Blog

“Where is that in the Bible?”This is the most common question I receive when I discuss the Catholic faith with Protestants. They ask me questions like: “Where is purgatory in the Bible? Or the Mass? Or the pope? Or the rosary?”These questions assume that Christians should only believe a doctrine if it is explicitly taught in Scripture—what is called sola scriptura (“by Scripture alone”). The 1647 Protestant Westminster Confession of Faith expressed a key aspect of sola scriptura this way: “The w …

In August 1619, a slave ship captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha carried 350 Africans toward Vera Cruz, New Spain. Before it arrived, Captain Cunha’s ship was attacked and robbed by an English corsair that then sold about twenty of those Africans in Virginia. It was the first recorded transaction of its kind in the colonies, and thus began slavery in what would become the United States of America. When the first Africans were sold in the colonies, conscience and tradition gave at least some of …

Almost 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul wrote to his young apprentice Timothy about the terrible times to come:“People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”(2 Tim. 3:2-4). In the next line of the passage quoted above, Paul continues his description o …

We recently sat down with Catholic Answers Senior Apologist Jimmy Akin, to talk about why the Bible is a Catholic book. Q. Our Protestant friends often speak of “the word of God” as if it was limited to just the Bible. Is that true? Jimmy: No. The Bible speaks of the “word of God” as being several different things. It certainly includes the Bible, but it also includes the word of God communicated to people orally—in the form of Tradition, as when the apostles preached the word to …

“You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition…thus making void the word of God through your tradition which you hand on.” -Mark 7:9,13“Where’s that in the Bible?”Any Catholic who talks religion with Protestants has at some time been challenged with this question. It stems from the Protestant belief that we shouldn’t accept any doctrine that isn’t explicitly found in the Bible, since it alone is our infallible rule of faith—a belief known as sola script …