart of the matter, as far as humans go. In the dog’s life a bargain is struck to become a servant of a being in the world, a human being. In the wolf’s life, the wolf must be entirely self-reliant, or perhaps reliant on a pack of wolves. Fortunately, we are neither dog nor wolf. We have intellect and free-will. We have a third option. But it must be chosen, it cannot be taken by force or shoved upon us by fear. This third option can only be granted with your consent, and not by bargaining and not by self-will, skill, or merit. You make a choice.

What you choose to follow and believe is not just a head game or wordplay. It manifests in you. Even if you think you are only a dabbler or taking a casual interest, that which you consume will merge into you in ways subtle and unforeseen. You start to act like who you admire. You become what you worship. You are what you eat. You are what you drink. Choose wisely. Enough of me talking about it, let’s just look at what Jesus himself says about this topic:

“Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.” (Jn 15:4-5)

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst…” (Jn 6:35)

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” (Jn 6:53-38)

What does all this tell you? It’s a simple set of instructions. Drink from the true vine. Turn and believe. Receive the Eucharist as often as possible.

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As for the failures of the Church: the faithful and the faithless have failed to be perfect in all eras and situations and nations since the beginning of time, and on that all groups agree. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t read the Old Testament or the Greek epics or even Native American myths, because all takes are full of fallen man. The news from last evening where I live was full of overdoses, murders, and domestic disputes.

We cannot keep the Commandments, not without help from above. This is kind of the whole point of the person of Jesus, and why he came, in case you didn’t know, and many today don’t know. It’s an interesting time because millions of people have not heard the Gospel, or have no idea of what it says.

He brought us the second part of what we need, called the Beatitudes, but people are less aware of these than they are of the Commandments. The Commandments are like a beam we have to walk on above a shark filled tank. But the Commandments with the Beatitudes is like a nice sidewalk with a guardrail above the shark tank where we can relax, be joyful, and not be constantly worried about falling off the beam.

We cannot live the Beatitudes by themselves either. We need the Commandments with the Beatitudes, otherwise we just discard the idea of sin altogether. We need to use the cheat code. There is a cheat code, but it’s not as easy as what video game developers build into their systems.

The way to win is to stop trying to cheat. We have to take up our cross and follow Christ.

I think what people fail to understand is that Christ showed us how to live. In the devolving of Christendom, through our obsession with knowledge, we have to unlearn and invert nearly everything that our American teachers have taught us to value, from public school, to Hollywood, to government. Christ’s way of living is an inversion of Americanism (which is why Americanism was called out as a heresy by the Church in 1899). Pope Leo XIII didn’t just go on the offensive against the errors of Karl Marx in Rerum Novarum (a prophetic encyclical that predicted all of the horrors of Communism), he also called out the errors that Thomas Jefferson gave birth to with his mistress, the “pursuit of happiness.” This might be a news flash to some: the Church is neither capitalist nor socialist. Instead, the Church is for both the Commandments and the Beatitudes. Again, Catholicism is a both/and religion, except for when it comes to ideologies - then it is neither/nor.

Sometimes I think we focus on the Commandments too much and forget about the Beatitudes. A common critique of Catholics is that they are “too dogmatic,” and act like Pharisees. But oddly enough, while, yes, Jesus does scold the Pharisees frequently, the reason he does is telling. In Matthew 23, Jesus says, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; 3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.”

Now, this can be passed over easily, but Jesus says something really important here. The Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat. The Church today refers to “the seat of Peter,” or “the chair of Peter.” The Pharisees, according to Jesus himself, have authority to interpret Sacred Scripture. This, dear reader, is why the Pharisees bear the brunt of Jesus’ anger in the Gospels. God chose Moses. He chose Moses’ successors, and they are the Pharisees. It is not the Sadducees, or Jesus would have said that they sit on Moses’ seat. This idea of Moses’ seat must be attended to. Later, in Matthew 28, Jesus says before ascending to heaven something extremely important about that authority.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So the Pharisees held the seat of Moses, and Jesus was given all authority in heaven and earth. But what about when he’s gone? Then who has authority to interpret and defend the Word of God? Who will the Holy Spirit be with? Well, that was covered in Matthew 16:18-19. Simon was given a new name, Peter, the rock, upon who he would build his church.

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Let’s recap here. Jesus states plainly that there is to be a Church. One Church. Peter is the leader. This is a direct commission, by name. There’s not even any wiggle room on this for interpretation. Further, nothing will ever defeat the Church that is founded on Peter, even though that Church may be attacked by Hell itself.

There is only one Church founded on Peter. That is the Catholic Church.

Ok fine. So we know there is to be a Church. We also know that Baptism is important, critical to salvation. The Eucharist is as well, which Jesus spoke ample words about at the Last Supper and in the Bread of Life chat after feeding the 5,000. And in this verse above, we know that Confession is important because in order to “bind” and “loose” sins, you have to speak them out loud to someone. You can’t just throw a penny in a well and wish - you have to speak it and take action (body and soul). As far as I know, the Apostles could not read minds like Jesus. (Well, maybe Peter does seem to be able to in Acts with Ananias, but that’s another story).

In Matthew 18:18-19, Jesus also states this “binding and loosing” power. He also says that his followers must gather in Jesus’ name, meaning there should be what? A meeting.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Now, this brings me to a point about the Gospel of Matthew that has led me to many hours of pondering and displeasure, which I will write about later or this will never end. I am teeming with words here, so I need to resist commenting on the lies of 19th century German scholarship and their intentions of tearing down Matthew because of these important phrases.

Let’s get back to the Commandments and the Beatitudes, and why both are needed.

