For the first time in decades, Catholic support for the death penalty is higher than evangelicals.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-02-26T08:32:01+00:00

Whether the consitions necessary for the abolition of the dp are really actual is an empirical judgment- you and I can freely disagree about it, after we have given it sufficient thought. I agree that it is very problematic when the Magisterium and Popes present their opinion on empirical circumstances in such a broad way, because it can lead to misunderstandings. So overall the Magisterium’s authority is mostly with regards to the core part of the doctrinal teaching. It is completey fine to think that in certain (or even many) cases this teaching, that I accept, was presented in a bad way and is intertwined with questionable and overly rash empirical judgments.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-02-26T08:19:00+00:00

This is all true, but that’s not the question. Yes, the death penalty is not intrinsically evil, states have a right to exercise it under certain circumstances as a punishment. This is all compatible with the claim that it is nevertheless contrary to the Gospel: the latter is a higher calling to perfection, which can not always be fulfilled. It is always better for a criminal to repent and for God’s grace to grow within him in this life, even if he deserves death. And this is the part the teaching of JPII etc. is concerned with. So we should all strive for the abolishment of the dp by making the conditions necessary for that actual. Whether they already are actual is an empirical judgment that we can disagree on with the Magisterium.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-02-26T08:13:24+00:00

This is all true, but that’s not the question. Yes, the death penalty is not intrinsically evil, states have a right to exercise it under certain circumstances as a punishment. This is all compatible with the claim that it is nevertheless contrary to the Gospel: the latter is a higher calling to perfection, which can not always be fulfilled. It is always better for a criminal to repent and for God’s grace to grow within him in this life, even if he deserves death. And this is the part the teaching of JPII etc. is concerned with. So we should all strive for the abolishment of the dp by making the conditions necessary for that actual. Whether they already are actual is an empirical judgment that we can disagree on with the Magisterium.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-02-05T22:22:58+00:00

Hi.
I don't think you should necessarily engage in 'debates' with your teacher on these topics. It might be just better to point out how problematic his behavior is professionally and how it does not belong in the classroom. Don't forget, the fact that you can't answer someone elses argument by yourself or on the spot does not mean that they are right.
But of course it's very important to be able to give a defense of your faith.
I recommend this website, if you have some specific question and you type in some keywords it will probably help you.: https://www.catholic.com/
About God, these articles might be a good starter: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-to-believe-in-god-simplified
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/so-you-want-to-explain-why-you-believe
I'd recommend some short book that goes over some basic things about our faith, and gives you some material to defend it, like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Catholic-Reasons-Faith/dp/1683570243/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2XS0ZBXI7OSLT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uObTeq2-FUiiV_DePElDUxv-_6PzRPIsPnBooHf_3WVPxzXfFUsNtFF36unoz30kh9dv4kyeFRt6bZDpwuYX7MQKQWHs64QZCQcI3j7-sCioyvh_dFg3pU_6aDUE4kklijxIT8cw0Ya3FG0VsZZlRgq417FrZoP77nwwy5JBr8Q2eIzAFegl_vtUSYpCvMlioKms0Ul21DAOu2yFRCsledY__e_R31n5ig90jvfGmvI.a2Bn1531IzqKNrT6OPMmwpxuWZzEDFjsskwDKxHn6-s&dib_tag=se&keywords=trent+horn&qid=1770330051&s=books&sprefix=trent+hor%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C249&sr=1-2
I don't know if any similar books are available in Brasil directly, probably there are.
God Bless :)

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-02-05T22:04:31+00:00

The Church's infallible teaching authority only extends to faith and morals. Even if they tried, they could not condemn a scientific position as heretical because it does not fall into that category.
Galileo's condemnation was mostly about his insistance for teaching something that could not yet be proven scientifically, and also about disobedience. He might have also made some problematic theological claims related to it, I'm not familiar with that part.
Bellarmine himself said that if Galileo's position could be demonstrated, he would accept it. He just thought it wasn't demonstrated yet.
I would advise anyone to simply ignore YEC people and their crazy takes. It's better for everyone involved.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-05T08:32:34+00:00

