Free Republic

Tear down that cross and toss it in the wood chipper because the American church is toast. So goes conventional wisdom after recent revelations from the Pew Research Center, which found that in just 7 years, the percentage of Christians in the United States dropped nearly 8 points. The news was met with uncontrolled fits of glee from liberal publications like Salon, where author Patricia Miller gloated that the benefits from the decline of Christianity would be, “huge.” No doubt the scores of natural disaster victims around the globe who have profited from all the atheist relief trucks rolling in...

Religions in the United States grow and shrink because of immigration, births, deaths and many other factors, but a recent report from the Pew Research Center offers a chance to look in detail at which religions are gaining and losing members the old-fashioned way: by recruiting new members. Pew took a look at which religions have gained and lost followers when people change faiths, and we used its data to run the tape forward and see which religions would be on the rise if people kept switching at the current rates. This model isn’t a projection of the future...

I'm going to transcribe an article that Jerry Walls wrote when he was a grad student at Notre Dame: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am nearing the end of three very happy (with a brief interlude) years as a graduate student in the philosophy department at Notre Dame. The philosophy department is quite lively and stimulating and I have learned a great deal about my discipline. Along the way, I have also acquired an education of another sort–namely in the ways of the Roman Catholic Church. My education in this regard has been informal and piecemeal, to be sure. My insights have been...

In an article entitled Saint Patrick the Baptist?, Stephen R. Button tries to claim St. Patrick for Evangelical Protestantism... or at least disassociate him from Roman Catholicism. Button is hardly alone: you can find similar attempts by Don Boys and others, some of them dating back several decades. The argument tends to work like this. From Patrick, we have (in Button's words) only the “84 short paragraphs that make up both his Confession and his 'Letter to Coroticus.'” Baptist authors then mine these texts for any doctrines that Patrick doesn't mention explicitly, and then claim that he must have held...

The Church, I’ve been hearing, has to change, if she is going to have any leverage with men and women of our time. What that means, of course, is that they would like a sexual permission slip. It’s the only thing they care about. What’s it to them, after all, if the Church does not change her teachings, even if she could? They don’t obey them anyway. But perhaps they are setting their revisionary sights too low. Why change the Bride of Christ, when you might as well go for Christ Himself? Why trick out the bride in lingerie from...

Here’s a post for our Catholic friends. Apparently the Popester has super miraculous turn-dried-blood-fresh powers in his lips because that’s the unnatural act he committed after chowing down with the gays and the transgenders.Watch below: More on his lunch date: While on a visit to Naples, Italy, Pope Francis visited the Giuseppe Salvia Detention Center in Poggiorale, outside of Naples. According to the Religion News Service, the pope insisted on the visit including lunch with inmates, though it was not on his original schedule. Around 90 inmates, randomly chosen by lottery, attended the lunch, and that group included 10 inmates...

For the first ten or fifteen years after my reversion, my main apologetical interest was in debating and discussing with Protestants. These days, I rarely engage the Protestant/Catholic debate, and I focus more on the "culture wars" by debating secularists and atheists. Protestants are fellow Christians, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the Church is very clear on that. However, every so often, I revisit the issues that divide Protestants and Catholics because Truth matters, and because the Church is a stronger witness to the world when we are undivided. At the Last Supper, hours before His death, Jesus prayed that his followers all be...

Members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) have voted to make the 1.8-million-member, 10,000-congregation denomination the largest Protestant group to formally recognize gay marriage allow same-sex weddings. The Presbytery of the Palisades in New Jersey cast the necessary 86th vote Tuesday night to establish that a majority of the church’s 171 regional presbyteries now support an amendment to the church constitution that redefines marriage, the Associated Press reported. “Marriage involves a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman, to love and support each other for the rest of their lives,” the church’s Book of Order will read,...

Christian theology in the American Church has seen no greater evolution than in the last 10 years. In fact, what the American Church has faced, particularly the Mainline Church, has probably been best described as a devolution or deconstruction of the “faith once received.” Another first, the culture has followed the American Mainline, particularly the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Episcopal Church (TEC) in redefining human relationship, sexuality, and marriage. Dr. Del Jacobson, retired professor from Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, MN long ago outlined what the evolution of ideas or movements look like in Church and...

As the chart ... shows, Catholicism is the most common religious tradition in 17 states, while white evangelical Protestants are first in 15 states, mostly in the South. The religiously unaffiliated are the most common religious group in 13 states, mostly in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast. Three states are outliers: Utah, which is 56 percent Mormon, the largest percentage of one single religious tradition, and Iowa and North Dakota, where white mainline Protestants are the dominant religious tradition.

Living on the Dark Side of the Cartesian Divide – A Reflection on the Gnosticism of our Times By: Msgr. Charles PopeThere is a line in the first letter of John, read this week at Mass, that is of critical importance to many difficulties we see today with heresy, unbelief, and moral decay. The line says:Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in...

