CorAdCor

500 years of Catholic-Protestant separation. 45,000 Protestant denominations. How is a sinner made right with God? What is the Church? This account explores those questions and others. Cor ad Cor. Heart to heart. Follow if you're serious about it. 👇

@TaylorRMarshall @MattGaspers Perhaps, an interesting example on how the Church’s teaching authority functions in practice.

This Holy Week, in an interview with Ben Shapiro, Bishop Robert Barron told Shapiro that Pope Leo XIV's anti-war comments do not refer to the Iran War. Ben Shapiro: "How should people interpret the Pope’s recent comments on the evil of War?" Bp. Barron: "I furthermore agree with you that Pope Leo is not referring specifically to the Iran War." I suspect Bp. Barron will be receiving a phone call from the Vatican after Easter....

The beauty of the Gospel and the Church convinces me.

If the Church founded by Christ went through periods of corruption, scandal, and mass apostasy (Scripture predicts this) that’s not evidence against its claims. It might actually be evidence for them, depending on what you think the gates of hell not prevailing looks like. Even so, sociological decline has never been a theological argument. The Apostles had a 1-in-12 defection rate at the senior leadership level.

If the Church founded by Christ went through periods of corruption, scandal, and mass apostasy (Scripture predicts this) that’s not evidence against its claims. It might actually be evidence for them, depending on what you think the gates of hell not prevailing looks like. Even so, sociological decline has never been a theological argument. The Apostles had a 1-in-12 defection rate at the senior leadership level.

Catholics want you to believe there is a sort of revival happening in the Catholic Church with an abnormally large amount of conversions happening! What they fail to tell you is: “Catholicism has one of the largest net losses of any religion in the U.S. 13% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics Catholics have experienced the greatest net losses due to switching. About three-in-ten U.S. adults (30.2%) say they were raised Catholic. But 43% of the people raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic, meaning that 12.8% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, 1.5% of U.S. adults have become Catholics after being raised another way. Overall, 18.9% of U.S. adults currently identify as Catholics, according to the new RLS. For Catholics, retention rates tend to be significantly lower than for other faiths, reasons given by former Catholics for walking away were clergy and religious leader scandals (39%) and dissatisfaction with church teachings on social and political issues (37%). Another 35% of former Catholics pointed to a gradual drifting away from their religion -- slightly less than the report's overall share of 38%. Equal shares of former Catholics said that their religion "just wasn't important" in their lives (36%) or that their spiritual needs were not being met (36%).” ***Data is quoted from the Pew Research Center & from the DetroitCatholic.com referencing the new study from Pew Research Center released Dec. 15, 2025 What’s really happening is that Roman Catholicism has a superficial lure promising structure and nostalgia, but once the short-lived experiences fade away these young converts seek truth and fulfillment elsewhere.

Bonaventure. He introduced me to the idea of ecstatic union beyond all concepts; that the mind and heart must ascend together.

The Catholic argument isn’t that Scripture was transmitted orally. It’s that identifying which texts belong in the canon requires a judgment that Scripture itself cannot ground. You can hold a manuscript of Galatians. Great! How do you know Hebrews belongs in the same collection? Or 2 Peter? Or Revelation — excluded from Eastern canonical lists by Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Council of Laodicea, and absent from the Byzantine lectionary to this day? Your manuscript evidence doesn’t answer that question 🤷🏻‍♂️

The claim often made by Catholics and Orthodox that “the canon is oral tradition” completely collapses under scrutiny. The Scriptures were not preserved as whispers passed down in the dark through a line of succession. They were written documents. Real, physical texts authored by the apostles and prophets, copied, WIDELY circulated, and examined across the early church. They are historical artifacts. That is not the same category as “oral tradition.” We do not accept the canon because of an infallible chain of storytelling. We recognize it because these writings bear the marks of authenticity: • Apostolic origin • Consistency across manuscripts • Widespread and early usage in the churches, allowing discrepancies to be identified and examined through historical analysis and textual criticism • Doctrinal coherence • Verifiable historical authenticity These are historic realities, not blind appeals to oral tradition. You can hold the manuscripts in your hand. You can compare them. You can test them, just as the Bereans tested the testimony of the apostles in Acts 17:11. That’s the point. Recognition is not the same as creation. The church did not make Scripture authoritative, but recognized what already was. So no, appealing to the canon is not secretly appealing to “oral tradition” as the ultimate authority. It is acknowledging that God preserved His word through written revelation, not an evolving stream of unverifiable claims. And that is why the believer can rest in Scripture alone as the God breathed, infallible standard.

@kaizen000000000 If naturalism is true, you have defeaters for all your cognitive faculties, including the ones generating your moral intuitions.

The atheist we all need finding him on youtube as a teen solidified my atheism 💃

John 6:51–58. Read it carefully. Jesus says "my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink." He uses sarx — the most physical Greek word for flesh. Many disciples left. Jesus didn't call them back and say "I was speaking metaphorically." Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107 AD) called the Eucharist "the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ." That's 40 years after John's Gospel. No medieval invention. The Protestant question is fair: Does "This is my body" require Aristotelian substance/accident categories to be literally true? Maybe not. But real presence has ancient roots. 🍞

The Entrance into Jerusalem

@FlanaganOnFaith Fax.

