The Catholic Bogeyman, Part 2: Responding with Love (#483)

0:00If you ache for truth, goodness, and beauty, if you're hungry for a Christianity with substance and strength, if you long for a faith that's big and bold and biblical and all about Jesus Christ, if you're inspired by the idea of one church that has spanned 20 centuries, 24 times zones, and two hemispheres in folding every race, nation, and language. Then you're considering Catholicism. So in the last episode, which was number 482, the Catholic Boogeyman, part one, we talked about how a lot of anti-Catholic propaganda functions more as a myth than it does a set of rational arguments.

1:00To be clear, and as I said in the last episode, you can make rational arguments against Catholicism. I personally, I used to make those before I was Catholic. And now that I am Catholic, or the reason I became Catholic is that I no longer buy those arguments, I no longer agree with them. But nevertheless, one can have a fair, objective, intellectually based argument for or against Catholicism. But that's not what we're talking about. Or what we talked about in the last episode. We talked about how for 500 years, there's been a certain type of anti-Catholic propaganda that has this whole mythology linked to it. Or it's shaped by this mythology, and it's a rant, and it plays on emotions, and it's largely unfair because it simply lobs all these hand grenades against Catholicism.

2:05And you can't really respond to it in any sort of organized, rational way. Go back and listen to that episode, especially listened to the clip at the beginning that I played, and some of the excerpts that I gave you through it from anti-Catholic propagandists. This is the whole stuff about the Catholic Church, it's the horror of Babylon, and the Pope is the Antichrist, and there were tunnels from the monasteries to the convents where the monks and nuns did their secret satanic rituals and on and on, all this kind of stuff. The death cracker of the Eucharist and all of that. Here's the thing, I listen to a lot of people, some of you who write in, other people that I know that I speak to, who are living with this, because you have people in your lives that are waging this kind of propaganda war against you, they're perpetuating that myth, they're shouting it at you.

3:05I was speaking to a college student the other day who is considering Catholicism and has a parent who is just barraging this student. The parent has actually, it's a college student whose father is a Protestant pastor, like I was, and the father is so upset that his child is considering Catholicism that this pastor is just lobbing the kind of anti-Catholic myths and rants that I shared in the last episode about. And I know some of you are living with that too in your life. And so what I wanted to do is I know Thanksgiving is coming up and all that, and some of you have to go home, you're considering Catholicism where you've become Catholic or you're in OCA, and you're going to face that kind of animosity. And I promised at the end of the last episode that I would address how you address it. So how do you respond to that? And the first thing I want to say is that it's okay to walk away.

4:15It's okay to walk away from that kind of propaganda mythological anti-Catholic rant. Sometimes the best thing to do is to walk away. Either physically walk away or metaphorically walk away, change the subject. You can go home for Thanksgiving and you're going to have the anti-Catholic relative or whatever letting loose on you. It's okay to sort of stay and eat the turkey and the apple pie. And it's okay to let them go on. And here's the thing. It's okay to to not have to win, to preserve the Thanksgiving dinner, the family time. Let me say this really clearly so that you understand. Christ did not appoint every single baptized person to spend the rest of their life being a soccer goalie for the Catholic church,

5:23while somebody will want anti-Catholic propagandists take shots on goal, kick balls at you, 10, 15, 20 balls a minute. Because that's a lot of times how it feels. You're the goalie and you're trying to defend the Catholic church and defend the Catholic faith and defend Catholic history and you're just getting shot on goal. Christ did not say to every Catholic, your job is to play goalie for Catholic doctrine in history. Relationships who require love and love has to go both directions. Otherwise, your response is just a tactic. How do I respond to them? That's the question that I'm getting from people after the last episode. What do I say? What do I do? How do I respond? And sometimes, in fact, on all cases, your response has to be rooted in love. Love for the person launching the charges,

6:29love for the Catholic faith, love for Jesus Christ. The person launching the charges at you, perpetuating the myth, throwing that anti-Catholic hatred at you, is not a cartoon. They are a human being and they have a soul and a mortal soul and God loves them and Jesus died for them and he would long for them to be in full communion with Christ in his church. And you don't know completely what their motives are. Some of them launched that anti-Catholic propaganda out of a sincerity of motive. They really are in the well within the context of what they know and what they understand. They believe they're standing up for the truth. And if they're a relative of yours or a friend and they're concerned that you're going into the Catholic church and it's going to mean the loss of

7:30your salvation, it may be a really abusive way for them to share it, but they can be genuinely motivated because they're afraid you'll lose your salvation. They're wrong that the Catholic church is the horror of Babylon run by the Antichrist, full of paganism, denying of Jesus that Catholics can't be saved. They're wrong about that, but can you see that it's possible that they believe that because that's what they were taught? And that rant towards you actually comes from place of misguided love for you. Because a lot of them, that rant, as I shared in the last episode, that anti-Catholic myth has been around for 500 years since Martin Luther launched it and in Calvin and all the reformers. They're passing on what has been taught by the great reformers, Protestant theologians, pastors, everything that they've been taught for 500 years.

