Day 276: Irreligion and Atheism (2025)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Ascension
4.9 • 11.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
We continue our examination of the first commandment, unpacking irreligion and atheism. Fr. Mike highlights the different elements of irreligion, namely tempting God in words or deeds, sacrilege, and simony. He emphasizes that the sin of tempting God is easy to fall into when we are deeply troubled or afraid. Fr. Mike also spends time unpacking the many different aspects of atheism, and its impact on our world today. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 2118-2126.
This episode has been found to be in conformity with the Catechism by the Institute on the Catechism, under the Subcommittee on the Catechism, USCCB.
For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/ciy
Please note: The Catechism of the Catholic Church contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, my name's Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, where we |
| 0:09.6 | encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down to the tradition |
| 0:14.0 | of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in New Year is brought to you by Ascension. In 365 days, |
| 0:18.6 | we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is Day 276. We're reading paragraphs 2118 to 2126. As always, I am using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism and hear reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com |
| 0:41.7 | slash CIY. And you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily |
| 0:46.6 | notifications. As I said, today's day 276. Well done. Reading paragraphs 2118 to 2126. |
| 0:52.2 | Yesterday we talked of course about divination and magic and superstition and idolatry. |
| 0:57.0 | Today, we're continuing this whole, not the whole trend, but the ways in which we could put other gods before the Lord God, or we might not place the Lord God in his place. |
| 1:07.6 | So we're talking today about irreligion. |
| 1:09.8 | We're talking about tempting God in words or deeds, |
| 1:13.0 | sacrily, seminy. We're talking about atheism today. Tomorrow we'll look at agnosticism and some other stuff. |
| 1:18.0 | But here we are with these, what's irreligion? Okay. Irreligion, the catechism, will highlight |
| 1:23.7 | these three particular ways of sinning when it comes to this irreligion. |
| 1:29.0 | One is tempting God in words or deeds, sacrilege, and simony. |
| 1:34.8 | And simony is essentially trying to buy or sell spiritual things. |
| 1:39.9 | So in case you're wondering, that is the definition of simony. |
| 1:44.1 | We're also looking at atheism. |
| 1:46.2 | And that is a word that I imagine every single one of us are familiar with. We're looking at the |
| 1:51.1 | catacism has four paragraphs on this and just kind of like unpacking what is the reality |
| 1:56.2 | and what is the temptation towards denying the existence of God, denying the goodness of God. |
| 2:01.9 | And so we're looking at that as we jump into today. |
| 2:04.4 | So let us first, as always, just stop and allow the Lord to love us. |
... |
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