In this open mailbag episode Trent answers a variety of questions submitted by his patrons at trenthornpodcast.com.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
I am tired. That is a confession that I must make here on the Counsel of Trent podcast. I was up late last night with my wife. We were continuing our track through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, going through Thor: Ragnarok, a very delightful film, by the way, that I recommend. I mean, Jeff Goldblum makes everything delightful. Definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it before. But then after my wife went to bed, I get in this habit where I stay up late and enjoy the fact that the house is perfectly quiet, and I start catching up on work like editing podcasts or writing. I’m working on a new book on salvation for Catholic Answers Press. I think you guys are going to like a lot. Hopefully, we’ll have out this fall, if not next spring.
I’ve also, I dusted off my fiction book a little bit last night and I was reading through it and thought, “Hey, this is actually kind of entertaining.” If it entertains me, I’d love to finish it. Who knows, maybe by the end of the summer and share that with you all. And that might be a Trent Horn publication, not a Catholic Answers publication. We’ll see, but I am tired. I was up pretty late, but I’m still excited to share this podcast episode with you today. A few notes, though, about bonus content. If you go to trenthornpodcast.com, if you’re a premium subscriber, which you can be for as little as $5 a month, you can check out my new talk; Evangelizing at LGBT Pride Parades. It was featured at the Love Life Virtual Catholic Conference this past weekend. If you didn’t get a chance to go to that conference, by the way, go to my Twitter page, click on the Trent Horn Twitter, click on the posted link, the pinned post, it’s the highest post on the page.
There’s a link there where you can go get a premium pass to watch all of the talks from the conference, over 70 of them, meeting a chance to do that, including my talk on Evangelizing at Pride Parades. And also, you can get that talk trenthornpodcast.com, if you are a premium subscriber. And also, if you’re a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com, you get to submit questions for our open mailbag episodes, which is what we’re going to be sharing with you today. So exciting. You’re a gold level subscriber. You get a first round dibs, your questions get the most priority, and then I open it up to all of our subscribers. If you want to be part of that and get other bonus content, and keep the podcast going, be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com. And if you’re at any bonus level, I will send you a little thank you video that you can send to your friends and family. Something I always love and enjoy doing.
Now, onto the questions that were sent to us. Here’s the first one from our gold level subscribers. We know that Jesus was begotten by the father and has existed for all eternity, but was not fully revealed in the Old Testament. Where in the Old Testament is Jesus present? I sometimes struggle with the fact that people living in Old Testament times never knew who Jesus was like we know who He is today. Well, you can least rest assured that the righteous people who lived during Old Testament times know Jesus even better than we know Him today because they are with Him in heaven. That’s why we celebrate on Holy Saturday that Jesus descended into hell, not the hell of the damned, but what they say in Greek is Hades or in Hebrew, Sheol, not Sheol. “Jesus, here went down to Sheol.” No, in Hebrew it’s Sheol, though I pronounced it as Sheol for a long time before I realized it was Sheol.
And he went down to the underworld and freed the righteous there who dwelled there, who died before His crucifixion, and then brought them into heaven. I think that’s in paragraphs, it’s around 60, 61 one of the catechism, which says that the patriarchs and the prophets of the Old Testament are still regarded as saints under the New Covenant. They do know Him now, that’s for sure. But there’s also instances in the Old Testament where we see implicit descriptions of the pre incarnate, Jesus Christ or God the son being made known to God’s people. One of those examples, these would be in Theophanous, God’s appearances to human beings like the burning bush, which would be an example of the father making an appearance to Moses.
But we see other examples that may reveal the Trinity more. Probably one of the most famous ones is in Genesis 18. In Genesis 18, it says, “The Lord appeared to him, Abraham, by the Oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked and behold, three men stood in front of him.” There we see that the Lord chooses to appear in the form of three men. There’s an implicit reference to the Trinity there. Also, in early Christian iconography, early Christian icons, you see a habit of the Trinity; the father, son, and Holy Spirit. Sometimes it’s a older man and a carpenter, and a dove, a bird, but many of the earliest works, you actually just see three identical men to show that the Trinity is not three separate beings, but three distinct persons of the one Godhead.
