25 Objections to the Catholic Faith, Answered
Somebody asks you a question about the Catholic faith, and you don’t have an answer. Not because there isn’t one, but because nobody ever gave it to you, and the version you half remember from Catechism class in your youth won’t survive a debate with someone who has studied Scripture.
This page has 25 of those questions with short answers. Each one takes about a minute to read. Each one links to a longer written version with the sources laid out, and to a video where I work through it.
I’m Deacon Dan DeLuca. A permanent deacon, ordained for the Archdiocese of Omaha in 2023, completing a Master’s degree in theology.
Three things about how these are written.
I state each objection the way somebody who believes it would state it, in their words, with their best evidence. I try my best to represent the other side fairly. If a Protestant reading this wouldn’t recognize his own position, I’ve wasted both our time.
I concede what is true first. Every one of these 25 objections contains something true, and acknowledging that is what earns the credibility to answer. Christ really did say “call no man father.” The Church really did burn people. Denying those facts is dishonest.
And every claim here can be checked. Chapter and verse, paragraph numbers, the Father and the work, and the book number. If you find something I’ve gotten wrong, the comment box is open, and I’d rather hear it from you than from somebody else.
Where to start
If you got sent here by a question, use the list. If you’re reading straight through, start with the first eight. Those are the ones where Scripture does most of the work, and the method is easiest to see.
Scripture
1. “Call no man father”
Jesus says it in Matthew 23:9, and Catholics call priests Father. The objection is as plain as it looks, and the context makes it worse: the chapter denounces religious leaders who love their titles.
Here’s the hinge. The same sentence forbids three things. Verse 8 forbids rabbi, verse 9 forbids father, verse 10 forbids guide. Same construction, same reason given each time. Anyone reading verse 9 as an absolute ban on a word has to read the other two the same way, which forbids calling anybody a teacher. Nobody does that. And Paul calls himself a father in 1 Corinthians 4:15, four chapters into a letter about how little he is. Chrysostom, preaching in the 390s, says the command is “not that they should not call, but they may know whom they ought to call Father, in the highest sense.”
The two-sentence answer: Christ forbids treating any man as the source of your life in God. He doesn’t forbid the word, which is why Paul uses it about himself.
→ Read the full answer · Episode 1
2. Why do Catholic Bibles have 7 more books?
The claim is that Trent added them in 1546 to win an argument with Luther, that the Jews never accepted them, and that Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, rejected them too.
All three of those facts are true, and the last one is a real difficulty. What the objection leaves out is the thousand years in between. Augustine lists all 44 books, the seven included, with no asterisk, around 397. The councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 published the same list. And Hebrews 11:35 describes believers tortured and refusing release in hope of a better resurrection, which is a scene that appears nowhere in the Hebrew canon and appears in detail in 2 Maccabees 7.
The two-sentence answer: The apostles’ Bible was the Greek Old Testament, which had these books in it, and the Church’s canon lists from the 390s include them without argument. Trent refused to drop them; it didn’t add them.
→ Read the full answer · Episode 2
3. “The Eucharist is only a symbol”
John is full of metaphor, and John 6:63 says “the flesh profiteth nothing.” That’s the argument, and it’s a good one.
Watch the verb. Through verse 53 Jesus uses the ordinary Greek word for eating. In verse 52 the crowd takes him literally and objects out loud. And from verse 54 he switches to τρώγω, a coarser word meaning to gnaw or chew, and repeats it four times. Then in verse 66 disciples walk away over it, and he lets them go without a word of correction. As for verse 63: he doesn’t say “my flesh” there. He says flesh, with no possessive, eight verses after calling his flesh true food. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107, already treats denying the real presence as the mark of a heretic.
The two-sentence answer: When they took him literally and left, he didn’t call them back. He said it again in a blunter word.
→ Read the full answer · Episode 3
4. “Faith alone”
Romans 3:28 says a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law, and the Reformation built on it.
James 2:24 is the only verse in the New Testament that puts “faith” and “alone” next to each other, and it puts a “not” in front of them. Paul’s target in Romans is the works of the Mosaic law, circumcision and dietary rules, which is what the argument in that letter focuses on. Galatians 5:6 gives the Catholic position in Paul’s own words: what counts is faith working through love. The Council of Trent, Session VI, is where the Church states this formally, and it condemns earning salvation just as firmly as any Protestant would.