8:35And a lot of that really comes out as formed as loyalty. They're loyal to the Christian faith as they understand it. And in some cases with you, if you're on the receiving end of it, they're loyal to you. They love you enough not to let you wander into what they think is spiritual danger. Now, they may be calling you a dupe, a fool, they may be saying that the Catholic Church is pagan full of poor idiots in the pews, taking the death cracker, the death cookie, or whatever. But look, I want you to listen to the advice that I give you here and take it for whatever it's worth. Okay? You are not required to earn the right to remain Catholic by winning a debate at the dinner table. That is of all the things that Jesus asks of you. Winning a debate with Uncle

9:45Fester at the dinner table at Thanksgiving is not one of the things that Jesus requires of you. The Catholic Church is not waiting for you to come up with the perfect response, the perfect one liner, the perfect way to bat down the whore of Babylon charge before the church can receive you or the church can give you the sacraments. You are already belonged to the church, you belong in Christ. A life hidden with Christ is not a lesser life because you're not a great apologist, a great debater. Last week I talked about the myth, the anti-Catholic myth, and I want to unpack here. My thoughts, you probably noticing I'm struggling, I don't have kind of my thoughts organized and the way that I usually do when I record because I'm kind of speaking more from the heart today and really thinking this through. But let's talk a little bit

10:51about how these kinds of debates play out. Let's back up a little bit and talk about a debating tactic. And this is just not just about Catholicism. This is a debating tactic that gets used in politics and every other kind of argument that people have. And it has to do with the fact that offense is cheap and defense is expensive. Here's what I mean by that. When I want to launch a criticism, I can launch a criticism in five or six words, very short sentences. So with criticism, the Catholic Church is the horror of Babylon from Revelation. The Catholic Church is idolatry and paganism. The Rosary is a rabbit's foot. The Eucharist is a death cookie. There were tunnels between the monks and the nuns. The Pope is the Antichrist. Right. Every one of those just takes me three to four or five or six words, five or ten seconds

11:58each to launch the attacks. Now, for you to respond to any of those, sincerely and intelligently, where you unpack scripture and history and logic and what the Catholic Church actually teaches, to respond to any of those charges I just rattled off would take you five, ten minutes for each. So if the critic in his propaganda is going to launch five, six, seven, eight, nine, five second charges against you and you're going to take ten minutes to respond to each one of them, that's an hour and a half, an hour and a half of deconstructing these charges, showing how they're curious, going back to scriptures, pulling open Bibles and referencing things, going back to quotations and church history and all this kind of business, right. And nobody

13:01wants to listen to you go on for an hour and a half about it. The critic who's launching in 60 seconds and 90 seconds is launching a dozen attacks at you is not going to listen to you go on for an hour and a half or two hours and respond. They're just taking shots on goal like an insokka or a hockey. They're just and they want you to be scrambling, they want you off balance. That's what I mean by offense is cheap. It's easy to hurl charges at somebody. It's easy to hurl criticism at somebody. And when you try to defend against them, you sound defensive, you sound guilty. And see, that's not a conversation. That's a scoreboard that only works in one direction. Bam, charge, criticism and then you're scrambling, hold on, let's go back to that thing that you said two minutes ago and let me try to find some Bible verses or let me pull out a podcast that you should

14:05listen to. And I grew up, especially doing campus ministry when I first started out in university ministry. I used to think that it was all about the debate. Here I was working with college students and they'd launch, they would ask questions, asking questions is different, but there would be criticisms. And then I thought kind of my job was to spend the 10 or 15 or 20 minutes responding to answer every charge, leave no slander unanswered. And that to me felt courageous. And I also felt that if I could just give them a really clever, well-reasoned, well-referenced response, they would listen. But it was a sucker's game because they're not really trying to explore the truth with you. That's the distinction I made in the last episode between a myth and a logical argument.