The one God in three distinct persons who are all equal in divinity, equal and sharing in the godhood and the divine nature, but they are distinct in their person, is that the father is not the son, son is not the Holy Spirit, the father is not the Holy Spirit. When you think of the Athanasian shield and what is the Trinity? The father is God, the son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. The father is not the son. The son is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the father. The son is not the Spirit. Another example though, when we go into the New Testament in John 12:37-43, this is interesting. It’s talking about the unbelief among the Jewish leaders. It says, “When Jesus had said this, He departed and hid Himself from them, though He had done so many signs before them, yet they did not believe in Him. It was that the word spoken by the Prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled.”
And what word is that? 1st John quotes Isaiah 53, “Lord, who has believed our report and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed, therefore they could not believe.” Verse 38 is quoting Isaiah 53, a reference to the Messianic suffering servant, “By His stripes, we will be healed.” That’s a reference to Jesus. Then Isaiah again said, “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.” And in John 12:41, it says, “Isaiah said this because he saw His glory and spoke of Him.” Now, who is he talking about here? You might be saying, well, the father or Yahweh. But remember Isaiah is talking… John is referencing here to Isaiah 53 and in another passage in Isaiah to Isaiah chapter 6. And he’s talking about how Isaiah saw His glory.
And a lot of commenters say that in John 12:41, John is saying that in Isaiah chapter 6, where Isaiah talks about, “In the year of King Uzziah, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne and saw His glory,” that in Isaiah 6, he saw that the him in John 12:41 is Christ. John 12:41 means Isaiah said this because he saw Christ’s glory and spoke of Christ. A lot of commenters believe here that John, in this paramedical remark, is saying that Isaiah, when he saw the glory of Yahweh in Isaiah 6, he actually unbeknownst to him, saw the glory of the pre incarnate Christ as well. And that John is making this more apparent because the point of John’s gospel is say, Jesus is God. Even Bart Ehrman, a very skeptical New Testament scholar, Ehrman wrote a book called How Jesus Became God, and then a bunch of other Christian scholars wrote a book called How God Became Jesus as a response to Ehrman.
Ehrman says that Matthew, Mark and Luke didn’t believe Jesus was God, which is not true. They did. But even Ehrman admits that in the gospel of John, Jesus is treated as being divine. It is patently obvious, even a very liberal critic like Ehrman admits that, which is helpful because some Muslim apologists will cite Ehrman because he’s an agnostic who tries to say the Bible’s unreliable. They’ll say, “Well, look at Bart Ehrman, here’s what he says.” But they won’t say Bart Ehrman when Ehrman says, “Yeah, but the gospel of John,” which Muslims will say, “You can believe in the in shield and the gospel that was given in the Bible, it’s not corrupted.” Ehrman says, “Yeah, the gospel of John says that Jesus is God.”
Good question from our gold level subscribers. Let’s keep going. If you think something should be changed in Canon Law, what is the process of trying to accomplish this? Well, you’d have to talk to the Pope, because he’s the only one with the authority to change Canon Law. He’s a Supreme legislator of the church. He has full Supreme power as the pastor of Christ church, not as some kind of autocratic tyrant, but as just the pastor of Christ church, as the vicar of Christ, as the successor of St. Peter, Peter of course being the leader of the early church as well. Only the Pope can change Canon Law. And this does happen from time to time, not frequently, but it does happen. John Paul II released an entire new code in 1983 to supersede the Pio-Benedictine Code of 1917.
Then later, he adjusted Canon Law to correspond with the Profession of Faith he published in 1998. And he was writing that partly because he wanted to tell theologians at Catholic universities, “Hey, if you’re Catholic, you can’t weasel your way out of believing the essential doctrines of the faith. Like if this teaching is dogma, you have to affirm it as divinely revealed under the pain of sin. No weaseling your way out of this one.” And then he made other changes to Canon Law as well, minor changes here and there, and Pope Benedict did the same thing with motu proprios that he released, I think in 2009. Where he said, actually, that being in the person of Christ applies only the presbyterate, not to the diaconate. It happens not often, but if you want to change Canon Law, you might need to talk to the Pope. He is the only one that can do that.
Next question. If you were to be in charge of banning contraception, would you do it? Well, yeah, if I could ban it and people will go along with it, sure. Just like I banned pornography. I ban things that are bad for people’s souls, and frankly, bad for society. Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae prophesied that if birth control, contraception, became widespread, you would see a degradation of women, an increase in infertility… Sorry, I don’t know if he said in infertility, but he definitely said in infidelity. Obviously, if contraception is widespread, infertility increases, their whole point is to make you temporarily in fertile. Though I know a girl, I used to work at Macy’s in the shoe department, she worked in cosmetics, and we would talk here and there.
