In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to respond to common challenges from those who claim Catholic worship is sinful. From accusations of Mary-worship to misunderstandings about the Mass and objections to the Church’s handling of money, Joe breaks down each issue with clarity and charity—showing how Catholic teaching aligns with Scripture and honors God in truth.
Transcript:
Caller: Looking Catholic and Orthodox, grew up Protestant. Feels like sometimes in Protestant churches, they seem lost. They seem. The lack of tradition, a lack of structure. It feels more like a stage than an altar. So, yeah, this really gets me thinking about the Catholic Church. And so my question for you is about metaphor. When I see a Catholic praying to Mary, I realize that they’re not really praying to Mary. Right. They’re using that as a metaphor. But what do you say to people who, when they can kind of get their head around the metaphor, but even just doing that alone feels. I feel like I’m cheating on God by doing that. What do you say to that?
Joe: Yeah, okay. That is very well framed. I think that was a very good job. And I agree with your hunger for something more rooted. And I also agree with your wanting to make sure you’re not indulging in something that isn’t pleasing to God.
And so the question of, like, do Catholics worship Mary? We don’t worship Mary. But if you say, do Catholics pray to Mary, well, what do you mean by prayer? So in First Timothy, chapter two, Paul says to Timothy, first of all, then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men. So within the kind of genus of prayer he gives those four different types, you can have a supplication, you can have a prayer in the direct sense of prayer, you can have an intercession, or you can have a thanksgiving.
And Origen in his commentary on this says, okay, well, who are all of these directed to? There’s a type of prayer that is only given to God, like when you are giving worship or when you’re giving divine honor, when you’re asking for things only God can do, those things are going only to God. But there are other things, like supplications and even thanksgivings that we can give to other creatures. I can ask you to pray for me. That’s a supplication. Or, excuse me, intercession. I switched up. I just said these are the four categories. Then I screwed it up. An intercession. I’m asking you to intercede for me. And likewise, I can thank you and I can honor you for something that you’ve done, and that’s not worship.
So we want to be clear. There’s a difference between prayer and worship biblically. And the easiest way to see this is that in John chapter four, when Jesus and the Samaritan woman are talking, they talk in verse 20 about how the Samaritans believe you have to worship on Mount Gerizim, and the Jews believe you have to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. But here’s the catch. Neither Samaritans nor Jews believed that you had to pray in only those two places. You see people praying all over the place. And that’s good, because prayer is talking to God or talking to whoever. But if you’re worshiping, that’s something different than just prayer.
So that’s why it can throw people off, because there’s an unfamiliarity there. And I can understand that completely, because many Protestants have the unbiblical idea that prayer is worship and worship is prayer. But there are different words used to describe these different realities. Now, to be sure, you can pray in the temple and prayer can be part of your worship, but they’re not the same thing.
The kicker, if you want the heart of what worship is, it’s not just asking God for something or asking somebody for something. Worship comes in English from “worthy ship.” To give someone their worth, it’s an act of offering. So we offer God divine honor. We offer God a sacrifice of praise. And at the heart of worship is this concept of sacrifice.
So Everett Ferguson, a Protestant scholar, said that in the ancient world, sacrifice was the language of worship. So the reason that a Catholic Mass, as you said, has an altar rather than a stage is because at the Mass, we present to the Father the pure sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. His body and blood are made present and presented to the Father. That’s a sacrificial act.
And so from the first century on, you find Christian worship being described as a sacrifice. In First Corinthians 10, St. Paul compares the sacrifice of the Eucharist to both Jewish sacrifices that you would then eat and pagan sacrifices, which you would then eat. So we know sacrificial worship is at the very heart of this thing that we’re doing. If you don’t have that, and many Protestants have lost any sense that we come together to give sacrifice to God, if you don’t have that, then you lose the difference between sacrifice and prayer.
And so any prayer looks like it must be worship because we’ve lost sight of what worship is. So I would say I think the danger isn’t that Catholics are giving too much honor and glory to Mary and to the saints. I think the danger is many Protestants today are not giving enough glory to God. They are not giving worship. They are not giving sacrifice because they’ve lost this dimension. They’re not kneeling. They’re not bowing down. They’re not giving these things that are tied to divine honor.
If you have those things, then it’s like, well, no matter what you do with Mary and the saints, it’s infinitely inferior to what’s happening at Mass to God. That makes sense.
Caller: No, no it doesn’t. Because if you say Protestants don’t give glory to God, you still haven’t explained why that’s different. Okay, so, and so how is that accident, like, so from like a Lutheran, from a Lutheran priest, how is that actually different?
Joe: So they’re going to say there’s some sacrificial dimension that we’re offering a sacrifice of praise, but they don’t believe that we’re offering the sacrifice of Jesus. They don’t believe we’re united to the sacrifice of Jesus. That is explicitly rejected by Lutherans, and Martin Luther railed against.
Caller: What do you mean by that concept? You mean they don’t recognize the sacrifice of Jesus?
Caller: No, no, they don’t think that their Mass is a participation in the sacrifice of Jesus. It’s more metaphorical. Right?