15:09Okay, I talked about the difference from Greek philosophy of mythos, which is story and logos, which is rational argument. This isn't somebody coming to you. I had a Protestant come to me just a couple of days ago and asked me some questions. And they were pointed to questions about Catholic teaching and history. But I think that they actually wanted an answer. They asked me sharp hard questions and then they paused and they listened to what I had to say. And then they asked some follow-up questions. And I felt like we actually had a conversation. But when you're dealing with the kind of rant, the mythical anti-Catholic propaganda rant that we've been talking about these episodes, halfway through your carefully constructed reply on the history of images and icons in the ancient church and their use today and the different Latin words that for how we respond

16:12images and blah, blah, blah, blah, halfway between you launching this big complex response. They've already moved on to how Mary is a pagan goddess or how the celebration of Easter came from the Nordic goddess, Easter, or they've moved on to some other kind of crazy thing. And then they've moved on to the Emperor Constantine and how he did this and that. And then there's a headline about this wicked priest or bad bishop somewhere and you're still scrambling five or six or eight points ago trying to construct this whole thing about the veneration of images and icons and what they mean and what happened in the second century and the fourth century and the fifth century. And here's a quote from somebody, man, they've moved on six or eight hand grenades past that. And you just can't catch up. You're never, you were never meant to catch up. That's not what they're doing. That's not what the game is about. The genre of this kind of mythological anti-Catholic propaganda is such that it doesn't want a rational discussion. It wants a monster. The Catholic

17:21Church is a monster and they frame themselves as the faithful remnant to Christ against the monster of the Catholic Church. And if you accept that conceptual frame, then you've already wasted hours inside their loop. So the first move when you get this kind of rant is not to immediately think, okay, here's my notes and here's my references or I remember this podcast or this YouTube that I watched and now I'm going to pull out of its points. The first move, seriously, the first move when you get this kind of anti-Catholic rant is to pause, take a deep breath, pray for wisdom and discernment and guidance and pray for the person who is launching at you. But then ask yourself a question. Is this person actually asking you for a response? Now, obviously, we think nobody launches a

18:24criticism unless they want an intelligent response, but that's not necessarily true. A lot of us like to just throw hang grenades at things that we don't like. And a lot of us have this, live in this polite fiction that when a person launches a rant or a viewpoint that what they want is an intelligent reply. And what we have to understand is a lot of speech doesn't have a question mark at the end of it. So when they say the Pope is the Antichrist and the horror of Babylon and Mary is a pagan goddess and all the rest of that, each of those charges doesn't have a question mark. And they aren't saying, is the Catholic Church the Pope, is the Catholic Church the horror of Babylon? And what do you think? My Catholic friend is the Pope the Antichrist. And what do you say my Catholic friend is Mary a pagan goddess? They're not asking. They're telling you. It's a performance. It's fear. It's a rant.

19:27And it's a rant that wants an audience and it's a rant that wants you cowed. That clip that I played at the beginning of the last episode of that Baptist pastor was not a man seeking clarification or discussion about Catholicism. He was somebody working a room agitating his people, getting amends from the pews. And if you had been in that Baptist church where that rant was from the beginning of the last episode, and you had stood up and said, excuse me pastor, I have my catechism of the Catholic Church with me here. And I would like to go through and answer all of your points. And you said that in the calm voice thinking that's really what he wants is a calm, clear response from the catechism. Then you wouldn't have been, have that kind of dialogue. You just would have been the punchline. Look, here's a paper. Here's a, here's a, here's a doop standing up to us. But I love you, doop. I love you. You're deluded by the Catholic Church. Let me save you.

20:31See, when I talk about discernment here, that's not a dodge. It really is, I think, a Christian duty to discern what's going on. This is wisdom. This is straight from the book of Proverbs on the Old Testament, the Hebrew word, Huchma, which is, was wisdom, its discernment. It's trying to discern the spirits to test the spirits. What's going on here? What's going on in this scene? And sometimes when someone is launching that, you need to look in their face, you need to look at the timing, you need to look at their tone of voice. You need to ask yourself, can they even hear what I'm about to say? Do they even want to hear what I have to say? Because a person who wants you to respond will leave you a gap. They will ask a question and let you respond. There's a gap. There you are. Is the Catholic Church really the horror of Babylon? Again, just 48 hours ago,