Living by the Commandments and the Beatitudes can only come through following Jesus. You can’t have one without the other. Otherwise you end up a Pharisee, a legalist on the one hand, and on the other hand you are all free-love and dope and Jesus becomes the Big Lebowski, the dude. In fact, if you watch the Big Lebowski, you can see the problems of Pharisees and libertines rather plainly. Walter is a jerk obsessed about the rules, and the Dude cares for no rules. One is all justice and is a hypocrite, and the other is a buffoon that stands for nothing. Donny, the forgotten third character, is a kind of Jesus character, and indeed, he is indirectly killed by Walter and Dude’s dispute with the nihilists, which wouldn’t have happened had they not both been so hell-bent on justice (Walter) and mercy (the Dude). Donny is martyred for their sins.

So we need to be like Donny a bit. Humble. Peaceful. Seeking righteousness while following the rules.

Ok, now forget Donny. Be like Jesus.

When you wake up in the morning, surrender to God, be grateful for breath, and ask Jesus, “What are we going to do today?” To follow him requires surrender and obedience. Freedom requires forgetting the self.

Let’s cut to the chase: nobody loves a list of rules. Rules alone do not inspire. No one ever built a Cathedral because of a list of rules any more than the local swimming pool was built to hang up a sign of “pool rules.” Kids do not go to the swimming pool on a hot summer day to celebrate the rules. They go to the pool to play and cannonball and scream and splash.

This to me is the fundamental error of the Pharisees, and Catholics can become Pharisaical quickly if they think the early Christians were gathering just to celebrate a list of rules instead of cannonballing into a pool with Christ. They came for community, beauty, joy, truth. St. Peter’s Basilica and Notre Dame were not built so that we could hang up a sign that read, “No running. No glass bottles.” They were built because people experience a union with God that unshackles them from life and makes them free, in a way that the pool, or drinking, or sex, or money, or trophies can never even come close to reaching.

The funny thing about the rules is that once you find that key that opens the door, and you follow Christ, only then do the rules make total sense and you actually want to follow them. You even yearn to follow them, because it would please God to do so. In fact, the pool was built for joy, but if there were no pool rules it would be chaos and no one would want to swim there. Lawless pools with loud drunks and kids running wild end up as empty pools. Suddenly, once you believe, the joy singing goes right along with the requirements of fasting. The prayer where the heart surges toward God goes right alongside Confession. That’s the miracle that happens, which I will keep repeating it on this site until I move to my cave someday, following the leads of St. Benedict or St. Anthony of Egypt, where there is no internet.

We’re all “failures” to some degree and we deal with our human flaws in different ways. This is the problem of sin. In order to feel better, we need to elevate our side. Out of this competition, scapegoats are born. We want to scapegoat and point fingers at the failures of our opponents. The notion to blame is always inserted into our heads, put there as a thought from somewhere. I can tell you where that somewhere thought comes from. For many years I assumed thoughts came from myself, but the conception of thoughts have outer origins. It is from the devil, who is the divider and the distractor.

There I said it. The devil is real. What a relief. It’s nice to stop dancing around these things and just say it.

The favorite, perennial scapegoat for all sides is the Church, as in the Catholic Church, because it’s an easy target, and it is the main target. And I mean all sides are on the attack. Even Catholics attack the Church relentlessly, from both the liberal progressive side and the Rad-Trad side. After a while, when you see how much hatred is directed at the Church, it should start to make you wonder. Why?

Why is there so much hate against the Church? Because they say that abortion is wrong? Because they say that marriage is between a man and a woman? Because they reprimanded Galileo? Because of the Crusades? There are hundreds of these reasons, but none of them are the real reason.

The real reason is because God granted the Church authority on interpreting faith and morals until Jesus returns, and we really, really hate anyone telling us how to live. We hate authority. But that is exactly what Jesus claimed, and he deputized the Apostles, with Peter as the leader. Even “scripture alone” interpreters have to dance around the fact of Jesus giving the keys to Peter, and Peter being the rock of the Church. Furthermore, you have to pretend Peter never lived in Rome, and do all kind of “textual criticism” and other rain-dances to try and undo the fact that the Church was founded on Peter, and Peter’s took his seat in Rome.

We hate authority so much that we’ll do anything to tear it down or avoid it.

And this is precisely what the devil does. It’s really the first line from the serpent over and over again, as he said to Eve: “Did God really say…?” That is his opening phrase and his unending hymn of rebellion.

When Jesus gave Peter the keys to the Church, he chose a leader and gave him and the Apostles the authority to bind and loose sins. This is really irritating to people because it means that someone has the authority, and the reason we dislike that idea is because we, each of us, wants to be king. Thus, the claim to authority over faith and morals becomes a target just as it did in the Garden of Eden, when the authority of God was questioned and rejected.

Now, I know for any of my Protestant friends who read this, they will disagree, and will assume that for 1,500 years the church was in the wrong, and only the Reformation brought Christianity back to life. But that assumes that all of the spiritual battles and bloodshed by every saint and martyr from 30 A.D. onward was for a Church on the wrong track, which to me is ludicrous. The early church was the Catholic Church, and the more I read of early Church history, the more it’s clear that the doctrines in the Catechism we use today matches with what Jesus and the Apostles believed. As John Henry Neumann said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant."

But, even Protestants should be wary of this urge to blame Catholics, because if they pray for the demise of the Church and the Pope, you can bet that the next domino to go is your local Bible-believing neighborhood church, because the only keeper of doctrine is then in the pastor’s head, or three-ring binder, or the next vote at the annual conference. Chastity is currently on the chopping block for many Protestants, and the faith of the early church is being flung aside for the spirit of the age.

