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The Case for St. Faustina to be a Doctor of the Church with Fr. Bonaventure Chapman, OP | The Catholic Man Show

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Adam opened by asking Fr. Bonaventure Chapman to explain his love of toads, and Father asked back whether this was going to be the essay version. It was. It started with Hopper, a good-looking male toad caught on Mother's Day when Father was a kid, the first real pet in the house. You can tell a male toad by the forearms, which he needs for holding on. But a pet is a deposit, and theology is what you do with a deposit. Every animal exists because it is supposed to, and each one reflects some attribute of God, because God is infinite and nothing finite can carry all of Him at once. So the attributes get spread out. Power goes to the lion. Strength to the ox. Purity to the swan, penetrating sight to the eagle. Mosquitoes remain an open question Father intends to raise personally when he gets up there. Toads carry the hard one: aseity. They look like rocks, but they are alive. You nudge one and it does not flee, does not panic, does not perform. It looks back at you with a plain so what. It is not depending on you. It is fine without you. That is what God is like. Sponsor: Select International Tours When Adam and Dave went looking for help leading their first pilgrimage, every person they asked gave them the same name. Having used Select now, they can vouch for it. Wherever in the world you want to go, whether you are leading a pilgrimage or joining one, go to selectinternationaltours.com and look at what they have ready for you. David countered with the platypus, which he and his buddy Thomas Lackey have decided is the noblest of animals and has to be either the first thing God made or the last. First, because He had been looking forward to creation for all eternity, led with His best material, then realized He had better slow down and give everything after that one good idea apiece. Or last, because He had already made everything else and thought, what if mammal, but with venom in the heels, and it lays eggs, and it has a bill. Then He stopped out of mercy. Michael filed a friendly amendment on behalf of the finite intelligences. Australia went on record as the test lab. Then the topic, and it is a big one. Father's case is that St. Faustina Kowalska should be named a Doctor of the Church, and that the Year of Mercy was the obvious moment to do it. A doctor is not honored for her own sake any more than a saint is canonized for his. Both are given to us, pro nobis. A doctor is someone whose vantage point lights up an aspect of the faith the rest of us were walking past. Augustine gets grace. Bernard of Clairvaux gets the mellifluous tongue. Bonaventure gets the seraphic love. It is not competition, it is refraction, one pure white light through a prism, and the doctors are how we see the colors. Faustina has a doctrine, and the doctrine is mercy. Her work is the Diary, which is not a treatise but a record of a woman talking to Jesus and writing down both halves of it. That is the part Father loves. You are not reading a transcript of revelation, you are in the church balcony listening to a saint pray, and she tells you what she thought about what He said, how the sisters reacted, what she wanted to do next. Bible and the Diary is his desert island list. Here is the objection, and Father takes it seriously because Thomas takes it seriously. Mercy cannot be the greatest attribute of God simply speaking. Mercy is pity toward a sufferer and a desire to heal it, which means it depends on somebody suffering. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit do not need mercy from one another. God's greatest attributes have to be the ones He has with nothing else but Himself: intellect, will, love. Deus caritas est. Thomas allows that mercy is greatest secundum quid, for us, because our condition means mercy is the shape His love takes when it reaches us. So when Jesus tells Faustina to proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God, you can start to wonder whether the Diary is reliable. It is a translation problem, and it is the best thing in this episode. Jesus is speaking Polish to a poor, uneducated Polish girl, and Polish does something no other language does here. In Latin, mercy is misericordia, from miser, wretchedness, plus cor, heart. Pity of the heart. English, German, and the rest all run mercy and love back to separate roots. Polish does not. Miłosierdzie sounds exactly like misericordia, but its root is not misery. It is miłość. Love. So the word is not pity of the heart, it is love of the heart. The deeper love. When Christ tells her to proclaim mercy as His greatest attribute, He is telling her to proclaim the deepest love. And she already showed you this, back at Diary 180, where she writes that the third attribute is love and mercy, miłość i miłosierdzie, and the verb is singular. Not two things. One. By the time you get to 301 the shorthand is already established. Which is why it matters. We treat mercy as a second act of the will. I am supposed to love you, and then if you wrong me I have a separate question to answer about whether to be merciful. Two decisions. For God there is only one. He does not love us into being, watch us sin, and then convene a divine moment to decide whether to bother. Mercy is His steadfast love refusing to stop. You love someone, they walk away from you, and you keep going toward them. You just have to go farther. That is not a different love, it is the same love gone deeper, which is what the sierdzie is doing in the word. It is not a lifeguard deciding whether to blow the whistle or go in the water. Going in is who He is. Run that lens over everything else and it starts opening doors, which is Father's actual pitch for what he calls Faustinianism, a school of thought alongside Augustinianism and Thomism. It makes sense of the hard line in the Diary about the greater sinner having the greater right to His mercy. More love for the ones who need more love. That is not scandalous, it is arithmetic. On the podcast, which you should go subscribe to, the guys keep Father for the harder questions. Whether God loves anyone without mercy. Whether Mary is the exception, and why the Immaculate Conception turns out to be an act of mercy too. Whether God loves some people more than others, and what a glass with holes in it is doing under a waterfall. Plus how to actually read the Diary, which is one page a day for about two years, and why Father carries a holy card with her relic in it that Fr. Gregory Pine handed him right when he needed it. Raise your glass.TOPICS COVERED * Why Fr. Bonaventure loves toads, starting with Hopper, caught on Mother's Day * How to tell a male toad from a female toad, and why the forearms matter * Theological biology: every