Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ first came out in 2004 in a flurry of public discussion and controversy. The time for blogging about it or shaping public opinion about it have long since past. Still, it is bound to become an annual classic around Easter, where it will gradually bring in some first time viewers like me. When I reflect on the many people that had their faith reinvigorated or may have been introduced to Christ in a serious way for the first time, I can overlook that the story isn’t quite the way a Mormon film maker would want to show it. Only a Catholic, like Gibson, can tell the story with such dramatic force. Read the rest of this entry »

The Saturday before Palm Sunday I took a break from researching in my campus office and went for a walk. On a whim, I wanted to see if the nearby Catholic parish had posted its Easter service schedule. I asked a friendly woman doing some work about the church grounds about when upcoming services would be. Relatively quickly, the lady picked up on me not being a Catholic. She stopped what she was doing as we went inside to locate a printed bulletin. Due to her kindness, my idle curiosity turned into my next stage of commitment, that of mentally planning on attending. Read the rest of this entry »

To prepare for this article I went and searched the LDS church website for “Catholic”, a word that brought up 294 hits. There was a good mix of articles. Some recounted Christian history and expressed gratitude for the Protestant Reformation and the counter reform that culminated in the Vatican II council. I found a few articles where Catholics were quoted because they had something favorable to say about some facet of Mormonism. It occurred to me that such citations manifest that Mormons crave respect from this long-standing branch of Christianity. How else can explain the acceptance of this much beloved quotation: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m Brad Haas, a.k.a. Defensor Veritatis.  I’ll be representing the Catholic side of things around here.  I became acquainted with Dave on the Catholic Answers discussion forum, and I was honored and excited when he approached me with the idea for this blog.  I look forward to the discussions, although for now I don’t have enough time to post very much.  Feel free to comment or email me with any questions, or stop by my more-Catholic-oriented blog if you’re interested.  Ciao!

To briefly introduce myself, some of you may know me from my screen name I use to post on FAIR and Catholic Answers, the premier apologetics message boards for the LDS and Catholic faiths, respectively. The latter forum is where I met Brad Haas and I have learned a lot from him over time. Currently I am a Ph.D. student in engineering, but my real passion is reading and writing about religious history and ideas. I have developed a high regard for the Catholic faith since attending a service for Ash Wednesday on my LDS mission in Shawnee, Oklahoma.