The long history of half-truths being told about the Catholic Church will only blow up in the face of anti-Catholic Christians in the end. Why? Because we are all, at the root, brothers in Christ. We are all drinking from the same vine. But here’s my belief: the last stand of Christianity will be made in the barque of Peter, the Catholic Church, not in your local pastor’s three-ring binder, or in the Southern Baptist Convention or in one of the Lutheran Synods or in the First, Second, or Third Baptist Church. And if the barque of Peter goes down, then so shall all other boats, because the focal point of the anger always lands on the Church. If the gates of hell were to prevail against the Catholic Church (which can’t actually happen), then all of the denominations that came after the Catholic Church will lose the boogeyman. Then they will become the boogeyman and would crumble quickly under the weight of the world. The Church, I believe, is in the world, but is not of this world, and Jesus guaranteed that his followers would be hated, and they most certainly are. But that only encourages us to keep speaking, to keep partaking in the Sacraments, and to keep “praying to Mary and our statues” as the detractors like to say.

As for the unbelievers, the “love of others” has taken precedent over the first commandment of Christ, which is to “love God.” And here’s the problem with that:

When love of God and his word gets put into second place and given the silver medal, then love thy neighbor attempts to take the podium, the gold. Unfortunately, this never works. There is a reason for the order. The imitation of Christ is not a game with optional modes of play, it’s guidance for the salvation of your soul. So much has been forgotten in the distractions and fragmentation of modern thought. This is why you now see Pride flags outside of Methodist and ELCA churches that would make the Wesley brothers’ and Martin Luther’s heads explode. It’s honestly hard to imagine a greater insult to their names and legacy than what has happened in their churches, but because their own step to form these churches was one of protest, it’s not terribly surprising that the protestors are now protesting the earlier protestors. This again, goes back to the beginning and illustrates exactly why the odd story of the Garden of Eden has such lasting power.

Obedience to God must be first. Not flags, not clubs, not organizations, and certainly nothing national or political. None of those things can provide the foundation needed. If Jesus said that not one letter of the law would be undone, meaning the Commandments, then how on earth can you skip Sunday Mass for youth sports or claim that sex outside of marriage is allowed? You can only do that if you are ignoring what Jesus says. And the Church was established to defend and follow his example. To argue against marriage and chastity means you have to throw out the Gospel, and if you start throwing out parts, you’ve thrown out all of it. It comes as a package. Moreover, it only makes sense as an entire package. The baby and bathwater are both out on the lawn now in those churches because they have rejected the Gospel and called it “love.” What they really mean by love is “lust.” Many people have forgotten that Jesus was a celibate man his whole life and ardently, clearly stated that there is to be one marriage in life, and if you aren’t married, no sex. No one wants to hear that, but it’s incredibly loud and crystal clear if we would just take a minute to open up the book and actually look at the words. The only thing the Church is saying to make people so angry is the exact words of Jesus in Mark 6. It’s remarkable really, that just repeating the Gospel words, as they are written, can cause such madness among us lusty moderns. That is how you can tell that we are under a kind of slavery to the passions. The same happens when you try to take away an addict’s drugs or when a wealthy person’s finances collapse. When the devil finds the right bait for each of us, he keeps using it and sets the hook deep.

In our era, methinks the Protesting hath gone on too long and each protesting generation tries to remake the world anew in its own desires. This is why the saying rings true that “A church that marries the age it finds itself in will find itself a widow in the next.”

This is the logical conclusion of sola scriptura and sola fide. By faith alone, you can do whatever you want because you were saved fifteen years ago. With sola scriptura, you can interpret the book yourself, however you like, which is being proved out right now before our eyes. Want to throw out chastity? It’s gone! Poof. Want to sacralize greed? As you wish, says Kenneth Copeland. Want to rid yourself of the Eucharist and just focus on preaching? Welcome to the party, Zwingli, and all you other random people who want to start your own church. The only problem is that Jesus only appointed Peter as the rock, and said nothing about Zwingli or Wesley or anyone else. Every heresy since Christ rose from the tomb has played out again and again over the past five hundred years by wannabe Simon Peters, thanks to the five solas of Protestantism, but mostly because of two: sola fide and sola scriptura.

You can argue yourself into any position, because, well, why not? If you’re saved by your faith, actions don’t matter. If traditional interpretations of scripture doesn’t quite match your desires, then you can hammer doctrine intellectually into the shape you like, just like Henry VIII called in all the scholars of Europe to to bless his divorce. Works? Works mean nothing. Works are optional. You can pretend Jesus said what you want, and even pretend the letter of James doesn’t exist at all.

As soon as you cut out the physical, as soon as the Sacraments are not needed, you’ve cut the body from the soul, because the body is what carries out “works.” In fact, if there is one damning bit of evidence against Protestantism’s shedding of the Sacraments it’s that Covid proved that church attendance is not necessary if you have no sacraments. The internet and streaming video seems to be God’s humorous way of proving that “four walls and a sermon” make not a Church, because now everyone can stay home to watch it online. Covid presented this fact in full, because a community gathering to hear a sermon is only as compelling as the speaker, and if the mouthpiece can be piped into the ear alone, then getting dressed and driving to church is not needed. With the Catholic Mass, attendance is required. You cannot do confession over Zoom, and you most certainly cannot receive the Eucharist through an iPhone. Again, body and soul are required in the Catholic Church. This is a great feature of the Church.

