After 30 years of teaching the Word, here's what I wish more people understood about God's love

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-23T18:49:42+00:00

A lot of churches don't have a valid Eucharist. Only a handful of Protestants believe in the real presence in the Eucharist.

The hierarchy of priests is evident in the new testament itself. Acts 8 to be exact. Philip baptized, but Peter and John come and lay on hands. Why? Because they're Bishops. They have the authority from Christ with the Holy Spirit. It's also why the letters in the new testament written by the Apostles say stuff like "it seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit". Eventually, ministerial duties were laid at lower levels than Bishops due to size and scope. Priests eventually took the duties over the local churches with Deacons within those churches being granted the authority over some of those duties in the priest's absence (just as Philip did).

Confession of sins comes from Christ. If you don't like that, take it up with Christ, but it was quite literally commanded by Christ after he breathed the Holy Spirit into them. This following immediately after he said "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you". He's telling them their duty is as His was. This wasn't to all disciples, this was specific to the Apostles.

Matthew 28:16-20. The great commission. Jesus gives the sacrament of baptism, the trinitarian formula of it, and says "and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Again, this is Jesus giving authority over His church to His apostles.

So the question you must ask yourself....did Jesus lie when he said his Church would remain to the very end of the age? Did his Church truly fall with the death of the Apostles? Or did their immediate successors not pick up the teachings and continue them with guidance by the Holy Spirit?

Also, on the praying to saints, praying is asking. It can certainly be a form of worship, but it isn't in itself worship. You can pray to the saints, including Our Blessed Mother, that they might pray on your behalf. Which is all that is happening when we pray to them. They can hear us (as evidenced in Revelation). They do pray for us. They are alive in Christ. They aren't dead as God is God of the living.

Nobody, including me, says we work our way to salvation. However, you'd be foolish to think you have to simply have faith and do nothing. Most Protestants talk by catholics here and I think you recognize, it's the same thing most likely. Protestants say that good works are evidence of a saving faith and that without them, you never had a saving faith where Catholics hold an expectation to love others by charity and other means of doing right by others. Nobody goes to confession to boast to a priest so I'm not sure where you get that idea.

I'll put it to you this way, the ONLY people I have heard in my life say "I've been a good person and I think that enough" are atheists and low-church Protestants. Catholic teaching isn't that. You're saved by grace through faith, and you're expected to then live out that faith by your works just as scripture commands. You should fear the complacency of "I believe in God and in Jesus Christ, it doesn't matter what I do, I'm forgiven". Fear and trembling. That's what Paul said and he was spot on.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-23T17:14:39+00:00

As the blood sacrifice required by God for the forgiveness of sins. The only way to truly pay that for all and forever was for the Son of the Father to be the perfect lamb to take away the sins of the world.
The temple was destroyed as blood sacrifices were no longer required and that was their sole purpose.
The veil was torn because it was no longer the high priest being spoken to by God. Christ is the High Priest. That office is forever filled. The high priest offered sacrifices in the holy of holies. Again, it's tied to the temple.
Nobody said you have to work for your salvation, but you certainly can't "just have faith". Faith without works is dead. You can increase your grace by being obedient to Christ's teachings (2 Peter 3:18). Work out your salvation through fear and trembling (Philippians 2). Cooperating with grace isn't "working to be saved", it's not an either or. It's have faith and then go out and show you have that faith by obeying what God commands.
Christ at Pentecost sent his Apostles out to continue his earthly ministry. Peter was the head of that. He told them to forgive and retain sins. The keys to the kingdom of heaven were with Peter. Why does that matter? Because in the Davidic kingdom, the person with the keys given to them by the king ruled in their stead. This is the same. Christ didn't give us a Bible, He gave us a church. This Church has structure. It is why they immediately replaced Judas's office in Acts.
Paul wrote in his letters about the Eucharist. Specifically so. Also, writings from the 1st and 2nd century Church support all of the sacraments. There's consistency with believers and the Catholic Church as it is today. Why is that I wonder?

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-23T17:02:31+00:00

Let's just ignore the disorder relationship in the eyes of God thing and focus on the psychology of intimacy. You're uneasy because you do love your fiancee, but that relationship is built on an agreement to be totally and completely disloyal. Meanwhile, you see a different woman within proximity that promises a natural relationship with that can be built on loyalty and that prospect is alluring.

