Frequently Asked Questions

The Church teaches that God’s existence can be known with certainty by natural reason alone, independent of revelation — this is the basis of Aquinas’s Five Ways. Faith then perfects what reason already grasps.

No — the popular objection usually targets the kalam argument (the universe began, so it needs a cause), which does depend on cosmology. Aquinas’s own argument concerns dependency here and now, not a temporal beginning: even an eternal or ever-branching universe would still need something sustaining its existence moment to moment.

The Trinity is one divine essence subsisting in three really distinct Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — distinguished not by nature but by their relations of origin. It is a revealed mystery, not something reason alone could discover, though reason can show it is not self-contradictory.

No — since Pius XII’s Humani Generis (1950), Catholics have been free to hold evolutionary theory as a serious account of the human body’s origin. The line the Church does hold is that the human soul is directly created by God in each individual case, not a product of purely material processes.

Yes — independent early sources (Paul’s letters, non-Christian writers like Josephus and Tacitus) converge on a real, crucified Galilean preacher. Mythicism, the claim Jesus never existed, has essentially no support among professional historians, including skeptical ones like Bart Ehrman who reject much else about the traditional account.

No — the Church has canonized many souls as certainly in heaven, but has never declared any individual soul to be certainly damned. Hell’s reality and possibility for every person is firmly taught; whether it is actually populated by any human souls is a question the Church has left open, which is the basis of the “dare we hope” debate.

No — Rome left the Thomist and Molinist accounts of how grace and free will fit together formally open after the De Auxiliis dispute, and a Catholic may hold either. Both schools agree grace is always a free gift, never something earned by sufficient faith or effort.

No — canon law requires actual participation in the Mass, which a livestream cannot provide. During COVID, most Catholics weren’t fulfilling the obligation remotely; bishops had dispensed them from the obligation entirely for a time, which is a different thing.

No. Catholic moral theology holds that certain acts are intrinsically evil regardless of intention or circumstance — a good end cannot make an evil means good, though intention and circumstance can affect the degree of culpability.

Two reasons: it separates procreation from the conjugal act the Church holds are inseparable by design, and it typically creates more embryos than are implanted, most of whom are discarded or frozen — which, if human life begins at fertilization, is the destruction of human lives on a routine basis.

No — the Catechism only began calling it “inadmissible” in 2018. Whether that’s a legitimate development (circumstances changed) or a real reversal of a previously definitive teaching is a genuinely contested question among faithful Catholic scholars, not a settled one.

It depends what’s being discussed. How the Church consults and governs has always had room to develop, and synodality falls there. But dogma the Church has always taught she cannot alter is a different category entirely — the live debate is which category a given synodal proposal actually falls into.

Not really — most reported NDEs are uniformly comforting regardless of the person’s moral state, which sits oddly with the Church’s teaching that the particular judgment differs according to the state a soul dies in. They’re consistent with an afterlife in general, but don’t especially support the specifically Catholic account of judgment.

Not quite, despite looking similar from the outside. Mindfulness aims at observing one’s own mental states for psychological benefit; contemplative prayer aims at a real encounter with God, understood as genuinely present and other, not a byproduct of quieted thought.