It’s worth noting that Jesus isn’t here in the flesh. He is risen. So that means that we must act as the arms and legs now. He is the head of the Church, but the mystical body is important, too. We can use our individual bodies like cells of the mystical body. Our bodies can move around. We can use our bodies to feed the poor or to carry out sinful actions. Ideally, we move toward using it for God’s purposes rather than our own. Socialists understand that the body is needed to do good things, so they have half of this whole thing figured out, except they deny the soul. Protestants have the soul and faith part figured out, but can’t quite factor in the body because it’s not really needed. Put them together and you have something more whole, body and soul, and it’s called the Catholic Church.

I don’t believe that scripture alone or faith alone jives with the Gospel. Otherwise, when you are on your third marriage or looking at porn or having extra-marital sex, you get angry when the Church merely points out the words that Jesus said. Simply reminding others what Jesus said about marriage gets people fired up. It’s not like the Church made any of this up. Jesus said these things and the Apostles wrote them down. Merely saying what Jesus said invokes rage from many unbelievers and Protestors, because they have already decided that Jesus is some watered down hippy teacher. But he’s a knife that divides people. He was clearly offensive. Nice people don’t get crucified.

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You do not end up in the Catholic Church by accident. Even for the cradle Catholic who strays, a full return cannot happen without a deep search. For most people that convert or revert, it’s a long story. It’s a battle. The truth is: we resist the Church. We struggle with it. But many end up in the Catholic Church because they wrestled with faith and reason for a long time before having the moment that they understood why Jesus started this Church. They suddenly stop hating the Pope, as they were often instructed to do, and submit to that authority. We dislike authority. That is our nature. That is the story in the Garden. It is often the story of our lives. Coming to love God and his Church means letting go of our preconceived notions and cultural teachings about power.

The idea of being required to go to Confession and attend Mass weekly (because skipping Mass is a mortal sin) seems ridiculous to non-Catholics, but the reason for it is solid. This is a pattern for living. Further, partaking in the Sacraments does what they actually claim they do. They make the invisible visible. This is a mystery, but a glorious mystery if you can move from doubt into assent. Not everyone can do this. For some it seems to come naturally. For some it takes years. For some, they can never fully give up the love of self, or take the leap of faith and “know” that the Eucharist is indeed the body and blood of the risen Jesus.

God bestows this gift of faith on those he chooses and who cooperate with his grace. All are offered grace but many simply refuse to cooperate. We are all given time and multiple opportunities to react to this offering, to reject it or surrender to it. This is a centerpiece of our free-will, this choice to cooperate or refuse God’s grace. So for anyone that seems to lack access to that grace, or rejects it, it is our duty to pray for them, and a good practice is to do a 9-day or a 54-day Rosary novena for your most beloved unbelieving friend. It will probably just irritate them, so you don’t even have to tell them. But praying for others is important. Prayers matter. They work. I have watched people change through prayer that goes beyond explanation. Thousands of hours of therapy fail, and suddenly a healthy prayer life heals. Yes, it’s bizarre.

Oddly enough, knowing God is like knowing any other person. The infinite and unexplainable Creator must be known just like your next door neighbor: through conversation, visits, shared experience, the journey of life, and shared meals. It’s very important he be invited to meals, and that is what the Eucharist at Catholic Mass is: a thanksgiving meal where God and his family come together. We get to have thanksgiving every week, or even every day if you live somewhere that daily Mass is offered.

Through the years, a relationship develops, but only if you develop it. No relationship in the history of mankind has flourished by two people ignoring one another. No relationship can be made with mere thoughts either, because we are both body and soul. Hence, Sacraments. Hence, the spiritual and corporate works of mercy. Hence, prayer. Prayer is essential and it works, just as conversations and phone calls and get-togethers work with real people. Action, also, is essential, as faith without works is dead. Catholicism is a “get off the couch” religion, if you’re doing it correctly.

This relationship with God: it cannot be explained fully. It is a mystery. Like the Trinity, we can never really understand it. And rather than frustrate us with uncertainty, it is a great letting go of the need to control, of the ego, of the self. While this drives modern people crazy, resting in that mystery can “unmodern” your misshapen plastic brain all by itself. This requires the step where you go into the unknown, the uncertain, the un-Google. Call is mysticism if you like. Whatever it is, it’s better than that THC or Fentanyl everyone get so excited about.

Kneeling and asking for the willingness to be willing can change everything. It’s also free, and still legal. Even simply saying, “God, please help me. Give me strength and direction today,” has altered people’s entire lives. That was the first prayer I said on my road back to building the relationship with God. And I hope and pray that you, reader, will ask, seek, and knock on that door to find out. Because it will change your life beyond any drug or experience that this world can give you. What you “know” today may change into a new kind of “knowing,” especially if you have been ignoring the one relationship that can restore you to health and make you whole.

In short, I was disenchanted from all things supernatural like the priest-hunter in the Graham Greene novel. If there wasn’t a rational explanation for something, then I decided it was absurd. Praying for people? My response to that was: Sending money for therapy would be better, since prayer is just talking to an imaginary friend. Belief in Angels? Give me a break. Devils? Sure, if they were just people with pitchforks dressed up in Halloween costumes.

Re-enchantment doesn’t mean jumping into the deep end of the pool and booking a vacation to where a Marian apparition occurred. It all starts with one prayer, a simple reach, to a power outside of yourself. You may even begin with a generic “spirit of the universe” and later get to God himself, the Creator, to Jesus, the Word, and the the Holy Spirit, the breath of life. I had to jumpstart my dead heart with the idea of an absurd “Streetlight God.” Hopefully most people don’t have to go that far downward, but it does work. If you can, just pick one person of the Holy Trinity to start with. But try all three. Some people connect with one element of the Trinity better than others. You’ve tried every flavor of ice cream, what have you go to lose? You’ve probably gone through the kama sutra trying sexual positions, but that didn’t satisfy you any more than eating Snickers bars “satisfies,” as the advertisements claim.

