Yes, Pope Francis is the Pope

        Yes, Pope Francis is the Pope

                    It has recently come to my attention that there is a small (but loud), contingent of Catholics that do not think Francis is the Pope.

            And those people are wrong. 

            First of all, Benedict the 16^th himself has no desire to be Pope.

            It has become increasingly common in TLM circles to claim that he’s still the Pope.  If that’s so, he’s the only Anti-Pope in history with no desire to be the Pope. 

            Simply Pope, a bad Pope, or, for that fact, even a heretical Pope, is still the Pope. Remember, Peter denied Jesus three times before the cockcrow (Mt 26:69-75,Mk 14:66-72, Lk 22:59-62, John 18:15,18, 25-27).  Not only did the first Pope deny knowing Jesus, in essence, he denied being his follower.

            I do not believe the gates of Hell prevailed against the Church (Matthew 16:13-19), to do so would be to call Jesus a liar.  Pater, and, by extension, his successors, was told by Our Lord, to feed his lambs and tend his sheep, and even told Peter he was going to die for it (John 21:15-19)

            When my dad fathered me, he gave me his last name (which you probably pronounce wrong).  In a sense I am my father’s successor.  I carry on his name even after his death.  It is not a perfect analogy, but I am just trying to give you a sense of it. 

            So, then, the successors of Peter pass on his office.  All his rights, privileges, etc of the office of the papacy. 

            Francis was validly elected Pope, by his brother bishops, in accord with current Church law on the election of the Pope.  If you PREFER Benedict, that is fine.  But, he voluntarily resigned his papacy.  Nothing Taylor Marshall says is going to change that.  

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The problem of circular reasoning in apologetics

The problem of circular reasoning in apologetics

            You ever been in conversations where someone tries to prove their argument simply by stating their argument?

“The Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon”, the Baptist preacher may say.  And then give you Bible verses that he thinks support that.  However, if a Catholic doubts their faith, or, someone is a member of his congregation, these people may be predisposed to believe this. 

I think another good example of this is when the Mormons (stop calling me a “Roman” Catholic, and I’ll stop calling you Mormon), is when the LDS missionary at your door tries to prove Mormonism by claiming that his testimony is from the Holy Ghost.  If you know Mormon theology, you’d know that the Holy Ghost isn’t considered omnipresent.  (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrines-of-the-gospel-student-manual/5-the-holy-ghost?lang=eng), so, how exactly can the Holy Ghost testify to your Mormon missionary when he’s busy testifying to other Mormon missionaries thousands of miles away in different time zones?

And, it’s not like we Catholics don’t have this problem, too.  A good example is the Radical Catholic Reactionaries, who think we should only go to the Latin Mass.  NOW, I have nothing wrong with the Latin Mass, but, it being “ancient”, is, one, both, not true, and, two, the modern Latin Mass is actually a revision.  TLM doesn’t stand for Traditional Latin Mass, it stands for TRIDENTINE Latin Mass.  As in, the Council of Trent.  It’s actually not entirely possible to know what the oldest liturgy is (I personally believe it’s some variation of the Syriac Rite), but, “it’s old, therefore, it’s better”, is not a good argument.  Neither is the inverse. 

One last one, is the canon of scripture.  The Bible doesn’t list which books are in The Bible, but, sometimes you will hear that you can figure out which books are in scripture by reading other books in scripture.  But, we don’t know which books are scripture, by definition.  Confused?  Me too. 

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