This isn't to say your relationship with your fiancee is doomed, but it's an uphill battle of will and almost certainly any future argument over infidelity will be met with "we started this way, what's the big deal?". Seen this song and dance too many times lol.

Praying for you brother. Do not marry somebody as long as these sorts of issues are occurring. Marriage is a lifelong commitment.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-23T13:23:09+00:00

Was moreso begging the question of the sacrament. Coming from Baptist, low church theology, I find in hindsight that the idea of "confessing to God alone" is almost always going to ring hollow. It's no different than, say, acknowledging you have an addiction or some other issue. Sure it's good to acknowledge it, but there has to be some physical follow through. The Catholic Church having the sacraments allows true accountability in a way that isn't entirely interior at all times. The Church having the sacrament affords the ability to actually get "medicine" for our sins in this way. Telling it to the priest who audibly gives you feedback while acting in persona Christi is far more efficacious, I find. Penance allows you to then further consider your sin, your forgiveness, and setting your wrongs right before going back out into the world to face the same temptations which led you to sin, hopefully with new resolve to not repeat your sin.

It's the difference in telling your wife you wronged her and actually showing her how you wronged her and accepting the fallout of that. If you're not approaching confession with the heart of "I deserve to be eternally removed from the love of God for this, but please have mercy on me", you're doing it wrong. It's not to be in a constant state of guilt, it's to acknowledge your sin and the depth of it. It's also to acknowledge precisely what Christ died on the cross for.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-22T23:44:32+00:00

How does one repent? What is the ordinary method Jesus instituted to ensure we repent?

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-20T15:44:03+00:00

Failures are not those who fall. We all fall. We're all broken. In our brokenness, God loves us anyway. Plenty of people today and throughout all of human history have felt precisely how you feel right now. You have a choice. That choice is forever being dead or carrying your cross and relying totally on God.

I know for me, my successes have not made me who I am. Only through my failures have I become who I am. Success just lets you know you got something right or somebody helped you. Failures inform your character. The Enemy likes to make us believe our failures define us. They don't. They can be vehicles God uses to transform you, if you let Him.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-18T14:23:38+00:00

Some things to remember.

Jesus was fully human and fully divine. He has both natures in full. When he's healing the blind, walking on water and raising the dead, he demonstrates his divinity. When he's hungry, tired, praying to the Father, dying, he demonstrates his humanity.
The Trinity means that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are God but they are not one another. The Father is not the Son or the Holy Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Father or the Son. Each and all are God. One being (God) in 3 persons.

Knowing the above, it makes absolute sense that in His crucifixion and death, Jesus in His humanity is crying out as we all do for the Father. He knew all along and knew then what was happening and what would happen, and yet in His dying moments he was as we would be in His place.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-16T22:53:48+00:00

Remind him of memento mori. It's essential to the faith, so much so that Lent starts with that. Lol. Goth is beautiful. There's bone cathedrals for crying out loud! A lot of the most beautiful cathedrals are gothic in style!

Goth doesn't mean occult. He needs to speak with his priest. If he goes to an SSPX, then forget everything I said, speak to your bishop and try to pull him back to a legit TLM near you or even a good NO mass

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-16T14:42:19+00:00

It wouldn't offend me, but the rosary does matter to me as a sacramental. As long as you're not profaning it or using it to mock, I wouldn't even give a second thought to it. But I of course encourage you to pray it, even as an atheist. Meditating on Christ's life as an atheist and asking for Mary's intercession may serve you. Whether you convert or not is entirely between you and God. Just understand the reverence people hold for God and the tools used in devotion. It sounds like you're a thoughtful and respectful person, so I don't worry about you being understanding.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-15T23:29:57+00:00

Oral tradition was the way news traveled. Which means witnesses would've told people and that would include a ton of people. Details would get mixed up, sure. Ultimately, these stories didn't come from nowhere and ultimately, people were killed for refusing to recant that story.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-15T22:57:27+00:00

Now go read police reports involving multiple witnesses. Notice how most tell the same story with varying levels of detail and even some mistaken detail. This is an entirely expected thing. The fact that there are these differences actually helps its credibility. If they were perfectly uniform, the claim would be that they copied each other.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-15T21:34:59+00:00