The two-sentence answer: Nobody earns salvation, and Catholics don’t teach that they do. Faith that stays a private opinion isn’t the faith the New Testament is talking about.
→ Publishing Tuesday, September 8 · Episode 4
5. “Mary had other children”
Matthew 13:55 names James, Joseph, Simon and Judas as Jesus’s brothers. In English, that settles it.
In Greek it doesn’t. ἀδελφός covers a wider range than the English “brother,” including cousins and kinsmen, because neither Hebrew nor Aramaic had a separate word for cousin and the Greek of the Septuagint inherited that. And there’s a harder problem for the plain reading: at the cross, in John 19:26-27, Jesus gives his mother into the care of John. A first-century Jewish man with four living brothers does not hand his mother to a friend. Jerome takes the whole question apart in Against Helvidius around 383.
The two-sentence answer: The word doesn’t mean what it means in English, and the cross scene makes no sense if Mary had other sons.
→ Publishing Tuesday, September 15 · Episode 5
6. “Confession to a priest is unbiblical”
Only God forgives sins, and there’s no verse telling you to tell a man about yours.
John 20:23 is Jesus, after the resurrection, telling the apostles that whatever sins they forgive are forgiven and whatever they retain are retained. That authority has to be exercised somehow, and you can’t retain a sin you haven’t heard. Paul describes the ministry of reconciliation as entrusted to men in 2 Corinthians 5:18-20. James 5:16 tells Christians to confess their sins to one another. And the Didache, a first-century document, already instructs Christians to confess before the Eucharist.
The two-sentence answer: God forgives sins and has always chosen to do it through people he sends. The priest isn’t the source of forgiveness any more than the Jordan was the source of Naaman’s healing.
→ Publishing Tuesday, September 22 · Episode 6
7. “Purgatory isn’t in the Bible”
The word isn’t there. That’s true of “Trinity” and “Incarnation” too, but the objection is fair and deserves verses.
1 Corinthians 3:11-15 describes a man whose work is burned up, who suffers loss, and who is himself saved “but only as through fire.” That’s a state after death that isn’t hell, because he’s saved, and isn’t heaven, because he’s suffering loss. Matthew 12:32 speaks of a sin not forgiven in this age or the age to come, which implies some sins are dealt with in the age to come. 2 Maccabees 12:44-46 shows Jews praying for the dead before Christ. Augustine prays for his mother in Confessions IX.
The two-sentence answer: Nothing unclean enters heaven, and most of us die not quite clean. Purgatory is the name for God finishing what he started.
→ Publishing Tuesday, September 29 · Episode 7
8. “Praying to saints is necromancy”
Deuteronomy forbids consulting the dead, and asking a saint for prayer looks like exactly that.
The dead in question are the living. Hebrews 12:1 puts a cloud of witnesses around us. Revelation 5:8 shows the elders in heaven holding golden bowls of incense, “which are the prayers of the saints,” and Revelation 8:3-4 has an angel offering those prayers before God. Whatever else is happening there, people in heaven are handling the prayers of people on earth. And 2 Maccabees 15:12-14 has the dead prophet Jeremiah praying for Israel. Asking a saint to pray for you is what you already do when you ask your friend to pray for you.
The two-sentence answer: Necromancy is trying to get information out of the dead. Asking somebody alive in Christ to pray for you is what Christians have always done for each other.
→ Publishing Tuesday, October 6 · Episode 8
The Church
9. “Peter was never in Rome”
Scripture never says Peter went to Rome, and yet one of the most important papal claims rests on his being there.
1 Peter 5:13 sends greetings from “Babylon,” which was standard Christian code for Rome and is read that way by nearly everyone, Protestant scholars included. Clement of Rome, Ignatius, and Irenaeus all connect Peter with the Roman church within a century and a half, and Irenaeus lists the succession of Roman bishops from Peter forward. The excavations under St. Peter’s in the 1940s found a first-century grave under the altar, inside a shrine that second-century Christians had built to mark it.
The two-sentence answer: The written evidence is early, wide, and uncontradicted, and no other city ever claimed his grave. If Peter died somewhere else, somebody would have said as much.