This time, and in the future, try a new position called “kneeling.” That is, kneeling before God. It does wonders. Surely on a sleepless night you can take five minutes to start a new relationship that isn’t centered around your phone. You are not a moth, so you stop acting like one. Stop buzzing around bright lights and screens, as if that’s all you were made to do. If you are like most people today, you are mesmerized by the dancing light of a screen. After all, entertainment is not your end goal. It is a distraction from your fears: of death, rejection, abandonment, and shame. All of those fears come from a lack of relationship with God. You’ll sleep better once you start dialing up God in the middle of the night, because he’s always there and doesn’t need sleep.

The thing is, once the relationship begins, you learn that you are never alone, or rejected, or abandoned. You have a perfect family that you’ve been neglecting. Sure, your earthly family has flaws, or isn’t perfect, or makes mistakes. That’s because they are compromised humans. They are compromised, but not broken. All of us were ejected from the Garden for our own good, so that we would not remain in a permanently fallen state. The family that you have here is the earthly family that has been given to you to love. That is the trial and test, of course, and as soon as you start seeing those people as redeemable, compromised creatures that God loves, they look different. But even if those people are not around, you are never alone, and here’s why…

You are never alone because God is always present and available. If he does not feel present to you, then he is letting you walk, just as a toddler who is learning is allowed to fall. He wants you to walk and carry the cross, but he has not abandoned you, ever, just as a loving parent doesn’t let their toddler destroy herself. The parent will pick her up when the time is right. God is doing that in your life, in different ways.

If your earthly father is controlling, you may have a problem with the idea of a heavenly father. Thus, kneeling may seem too much to give up, since submission makes your blood boil. But the father in heaven isn’t like your earthly father. He doesn’t coerce. He doesn’t force. He invites you.

If your earthly father was a “deadbeat dad” who abandoned you, you may not like the idea of forgiving a father. But again, this father has never and will never abandon you. Only you can abandon this father.

The father that we all want is this kind. He is the father who runs out to meet the Prodigal Son. He is the father that weeps when his children disobey but allows them chance after chance to come back. He is the father that never leaves you but also won’t coddle you, because he wants you to grow. Don’t confuse your earthly father with the Father in heaven.

So you have a loving father, but you also have a brother. If you are baptized and believe, or if you ask for belief, you have a brother in Jesus. He will pray with you. He will be beside you in prayer if you ask. Like the St. Patrick prayer, he will be in you, around, above you, below you. Further yet, you can “put on the mind of Christ” and let his thoughts become yours, and if that seems impossible, open the Gospel and see his words and life, or do Lectio Divina in the Hallow app if you don’t like to read. So now you have a loving father and a loving brother (also your savior), both who are perfect, who can help you fight the spiritual fight. They will show you how to live. One will father you and one will guide you. You have navigation from headquarters and boots on the ground to walk with you.

There is more. What family is complete without a mother? The beauty of Catholic complementarity is that we don’t have to pretend men and women are the same. Sometimes we need a mother, and sometimes we need a father, but we need both. We are whole when we have a relationship with both. We know that men and women are not the same, despite what the modern media tells us. Sanity is sometimes as simple as stating the obvious. The genius of femininity is that it is not male. It is something different and wonderful.

The Blessed Mother, Mary, is your mother. You have a perfect mother and she will pray with you, any time, any where. And her prayers go straight to the top, as no one intercedes ahead of Mary. From the cross, Jesus looked down and said to Mary, “There is your son,” referring to the Apostle John. To John, he said, “There is your mother.” The Church has always held that Jesus, right then and there, from the Cross invited all faithful into the holy family. If we are brothers with Christ, then God is our father, and Mary is our mother.

There is more. There is another earthly step-father for you other than your biological one, and his name is Joseph. His moniker is the “Terror of Demons” because of how he protected Mary and Jesus, taking action when the dreams and warnings appeared. People often consecrate themselves to Mary and/or Joseph. Why? Because they love their family and want to grow closer to them.

“What does it mean for a person to be consecrated to St. Joseph? Well, it basically means that you acknowledge that he is your spiritual father, and you want to be like him. Total consecration to St. Joseph means you make a formal act of filial entrustment to your spiritual father so that he can take care of your spiritual well-being and lead you to God. The person who consecrates himself to St. Joseph wants to be as close to their spiritual father as possible, to the point of resembling him in virtue and holiness. Saint Joseph, in turn, will give those consecrated to him his undivided attention, protection, and guidance.” (from the Consecration to St. Joseph)

And lastly, the saints. We have the saints, a larger family, who can intercede and pray with us. I ask for St. Peter and St. Anthony of Egypt to pray with me, as well as St. Dymphna and St. Mary Magdalene. It’s a co-ed team of prayer, every day. And there are thousands of saints to ask for intercession, and even Rafael and Gabriel, the angels that we have come to know through Sacred Scripture.

When navigating this world, sometimes you need a father to guide to, sometimes you need a mother to help you, and sometimes you need your brother to fight off a dragon. And still, sometimes, you need just to be still with the Holy Spirit - that unexplainable breath of life. The simple prayer of “Come, Holy Spirit,” opens us up to God’s grace. No matter what you need, you need to be open to your heavenly family, because that is your perfect family, your family without wounds, without identity lies. Knowing and building a relationship with that family will help you grow in relationship with your earthly family.

