Shameless Popery

Catholic conversions are SURGING this year! But does that mean we’re in a revival in the US? The numbers are a little more nuanced than you may first expect… Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’ve got a lot of exciting news for you, not least of which is we’re ending the season of Lent and entering the season called Trudiwum, the shortest season on the church’s calendar. Fun fact, it’s the three holiest days of the year. It begins with tonight, Holy Thursday, the mass of the Lord’s Supper, and it’s g...

Joe explains the importance of the Sign of Jonah named by Jesus in Matthew 16, and how it relates to Holy Week. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I’ve got two very exciting pieces of news to share with you before I get started on today’s episode. Number one, this time next week, we should have the debate with Doug Wilson that I just did. It should be live and up and you should be able to watch it in its entirety. I will also have an episode that’s basically a version of my opening statement like I normally do. And then you can kind o...

Joe dissects a poorly written, AI-sourced article from X that paints a laughably inaccurate picture of American Catholicism and Catholic Answers specifically. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and it’s not every day that as an apologist for Catholic Answers, I find our work called out in a piece shared by a city and US Senator, but this week I had that unique experience. So Senator Ted Cruz shared a piece by a Twitter user called Insurrection Barbie, and it’s an article, it’s over 8,000 words long, called The Long Game and the Conser...

Joe explains how the 10 plagues of Egypt in Exodus was a direct judgement against the false gods the Egyptians were worshipping. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and you probably know the basic story of the tin plagues and the Exodus. God sends Moses to Pharaoh to tell him- CLIP: Let my people go. Joe: Pharaoh, of course, refuses, and so God sends a series of tin plagues, ultimately leading to the death of the firstborn children of man beast alike. Only at this point does Pharaoh relent? The Israelites are freed. But that’s just the surface of ...

Joe sits down today with Anna Sutton and chats finding your Catholic Wife, everyday apologetics and a lot more! Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer here to have a cup of Joe with my friend, Anna Sutton. Anna, welcome. Anna: Thank you. It’s so exciting to be here. Joe: And of course, as always, metal Mike. Mike, welcome. Mike: Good morning. Joe: I have to make an immediate disclaimer despite the name, Cup of Joe, which is centered around having a coffee and a conversation. Today, I’m fighting off a cold. I thought I’d infect Anna in pers...

Joe looks at competing theories about the story of Noah’s Ark and other similar flood myths. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to ask three questions today about Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood. Question number one, did it really happen or is it just a retelling of older Babylonian stories? Question number two, if it did really happen, was it a global flood or a local or regional flood? And finally, question three, are we missing the point of the story and asking these questions? Now, if you like videos like this, I encourage you...

Having a chat with Austin Suggs from Gospel Simplicity about Catholicism, Orthodoxy and his personal faith journey. Transcript: Mike: Go ahead. Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity. Austin, thank you so much for being with us. Austin: It is my pleasure. I just looked at, I don’t know if this is the public title for the conversation, but the one in StreamYard. Your favorite Protestant YouTuber. I’m touched, Joe. Joe: Yeah, I will say two things. One, Mike chose the title, but two, ...

Joe responds to the common claim that the Catholic Church are the modern day Pharisees. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and a common CLIP: Accusation against Catholics is that we’re modern day Pharisees. I think Pharisees and Roman Catholic leaders have a lot in common nowadays. Yeah. The reformers chose to follow the Bible while the Jesuits chose to fight against it on behalf of the traditions and power of the Catholic church. The view of the Jesuits toward the Bible could be likened to that of the ancient Pharisees 2000 years ago who opposed...

Joe and Isaac Hess discuss Joe’s last appearance on Pints With Aquinas, that created some controversy among the LDS community. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’m here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Isaac Hess. Isaac, thanks for coming on. Isaac: Yeah, thanks for having me. Joe: Isaac, we’re going to talk a little bit about Mormonism, which I thought I might … Church of Jews Christ for Latter Day Saints thought you might be a good person to talk to to sort of translate between these two worlds. You want to introduce ...

