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The Question of "Where is that in the Bible?" “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 expr …

One evening I had the sad duty of attending my neighbor’s funeral. The assistant pastor from the church stood up and after a few remarks about the deceased began to give a sermon. The first ten minutes was dedicated to how he knew that my neighbor believed in Jesus and was in heaven, so there was no need to pray for her or offer Masses or anything like that. The next thirty minutes or so (it’s difficult to tell since it seemed like eternity) was dedicated to explaining why it doesn& …

Despite the ruins of the Sexual Revolution being all around us, many Protestants are doubling down—not only continuing to support contraception, but starting to embrace other related practices that have historically been considered grave sins. And as usual, theirsola scripturaapproach is allowing them to re-interpret Scripture to find justification. For example, the debate over homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” in Protestantism is taking an almost identical trajectory to t …

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 …