You are never alone. When I heard someone say that in the past, I assumed they were schizo, but today I know exactly what they mean.

Having been re-enchanted, the invisible spiritual world is now as real and palpable as that rock in my shoe. If you come to believe in Jesus, then you come to know, and one thing that comes along with it is the awareness of your own sin, but rather than being a horrible thing, it can be a liberating thing. You can’t get found unless you were once lost. It’s an entirely new kind of freedom, but not a freedom to do what you want, but a freedom to follow God, as best as you can. And you want to do it. It’s not forced! Never forced. That is one of the miraculously weird things that happens once you know you are a sinner and come to love and know God. Sooner or later, you come to know that angels and demons are also as real as that rock in the shoe. Once that happened, I began to see why and how the world and individual people behave as they do. The faith of an atheist doesn’t allow for miracles, or spiritual lives, or souls, or partaking of the divine nature.

The faith of an atheist really offers only half of life. It offers nothing that I want to take back, because I have discarded my anti-depressants, I haven’t drank in almost seven years, I have zero desire to scroll porn (because people have souls and are not objects), I pray for my enemies and enemies of the Church. Daily, I meet with whole people of faith that astonish me in their own miraculous underdog comebacks. I start and end my day with prayer and gratitude to God. What more could I possibly want? (If you’re an atheist, you scoffed there, and that’s ok. If you’re a Protestant, I probably lost you back at my “faith alone” rant. To both - I’m sorry, but this is my blog site, and this is my body and soul story. There are many things I admire about Protestants, but I believe that Christ’s Body in the world is the Catholic Church.)

The strangeness of it all is this: it all fits together. All of it. Somehow, someway. The bizarre storytelling and miracles and parables and Marian dogmas and relics and Sacraments - they all bake into something perfect and unendingly satisfying - a bread that never stops feeding you. That is, I believe, what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the bread of life.” Hence, the Eucharist at Mass is food for the body and the soul. It is food for the faithful. It is a meal with God himself. The tie that binds is Jesus. “Love God. Love others. Let’s all get together and eat my body. Do this in memory of me.”

I recall reciting the Nicene Creed as a teenager and skipping certain elements, mostly the ones that required supernatural belief, which means a large portion of it. As the years went on, when I had to attend a funeral or wedding, I started to notice that certain elements had become less difficult to accept, as a rudderless life had tossed me about so much that I reached a state of openness. Through the use of alcohol, I had moored my ship on many rocks, on islands of ideologies and empty pursuits. Of course, this process of getting to shore meant getting both the rudder and the sail working together, not against one another.

Switching metaphors, I’ll move over to Chesterton’s “lock and key” example. For me, it was not that one single grand moment made all the difference, but many small moments that carved away untruths and honed edges down. I could not open the door using the key I had, because the key just hadn’t been fully prepared yet. At first the key was just a cylinder that did not fit the keyhole at all. But over twenty years, with many books and life experience, the grinding of the search shaped the key, until one day I tried the key again, and I felt the thunk of the lock as it sunk into the center.

A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key. (From Chesterton’s Orthodoxy)

Perhaps you know the feeling. When the key fits, you think it’s the right key, but if haven’t yet turned the deadbolt, you’re still not certain. I’d had that feeling before, but the key wouldn’t turn. A key seemed to have the fit, yet I still couldn’t open the door. With modern versions of stoicism and epicureanism and humanism, I felt I’d had the key before, but none of those could turn the bolt. But then this time, when I twisted, the bolt moved. Then I had to decide, did I really want to open the door? Because I knew that opening the door meant the change of everything in my entire life. This is what Catholics call “cooperating with grace.” Even if the key has been given, and the door unlocked, each of us must still choose to open that door. The mystery of why God gives us trials and temptations in life is clear to me now: they key that we need to unlock the door needs to be shaped, and God shapes the key using these struggles.

Of course, I had to open the door. After all, I’d spent a long time looking for that key and having it shaped. So what other choice did I have? How could I go back to the prior attempts that left me locked out? None of them had made me happy.

If you have been given the key, you may think there is no choice but to use, but God does not coerce or force us to do anything. He wants us to open the door voluntarily, but he doesn’t fling it open for us. He just gives us the key. And then opening the door, the treasure is there, the one that makes sense of all the struggle and searching. This is the key we are all looking for. If you haven’t gotten the key fully shaped yet, you still might, given more time and experience. But you have to come back to the door now and then to test the key, because that is the game that God is playing with us. He’s doing something in your life, but you may not understand it until much later.

So that is my take on coming to faith. As Jesus said, we are only drawn to God if God draws us. This is confusing, but if you feel drawn, you should set down your busy life and try the key again. Free will is a powerful thing, because God beckons us but we have to take action. If the beckoning happens, then you are likely being called. If you ignore the beckoning, you may miss the opportunity. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day.” (John 6:44)

Now, most people today have a real beef with the Catholic Church, so let me take some time to comment on that. Everyone seems to have this in common, especially Catholics themselves.

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From Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, set in Mexico during the Communist persecution of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, there is a great line from an atheist, who fully embraces his “faith.” It’s interesting, in hindsight of my own experience: to not believe in God takes every bit as much faith in the end as does believing in God. However, the outcome of how you see the world is radically different.

The character is an angry man who is hunting down the “Whiskey Priest,” a drunk, corrupt, unheroic hero who needs to be snuffed out, because snuffing out the priest will kill off God for good. “Kill ‘em all” is not just the title track on a classic Metallica album, it has also been the classic blunder in attempting to stamp out Christians since Nero first blamed followers of Jesus Christ for the fire in Rome.