This is a continuation of my review of The Protestant’s Dilemma: How the Reformation’s Shocking Consequences Point to the Truth of Catholicism (San Diego: Catholic Answers Press, 2014, Kindle edition) by Rome's defender, Devin Rose. The book throughout presents caricatures of Protestant positions, illogical conclusions, shoddy documentation, assumes the truth of the Roman Catholic worldview without proving it, and demonstrates that the author did not apply his own criteria to his own position. Section 2 of TPD  is entitled, "The Papacy." It's a short chapter, under 1000 words. The temptation in reviewing it is is to respond at a much...

This is a continuation of my review of The Protestant’s Dilemma: How the Reformation’s Shocking Consequences Point to the Truth of Catholicism (San Diego: Catholic Answers Press, 2014, Kindle edition) by Rome's defender, Devin Rose. Part one can be found here (and also at the Aomin blog). The first part of the review examined the conversion story of the author. This current installment will deal with the author's notion of authority and church corruption. The book throughout presents caricatures of Protestant positions, illogical conclusions, shoddy documentation, assumes the truth of the Roman Catholic worldview without proving it, and demonstrates that the...

Recently I picked up The Protestant's Dilemma: How the Reformation’s Shocking Consequences Point to the Truth of Catholicism (San Diego: Catholic Answers Press, 2014). In the preface of the Kindle edition, an unidentified author states that the primary author, Devin Rose, has put forth a book looking to engage in "dialogue" specifically"with members of the thousands of Protestant sects." The book is said to raise issues that a Protestant "has never considered before," not simply to have dialogue for the sake of mutual understanding, but rather to have "conciliar" dialogue in which the goal is to show the logical inconsistency of Protestantism...

My new book, The Protestant's Dilemma, shows in a myriad of ways why Protestantism is implausible. We sifted through many arguments to boil the book down to the most essential. A few chapters didn't make the cut but are still good enough to share. Here's one of them. If Protestantism is true, There's no way to know whether you're assenting to divine revelation or to mere human opinion about divine revelation. Protestants and Catholics both believe that God has revealed himself to man over the course of human history, culminating in his ultimate self-revelation in Jesus Christ. But whereas Catholics...

Presbyterian Church USA and Arab Palestinian Group Rewriting The Bible To Remove References To Israel  HAVE you heard that there is a new version of our Bible? But this version is unlike any prior version of God’s Word. This sinister new version has all references to Israel removed.T his new version blatantly changes God’s Word. Any mention of Israel – gone. Any mention of Jesus being a Jew – gone. The movement which has brought the world a NEW bible, is called Palestinian Liberation Theology. At its heart is hatred for the Jewish people and for Israel. Of course, keeping...

Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper" had another jaw-dropping weekend, reaching an impressive $200 million at the domestic box office. Despite the film's colossal success, liberals like former DNC chairman Howard Dean and director Michael Moore just won't let "American Sniper" go. Over the weekend, Moore invoked Jesus in a slew of incendiary tweets aimed at dishonoring American soldiers and the Iraq war. One tweet stated "Tomorrow's Sunday School (1 What Would Jesus Do? Oh, I know what he'd do --hide on top of a roof and shoot people in the back!" He followed that tweet with: Sunday School: (2) But What...

A Glimmer of Light in a Very Bleak Decade – A Consideration of the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By: Msgr. Charles PopeIt is difficult to describe the decade of the 1960s as anything but a near complete disaster for this country, Western culture, and the world. Like a tsunami that sweeps in and out in successive waves destroying and reworking the whole landscape and setting loose subsequent disasters, the 1960s was a disastrous series of revolutions whose destructive aftermath is now breeding disease, broken families, addiction, sexual confusion, and social chaos. The sexual revolution, the revolution...

Faith is not alone, Scripture is not alone, Grace is not alone. We ought not separate what God has joined. By: Msgr. Charles PopeThere are a lot of “solos” sung by our Protestant brethren: Sola Fide (saved by faith alone), Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone is the rule of faith), and sola gratia (grace alone). (See the Protestant logo to the right.) Generally, one ought to be suspicious and careful of claims that things work “alone.” It is our usual experience that many things work together in harmony, that things are interrelated. Very seldom is anyone or anything “alone.”The problem of...

The upcoming front cover for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo will picture the prophet Muhammad holding a sign that says "Je suis Charlie." While many in a (let's say hypothetical) march would personally like one expression of free speech, but not necessarily the other, should there be marches supporting free speech for both Charlie Hebdo - and let's say works like Serrano did ("The Piss Christ") and not getting mad at either of the depictions? In other words, temporarily suspending all dislike for either in the name of free speech in this march, as some in the media do...