→ Publishing Tuesday, October 13 · Episode 9
10. “The rock was Peter’s faith, not Peter”
Matthew 16:18 uses two different Greek words, Πέτρος and πέτρα, and the argument is that the second means a large rock and the first a pebble.
The difference is grammatical gender. πέτρα is feminine, and you don’t hang a feminine noun on a man as a name, so it becomes Πέτρος. And Jesus wasn’t speaking Greek. In Aramaic the word is Kepha both times, which is why Paul keeps calling him Cephas. What follows in verse 19 settles the sense: the keys of the kingdom, which is a direct quotation of Isaiah 22:22, where the keys are handed to a royal steward who holds an office that outlives him.
The two-sentence answer: In the language Jesus was speaking, it’s the same word twice. And the keys in Isaiah 22 belong to an office, not a man.
→ Publishing Tuesday, October 20 · Episode 10
11. “Jesus never founded a church”
He preached a kingdom, and the institution came later.
Matthew 16:18 has him say he will build his ἐκκλησία (Church), and Matthew 18:17 tells you what to do when a dispute with your brother can’t be settled: take it to the church. If your brother won’t listen to the church, treat him as an outsider. That’s a body with authority to make a binding decision. Acts 15 shows that body doing it. And Ignatius of Antioch, around 107, writes of the “catholic church,” the first surviving use of the phrase, in a letter about bishops.
The two-sentence answer: A kingdom with no visible government is a metaphor, and Matthew 18 gives it a government. The structure is in the text, not bolted on later.
→ Publishing Tuesday, October 27 · Episode 11
12. “Papal infallibility means the pope can’t sin”
If that were the claim, five minutes with a history book would end the argument.
It isn’t the claim. Pastor Aeternus 4, the 1870 definition, is narrow to the point of being disappointing: the pope, speaking as universal shepherd, defining a doctrine of faith or morals, binding the whole Church. Personal holiness isn’t part of it, and neither are opinions, interviews, or policy. Galatians 2:11-14 has Paul rebuking Peter to his face over conduct, and the Church has never had trouble with that passage. The charism is a guarantee against defining error, not a promise of good behavior.
The two-sentence answer: Infallibility is protection from teaching error under specific conditions. Popes have sinned badly, and the doctrine has always known it.
→ Publishing Tuesday, November 3 · Episode 12
13. “The Church added books at Trent”
The same claim as objection 2, aimed at the council rather than the books.
The dates are the answer. Hippo published a canon list in 393. Carthage published one in 397. Augustine gives the same list in On Christian Doctrine around the same year. That’s 1,149 years before Trent’s Session IV in 1546. What Trent did was define under challenge, which is what councils do. Nicaea didn’t invent the divinity of Christ in 325 either; it defined it because somebody had denied it.
The two-sentence answer: Councils define things when they’re attacked, and the definition comes after the belief. Trent in 1546 said out loud what Carthage had listed in 397.
→ Publishing Tuesday, November 10 · Episode 13
14. “Constantine invented Catholicism”
The story is that a Roman emperor took a simple Jewish movement and turned it into an imperial religion at Nicaea in the year 325.
Read what Christians wrote before Constantine was born. Ignatius, around 107, on the Eucharist as the flesh of Christ, on bishops, and on the catholic church. Read Justin Martyr describing the Sunday liturgy in the 150s in a shape you’d recognize at Mass this weekend. Read what Saint Irenaeus wrote in the 180s on the succession of bishops and the authority of the Roman church. Finally, consider Nicaea’s actual agenda, which was the divinity of Christ and defending that against the Arian heresy, the date of Easter, and some disciplinary canons.
The two-sentence answer: Everything the story says Constantine invented is documented before he was born. Nicaea was about whether Jesus is God.
→ Publishing Tuesday, November 17 · Episode 14
Worship and practice
15. “Statues are idolatry”
Exodus 20:4-5 forbids graven images, and Catholic churches are full of them.
Read a few chapters further. In Exodus 25:18-20 God commands two golden cherubim over the ark, in the holiest place Israel had. In Numbers 21:8-9 he commands a bronze serpent be placed on a pole, and looking at it heals people. So the same God who forbade images commanded images, which means the commandment isn’t about the objects. It’s about worship. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 defined the distinction. John Damascene made the argument a generation earlier: the Word became flesh, and flesh can be depicted.