And she used to be Catholic, and she said, “Yeah, I was on birth control, but I got pelvic inflammatory disease.” She was so sad about it and she said, “Now I’m permanently on birth control.” It’s sad all around. Yeah, I would ban it, but what’s hard is we live in a democratic Republic. If people won’t obey the law, you could ban it, but people are going to do what they’re going to do. That’s why with abortion, I’m for banning abortion, but we’re going to have to get like 70% or 80% of people on board with that if we’re going to ban it. It’s like with alcohol. When the state tried to ban alcohol back in the 1920s, the Organized Crime stepped in to fill the void and crime went up, alcohol consumption went up. It just didn’t work. Now, sometimes you do ban things and it does work. You have to see where it’s realistic.
It’s like with the quarantines right now. I live under an autocracy. Governor Gavin Newsom, even the L.A. times has said that California used to be a one-party state, now it’s a one-person state, where Governor Newsom will just pass these executive orders, but even he’s backpedaling. You see governor’s backpedaling because if people won’t obey the laws, they just refuse, then the laws don’t really have a lot of force. We’re living in a nation of consent of the governed. Like here in California, for example, San Diego County, I want us to reopen. I want to go back to church as soon as possible. It’s looking like it could be soon, but governor Newsom said, “Well, you can’t reopen churches until you’ve had no coronavirus deaths for a 14-day period.”
Which is ridiculous. We’re a County of 3.3 million people. We have health care capacity to deal with a surge and we’re never going to be at a point where there’s not going to be one death every two weeks, especially when you have people who will count coronavirus deaths and say he died in a car accident and tested positive for coronavirus, coronavirus death. There’s a wonderful meme online where it talks about this. And a wife says to her husband, “Oh, I’m so worried about quarantine. Am I putting on weight for the coronavirus quarantine?” And the husband says, “You weren’t really that thin, to begin with.” Then it says, “John Doe dies March 23rd, 11:00 AM, cause of death, coronavirus.”
My point here is that even if you try to ban contraception, if 90% of people want it to be legal, it’s not going to stay illegal for long. I’d love to outlaw it. I do. I would. Absolutely. I think it’s a bad thing. And I think it’s overall harmful to society. But if people aren’t willing to go along with that, I think you’ve got to change people’s hearts before you can change the laws. I think that’s something we need to focus on and people are getting disenchanted with contraception. One thing, people care about being green, people are all into essential oils and all this other stuff, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop. They think they’d be okay with NFP, which is a way to regulate birth, spaced births without doing anything intrinsically evil, without using chemicals, without using barriers. People are all for that natural, everything’s all natural. I don’t know why they’re not for natural family planning. You tell me.
Here’s another one. Why can’t Catholics get married on the beach? I am getting married in July and people are asking why can’t I just get married someplace else if the governor is not allowing a large crowd? Why must it be in a church? Now, I used to work at the office of Marriage and Respect Life in the Diocese of Phoenix. And so, I handled a lot of requests about marriage. And there were always people here and there who would request to get married outside, and they were always denied. You’d have a rare circumstance where people want to get married outside of the church. The only times the church really grants that is if you have a mixed marriage or a disparity of cult, where you have a Catholic who’s marrying a Muslim and the Muslim family refuses to step foot inside of a Catholic church, but the Muslim spouse is not going to hinder raising the children to be Catholic.
And you know what, all right, we’re going to accommodate them. We’ll get married in a neutral place. The priest sits there, but you have to be dispensed by the Bishop, the local ordinary to be able to do that. And so, that’s why it says here, this is allowed for in the code of Canon Law in Canon 1118. It says, “A marriage between Catholics or between a Catholic party and a non-Catholic baptized party, is to be celebrated in a parish church. It can be celebrated in another church or oratory with the permission of the local ordinary or pastor.” And then here is the important sections, both of the Muslim example I gave and for anything else, it’s subsections two and three of Canon 1118. “The local ordinary can permit a marriage to be celebrated in another suitable place. A marriage between a Catholic party and a non-baptized party can be celebrated in a church or in another suitable place.”
It allows, but usually that’s only for grave or extreme circumstances, the Muslim family, or maybe the fundamentalist Baptist family who refuses to set foot in a Catholic church, or maybe they’ve had a natural disaster and all the churches are turned into piles of rebel. You still got to get married, can’t get married in the church. Well, then you get married in a suitable place. It has to be a suitable place. I tried to find this but I think the Diocese Orlando specifically said once that you can’t get married at Disneyland, it’s not a suitable place to celebrate the sacrament of matrimony because of its promotion of secular values. But if you wanted to get married, like for example, I live here in San Diego and it’s beautiful here.
