It all starts with the basic concept of how should the Church deal with heresies? What does a trial for a crime against truth look like – and what should it look like? Throughout history, were there abuses of this process by the Church or by the civil authorities? Or is it all completely exaggerated? There’s lots of info that Dr. Rao will help us uncover.

We’re starting to look at some of the more controversial aspects of Church History. Over the next 6 episodes, we’ll have Dr. John Rao join us to look at the “hot button issues” that are commonly used to attack the faith. Today we’ll start by looking at the Crusades. Were they good, or were they bad? Or, is it a lot more complicated than that? How did the Crusades impact the growth of Roman Catholicism, and how did they impact the relationship between East and West?

Fr. Ian Palko will join us again to look specifically at the Miracles that the New Testament says Our Lord performed.  Did he actually perform these, or are these just made up stories, passed from word of mouth, and finally collected in the New Testament as fodder for a new religion? How can we possibly prove these fantastic stories from nearly 2,000 years ago as being accurate? 

Now we’ll start to see what religion needs to look like, so that it’s not just something we believe in, like a myth or a legend. What is the most fundamental principle of a religion, if it is going to be true? We’ll ask Fr. Leo Anthony Haynos, who teaches this exact topic at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary.

We’ve already seen in Episode 5 that we have to practice a religion, but now we’ll start to see what that religion needs to look like, so that it’s not just something we believe in, like a myth or a legend. What is the most fundamental principle of a religion, if it is going to be true?

There are tons of theories about who holds authority within the Catholic Church. Is the pope one of multiple patriarchs, who need to share power? Or is he the supreme, absolute monarch of the entire Catholic Church? How can we use Scripture and Tradition to answer this?

In this episode, Fr. MacGillivray will look at the concept of the papacy itself. We’ve already seen that Jesus set up the Catholic Church, but he left us with 12 Apostles, who would be the first bishops. Did he actually set up St. Peter as the most important of the Apostles? And what was the reason for putting one fallible, hot-headed, uneducated man at the head of His Divine Church?

We’ve seen that Jesus is God, that He rose from the dead, and performed miracles, but what about after He went back to Heaven? Did He just leave us with His teachings, or did He expect us to do something else? Some would claim he wants us to belong to a visible, real, hierarchical Church, but didn’t He say that His kingdom was not of this world? So why belong to a church here on earth?

We know that the New Testament is credible, but what about its most important event? Is it logical that a man died and then rose from the dead by his own power? Is there another way to interpret or explain what we read in the Scripture? Maybe the Apostles misunderstood it – or they exaggerated the story, or just made it up… But by the end, we’ll see that the simplest explanation is that it actually happened.

Fr. Franks will join us to examine whether we can believe what is written in the New Testament, or, like critics allege, whether it is just a collection of pious stories. Are the Gospels anonymous, or can we prove they were written by the Evangelists? And can we really show that over 2,000 years, they have not changed or been embellished at all? We’ll dive into that and more.