animal reflects some attribute of God because nothing finite can carry all of Him * Lions for power, oxen for strength, swans for purity, eagles for penetrating sight * The outstanding question of mosquitoes, to be raised in person * Why the toad is the best living image of God's aseity and impassibility * The toad's "so what," and a God who is perfectly happy whether or not you show up * The platypus as the noblest of animals, and whether it was God's first idea or His last * Australia as the containment lab, and Michael's friendly amendment on behalf of the angels * Crusius on why there can be no loveless world, and why God could not have made a universe of only toads * Why non-loving things have no interesting relation to God, and loving things do * The case that St. Faustina Kowalska should be named a Doctor of the Church * Why the Year of Mercy was the obvious moment and it did not happen * What a Doctor of the Church actually is, and why doctors and saints are both given pro nobis * The prism image: one pure white light, and the doctors are how we see the colors * Why the Diary is unlike other spiritual classics, and what it means to eavesdrop on a saint at prayer * Bible and the Diary as the desert island list * The early pushback on Faustina, the mistranslations, and why the Church is rightly slow with private revelation * Aquinas condemned in 1270 and 1277, and why being disliked is not a mark against you * Lord Falkland's rule: where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change * Thomas's objection: mercy depends on a sufferer, so it cannot be God's greatest attribute simply speaking * Why the Trinity has no need of mercy, and why intellect, will, and love are the attributes up for grabs * Mercy as greatest secundum quid, the shape God's love takes when it reaches sinners * The Incarnation as an act of mercy, which is love for the sinner * Why misericordia means pity of the heart and miłosierdzie does not * The Polish root: miłość is love, so mercy is love of the heart, not pity of the heart * Diary 180 and the singular verb, and why 301 is shorthand for something already said * Why we treat mercy as a second act of the will and God does not * Love that keeps going farther when the person walks away * Why this is not the lifeguard deciding whether to blow the whistle * Faustinianism as a school of thought alongside Augustinianism and Thomism * "The greater the sinner, the greater the right he has to My mercy," and why that stops being scandalous * The Balthasar translation problem: dürfen is "may we hope," not "dare we hope" * Polish as a vowel desert, and the despair of a 7 a.m. Mass in Polish * What English is good at, what German is good at, and why English is bad at both knowing and loving * MapQuest, GeoCities, AAA TripTiks, and when riding shotgun was a real job * Whether God shows any love that does not involve mercy * Why even the Immaculate Conception is an act of mercy, and the Dominican line written into the definition * Whether God loves some people more than others, and what capacity has to do with it * Why grace is not foam on top of a milkshake, and why God coats the glass before He fills it * How many holes you have put in your own glass, while standing under a waterfall * How to actually read the Diary: one page a day for about two years * Why 301 without 180 will lead you wrong * The Dominican novices and their "spiritual girlfriends," and how Faustina found Father in Buffalo * Why men should read female mystics, and what a bride hears that a servant does not REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Guest: * Fr. Bonaventure Chapman, OP — Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, and co-host of Godsplaining. Raised in Buffalo, converted from Protestantism, entered the Order of Preachers in 2011, ordained 2017. His research is in eighteenth-century German philosophy, especially Christian August Crusius and Pietism; his dissertation was on the Crusian core of Kant's critical project. This is his third appearance on TCMS, after episodes on SCOTUS and on modern art. Books and works: * Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul by St. Maria Faustina Kowalska — Diary 301 ("Proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God. All the works of My hands are crowned with mercy") and Diary 180 ("The third attribute is love and mercy") * Dilexit Nos (2024), Pope Francis's encyclical on the Sacred Heart * Cur Deus Homo by St. Anselm, on the fittingness of the Incarnation * Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved?" by Hans Urs von Balthasar — German title Was dürfen wir hoffen?, which is closer to "what may we hope" than "dare we hope" * Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas, on mercy and God's attributes * Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant * The City of God by St. Augustine People and saints: * St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), Polish religious of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy * St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor, condemned in 1270 and 1277 * St. Augustine, the Doctor of Grace * St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Mellifluous Doctor * St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor * St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the Little Way * St. Catherine of Siena * Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity * St. Louis de Montfort * Bl. John Duns Scotus, on the Immaculate Conception * Christian August Crusius (1715–1775), Lutheran Pietist philosopher, on why a created world must contain free creatures * Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland: "Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change" * Fr. Gregory Pine, OP, who gave Fr. Bonaventure the Faustina relic card * Thomas Lackey, Adam's partner in platypus theology Latin and Polish in this episode: * Deus caritas est — God is love * Misericordia — from miser (wretchedness) + cor (heart), pity of the heart * Miłość — Polish for love * Miłosierdzie — Polish for mercy, built on miłość rather than on misery, so love of the heart * Simpliciter and secundum quid — absolutely speaking, and in a qualified respect * Pro nobis — for us Podcasts and past episodes: * Godsplaining, Fr. Bonaventure's podcast * The TCMS winged hussars episode with Fr. Donovan, for the croissant and coffee tradition and the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary * One more episode with Fr. Bonaventure is already recorded and coming Community: * TCMS Winged Hussar wine, made for the show at Water's Edge Winery in Broken Arrow. It does not ship and the winery does not stock it, so you have to get it from Adam or Dave. Hosts: * Adam Minihan (host; Lady Haylee, Porter and Prairie Farms, M6 Marketing, The Grounded Builder on Substack) * Dave Niles (host; Niles Ranch and Fecundity Farms, Lady Pamela)