And at the mission to Alcoa, there is a beautiful St. Francis garden outside. Someone may want an outdoor wedding. No, that’s not a profane. Sorry, profane would just mean secular. You hear the term the sacred and the profane. Profane doesn’t mean like four letter words in that context, profane just means like secular or earthly. But if it’s in the St. Francis Rose Garden, that could be a suitable place. But I would say in that case, why aren’t you just doing it inside the church? Usually, diocese will not grant permission for you to get married on the beach for two reasons. One, married on the beach or in the mountains, or in an idyllic place makes Catholic marriage seem like it’s all about weddings and fuels this wedding industrial complex we have that makes the sacrament of matrimony become materialistic.
It loses sight of the importance of marriage is not to look pretty on your wedding day. It’s you’ve entered into irrevocable vows to freely give yourself to your spouse until death do you part. And themed weddings and other things like that lose sight of that. Now look, if you want to have a reception on the beach, if you want to have a reception at medieval times and dressed in suits of armor or King and queen, go right ahead, the church doesn’t care what you do within limits for your reception, but the wedding itself, that’s a different matter. They worry about it being trivialized. And they also worry about that if you grant an exception to one person, they get to get married outside, everybody’s going to be asking for that. And they don’t want to have to wade through that.
Now I think though, in this case, if it’s like, “Well, can we get married outside because we’re not allowed to be in church?” I think the diocese is more likely to grant, you can get married on church grounds, on the parish property underneath a large tent, but there’s still no reason for you to do your destination wedding at the beach, for example, or you show up on horseback or something like that. There you go. Here is the next one, this question pertains the Old Testament and the Jews. God gave very specific instructions about offering sacrifices in Exodus and Leviticus. Why do observant Jews no longer make these sacrifices? I know the temple doesn’t exist for temple sacrifices, but what about sin offerings?
Well, the answer to the question is, yeah, that Jews don’t offer sacrifice anymore because they’ll say that God prescribed that sacrifices should only take place in the temple. That the last place He gave for the sacrifices to occur was the temple in Jerusalem. They usually cite passages in Deuteronomy for this. They’ll say, “Look, we can’t make sacrifices in places God did not authorize and until…” There are Orthodox Jews that are waiting that if they can get the Temple Mount back and rebuild the temple, and without starting world war III, because the dome of the rock is there, which is a Holy site to Islam, they’ll start sacrifices all over again.
In fact, there are people who are arrested going to the Temple Mount, Jews to this day who try to offer sacrifice there. Where the vast majority of Jews will say, “No, we don’t offer sacrifices.” And frankly, a lot of the reform and a moderate conservative Jews have really lost sight of the sacrificial understanding of a lot of the essential elements of Judaism, especially the reform Jews. Orthodox Jews still care very much about that. But if the temple is destroyed, you can’t offer it. Also, in the Old Testament, when you had sin offerings, they were offered in Leviticus, like Leviticus chapter 4, those could only be done in the tabernacle. You couldn’t just do them anywhere. They were offered in the tabernacle or in Hebrew, the Mishcon and the center of the camps. It had to be a designated Holy place.
Jews today, ever since Rabbi… is not Gamaliel, Gamaliel II, they offered sacrifices a little bit after the second Jewish war in 132 AD, 135 AD, but then after they got crushed by the Romans, again, the rabbis said, “No, we’re going to celebrate people of the Torah, but we do not offer sacrifices until the temple is rebuilt.”
Here’s the next question. In my ethics class, we had a whole unit on natural law ethics. In that class, there was an objection about natural law ethics that was modal in nature. I’ll get to what that means in a second. The argument stated that because we can imagine another world where our telos or our end, involves sinful behavior, such as the telos of sex being for harming another person or speeches and being for harming other people, natural law does not work. How would you respond to this objection? Natural law is based on natural ends. God made us. God made the world for a specific purpose.
And if we look at the nature of human beings, our rational nature, even our very bodies, how their function and they’re ordered towards, we can know how we ought to act. The most basic fundamental element of the natural law is you ought to do good and avoid evil. And then we look at our particular nature’s speech, rational thought, even our sexual powers and see what end they’re naturally ordered towards, or they’re telos. This objection says, look, but I can imagine a world where having sex hurts people. You don’t have sex. In this world, sex is ordered towards a good end, according to natural law, but in another possible world, that’s what modal thinking is.