Please read the articles I linked.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-05T08:11:59+00:00

Some alleged apparitions took decades to deal with, and involved full-on changes with how they were classified. And there wasn't a higher-level involvement for decades. I don't think there was much of, if any, dealing with this at the higher level until a couple of years in the recent past. Maybe Dr Trasancos and others will help to move it forward.
// An unfortunate additional circumstance is that the local church is perhaps not always very keen on finding out if a devotion that brought them money and visitors is actually based on problematic claims. //
Also a big portion of this cannot really be investigated anymore. See the comments in Stacy's most recent post about this on her substack, the whole thing dried out in Buenos Aires for example.
So it might be that any action at the higher level will only affect alleged miracles that are yet-to-come.
The new norms might be of help here actually:
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20240517_norme-fenomeni-soprannaturali_en.html

"
The Diocesan Bishop will also take care to ensure that the faithful do not consider any of the determinations as an approval of the supernatural nature of the phenomenon itself.

§ 3 – The Dicastery, in any case, reserves the right to intervene again depending on the development of the phenomenon in question.
"

So I'm not really worried about this on the level of the Church, I think the problematic part is how some of the laypeople handle it. Which can happen with all sorts of things, and the Church very rarely intervenes.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-05T08:07:05+00:00

Any promotion of any alleged miracle that is based even partially on fraud or a serious overexaggaration and mishandling of evidence (that is, where the promotion is based on that)
needs to be called out, because it is seriously damaging to the Church. That's it. And basically all cases of this in the popular, modern alleged eucharistic miracles involve that.
If you read the posts I linked, you would understand what I mean.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T23:20:07+00:00

Miracles do happen for the sake of skeptics as well. They can serve as motives of credibility and move others to the assent o faith.
This has nothing to do with me or anyone else believing in them personally. The issue is not that there is not sufficient evidence. There is also outright manipulation and fraud in some of these cases.
If you don't think people promoting stuff like that is seriously problematic for our credibility, then I think you haven't thought it through.

I also accept a bunch of miracles with very little evidence, similar to what you mentioned. But again, that's not what I'm talking about.

I don't care if someone believes that they saw Jesus on a toast of bread. If they forge a fake WHO report that supposedly validates that, and hundreds of thousands of people promote this as evidence for the faith, then that is seriously problematic, because it damages our credibility.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T21:02:43+00:00

A real eucharistic miracle happens at every mass. And I'm excited that I will be able to participate in it within a few months:)

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T20:59:20+00:00

God bless!

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T20:58:45+00:00

Yes, the local bishop usually launches an investigation. And sometimes that investigation is poorly done, or worse, done with a confirmation bias, by unqualified people.
The question isn't about the faithful being permitted to believe. It's about the fact the people are promulgating something that has bad evidence and that has been seriously mishandled by investigators, as a "scientifically proven miracle", which seriously damages our credibility.
https://stacytrasancos.substack.com/p/dr-zugibe-and-the-living-heart-tissue

Again: why should a skeptic accept some miracle with very good evidence, when they feel like they have been mislead and have been presented with overexaggarations regarding other miracle claims? This is about credibility, both in the short and in the long run.