The two-sentence answer: God commanded statues in the same book where he forbade idols, so the prohibition is about worship. Nobody thinks a photograph of his wife is his wife.
→ Publishing Tuesday, November 24 · Episode 15
16. “The rosary is vain repetition”
Matthew 6:7 warns against heaping up empty phrases, and the rosary is 53 Hail Marys.
The Greek word is βατταλογέω, which means babbling, stammering, piling up words as though volume forces God’s hand. That’s the practice being condemned. Jesus names it: the pagans think they’ll be heard for their many words. Repetition by itself can’t be the problem, because Revelation 4:8 has the living creatures saying “holy, holy, holy” without ceasing, and Psalm 136 repeats the same line 26 times in a row. Most of the words contained in the Rosary come directly from Scripture: the Our Father from Matthew 6, the first half of the Hail Mary from Luke 1.
The two-sentence answer: The verse condemns babbling to twist God’s arm, not repetition. Heaven itself repeats in Revelation 4.
→ Publishing Tuesday, December 1 · Episode 16
17. “Infant baptism isn’t biblical”
Every baptism in Acts follows a profession of faith, and a baby can’t profess anything.
The New Testament baptizes households. Lydia and her household in Acts 16:15, the jailer and all his in Acts 16:33, Crispus and his whole household in Acts 18:8. οἶκος in that period means everyone under the roof, and first-century households had children in them. Colossians 2:11-12 links baptism to circumcision, which was given to infants on the eighth day. Origen calls infant baptism a tradition received from the apostles, and Cyprian’s Letter 64, around 253, is a bishops’ council arguing about whether to wait until the eighth day. Nobody in it questions baptizing babies at all.
The two-sentence answer: The apostles baptized households, and households had children. The early argument was about which day, not whether.
→ Publishing Tuesday, December 8 · Episode 17
18. “Priestly celibacy is unbiblical”
1 Timothy 3:2 says a bishop should be the husband of one wife, and Peter had a mother-in-law.
Both of these statements are true. However, celibacy is a discipline rather than a doctrine, which means the Church could change it tomorrow without contradicting anything. Eastern Catholic churches in full communion with Rome ordain married men right now. As for whether it’s biblical: Matthew 19:12 has Jesus speak of those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom, and 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 is Paul arguing at length that the unmarried man is free for the Lord in a way the married man isn’t. Paul was celibate and recommended it.
The two-sentence answer: It’s a discipline, not a doctrine, and married Eastern Catholic priests exist today. Christ and Paul both praised the choice.
→ Publishing Tuesday, December 15 · Episode 18
19. “The Mass re-sacrifices Christ”
Hebrews 9:28 says Christ was offered once. If the Mass is a sacrifice, it either adds to Calvary or denies it.
In that same letter to the Hebrews, it says “we have an altar,” and altars are for sacrifice (13:10). 1 Corinthians 10:16-21 sets the cup of blessing directly against pagan sacrifices, in the language of sacrifice. Malachi 1:11 prophesies a pure offering made among the nations in every place. The Catholic claim, in CCC 1367, is that the victim and the priest are the same and only the manner of offering differs. One and only one sacrifice, made present, not repeated.
The two-sentence answer: Catholics believe Calvary happened once and can’t be repeated. The Mass makes that one offering present, the way a memorial makes the Passover present to Jews who weren’t in Egypt.
→ Publishing Tuesday, December 22 · Episode 19
Salvation and Mary
20. “Once saved, always saved”
If salvation can be lost, it was never a gift, and in John 10:28 our Lord says that nobody snatches them out of his hand.
Nobody snatches. The question is whether you can walk away or not. Hebrews 6:4-6 describes people who were enlightened and shared in the Holy Spirit and then fell away. Hebrews 10:26-27 warns of deliberate sin after receiving knowledge of the truth. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9:27, disciplines his body lest he himself be disqualified, which is an odd worry for a man who can’t be snatched away. Galatians 5:4 speaks of falling from grace. Philippians 2:12 tells Christians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.
The two-sentence answer: God never withdraws the gift, but a person can refuse it later. Paul himself thought he could be disqualified and he’d met the risen Christ.
→ Publishing Tuesday, December 29 · Episode 20
21. “Indulgences are buying forgiveness”
Tetzel really did sell them. Luther objected, and he was right.