21:32I had a very long discussion with the Protestant who came, kind of sought me out. I wanted to ask hard questions. But he asked really hard, awkward, painful questions about Catholic history and doctrine and after asking each question, he paused and allowed me to respond. See, a person who just wants a kill shot, like a rhetorical kill shot, isn't going to pause and let you respond. His voice isn't going to go up at the end with a little question mark. And a lot of times you can figure this out pretty quick from what's coming at you. Now, in charity, you should assume that this person is seeking the truth, but a lot of times through discernment, you realize pretty quickly that this is not a conversation. It's a carnival. And if that's what it is, then sometimes the

22:34best thing to do is to simply walk away from the carnival. And to pray, actually pray, not the way we always say, oh, I'll pray for you, but actually pray that person will be able to, at some point, hear you. Pray that or that person will be able to hear, maybe the better way to do it. Because a lot of times we're not the person that's going to deliver that news. Don't pray that you are the person who can convince them that they're wrong and get them to convert to Catholicism. Pray that God will open their eyes, that God will work in their life, and God will in some way that you don't understand since someone or something, a book, a funeral, a cathedral, some experience, a Catholic coworker who is decent to them. Pray that somehow, some way the Lord will

23:36crap or open a gap in their anti-Catholic hatred. And don't confuse loving the person and wanting the truth with winning the argument. You don't have to win the argument. Sometimes the best thing you can do in these situations is to change the subject. Again, when it's in your family, look, there are already things that we don't argue about at the Thanksgiving dinner table, right? How most of you, hopefully, have grown up enough to learn that, right? That we don't go to Thanksgiving and argue with our cousin Sheila and our uncle Fred about the election and the pandemic and music and pop videos or whatever, right? Just don't argue about things that you know we're going to cause fights. Faith can be something that is there and

24:40is understated and without it being tonight, it's the topic of debate. You all are so gracious to listen to me and you all must assume that in every situation I'm going to have a ready answer. And I got to tell you here, I host this podcast about considering the Catholic Church and doing apologetics, but I have people that I love in my life that I do not try to evangelize or respond to who or not Catholic because they're in my life and I want them to be in my life. And I recognize that I do pray, I honestly do pray for the people in my life that the Lord will bring them into the fullness of communion with him through his church. But I recognize that because of the relationship that we have, I may not be the person to share that

25:42with them because of the nature of our relationship. They're not going to hear it from me. And if the price of me doing apologetics with them is that our relationship ends, then I think I've made a bad trade out of some kind of misguided zeal. The Lord Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church is not short of messengers. We have 2000 years of messengers, brilliant messengers. And he's not necessarily waiting for me and all of my relationships to burn down my relationships to do apologetics with family members or neighbors. Sometimes just walking away, okay, look, walking away is not the same thing as being ashamed of

26:45the gospel. This is or ashamed of the Catholic Church because this is what I'll hear is if you let that rant stand and you don't stand up to it, then you're ashamed of Jesus or you're ashamed of his church or ashamed of whatever. I'm not ashamed of the Catholic Church or Christ, but I'm not going to feed an argument that's a pointless argument. And the critic who's launching it, if he or she is in good faith, can respect my walking away. I hope that we can do that in love. When out of discernment realize it is time to share a response and an answer, the right way to do it is not to swat back. Probably one of the most frequent questions that I get from listeners is how do I respond to the people in my life, family members, close friends,

27:52people that I love and care about who reject my Catholicism and are critical of it? What do I say to them? And they'll write me sometimes emails where they say, here's the 10 things that Uncle Fred said about the Catholic Church at dinner and how do I respond to each of them. And what do I do when he comes up with the next 10? And the standard answer that I share is this. Sometimes the best way to respond to someone who criticizes your Catholicism is to simply talk about your love for Jesus Christ and to show them that you're a Christian. See, because the anti-Catholic myth needs you to play a role. It needs you to be a dup. An ignorant pagan who doesn't know Christ, doesn't know the Bible, who's been bewitched by the incense and the priests, who doesn't have a saving relationship with Christ. It needs you to be

28:58superstitious and to eat the magic cracker of the Eucharist and to think that your rosary is your lucky charm and be duped by your pedophile priest. But if what they see in you is a Christian who loves Jesus Christ, who prays, who knows the Gospels, who can share their faith authentically. You disarm all of that. What I'll say to people is instead of talking to them, instead of trying to reproduce the things that we do on this podcast where you're kind of doing all these rational arguments, maybe just talk to them about how much your growing in the Catholic faith is just drawing you closer to Jesus Christ. You say, the more I investigate Catholicism or

29:59participate in Catholicism or go deeper into it, I just find myself closer to Christ. I find myself praying more. I find myself reading scripture more often. I find myself loving people more easily and then let them see that. Let them see that in you. Let them see in you that Catholicism is making you more and more resemble Jesus Christ. And you don't need to play swat down the anti-Catholic Rants. Live in such a way that they can't deny Christ in you. A lot of times I'll call this the Mother Teresa problem because even people, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, even people who hated the Catholic Church who hated Christianity had trouble criticizing Mother Teresa.