If you remember our episode on the ontological argument, we talked about modal logic and possible worlds. Maybe there’s another possible world where having sex actually is a way of hurting people. And so, sex is a bad thing. What do you do with natural law then? Well, first, what I would say is this kind of objection, it’s a universal acid. It could undercut any kind of morality that’s out there. Because you could have modal thinking that says, all right, morality can be based on natural law because what if our natures were different in another world? And so, we had different moral laws as a result. Well, if you have morality that is based on human opinion, what if human opinion is different in another world?
And it could easily be different in this world or what if it’s based on utilitarianism, maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain? But in another world… well, let me put it this way. Natural law, is just you have to follow your nature. Well, what if we had different natures and in some places, they’re good, other places, they’re evil? Well, that’s like saying in that ethics class, I would say, what about utilitarianism? Morality is about maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain. What about you live in another world where massaging somebody back caused them riving pain and electrocuting them is a ton of pleasure? Well, all that would mean is in this different world with different laws, you just apply the central truth of morality differently. They’d just be applied in a different way, much the same if our nature’s we’re different.
Like if we reproduced asexually instead of sexually, we would have different sexual ethics than we have now, but that wouldn’t revoke the fundamental elements of natural law, which is we ought to act according to our natures, we ought to do good, we ought to avoid evil. Even though we can imagine the world being different, that wouldn’t change the fundamental elements of morality that we are bound to follow. You get a morality here as an applied ethics question. If you please, I certainly can, could you speak about the difference between mercy killing and euthanasia? Well, they are the same thing, euthanasia and mercy killing, that’s what it is.
Euthanasia is “good death”. It’s killing someone because you want to alleviate their suffering. He says, for example, in The Last of the Mohicans, Major Hayward is shot to spare him the suffering of being burned alive. This does not seem wrong to me. Is it ethical for a CIA agent to take poison to kill himself if he is facing certain and painful death? If a child is suffering a long-drawn death process, is it ethical to hasten his death? I’m thinking of an example where a child lives in a place with no medical facilities which could provide palliative care. Yeah. What the church teaches is that you directly kill someone just because they are suffering. But so, you cannot directly kill someone.
It says in 22:77, “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia is morally unacceptable.” However, in 22:78, it says, “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to an expected outcome can be legitimate.” You can’t kill someone who’s dying, but you don’t have to give them every available treatment in order to keep them alive. It also says in 22:79, “The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity. If death is not willed either as an end or a means, but as only foreseen and tolerated.” If someone is an agonizing pain, you give them a bunch of painkillers. As long as you’re not intending to kill them, you’re just intending to alleviate their pain, knowing that it may shorten their life, that can be acceptable. But it is not acceptable to kill someone because they are suffering.
And it’s hard for these examples. You can think of a very, very typical case where it pulls at your heartstrings and this person is suffering. And The Last of the Mohicans example, that’s one that gets to me, based on the old… Gosh, when was that written? The 19th century? There’s been several films about it. A modern one was made with Daniel Day Lewis. I remember we watched it actually in English class. Thanks government education, who needs to read Last of the Mohicans and we could watch it at school? And there’s a scene where Major Hayward, I remember this, he gets pulled up and he takes somebody else’s place. And he’s executed by some of the indigenous people and they burned them alive.
And I think it’s Daniel Day Lewis, I think it’s him, somebody shoots him so he doesn’t end up being burned alive. We might say, “Well, why is that good? He’s going to die anyways.” But if that’s your rationale, he’s going to die anyways. What do you do with the cancer patient, to the bone cancer patient who is going to suffer a lot more than Major Hayward? If major Hayward’s 10 minutes of being emulated justified directly killing him, then it would even more justify directly killing someone who’s going to spend 10 weeks writhing in agony from bone cancer, even with painkillers in a hospital. What about someone who’s going to spend 10 years of the rest of their life as a quadriplegic, and that causes them intensive suffering, psychological and emotional anguish.