An unbeliever writhes at the stereotype of the faithful fool. He loathes the idiot who prays and believes in angels and demons. Why? Because he knows better. He knows that religion is all smoke and mirrors. It’s all b******t, and he knows it. He knows. He sees the wizard behind the curtain. These words could have come from my mouth or mind, even though I wasn’t physically hunting priests to kill them:

“It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.”

Yes, he knew. I knew. But I know now, too. Don’t we all know? That is, after all, the point of the “tree of knowledge” in the garden. When we eat from that tree, we know, and we think we know better than God. We turn away from God. Genesis, what a timeless old thing it is! How on earth did the sacred writer know how to craft it so elusively and accurately throughout all the ages? Oh, right. I forgot: it’s because God inspired the sacred author of Genesis (and I’ll refer you to Dei Verbum for expansion on that idea, which is a worthy read for Catholics and anti-Catholics alike, and I would recommend followups of Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio) and The Splendor of Truth (Veritatis Splendor). And if you’ve gone that far, you might as well read the Prologue and Part One of the Catechism).

What the atheist “knows” is not known any more than what the believer “knows,” but assumes a similar kind of faith. In other words, to quote The Big Lebowski, you can say to either one, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” But of course, one is right and one is wrong, but neither can ever prove it. After adopting the ideas of unbelief for about fifteen years, I realized that I do not have enough faith to be an atheist, particularly after witnessing addiction recovery miracles and seeing, literally, the power of prayer in real people’s lives, including my own.

The unbeliever’s belief requires a kind of assent that is not at all different from the person of faith (and I’ll refer you to John Henry Neumann and G.K. Chesterton for expansions on the idea of assent). We are assenting to a faith, like it or not, whichever way we lean, and the reason endless debates rage over the existence of God is because both sides “know” they are right and have ample arguments to defend their view. Yet only one can be right. Only one will be proven correct, and the test date is usually unscheduled, kind of a pop quiz, that happens with the final beat emitted from of our hearts. This makes for a lot of anger between the tribes of believers and unbelievers, because both “know” they are right.

However, the unbelievers should never be mocked, because that is their job: to mock us believers. They get to keep that for themselves. They don’t have much else to hold onto, so mockery and condescension remains theirs. To be mocked for having faith in God should not bother any person of faith. Seriously, faith is a gift. If you’ve been to a party where everyone received a gift except for you, the feeling results in sadness or anger, but the wound of being left out leads to envy. Sour grapes, insults on intelligence, accusations of inbreeding, and variations on the phrase “I don’t need a crutch” are just some of the results of envy. The error of envy plays out in toddlers and adults in interesting ways. You’ll notice that Jesus never exhibits any behaviors related to envy. Believers, as always, should imitate him and pray for strength daily. All adversity should be received as exercises in humility and for every insult for faith we should give thanks to God for the opportunity to be tested and grow in faith.

The meaning of life is wrapped up faith in God. It fills the Big Empty. Those without faith cannot grasp this. It’s impossible. If I try to explain that I believe in miracles to an atheist, the wall around them is built up so tall that they cannot even hear a word I’m saying. I had the same wall. The atheist will often say, “I just need more evidence,” meaning a sign, like the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, but even if Jesus flew around in the sky in front of them, they would start explaining the physics and asking for a video to review if he was wearing a jetpack. In fact, I had this very conversation about miracles recently with an atheist, and we spoke about the “calming the storm” miracle, and his answer was that science can do that, it can control the weather now. But I have yet to see a meteorologist reach out his hand and stop the wind and waves instantly. I didn’t bother to ask, “What about the walking on water?” but surely he would have had a material cause, like a reef beneath Jesus’ feet, or a first century paddleboard. My point is that you must take a leap of faith on miracles in order to believe. The alternative is to find material reasons for divine things, or deny the stories altogether. Many modern people have done all the way in trying to solve the problem, denying that Jesus ever existed. The problem with that is, like the ostrich, God still exists even while the head is underground. The walling-in of our wonder is what keeps us from opening up, from filling the God-shaped hole in our hearts.

(This is where I start praising Protestants and Evangelicals if any are still here...)

Many believers of non-Catholic faith are enriched and filled with the Holy Spirit, and many understand the faith part better than Catholics. I’m talking about Evangelicals and Protestants. (Here is where I even praise “faith alone” a little bit…) The great thing about “faith alone” is that people meet Jesus this way, without having to assent to the whole Catechism of the Catholic Church and go through an RCIA class for six months. Luther lowered the barrier of entry, and Jesus certainly criticized the Pharisees for keeping the kingdom of God from the people. Catholics can trend toward Pharisaism, and this is a well-known charge against the Church. Rules and regulations are needed, and must be adhered to, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. After all, Jesus said he didn’t come to throw out the law but to fulfill it, and he also said that we must do more than just pray and say “Lord, Lord!” There are things that must be done. There are works like “Be baptized and believe” and “If you love me, keep my commandments” and “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.”

While I don’t believe that ease of entry into salvation is true with sola fide, that idea certainly gets people through the door. The ball gets rolling very quickly when someone is ready to change. So if someone is drawn to Jesus through a concert-style service or an altar call, there are far worse things I can think of people doing. I just don’t think that it’s the fullness of the faith. I believe that there is more to it, and that the Tradition that goes back to Peter is the Church, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that is guided by the Holy Spirit.

The simple invite of “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” has always seemed too easy to me, but I have seen it change lives in dramatic and stunning ways when someone takes it to heart, when it is not coerced or faked. I know Evangelicals and Lutherans who are on fire for God, and even though they say “works” are not necessary, these on-fire believers are engaged in mucho works, body and soul, helping people pray and get along in this world. And that is a beautiful thing.