Joe responds to “Catholicism Exposed: These Doctrines Contradict The Word Of God,” a video from Ashley Hays. He sets the record straight on generations of poor scholarship about paganism and Christianity. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and today I want to look at a video recently made by Ashley Hays critiquing what she claims Catholicism teaches. If you’re not familiar with her, she’s got more than a hundred thousand followers on YouTube, more than 300,000 on Instagram, more than 600,000 followers on TikTok, and she’s u...

Joe, Mike and Vanessa tackle the question “Do We Need Go to Be Good People?” Joe: Alright. Alright. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Meyer and I’m having a cup of Joe with Vanessa Parrish. That one Catholic girl as well as my producer metal. Mike, good morning to both of you. Mike: Good morning. Morning, Joe. Joe: Alright, well why don’t we do this. Mike, do you want to explain to everybody how this works? I know this is still a new format for people, and then we will talk about coffee and then kick off the actual theology. Mike: Absolutely. Good morning ...

Joe breaks down how Christ and the saints teach us to use fasting, almsgiving and prayer to combat the Triple Concupiscence. Transcript: JOE: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and the season of Lent starts tomorrow. For many Christians, it’s a time to give up chocolate and such, and that’s fine, but it kind of misses the point. I don’t want to have a forgettable lint, and I don’t want your Lent to be forgettable either, because the fact is lint in penance has the power to completely transform our lives. But for it to do that, we need to know wha...

Joe takes audience questions on the common Protestant claim that “Jesus alone is enough.” Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. First of all, apologies for the delay. We’re trying something new. I’m Joe Meyer. I’m joined today by my producer, metal Mike Kupris. Mike, do you want to introduce yourself? Mike: Hi, good morning everyone. My name’s Michael Kupris. I am the producer for Shameless Popery and I’ve been working with Joe for about a little over a year now. It’s been really good. It’s been very, very fulfilling. I do some...

Joe takes this opportunity to highlight just how great Pope John Paul I was, and how unfortunate it is that he gets overlooked due to his very short papacy. Transcript: JOE: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to talk about a pope that doesn’t get a lot of love, doesn’t get a lot of attention. Pope John Paul, the first many of us are maybe dimly aware that he even exists. And if we know anything about him, it’s probably a handful of relatively superficial facts. Like for instance, he liked to smile sometimes CLIP: The Smiling Pope albi...

In late of the latest sex scandal to strike in the Christian online space, Joe examines whether all Christians are hypocrites and if Catholic teaching on sexuality is too high. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about hypocrisy, particularly sexual hypocrisy. As you might have already heard, there’s a scandal that Milo OUIs broke this week involving the right-wing podcaster. Elijah Schaeffer, who it turns out has been seemingly a serial adulterer, and one of the women that he cheated on his wife with is Sarah Stock, who is a Cat...

Joe looks at the position of Sabbitarians, and their claim that Emperor Constantine instituted worship on Sundays. Transcript: JOE: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And why do Christians worship on Sunday? Is it because of something that Jesus did or because of something that Constantine did? In other words, was Sunday chosen because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ or was it chosen as a way of compromising with Roman pagans in the fourth century? You might be convinced you already know the answer to this question, but I hope you’ll give me the opportunity t...

Joe looks at three takeaways from Rhett McLaughlin’s deconstruction. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to do something a little bit different today. If you are like me, there’s a good chance that in the good old days of YouTube you watched a fair amount of Rhett and link, and one of the things about Rhett and Link is that both of them, they kind of oozed evangelical Christianity. It was pretty obvious even though they weren’t super open about it, that these were people who came from a Christian background. And sure enough,...

Joe looks at several ways Protestants try to justify their canon and Scripture, and how these standards contradict their canon. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. How do we know which books belong in the Bible? After all, there are seven Old Testament books that are in Catholic and Orthodox bibles that aren’t in Protestant bibles. So how do we know which Bible is right? One solution I’ve heard goes something like this. We know which books belong in the Old Testament by looking at which books Jesus treated his scripture. In the New Testament...

Joe explains how many apologists from different perspectives fall into the trap of what he coins the “Counterfeit Argument.” Learn how to spot and disarm this common logical fallacy. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to answer a kind of argument that I hear used to argue against Catholicism, to argue against church councils and the Pope, to argue against Christianity itself, to argue against the Bible, to argue against even the existence of God. And you’ll hear this argument in different forms, sometimes by Protestants, so...