There’s no logical place to stop. If it’s killing someone to keep them from suffering, you can’t do that, even in The Last of the Mohicans example. Now, there could be cases where you choose death but it’s intent, it’s foreseen, but not intended. There’s another element you actually want instead. For example, I would say that somebody who is in the World Trade Center, who is on fire and jumps out the window, I would say they’re not committing suicide. Instead, they are fleeing from the flames. They’re fleeing from the flames. And maybe if by some sheer amazing stroke of chance, they survive, they will be grateful that they survived. At least they wouldn’t wish they were dead, necessarily, because they weren’t trying to die. They weren’t trying to kill themselves. They’re just trying to get away from an intense amount of pain.
In that case, I would say that would not be suicide, properly speaking, even if it were, it would be so venial as a sin, given the circumstances surrounding it. But I would say somebody in that situation who is jumping out of a building, obviously cannot think rationally, and they’re not intending suicide. They’re intending to get away from something causing them pain, knowing they’ll probably die. But if they didn’t die, that wouldn’t grieve them. Compare that to someone who jumps off a bridge trying to kill themselves, if they didn’t die, they would consider that a failure, which would show that that’s suicide, in that case. Though, when you talk to people who do jump off bridges and survive, most of them say the second their feet left the bridge, they realized they’d made the biggest mistake of their life.
All right, here’s the next one. My friend had an emergency C-section at 28 weeks and the baby was baptized by a Catholic priest in the hospital. Because the baby’s skin was so sensitive, they didn’t apply the chrism oil at the time. The priest told my friend who was a partial baptism, and they would have to complete the sacrament by bringing the baby to the church later for the rest of the baptismal blessings. How could this be a partial baptism? Well, I would say first, it’s a valid baptism. A baptism, only to be valid, all you have to say is, “I baptize you in the name of the father and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit.” That’s all you need for it to be valid. If that baby had died after receiving that baptism, that “partial baptism”, they would die in a state of grace, because they received the essential element of the sacrament, which is, “I baptize you in the name of the father and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Okay.
That’s what the priest has to intend to say. And even if he, as he’s saying, if he coughs or sneezes, or something, and he mingles the words just a little bit, that’s fine, he’s intending to say the Trinitarian baptismal formula. But there’s a lot more to the sacrament. You do a prayer of exorcism, a blessing, a sealing with Chris and oil. In the Western church, that’s a sealing to remind you of your status as a prophet. In the Eastern church, that is the prism of confirmation. It’s the sacrament. You get the sacrament of confirmation in the Eastern church, right when you’re baptized as a baby.
And this is the prayer though in the Western church, at least, that the priest says over the baby, “The God of power and father of our Lord, Jesus Christ has freed you from sin.” That means the baptism was a successful, was valid. “Giving you a new birth by water in the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his Holy people. He now anoints you what the chrism of salvation, as Christ was anointed priest, prophet and King, so may you live always as a member of His body, sharing everlasting life.” And then we all say, amen. Here, the baby born premature in the hospital receives the full validity of it, though all of the graces accompanied with the sacrament, they would receive later when they can receive the Chrism, the sealing with oil, the new garment and everything else associated sacrament to have it in its fullest.
Here’s the next one. Trent, in light of the recent shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, it’d be appropriate to talk about the link between slavery and hate crimes. The leader of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, Douglas Wilson, published a document that takes scripture out of context and twists history in order to claim slavery is not sinful. It’s called Southern Slavery as It Was and is available online. Our questionnaire also brings up Joel Panzer’s book, The Popes and Slavery, very good book, by the way, talking about how the Popes dealt with slavery and how they combated slavery.
While slavery was something that has existed, of course, since the Old Testament and the New Testament, even through the middle ages, that if you conquered a kingdom, many of the able-bodied men in that kingdom would become slaves as punishment, especially the soldiers. It was an institution that was a part of society for a long time, though the church eventually saw that it was something that could no longer be tolerated as being an affront to the dignity of the human person. You go away, telemarketer, you telemarketers, you heard the ringing a little bit there. It always has my number. It has the area code and same first three numbers. That doesn’t fool me, telemarketers. If you had the area code, maybe that’ll fool me, but don’t copy the first three numbers of my phone because I know it’s I know it’s you.
Anyways, the Popes and Slavery by Joel Panzer shows that the church opposed the slave trade, opposed kidnapping people into slavery and worked hard against this institution. I should probably just do a whole podcast on that in the future, and I probably will. If you want a good book on that, Joel Panzer’s, the Popes and Slavery. But what Doug Wilson is saying, Wilson is part of this Christian reconstruction movement that tries to implement Old Testament law today under Christian identity. He wrote this booklet, Southern Slavery as It Was, and he says things like this, “Slave life was to slaves, a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food clothes, and good medical care.” He tries to say that it was a very affectionate thing that was abused every now and then.
