This is an audio file over an hour long. Do you have any specific questions from the talk you have? What did he say that is challenging to you?
I jumped around the file a little bit and heard him criticize praying to Mary. You can read
Catholic apologetics on that.
He, Rene Kageff, talked about how he was Catholic he would “say the Rosary faster than anyone.” Well, it’s not Catholic teaching that you need to pray the Rosary fast. That was his own personal scruple.
He sounds like he had a lot of personal issues or maybe bad catechetics, acting like he never heard that he needed to repent when he was Catholic, which is also not Catholic teaching. If someone is going to criticize Catholicism, one should criticize what Catholics actually teach.
At one point, he characterizes Catholic teaching as “we’ve been around for so long, how can we be wrong,” without touching actual Catholic theology of the communion of saints or the body of Christ and prayer.
He criticizes infant baptism in another spot without saying why that’s wrong. Read about
that here.
But it sounds like this person is merely criticizing the fundamentalist stereotype of the Catholic Church that we think we can get saved by going through certain motions, yadda, yadda. There’s really not much to respond to since what he’s criticizing isn’t Catholicism.
One thing he said that was indicative of eisegesis is when he said this toward the end of the 36th minute: “In John 12:48, it’s by the Bible that you’ll be judged. His word.” The verse actually says this: “He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day.”
If you listen to many fundamentalists, they will simply assume that when Scripture refers to the “word” or to “my sayings” that this means what is in the Bible alone (along with said fundamentalist’s interpretation of the text). But the reason he is saying this is because he believes that praying to Mary or infant baptism are things alien to the Bible, which of course, they are not. His lack of engagement with Catholic teaching indicates that he does not know how to accurately depict and address actual Catholic teaching in a way that a learned Catholic would recognize as a fair portrayal.
In the 41st minute he said that he used to go and kneel before a statue and “pray to it…and away with my idolatry I went.” What can be said other than Catholics agree with him not to pray “to” a statue. He is criticizing something, but that something is not Catholicism.
He argues in the 43rd minute that Purgatory is taken from “apocryphal” books. Presumably, he believes the only reference to Purgatory, in Scripture anyway, is from 2 Maccabbees. The canon of Scripture is one of the most damning doctrines held by a Bible-only Christian, because they are necessarily dependent on the Tradition which discerned the books of the Bible. So for him to assert Maccabbees is not scriptural is an assertion not based on the Bible, but on his inheritance of a fundamentalist tradition. His argument for why the books were taken out is, according to him, “because they’re heretical.” According to the speaker’s authority, of course.
He tries to say that we can’t pray for the dead because Heb. 9 says after death comes judgment. That’s correct. But so what? If I said after college I got a job, does that mean absolutely nothing can happen between? I can’t drive there? I can’t do a job search? Etc. And purgatory itself is a judgment of sorts because in Purgatory we encounter the Lord who cleanses us of that which he judges as blemishes. And frankly, a person who dies is immediately judged as worthy of heaven also. The text he cites doesn’t eliminate the possibility of being cleansed. He is simply adding his own theology into the text. The speaker simply does not engage Catholic theology.
A woman in the audience (45th minute) asked him how to address a Catholic who believes Maccabbees is Scripture. He danced around the question, cited Hebrews again, and didn’t even address how you confront the idea that Maccabbees is Scripture or not. Perhaps he has no idea how his Bible was assembled.
So basically, Kageff sounds like he had horrible catechesis, doesn’t know where the Bible came from, and is adept at criticizing straw men versions of Catholicism.