Years ago, I was very involved in politics. Now I understand that the real battle is for Faith and Family. That’s what is important. Politicians will not save you. Only Christ can save you. Don’t get it mixed up.

That’s Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), a profound 19th-century Russian novelist. You know, the writer of the literary masterpieces: Crime and Punishment & The Brothers Karamazov (maybe the best novel ever written). Uneducated and brain washed, lol.

@CorAd_Cor if god does not exist, everything is permitted ? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂. so god makes laws ? wow. that was one of the most uneducated statements i have ever seen/ heard. you are brain washed.

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Dostoevsky put it in a novel. Nietzsche put it in a philosophy. The 20th century put it into practice.

@LauraLoomer @Nix132Nick Atheism doesn’t merely struggle with morality. It dissolves it.

@Nix132Nick At least Atheists have moral clarity without using religion as an excuse to be a bad person.

I’d rather be a die hard atheist than be a member of any Church that welcomes people like you and Candace to join its ranks. You use your phony religious grandstanding as a shield to harass grieving widows and you align with Islamists who want Sharia Supremacy. Atheism is more appealing than joining anything you claim to be a part of.

@5Solas2 Which one of those guys in the pic had the true religion? Calvin, Luther, and (who looks like) Zwingli?

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@GrandMosk @rickbrennanjr @findveritasx @JoshuaTCharles I don’t know but that sounds rather uncharitable. What I do know: one of fastest ways to lose an apologetics conversation is to tell someone what they believe before they tell you. In such cases, assumption tends to replace listening.

@CorAd_Cor @rickbrennanjr @findveritasx @JoshuaTCharles Josh strikes me as the type of person who might believe that anyone who leaves the Catholic Church for another denomination is not well catechized by definition.

I have meet at least 50 former Catholics in the non-denom church I’ve been a part of. 100% of them were not catechized even halfway. Examples include not knowing the Catholic Bible had more books, why we pray to saints, or even that the Catholics claim to be the one true church.

Risk, it seems to me that Josh is simply saying that in every case he has personally encountered—not in every possible case. I think he’s referring to lived experience and not that every singe Catholic-to-Protestant move is an under catechized and unconvicted leap. Just my observation, in charity.

It is a gross exaggeration to suggest that most Roman Catholics who leave the Church are not well catechized: especially the extreme claim by @JoshuaTCharles that “in every single case…they knew nothing.” That statement is simply false. And to be blunt, having interacted with Joshua directly on this issue, he is misrepresenting reality. In my own case, I engaged the Catechism of the Catholic Church and church history carefully, and at length, with Joshua. And, when I pressed those points publicly, Joshua chose to block me rather than respond. That is not the posture of someone confident in the claim he is making. It is far easier to dismiss former Catholics as ignorant than to engage substantive theological disagreement. So let’s move past caricatures. What would you like to discuss from the CCC? And more importantly, why do I find a number of its teachings to be in tension with Scripture? I am more than willing to engage directly and demonstrate that many who become Protestant do so not out of ignorance, but out of conviction shaped by careful study of both Scripture and Catholic doctrine.

Chained books = anti-theft. That’s not suppression it’s medieval library science. The Mass was in Latin. The Bible was the Vulgate. Also in Latin across Europe: legal documents, university lectures, and medical texts. Latin was the language of learning — not a Catholic conspiracy. If the Reformation liberated Scripture, which Reformation? Luther’s? Calvin’s? Zwingli’s? Btw, more than a dozen German Bibles were printed before Luther’s.

The Protestant Reformation might be the most important historical event since the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without it, bibles would still be chained to pulpits and written in languages common people can’t understand so that the Catholic Church could remain corrupt.

Catholics don't teach the Mass *repeats* Calvary. They teach it *re-presents* it — makes the one eternal sacrifice sacramentally present across time. Council of Trent: "The victim is one and the same. Only the manner of offering is different." Think of it this way: Christ's sacrifice is eternal, happening before the throne of God (Hebrews 7:25; Revelation 5:6 — the Lamb "standing as if slain"). The Mass participates in that eternal offering. Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (2nd century) described the Eucharist as a sacrifice — before any "medieval invention" accusation lands. Still a Protestant? Fair. But the argument is more nuanced than you thought. 🕊️

This is where Protestants get most alarmed. The Catholic Mass is not just a memorial of Christ's sacrifice. It is, the Church teaches, a propitiatory sacrifice — a real offering that applies the benefits of Calvary to the present moment. Protestant objection (Hebrews 9:12, 26, 28; 10:10, 14, 18): Christ's sacrifice was ONCE FOR ALL. Done. Finished. "There is no longer any offering for sin" — Hebrews 10:18. How can there be an ongoing sacrifice if there's no longer any offering for sin? That's the sharpest edge of this debate. ⚔️

@dragodimitrov I think Theological Liberalism is a major contributor.

I think attachment to contraception is the #1 thing holding Protestants back from becoming Catholic.