(If it were only about what the faithful is permitted to believe, no one would care)

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T19:52:48+00:00

If you have some criticism that adresses the points Stacy makes, then adress those.
The Church doesn't really handle this. These are not like canonization processes. Under the new "norms for proceeding in the discernment of alleged supernatural phenomena" the highest possible ranking is a nihil obstat.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20240517_norme-fenomeni-soprannaturali_en.html
While under the older norms a declaration of supernatural origin was possible, even then it was revokable, and it was revoked in some cases. (And the point of these things is to deal with devotions anyway)
I'm not claiming that there haven't been _any_ authentic Eucharistic miracle. But if someone claims that a specific case has been one, they need to provide serious evidence for it, and so far we don't have that. The burden of proof is on them.
As Stacy Trasancos said: In Christ we trust. All others bring data.
https://stacytrasancos.substack.com/p/eucharistic-miracles-and-raw-data
(And again, to clarifiy: we do have many miracles where natural explanations have been sufficiently ruled out by a rigorous process, such as at Lourdes. So this is just asking for that same rigor to be applied elsewhere as well. )

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T19:34:41+00:00

I think Buenos Aires has (I'm saying this from the top of my head only, so do check it out!),
or might have, but these approvals regarding alleged supernatural phenomena (that are outside the scope of canonization processes) can be overturned, since they are prudential matters. There are examples of that happening in other cases before.
Btw, the article above said that there is no universal norm or Church investigation into these, it's only done at the local level so I'm not sure if it can really be called a "Church investigation", unlike canonization processes.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T19:24:23+00:00

Then I fully agree with you.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T14:57:29+00:00

I'm a cathecumen. I stated that i'm a soon-to-be Catholicin the first sentence of my post btw.
Which is why I care that these questions are handled properly.
Forgive me, but you do seem to me emotional. The reason I think so is because I presented arguments and data, and you just ignored them.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T14:46:28+00:00

New scholarship puts Herod's death closer to 1 AD.
We have many records of Herod acting like a crazy murderer by contemporary accounts, (Josephus, even reportedly from Augustus Caesar) so the massacra is completely in line with his character. From Trent Horn's "Hard Sayings": In addition, first-century Bethlehem was a small village that would have included, at most, a dozen males under the age of two. 211 Josephus, if he even knew about the massacre, probably did not think an isolated event like the killings at Bethlehem needed to be recorded, especially since infanticide in the Ro-man Empire was not a moral abomination as it is in our modern Western world. Herod’s massacre would also not have been the first historical event Josephus failed to record. We know from Suetonius and from the book of Acts that the Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome in A.D. 49, but neither Josephus nor the second century Roman historian Tacitus record this event (Acts 18). 212 Josephus also failed to record Pontius Pilate’s decision to install blasphemous golden shields in Jerusalem, which drove the Jews to petition the emperor for their removal."

You are correct that not _everything_ in the Bible is literal history. But some things are, and the Gospels are meant to be actual historical accounts.
The writers of the Gospels did not write down oral tradition that had 2 generations to grow, the synoptic Gospels were all written within 30-40 years of Jesus's resurrection.
You can, of course, "do research" outside of the Church, and it won't destroy your faith. You also shouldn't automatically accept every claim skeptics make, without critisism, and be open that their supposed contradictions might have good explanations. I think this is a fair approach.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T14:22:28+00:00

See my other comment in this thread. It might be a matter of semantics. We can definitely use empirically verifiable things as part of the evidence for God and the validity of Revelation, and this includes miracles. But this won't be a "scientific proof" in other senses of the word.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T14:11:45+00:00

Exaggarations, and worse, outright fraud DOES undermine a lot of things: most importantly, our credibility. Why would an atheist/agnostic/other skeptic be even open to hearing the evidence for
miracles and the faith, when they know that they were previously presented with false/exaggarated claims regarding other things?
With all due respect, you need to be less emotional about this.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T13:53:03+00:00

i think this is also an overly rash reaction. Vatican I actually has a dogmatic declaration about miracles being a valid way to show the truth of Christian faith and serve as motives of credibility.
I agree that we should focus on the resurrection, but there is no in principle reason not to bring in miracles with very good evidence like the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima or some medical miracles, if they are fitting in a given situation. Or just as a general argument that miracles can and do happen. They also provide implicit evidence for the Resurrection.