But the problem is that it leads to the Pink Cloud too often. What is the pink cloud? Addicts who get sober can experience a Pink Cloud after about thirty days of sobriety, and everything is wonderful. Life is amazing. Love is everywhere. And then the euphoria wears off. Many relapse because this new high of sobriety has dulled. The new feeling of being reborn in sobriety fades as real life plods along with the march of days. Thus are newly sober people warned, “Beware of the Pink Cloud.”

In a similar way, the euphoria of an altar call or instant conversion lacks long-term staying power, because it’s too easy. Having attended a few services in my life where sinners feel moved to come up to the altar, I watched with skepticism as it felt too dramatic. Perhaps too emotional, as feelings do not always last. This is why watching Marcus Grodi’s “Journey Home” conversion stories is so compelling. These are five year or ten year or twenty year conversion stories. There is meat and potatoes in these stories, of life, learning, hard knocks, and revelations.

Recently, a celebrity, Shia Leboeuf, did an interview on his conversion and said that “It didn’t feel like they were trying to sell me a car.”

He nailed it. He nailed the problem of cheap and easy evangelization. It’s too glossy, too polished, too impersonal, too much sugar. Let me give some examples of this problem of feeling “sold” instead of assenting to Church teaching through a process of both reason and faith, as Chesterton and St. Augustine did.

I can recall several attempts by people to evangelize me to Christianity while I was fallen away that repulsed me and pushed me further away from God than if they had scourged me with a whip. It was the sell. The approach. I think of these often now that I’ve returned to believe in Jesus, because they make me realize how obnoxious it is to sell religion to someone like it was soap or a gadget.

Example #1: I was on a beach during spring break, drinking heavily, just like any good useless college student raised on Nirvana and Sublime, when a few attractive college girls approached. They wanted to hang out, but then within a short time, they asked if I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and returned to the comfort of liquor.

Example #2: I had paid $50 to do an “ejector seat” ride where bungee cords shoot you up into the air for three seconds of bliss, and right before we were about to eject, the operator said, “I can only hit this button if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” And rather than say, “No, let me off,” I said “Yes,” because I had paid $50 and didn’t want to get off the ride. But it irritated me and ruined the experience because at that time I was still happy on the side of the devil.

Example #3: I recall retreat groups coming to church as a kid, with super motivated adults and teens who wanted to stir up the spirit in us. But I didn’t get it. I also didn’t get it when some kids would apparently feel the spirit and start crying and want to give their life to Christ. The retreats just kind of hit me like pie in the face. I just wasn’t ready to eat. The thing was, the people were trying hard and probably did convert some people, but I just couldn’t buy in.

Example #4: I attended an “all-night party” as a kid thinking it would just be bowling and basketball and movies, but then it turned out to be a Christian rock concert and an altar call where the singer needed, “Just ten more of you to come up to the stage and give your lives to Christ.” All the hand-waving and teary eyes didn’t phase me, as I eyed the pizza from the open side doors.

Example #5: I remember Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door and running an elevator pitch at me while I was hungover and watching football. It reminded me of when I had to sell candy bars for the local booster club as a kid, and I hated it then, and I knew the candy bar buyers hated forking over a dollar for sub-par milk chocolate. Likewise, I cringed watching these people try to sell religion to me when I was not yet in the market. I also knew just enough about Jehovah’s Witness theology to realize that it would be betraying my reason altogether to engage with them, so I said goodbye.

Now, with all that said, I can tell you this: every single one of those people who tried to convert me had a lot better grip on life than I did, since drinking was my escape, my idol. Drinking and goals was the game, I thought, and despite having a decent sense of Biblical stories, I had zero idea why anyone was pushing these old tales my way. All I saw was a bunch of rules. I felt like Cool Hand Luke, when he said, “I ain't heard that much worth listenin' to. There's a lot of guys layin' down a lot of rules and regulations.” I’m pretty sure I actually wanted to be Cool Hand Luke, come to think of it.

At the start of this series I talked about selling, because that is what people do with their worldviews. What’s so strange about the Catholic Church is that it does not feel like a sale, because much of what they teach runs against our desires and instincts. What an awkward pitch it is. It’s almost an anti-sales pitch, which is why we have to wrestle with it for so long. Just as Jesus confounded us and refuted our expectations, so does the Church.

But for those of us who end up buying Catholicism, it’s eventually purchased because it works. It is proven to work. People arrive at this place because nothing else has worked. Peter famously said to Jesus, “Master, where else will we go?” The Catholic Church is the last stop after all other sources of “truth” have been tried and found untrue. This has been the conclusion of people in every generation for 2,000 years.

We may not like the pitch or the demonstration, but the application of it works. It offers sanity in a world of half-truths. It requires elevating faith ever so slightly over reason, but just barely. The beauty of Catholicism is that you get to keep your reason - all of it - and add on the mysteries of faith to it. It enriches reason because it tears down the wall of needing material answers for everything. It throws out religious fundamentalism while keeping the laws of physics, the Commandments, miracles, and the richest trove of literature and stunning architecture the world has ever known.

Also, it’s not forced upon anyone. It doesn’t feel like trickery. How could it? The pitch takes away things that we perceive to be pleasure, so the gloss is off the flyer. The pitch is not easy, not a quick solvent or pill to swallow, but more of a tough love. It’s like a stern but loving family that sits you down to say: “This will be difficult, but you can be holy. First, grow up and take responsibility, and second, be humble and return to the faith of a child. Now start praying and serving others.”

What bothers me about saying “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and being done with progressing to salvation is this: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com