31:00Right? Because it was an exemplarly life here. She was among the poor of Calcutta doing the Lord's work out of an enormous self-sacrifice. So it was a really tough thing. There's some people found a way to do it, but still is a pretty tough thing to criticize Mother Teresa because her life was a testimony. Now, you're not probably most of us are never going to be Mother Teresa, obviously, but you can be visibly bearing the fruit of Jesus Christ in your life. In such a way that whatever anti-Catholic rant they want to throw at you doesn't stick. You never know how someone might come to the church and what cracks and like gaps might open in their life. A lot of people come to the church because of rational argument, but some come because of beauty or being impressed by or touched by the moral teaching of the church.

32:07I remember a number of years ago being with a group that I was with at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome with Vatican. And in the the square, St. Peter's square, the big piazza, there's a Roman obelisk, this big 40 foot 50 foot tall Roman obelisk. And somebody that I was with was saying, oh my gosh, look at the paganism of the Catholic church. They put this Egyptian obelisk, excuse me, Egyptian obelisk of the Romans brought in the middle of this thing. Look how pagan all that is. And I shared with them the story of that obelisk and why it's where it is because this is the spot where Peter the fisherman was martyred. Right on the spot of this obelisk, he was crucified and he was crucified upside down at his own request because he said, I'm not worthy to die in the same manner as my lord. And I said, that's why that obelisk represents. It marks the spot where Jesus, where Peter

33:12gave his life for Christ. And it was hard for him to go on that rant and they looked at the spot. And I could tell it made a little bit of a difference. I remember one time I was there, it was actually I think one of the first times that I went into St. Peter's square, our saint to the Vatican, and I went into St. Peter's Basilica. And I took a picture from the inside of Michelangelo's of the dome there. Michelangelo's beautiful dome. And I texted it to a friend of mine who's a very serious Lutheran. And I texted with kind of a smiley winky emoji saying, look where I am. And a few minutes later he texted me back and he says, built with the money stolen from German pussence exclamation point, right? And then yeah, I got caught on my phone because he's typing something else. And what came back next was in parentheses, but I'm kind of glad they built it anyway because it's incredible. Now, to this day, my friends not coming to the church, but I know

34:14there's something there. And it's somebody who was shaped by the Lutheran myth about the Catholic church, but there's things there that little cracks, little gaps. And I pray for him. And I pray for the people in my life. Sometimes when you're talking to someone who's criticizing your Catholic faith or your investigation of Catholicism, you can in a sincere way, don't do this like as a gacha or a stage thing. But sometimes you just mention that I was doing the daily readings this morning. And something in the daily readings really moved me. Again, don't do this in a fakie way. But they'll go, wait a minute. What do you mean? Catholics don't read the Bible? Oh yeah. We do that every day. We read scripture. And those are the kinds of moments of cognitive dissonance. It's not a trick or debating trick that they go, wait a minute. This person really loves Jesus. And they follow Jesus and they pray and they read scripture. And their life is

35:16bearing fruit. And I've seen it over and over again. These are the kinds of things that just over time can disarm those. And it may not be that it disarms the myth so that then you can rush in and claim the victory. But over time, God can move their heart. Okay. Because it does take time. I spent 15 years or more on my road to Rome going from being a hardcore Calvinist to becoming Catholic. And it just took time. And I know that if I can get there, others can as well. I just would say everything that you do respond in love and respond in prayer and discern and let Jesus Christ be your Lord and let the fruit of following him be evident in you. And where there's an opening

36:19to actually dialogue and where they're just going to throw rotten fruit at you and criticize and rant in love and charity sometimes. Let it go and walk away if you can. We'll be back with another episode very soon. And this show is 100% listener supported. My patrons keep the lights on and they let me spend more time researching and recording so that these episodes keep coming. If this show has helped you, would you consider becoming a patron for as little as $5 a month, you'll get every regular episode organized into topical playlists plus exclusive bonus content, extra video Q&As, deep dive courses, live streams and more. Just head to patreon.com forward slash considering Catholicism or tap the link in the show notes. And would you please

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