Joe: Well, they believe Christ is in, with, and under. It’s more than a metaphor, but they think it’s a separate action, that Christ becomes present there, but that it’s not attached to what goes on at Calvary.
Caller: So sacrificially you would be doing that every week. You’d be actually like transubstantiating that, that, that death every week literally versus the metaphor of it happened one time and we’re remembering it, that would be a contrast.
Joe: Yeah, there’s something a little even deeper than that. So with Old Testament sacrifice, there are two stages. There are a few stages really, but two that we’re going to worry about here. One, you kill the sacrificial victim like the Passover lamb on Preparation Day. And then the way ordinary people participated in the sacrifice, they didn’t kill the lamb directly. They may not have owned the lamb directly, but how did they participate? Well, by eating the lamb. That was still viewed as part of the sacrifice.
So when we eat the flesh of Christ, the Lamb of God, we participate in Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice on Good Friday. That makes sense.
Caller: Yeah. I appreciate that. It does. I appreciate that.
Joe: That is a crucial background that many of us don’t have. Because, you know, like when the Bible is written, everybody in the intended audience comes from a Jewish or a pagan background. And if you read First Corinthians 10, Jews and pagans agreed that the way you shared in a sacrifice was by eating it. So this is why the Eucharist isn’t a metaphor. This is why, like, at the heart of Christian worship is this sharing in Christ’s perfect sacrifice. And the way you share in it is by eating the sacrifice.
Caller: Man. I really appreciate that. And so not to waste your time, I have, like, one more thing.
Joe: No, you’re not wasting it at all.
Caller: You’re doing a fantastic job. And also to say, you said you’re going to do, like, 25 arguments that you normally hear. Be really cool to see that, because you seem to capture the good faith argument of the other side in a debate. That’s really important because when you mischaracterize it, it’s easy to just not believe that.
So I have a question for the gentleman. A couple of calls before were talking about the Pope. And this is. The question really gets down to Jesus. And it seems like, you know, you’ve forgotten more about the Bible than I know. Right? So if I’m quoting something wrong, please say. But it seems like when you look at the cardinals and the Pope and the Vatican and all the rest of it, it seems like exactly the church that Jesus was preaching against.
Joe: In what way?
Caller: Without taking it personally, without, like, giving me a simplistic answer, what would you say to the Jesus who preached to the people in poor places that would look to that and say, okay, upon the rock and as the church grows, you know, it’s kind of like, it’s hard to say. Like, what would it. What would you want the church not to do? Right. And so what would you do to answer that question? It seems like it’s not the place Jesus preached. Thank you.
Joe: Yeah, let me give a quick answer to that. Number one, there is a new pope who just spent, like, two decades of his life as a missionary in Peru, like, living in poor places and doing all the stuff that one would hope that a Christian would do.
Number two, Catholics are famous for that.
Yeah, totally, totally. It’s not an either or. We want places that are beautiful to glorify God. And so remember when Mary pours the expensive nard on Jesus’s feet and it’s expensive perfume, and Judas complains and says, oh, this money could have been spent on the poor. Jesus rebukes him because money used to glorify God.
You don’t pit good things against good things. That’s not coming from God. That’s coming from the enemy who wants to pit good against good. Like people who complain about, oh, the churches are too beautiful, live in beautiful homes and don’t bat an eye at it. They drive nice cars, they’re not living radical lives of voluntary poverty. They’re just complaining that we are not. And so the hypocrisy, Jesus calls this out. This is coming from the enemy. This is not coming from God.
Third, the church grows. And so a lot of what you’re seeing is the result of a church that grows. And this is good. This is called for. Like Jesus describes the growth of the church as going from a mustard seed to a mustard tree. So don’t go out trying to find the church by looking for a mustard seed because it’s already grown up. Find a 20-century grown-up mustard tree. And so it’s going to look bigger.
You know, look at, I give the example of like Apple computers. It starts in a garage and then by the time Steve Jobs dies, it has this massive headquarters because it grew. You can’t really avoid that. That’s a sign of the success of the gospel. It’s a sign of the success of the church. Not for like radical self-glorification. I mean, cardinals and leaders of the church have to be careful not to try to get rich and they can be judged for that. But having big buildings that are ornate and for the glory of God is good and is what you would expect if the promises of the gospel about the mustard seed growing into a mustard tree are true.
Caller: Thank you very much for that. I wait. Thank you so, so very much.
Cy: Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Joe: Thank you for your questions. They were fantastic.
Cy: Thank you for that call very much. That was a great conversation, Ex.
Caller: Thank you so very much. God bless you.
Joe: Yeah, hey, if you want to stick on the line, I’d like to give you a copy of my friend Trent Horn’s book, “Why We’re Catholic.” I’m looking at the words “Why Aren’t You Catholic?” and it for some reason flunks me. “Why We’re Catholic.”
Cy: Yeah, stay on the line. Give your information to Edgar who screened your call, and he will get you a free copy of Trent Horn’s book “Why We’re Catholic,” not “Why Aren’t You Catholic?” We’re hoping it turns you from one to the other. But thanks so much for that call. That’s exactly the kind of conversation that we’re looking to.