When it comes to the selling of indulgences, Luther was right, and the Church agreed with him on that point. In 1567, Pope Pius V banned attaching any financial transaction to an indulgence at all. However, that still leaves the question of what an indulgence actually is. 2 Samuel 12:13-14 is the model: David’s sin is forgiven, yet a consequence still follows. Guilt and temporal consequence are separable, and an indulgence addresses the second, never the first. Forgiveness comes through confession, and it isn’t for sale and never was, whatever a fundraiser in Saxony was doing.
The two-sentence answer: An indulgence has never forgiven a sin; confession does that. Selling them was an abuse, and the Church banned the practice.
→ Publishing Tuesday, January 5 · Episode 21
22. “Catholics worship Mary”
Watch a rosary procession and tell me that isn’t worship.
Catholic theology has three words where English has one. Latria is adoration and belongs to God alone. Dulia is the honor given to a saint. Hyperdulia is the higher honor given to Mary, and it’s still on the creature side of an absolute line. The distinction is old, and it isn’t a modern excuse. As for whether Mary gets unusual honor in Scripture: Luke 1:28 has the angel address her as κεχαριτωμένη, a perfect passive participle that says she has already been graced, used as a name. Lumen Gentium 66-67 states the doctrine while warning against exaggeration in the same breath.
The two-sentence answer: Adoration goes to God alone, and Catholics who blur that are corrected by their own catechism. Honoring the mother is what the angel did first.
→ Publishing Tuesday, January 12 · Episode 22
History
These last three are different. They’re about things the Church actually did, and they get answered the same way anything true gets answered: by admitting it first.
23. “The Inquisition”
The Spanish Inquisition tortured people and handed them over to be burned. That happened and no Catholic should deny it or soften it.
The historical numbers, however, are lower than the popular ones by a wide margin. Henry Kamen’s work and the Vatican’s own 1998 symposium have narrowed them considerably. But the number isn’t the point, and reaching for them as a defense first is a mistake. The argument being made is that these events prove Catholicism false, and that’s a claim about doctrine. Bad men holding an office doesn’t tell you whether what the office teaches is true. Caiaphas held a real office.
The two-sentence answer: The Inquisition did evil, and the Church has said so publicly. Whether a doctrine is true isn’t settled by the sins of the men holding the office that defends that doctrine.
→ Publishing Tuesday, January 19 · Episode 23
24. “Galileo proves the Church is anti-science”
Galileo was right about the solar system, and he was condemned for it. The Church was wrong.
John Paul II said as much in 1992, in public, without qualification. What’s worth knowing is the shape of the error, because it wasn’t a war on science. Bellarmine’s 1615 letter to Foscarini says plainly that if a proof were produced, Scripture would have to be reinterpreted, and Galileo’s proof at the time was faulty. Church officials made a bad judgment inside a scientific dispute they were entitled to have and got wrong. That’s different from opposing inquiry, and the Church’s own record on astronomy before and after is the evidence that she has never opposed inquiry.
The two-sentence answer: The Church was wrong about Galileo and has apologized for it. One bad ruling in 1633 isn’t a philosophy of science.
→ Publishing Tuesday, January 26 · Episode 24
25. “The abuse crisis proves the Church is false”
Priests abused children. Bishops moved them and covered it up. Both of those are true; they are worse than most people know, and no version of this answer can begin with anything else.
I’m not going to compare institutions, and I’m not going to give you statistics. Victims read pages like this one, and every number offered in this position reads as a defense of the men who did it.
What can be said is narrow. The argument is that these crimes prove Catholic doctrine false. Doctrine isn’t established or refuted by the conduct of the men who hold office, which is a principle the Church applied against itself long before this crisis, most clearly when it ruled in the fourth century that a sacrament isn’t invalidated by an unworthy minister. That cuts both ways, and here it cuts against us.
The two-sentence answer: The crimes are real, and the cover-up was real. Nothing here excuses either. Whether the faith is true is a separate question from whether the men entrusted with it kept it.
→ Publishing Tuesday, February 2 · Episode 25
If I’ve gotten something wrong
Comments are open on every one of these. Argue the Protestant position in good faith, and you’re the reason this page exists; I’m not going to delete you for disagreeing. What gets removed is abuse and attacks on other commenters, and that’s the whole standard.
New answer every Tuesday.