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. 👇

@JoshuaTCharles @chesterbelloc3 CATHOLIC ✝️

Welcome HOME to all the new converts this Easter Vigil! Our parish bursting at the seams. What a glorious night! Thank you Jesus!

CATHOLIC ✝️

When I was a Protestant seminarian, Church history became a methodological indictment of my ecclesiology — and eventually, my confession. Here’s why: Protestants routinely borrow a council’s conclusions while rejecting its own ecclesiological criteria. Cite the fathers selectively, accept their verdicts on icons, ignore their verdicts on everything else. But your own witnesses — Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius — also taught: • Baptismal regeneration (De Baptismo, Tertullian) • Eucharistic realism (Clement, Paedagogus II) • Episcopal succession as constitutive of the Church (Origen, Eusebius) • Prayer for the dead These aren’t peripheral figures. They’re your list. Do their voices carry authority on icons but nowhere else? Or does the hermeneutic only run one direction?

@CorAd_Cor @5Solas2 787 is when you sect broke away from the tradition of the early church, which strictly prohibited icons. 787 is when your self-serving sect accepted pagan practices. It was overcome by the gates of hell.

lol the difference is the word they use, that's it.

Iran isn’t enriching uranium for power plants. At 60% purity, enough for 9 bombs, IAEA inspectors expelled¹ — the CCC’s threshold for grave and certain harm is met.² Add Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, all funded by Tehran.³ Augustine called peace tranquillitas ordinis: the tranquility of order.⁴ That order is structurally impossible while this regime operates unchecked. ¹ Albright et al., ISIS, May 2025. ² CCC §2309. ³ CFR, April 2026. ⁴ Augustine, City of God, XIX.13.

JUST IN: Archbishop Timothy Broglio, Head of the Catholic Military Archdiocese, said the U.S.-Israel war on Iran likely fails just war standards, even as he stressed that rank-and-file troops are generally bound to follow orders unless they are “clearly immoral.”

¹ David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, and Spencer Faragasso, “Analysis of IAEA Iran Verification and Monitoring Report — May 2025,” Institute for Science and International Security, May 2025, isis-online.org/isis-reports/a…. ² Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §2309. ³ Council on Foreign Relations, “What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities?,” last modified April 2026, cfr.org/articles/what-…. ⁴ Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), XIX.13.

With respect to Archbishop Broglio — whose care for Catholic military personnel I deeply admire — just war analysis of Iran requires wrestling with hard facts. Iran isn’t enriching uranium for power plants or medical isotopes. At 60% purity, with enough stockpiled for 9 weapons and IAEA inspectors expelled,¹ the nuclear dimension alone meets the CCC’s threshold for grave and certain harm.² That’s before accounting for proxy networks (Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis) funded and directed by Tehran to wage perpetual war by deniable means.³ Augustine defined peace as tranquillitas ordinis — the tranquility of order.⁴ That order is structurally impossible while this regime operates unchecked. The Archbishop’s prudential judgment deserves respect. But prudential judgments can be wrong.

@Truth_matters20 Are you denying Christ’s humanity?

God has no mother. Mother implies beginning. God is eternal. I don't care what some council said.

@5Solas2 Is it the case that Calvin feared idolatry in the bones of martyrs? Perhaps. He seems to have no such fear of the printed page. Both are material objects through which God mediates grace. The logic that abolishes one should abolish the other.

"To have relics is a useless and frivolous thing, which will most probably gradually lead towards idolatry...In short, the desire for relics is never without superstition, and what is worse, it is usually the parent of idolatry." —John Calvin

@rickbrennanjr @papalsupremacy Worth pausing on the assumption embedded here: that “institutional” and “christological” are opposites. Paul didn’t think so. The Church is the body of Christ (Eph. 1:22–23).

@papalsupremacy I find it so interesting to read all these claims of "Catholics winning." That's the fundamental problem with Catholicism:" it's all about the institutional church: and nothing about Christ and winning souls to him,

We are seeing record numbers of new converts this Easter. Catholicism is winning. The future is Catholic.

Easter’s date comes from Nicaea (325 AD), and the council wasn’t merely setting a calendar but resolving ecclesiastic crisis. From the council came two binding rules: independence from the Jewish calendar, and worldwide uniformity. The driving concern was that while some were engaged in fasting and penitence, others were indulging in festivity; a scandal to the church and to unbelievers. Unity of practice was treated as a matter of ecclesial authority, not individual discernment. That’s not a Reformed synod’s conclusion. It’s a pre-schism, episcopal, catholic council, received across centuries through the very tradition the Reformation departed from — whose binding determination you’re still observing today. You said the church can establish traditions “consistent with Scripture.” Fine. But who adjudicated that at Nicaea? Not Scripture alone. A council of bishops, convened by an emperor, ruling for the whole church.

This question demonstrates a misunderstanding of sola Scriptura. No Reformer or Reformed theologian argued that Christians may only believe or practice what is explicitly stated in Scripture. Rather, sola Scriptura teaches that Scripture is the only infallible authority: not the only authority. The church may establish traditions, practices, and calendars (like Good Friday), so long as they are consistent with and derived from Scripture, not imposed as binding doctrine apart from it. So yes, Protestants observe Good Friday and the same date as the entirety of the Western church. Not because Scripture specifies this date, but because Scripture clearly teaches the event: Christ’s atoning death. The church, in wisdom, sets aside a day to remember what Scripture reveals. That is categorically different from doctrines that must be believed for salvation yet lack clear grounding in Scripture. So, the issue is not tradition vs. no tradition. The issue is which traditions are faithful to Scripture, and which claim authority equal to it. That is the dividing line the Reformers drew, and it remains the dividing line between Roman Catholics and Protestants today.

@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