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I'm gonna launch into this because it is a very difficult topic.

For me, this is the most difficult topic

of the ones we are discussing.

On the one hand, it is important.

It's a shibboleth of the Reformation that this is the article upon which everything turns.

You must get justification right.

The Catholics didn't quite think that, but they spent a lot of time at the Council of France coming up with a Catholic response. They broke with

precedent that are just listing the wrong things they condemned. They decided they needed

to give a summary account of Catholic teaching, unusual for a council, which they did.

So it is important, but there have been false stereotypes throughout the tradition.

The things I have heard Catholic say about Protestant understandings of justification

or Protestants say about Catholic understandings of justification are often howlingly wrong,

just incredibly wrong. But each issue is complicated. I think a lot of the discussion

on this issue have been ships passing in the night. There are places where the ships do, in fact,

I believe, run into each other. But in other places, it's hard to get the concepts to match.

One side says X, the other seems to say not act, but the words mean different things. So they don't quite mesh. Let me know at

one point. This entire retreat, we're talking about the Reformation. We're not talking about

...