He whitewashes slavery, which is a no, no, that’s not true. Slavery was a horrific crime. You’ve got to watch the great film… Oh gosh. It’s with Yom Griffin, the guy who played Mr. Fantastic and Fantastic Four. The title is based on the song; Amazing Grace. I think it’s called Amazing Grace. Maybe it’s called Amazing Grace. Anyhow, it’s about the abolitionist, William Wilberforce, and how he fought the slave trade in England. Awesome. Make you cry, wonderful movie that I would recommend. But no, it’s an evil and you’ve got people like Wilson and others who try to whitewash this evil. A good document that refutes Wilson is a paper called Southern Slavery as It Wasn’t. I will read some of the excerpt of that and they show what’s wrong with Wilson’s argument.
It says, “Wilson presents almost no historical evidence and the few documents he does use… sorry, Wilson and Wilkins. Steve Wilkins as collaborator, are highly selective. For the most part, they base their judgment that the majority of slaves were, in fact, happy to be enslaved on the testimony of former slaves who were interviewed by the works progress administration, WPA, during the 1930s.” But the problem is they point out in this corrective article, Southern Slavery as It Wasn’t, that the former slaves, when they were interviewed in the ‘30s by the WPA, they would give different answers based on whether the interviewer was white or black.
For example, when speaking to a white interviewer, Susan Hamlin of Charleston, South Carolina, remembered her former master as a good Christian man. He sure was a good man, but when she spoke to a black interviewer, she said all the other slaves was made to watch the whippings that would end up getting people killed. She told a white interviewer, her former owner just get his slaves so he could be good to them. I’m not trying to be offensive or anything, I’m just reading it. It’s spelled phonetically. I’m just trying to read it how it’s spelled here. Nevertheless, told a black interviewer that her fellow slaves hated and detest both of them, the master and wife, and all-day family, people was always dying from a broken heart.
The problem is you get these testimonies, and by the way, these are from elderly people. If you’re in the 1930s, talking about slavery in the United States, especially slavery when it was prior to the emancipation proclamation, you’d be like… you would have been, even if you were a child, like five or six years old, talk about it in the ‘30s, you’d be like 70 or 80 years old. You have elderly people who are being interviewed and they’re being interviewed. It says here when the interviews were conducted, many of the interview subjects were elderly and still living on the lands of the planters who once owned them. The WPA records cannot be taken at face value and every reputable historian who has made use of them has been careful to take these many distortions into consideration. If you ever came across this track, be sure to get the corrective papers, Southern Slavery as It Wasn’t.
Let’s move on to our next one. “Hi, Trent. I am a college student hoping to pursue theology. A professor of mine. I’m not at a Catholic college, but if you were at a Catholic college, this would probably still happen. Stated that new evidence has been uncovered that points to women in the early church as priests. One of the books referenced on this matter was Karen Jo Torjesen’s, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity. How would I respond to these claims?” Well, Torjesen’s book is not new. It was published back in the ‘90s, and you see women’s priest advocates always trying to find scraps of evidence to show women were priests in the early church. They’ll try to read a lot out of the fact that women were deaconesses, even though the Counsel of Nicea said that they were not part of the sacrament of Holy Orders, they belong to the lady. They’ll look for different small details extrapolate from them.
A good rebuttal to some of Torjesen’s arguments can be found in an article in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly. It’s an Eastern Orthodox publication written by Eastern Orthodox scholar, Valerie Karras. The article is called Priestesses or Priests’ Wives: Presbytera In Early Christianity. What Karras notes in these arguments is that they’ll look for two things. One is art. They’ll look at art frescoes, and try to say, “Look, this fresco shows a female priest presiding over the Eucharist at mass.” And so, Karras and Torjesen uses these images at the beginning of chapter two, averting that the clothing and hairstyles worn by the participants suggest that most of them are women who are presiding at some kind of a Eucharistic meal. Karras was on there saying, “The poor condition of the fresco makes it unlikely that there can be any secure determination.”