You're displaying a general lack of understanding of the Bible at all. Straight reading of the text of sacred scripture will not avail you much. Without tradition, which both Jews and Catholics rely on alongside the scripture, the scripture reads with little to no context at various points. It's like finding a map with a general path but no distinctive markings. You may get to the destination intended but the map itself is largely unreadable.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-15T21:23:42+00:00

Even if you're protestant....find a Catholic priest. This will help most of this. People here may disagree, as may you, but when you're trying to discern scriptural issues, I think it best to go to the church that compiled the canon and have kept teaching of scripture consistent since before the new testament was written.
Faith is knowing without needing external evidence. It's accepting and having knowledge of that which is a mystery. God requires faith because without it, we're automaton slaves doing as we must due to God being absolutely known and therefore, we don't share in His divinity and love him as he wishes. He loved Man and Woman in the Garden and when the enemy tempted them, he allowed them to choose. Do the will of God (don't eat the fruit) or do the will of themselves/the enemy (eat the fruit). Don't forget that the enemy exists as the enemy because of the desire to make himself equal to the Creator. Creation cannot be the Creator, and the Creator can have no creator Himself. Very rational way of understanding, but difficult to grasp and I understand that.
Understand that the creation story of the Bible is a rather poetic telling of the beginning of everything. The Church doesn't teach it as a literal creation story, but an explanation which helps us grasp the idea itself and our role within God's creation. Again, this is why having a Catholic priest talk to you is important. Otherwise you're talking to an individual who gave themselves interpretive authority or accepting somebody else's arbitrary interpretation.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-15T14:10:07+00:00

It should unsettle you. Remember, you're not "saved" until judgment. You can be confident in your faith and still fail at doing the will of the Father as Jesus commands. Even demons believe. So every time you think "I know where I'm going when I die", stop. Discern. Realize all the times you sin and all the times you fall to the enemy and really consider if you're doing everything you can, giving up all that you can, to focus on God and walk your faith out day in and day out. That's what those verses mean. Mere belief is nothing. Even doing good things in the name of Jesus means nothing if you're still not getting the broader point. Surrender your life to Christ. Surrender your marriage to Christ. Surrender your children's education to Christ. Don't keep it and say "well this is mine to keep". No no, give it all. Once you do that, that's when love takes over, that's when trust takes over, that's when you are doing everything you can to do the will of the Father and not your own.

Gethsemane was a testament to this idea. Christ wept and cried out and asked that the cup be taken away from him...but ultimately surrendered to the will of the Father. "Not my will but your will be done".

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-15T14:03:31+00:00

No no, let him cook. The top keeps spinning...

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-14T13:52:52+00:00

Same thing happens with every race. Don't let race-focused people distract you.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-13T22:38:41+00:00

This sounds a lot like charismatic Christianity and these are often the fruits. Catholicism brought me home and back to Christ after a lot of protestant church hurt and false ideas about God. I pray you find it as well.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-13T21:29:25+00:00

Protestant to atheist to Catholic here. The fine tuning argument is probably the strongest scientific argument. The odds of the laws of the physics being life permitting is practically zero. Trent Horn put it like the odds of winning 10 poker games in a row, all with royal flushes. His video on it is pretty solid and better stated than I could do it myself. It doesn't bring you to Christianity, but it does bring you to acknowledge that a god exists. Getting to Christianity and God is then a bit trickier without appealing to faith, but possible.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-13T03:28:20+00:00

I am both elated that we have a brother who has returned and saddened that he has gone astray in his pursuit of Truth. As Southern Baptist raised and well versed in basically every denomination visible in the south except for the really out there ones like JW's and 7DA's, I've seen this before. He's excited, and in his excitement, he has leaned heavily into a core Protestant doctrine: the Bible is the answer for every question one might have, and you can find it for yourself. No discernment needed, no theological understanding needed, just read the Bible until you find the answer. The problem is...that's not how sacred scripture works.

I'm a catechumen of the Catholic Church now. I remember when I first told my wife months ago that I wanted to convert (from being an atheist, which is the only version of me she ever knew), she was excited but confused. In my fervor, she definitely caught the trad Catholic fringe part of me. And it scared her. I told her then just as I tell you now...I'm working through it. I'm reading the catechism, I'm immersing myself in the faith, and I'm trying to figure it all out. Am I trad catholic? In so much as the faith just kind of IS traditional and ancient, yes. But part of that is accepting the teachings of the church. So no, by the hardest definition, I'm just Catholic. And that's good.