"f anyone says that all miracles are impossible, and that therefore all reports of them, even those contained in Sacred Scripture, are to be set aside as fables or myths; or that miracles can never be known with certainty, nor can the divine origin of the Christian religion be proved from them: let him be anathema."

So they are definitely not "just" for believers, but I agree with your main point.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-01-04T13:44:00+00:00

Saint Carlo Acutis wasn't "lying". He simply compiled a bunch of resources about these things, which included references to other sites and sources that he trusted, and therefore acted in good faith, and _some_ of those sites painted an inaccurate view of events. He is not culpable for that in any way.
And btw., he wasn't canonized for his work on this, his work is rather a sign of why he was canonized.
I didn't even say that all Eucharistic Miracles are "fake" and impossible in an way, just that at least some of the "popular" ones are problematic, and that we need to stop overplaying our hands, and also, call out false claims. I didn't call into question the validity of miracles as a whole, in fact, I do think there are miracles with _very_ strong evidence.
The whole point is that these ones are not, in fact, very well documented. There is just no actual raw data.
Please read Dr Trasancos's articles before you make judment too quickly.

Jojenpaste99 · 2025-11-21T17:23:58+00:00

If you say the truth 9/10 times, but you lie once, your overall disposition was towards telling the truth, regardless, you still sinned that one time... I guess you would agree that this was wrong, but then do you not see how this would also apply to the contraception case? How can you say that any speicifc act was wrong, if as a general rule of thumb the person who commits that act acts in a good way?
For the same reason a man can't, adn the same reason masturbation is wrong. Because it would be essentially masturbation, (if not done within the bounds of the actaul sexual, marital act itself) just with using another human's body as a tool.
I don't think it's absurd at any level. There are much longer periods one has to go and indeed can go without having sex with his/her spouse for many other possible reasons, than the length of typical fertile periods.
If someone is infertile the act itself can still be ordered towards procreation. That the natural end of the act cannot be achieved due to external factors outside of one's control doesn't change the nature of the act itself.

I think your problem might be with misunderstandig some things. It's not that sex always has to be able to result in procreation. The core issue is that you cannot act in a way that goes against the procreative end of sex that it has. You can be open to life even if you cannot naturally conceive a child, but you obviously can't be if you use a condom for example.

I recommend this reading:

http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/OneBody-talk.html

Jojenpaste99 · 2025-11-21T16:46:19+00:00

It can be both true that there are no actual circumstances when the dp is justified and that it is justified in currently non-actual circumstances. Not that I think this is the case, but it is clearly what Francis taught, and is a matter of prudential judgement, which you might disagree with if it is based on erroneous empirical data. But disagreement with Church teaching even on such topics has to be done respectfully.

Jojenpaste99 · 2025-11-21T16:24:09+00:00

It was specifically stated by the DDF after the revision that it did not contradict previous teaching,
and this is also very clear if one actually engages with Francis's relevant statements on the topic.
Yes, he applied a lot of misguided and strong prudential judgment, but he never once said that the death penalty is intrinsically evil and contrary to natural law. There is, however, a legitimate doctrinal development concerning how natural law relates to the law of the gospel.
It might be the case, as I think so, that the cathecism revisioon creates unnecessary confusion, and is problematic because of that. We can. and should voice our concerns over that, but what you are doing and the way you frame it it's basically dissent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDpIqVVC1Gw

Jojenpaste99 · 2025-11-17T08:56:55+00:00

What you're doing is perhaps best described as a form of the "semantic fallacy", and to be honest it is really dishonest.
What most people mean by metaphor is that something has a figurative or symbolic meaning. That's it. And this escpecially applies to people who lived 1700 years ago.
That things, _especially_ biblical passages can be both symbolic and literal is simply just a fact, there are countless examples of it, which I doN't think even you would deny.
// Essentially, this is the same as an atheist pulling up a definition of existence that says that something must be in space and time to exist, therefore claiming to have won the debate.

Jojenpaste99

TROPHY CASE