But here’s some neglected points. First, interpreting all the figures and she points out one fresco where it looks like a group of women celebrating mass, Karras says, “This neglects the fact that only one of them is wearing a veil.” The veiled figure would be the single lone female who was present, who was not presiding. And the fact that she’s wearing a veil is important because Paul says in first Corinthians 11, women cannot prophesy in church unless they’re wearing a veil to cover their heads. Karras quotes Kenneth Steinhauser who says, “This painting depicts, not a Eucharistic celebration, but a refrigerium.” It’s not something you get at Maytag, “A commemorative meal at the tombs of the dead, seeking refrigerate refrige, refrigerium,” which means refreshment for the dead. This is a commemorative meal of the dead, not a Eucharistic meal or a mass.
These frescoes are oftentimes degraded, highly subjective to interpret. They’ll try to get women priests out of them. Epigrams are another one. People will find women who are buried with inscriptions like Presbytera or Episcopal and they’ll say, “Ah, see, this woman was a Presbytera, a female priest or an Episcopal, a female Bishop.” But what Karras points out is that within both academic and ecclesiastical circles, the women in these inscriptions had been understood as the wives of priests and bishops. Even in the early church, bishops had wives. You go to 1st Timothy 3, it says a person cannot be Bishop, unless he can control his own household.
It wasn’t till later in the Eastern church, when bishops were told you can have a wife, but she has to live in a separate house from you. They just didn’t bother getting married as a result of that. But in the early church, they had married priests and they had married bishops, and they had these titles Presbytera or Episcopal, and that just referenced the fact that they were the wives of priests or bishops. Not that they were priestesses or Bishoperesses, whatever the case may be. All right, let’s do two more here.
I’d love for you to touch on the subject of nuclear weapons. My understanding is that there are limited scenarios for their use but not much else. Why isn’t this a bigger issue for Catholic voters? You’re right, that the Catholic church teaches in the paragraphs on just war in the catechism that you cannot indiscriminately target civilian populations, whether it’s with a nuclear weapon or a non-nuclear weapon, you couldn’t just carpet bomb an entire city, for example, civilians, military and not care what happens. You can only target military installations and any civilian casualties have to be foreseen, but not intended. But it’s not really that big of a deal now because we haven’t used nuclear weapons in war in 70 years. Most countries are way too scared to use them because if one person uses it, you get what’s called MAD, mutually assured destruction, and everybody uses them. And then it ends up with a nuclear catastrophe.
There was a great film made back in the ‘80s, and there’s like 1983 called The Day After, it was shown on television. I watched it at Steubenville when I rented DVDs from the library. I would get all my work done. I had to study there for six weeks, one summer and I went to the library to look at DVDs, to check out. And I was like, “Oh, this looks interesting.” And then it got me all freaked out and prepped for the nuclear apocalypse. Yeah, the church has been very skeptical of nuclear weapons, has encouraged disarmament for decades. And we are. Frankly, I would like to disarm nuclear weapons and get them all in a nuclear power.
But that’s another debate about whether nuclear weapons, what role they really do play in maintaining world peace, and stability, probably a subject for another time. But the fact of using them in war, you can’t do it except maybe like if you were going to use it against a Naval fleet at sea, and there were no civilians around, but otherwise, it just wouldn’t… it’s something you couldn’t do with a civilian population. Then it’s just not talked about because it hasn’t been used in a civilian population since the bombing of Hiroshima.
And the last question from our gold level subscribers, by the way. If you want to get a premium access to these Q&A mail bags, be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com. How did you end up working at Catholic Answers? Well, I will tell you this, get my testimonial, my conversion story, Following the Evidence at shop.catholic.com. The whole story is there, but here’s the scoop, basically. A friend of mine called me and said, “Hey, I have a friend who knows a guy, who knows a guy, that Catholic Answers is hiring apologists.” And I happened to be in San Diego at the time conducting a pro-life retreat for college students. And we were going to visit Catholic Answers the next day.
I went in, I brought my resume, told them I heard about it and they mold over it. I showed them some videos of me on college campuses debating people. And they brought me back a few months later in October of 2012, I signed the contract with Carl Keating and Tim Staples. They brought me on December after that, and I felt like Robyn walking into the Hall of Justice. Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice, I love the guy from Caddy Shack does that. I’m pretty sure he does. Yeah, that’s basically how it started, but if you want to get more of the details on my conversion, my conversion and how I got to become an apologist, get my CD set at shop.catholic.com, Following the Evidence.
You’re not going to be disappointed as that guy from men’s warehouse says, “You’re going to like my testimonial. I guarantee it.” Thank you, guys, so much, hope you all enjoyed this open mailbag episode. Become a premium subscriber for future episodes. And I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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