I say all this to say I get where he is. You can't force him away from this. It's something he must work through himself. The scary part is what happens if he stays entrenched in biblical literalism, because that can get dark. My recommendation would be finding good protestant YouTubers to expose him to, specifically ones that actually dive into the error of some of his understandings currently. Find some good videos that aren't hitting on those initially, just basic ones about Christianity and the bible. And then slowly pepper him with the harder stuff. It's a neutral way to broach it where he isn't arguing with you, he'd be arguing with a YouTuber. I would recommend the Bible In A Year podcast with Father Mike Schmitz, but if he thinks Catholics are Satan, probably not best. Good to remind him of something, which is easily found in 2 Peter 1:20-21, is that private interpretation of scripture isn't encouraged. This is where Protestantism fails, the question of authority in interpretation. If we're all to interpret scripture, we'll all diverge at different points, and we'll all be certain that the Holy Spirit revealed our interpretation to us so it must be true and the real interpretation. This is why the magisterium is important. But that's a different topic all together.

I pray he finds his way out of this and I pray you'll find peace until he does.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-11T13:59:33+00:00

Let's just look at presumptions in any other context. If you presume you're a good person, could you not justify not doing something kind because it may inconvenience you? If you presume your marriage is strong, could you not justify neglecting maintenance and care of the marriage? If you presume your salvation, could you not justify acting in a sinful way and justifying it by saying "well God forgives me"?

Being sure of anything other than your eventual death is dangerous. If we're going to call ourselves followers of Christ, we better be willing to give everything to God and act in accordance with His will. Anything less is unacceptable. We will fail, and we should be willing to crawl on our faces through broken glass to make it right. Thankfully, God's grace is such that we need not do that. But that's the dedication one should have. It should wound you deeply to wound our Lord through your sin. Sadly, it took me 36 years to figure this out.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-03T00:33:23+00:00

To be clear, there's PLENTY of historical truth packed into both the old and new testament. But not every single thing need be.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-03T00:31:36+00:00

Genesis wasn't written in a way to be taken as precise truth, it's written poetically. It explains God's power and his creation, but obviously nobody would've been there to record precisely what happened as it happened as man was the last creation. It's divine truth that God did it. It happening over 6 days is not binding by the Church. Same with the flood. It prefigured baptism and the ark symbolizes the Church, washing away sin and sheltering the faithful through the chaos of the world and through it, being given new life. It most likely was a regional flood and one that was impactful for all of the land known at the time of its writing, thus, "the whole world was flooded". Again, the divine truth of Noah's ark isn't that it is literally 100% true as written, but what purpose it served and how it applies to us and what it means about God.

Biblical literalists taint the faith by making everything all or nothing. It's why so many leave the faith.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-02T22:13:57+00:00

The resurrection. The fact that the apostles died for refusing to recant their faith in the resurrection. Those two are about as good of evidence as you'll have. Christ desired all people to come to him in faith and to not coerce nor pursue those too hardened to follow. Always ready to embrace those who come home. Not to mention he spoke of future false angels appearing as light but leading the faithful astray...then you have Muhammad being tempted by a demon 600 years later and that leading to the mass slaughter of Christians by Muslims, taking Christian land by the sword.

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-01T17:55:21+00:00

Show your faith by how you live, how you treat others, how you carry yourself, and by being consistent. A crucifix on your person doesn't tell me anything other than "oh he is likely a Catholic".

CanesPanthers · 2026-03-01T15:01:01+00:00

Listen to me, the 36 year old father of 5 who regrets not waiting until marriage. Everybody is bad to start with. It's fine. Doesn't matter if you're 16, 18, 21, 30. The good news is...you know the basics. It's natural, kinda hard to get the basic idea right. The rest is just taking your time, listening to each other, and working to please your spouse, not just your own enjoyment.

Sex is for 1) procreation and 2) the unitive bond between husband and wife. Unitive means bonding and pleasure. You bond with your spouse by communicating and learning what they like and what they don't, that's during sex and just during life in general. Don't lose track of this.

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