A few days ago, I posted a critical review of a show on Craig Truglia’s YouTube channel that was dedicated to demonstrating what they understood to be the serious problems with the centuries-long practice of the Roman Catholic Church in baptizing infants and then delaying the reception of the Eucharist and confirmation until the age of reason. Everyone should watch it before making an opinion.

Out of concern for people listening to that I made a post that strongly urged the video to be taken down due to its “serious errors” and “false alarms.” I also made comments as to the performance being rather extreme in its orientation. Having spoken with Reader Paul Trinca face-to-face, who was the chief presenter in the video, I can say there was an opportunity to discuss particulars in more detail (it is always better to discuss in live formats), and some of the statements I made in my initial posting should be clarified. Paul is an upstanding person and he is still wishing to stand up for the truth and shine it bright so all can benefit. That is respectable. In this article, I will provide three areas that I need to adjust in order to compensate for the lack of clarity in my first post. Thereafter, I give 7 reasons for why I still think the aim of the presentation given against credo-communion does not hit the bullseye in a way that is much more substantive than the thoughts I shared before. Before getting into this, I should point the reader that I have some other articles that might be worth reading that are related to this matter, and they are linked to at the very bottom under the small conclusion that wraps up this article.

In my time spent observing the many Protestant critiques of Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, including my own which lasted just under 10 years, it is often thought by the Protestant skeptic that the founding credibility and verifiability of the faith contents of Catholicism or Orthodoxy (what I say below regarding Catholicism can, for all intents and purposes, be equally applied to Eastern/Oriental Orthodoxy) are fixed in what can be gleaned by investigating the surviving historical record. Practically, if we want to know what the grounds for belief in the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary is, we turn ourselves to the historical documents and artifacts of the past and see if we can accumulate the evidence to warrant that it was a belief held by the earliest Christians and thereafter going forward in the Church’s history to the present. If a sufficient warrant is given, then the Protestant might say, “Ok, I don’t believe it is a binding doctrine for me (i.e., sola scriptura), but I can, at least, see that it has a basis in the historical record for Catholics and Orthodox.” On the other hand, if there is scant evidence in the available record, or worse, significant variance from one author to another in what records are available, then it is often thought that such circumstances indicate the non-Apostolic origin of the belief in question (i.e., the bodily Assumption of Mary). For if a belief was Apostolic in origin, it would have been known and accepted by everyone. Ergo, in this case, it is thought that a particular doctrine, such as the bodily of Assumption of Mary as our working example, is not even sustainable as a Apostolic doctrine, let alone a position even held by the early Church. The underlying assumption here is that Catholics and Orthodox have the burden to prove that all their dogmatic beliefs are in sufficiently exemplified in the historical record in order for her criteria to be met as to what qualifies as Apostolic doctrine.