Joe counters the common Protestant objection to the Catholic Eucharist, citing that Paul calls the Eucharist “bread,” so the meal must only be bread. 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And while Catholics and Orthodox believe that the bread and wine in the Eucharist become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, many Protestants argue that the Lord’s supper is symbolic and the bread and wine remain bread and wine. And for many Protestants in this second camp, they’re going to point to the words of St. Paul in ...

Needgod.net released a video listing 10 reasons not to convert to Catholicism. Joe focuses in on #6, The Catholic Priesthood, and shows that it is indeed the biblical priesthood instituted by Christ. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and many Protestants believe that the Catholic priesthood is unbiblical, that it’s not something that is authentic to Christianity. And this was recently raised by Ryan of needgod.net as one of his 10 reasons not to convert to the Catholic Church. Now, I might at another point in time address the other nine reasons, ...

Why did the sinless Jesus receive John’s baptism? Joe Heschmeyer explains how Christ “fulfills all righteousness,” inaugurates his ministry, and sanctifies the waters—making Christian baptism effective, not merely symbolic.

After Joe’s debate with LDS apologist Jacob Hansen, there’s been a lot of chatter on the topic of the Great Apostasy. Joe breaks down why this can’t be true from both an LDS and a Protestant perspective. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And since my recent debate with LDS apologist Jacob Hansen, there’s been a lot of great conversation on this idea of whether the church built by Jesus Christ fell into an apostasy. But today I don’t want to talk about the global church. I want to get very particular. Did the church in Rom...

Joe shows how the Finding of Jesus In The Temple prefigures the Resurrection, and what this means for the faithful. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Happy New Year. I want to talk about the finding in the template. It’s a strange event in the Bible that many of us just heard about this past Sunday. Specifically, I want to ask, how and why did Joseph and Mary lose Jesus in the temple in the first place? I’ve actually seen people argue that this event proves that Mary must have had other kids. As one Twitter user put it, if Mary only had on...

Joe examines Thomas Aquinas’ Christmas reflection, and why Christmas and the Nativity weren’t actually necessary. Transcript: Joe: Merry Christmas and welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And today I want to talk about a Christmas sort of isn’t necessary because the incarnation sort of wasn’t necessary. Now that might sound heretical, might sound insane for a Christian to say, but I think it’s actually an important thing for us to get right. And for support, I would point to the arguments made by people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aqui...

Joe gives his opening statement from his debate with LDS apologist Jacob Hansen on The Great Apostacy. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Mormons all agree that Jesus Christ founded a church. After all, he tells us that he’s founding a church. But most of us also agree that people can fall away from the faith. This falling away in Greek is apostasia, which is where we get words like apostate and apostasy. But Mormons and many Protestants believe that not only can individuals fall away from the church, but tha...

Joe reviews a reflection by Pope Benedict XVI on “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” on how wisdom and knowledge help us encounter Jesus Christ. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and as we end the advent season, it’s crazy to say that already and approach the Christmas season. I wanted to share a pair of beautiful reflections from Pope Benedict the 16th, and the launching point is this line. He has, what is this wisdom born in Bethlehem and he’s going to explore this theme. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay r...

Joe examines the debate over whether you should lie to your kids about Santa Claus. Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to tackle a controversial question even amongst Christians should parents lie to their kids about Santa Claus? My position is simple. If you want to tell them the true story of St. Nicholas, that’s great. If you and your kids want to play Santa, go for it. But lying is always wrong. You shouldn’t lie to anyone. You definitely shouldn’t lie to the kids. You are meant to be teaching right from wrong, an...

Joe debunks common belief that Jesus’s virgin birth was borrowed from pagan sources across the ancient world. Check out the article on the topic by Jon Sorensen here: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/cleaning-up-the-horus-manure Transcript: Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and as Christians prepare to celebrate the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, many non-Christians are preparing to tell their Christian friends and neighbors that actually the virgin birth is a pagan story that Christianity stole. CLIP: Does it ever bother you that the story of...