Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Cancer's podcast for living, understanding, and

defending your Catholic faith.

I'm Psy Kelly to your host.

And this time we welcome Paul Senn's, the author of Church Councils, 100 Questions and

Answers, a new book from Catholic Answers Press, and if you're going to be defending

the Catholic faith, you're going to have to understand and defend the councils.

This is a very helpful book to do that.

Paul is also the author of 100 and questions and answers about Fatima, and that's available

from Ignatius Press.

And Paul, thanks very much for being here with us.

Thanks so much for having me, it's great to be here.

So first of all, how many councils are there?

How many do we have?

So far, we've had 21 ecumenical councils.

Okay, so 21 ecumenical councils, what's ecumenical mean?

Why do you call it an ecumenical council?

The ecumenical councils are usually what we mean when we're talking about the Church

Councils.

You know, there are different contexts where you might use the word council, a pastoral

council, a finance council, whatever, but when we talk about the Church Councils, we're

typically talking about the ecumenical councils, and this is where all the bishops of the world

together in union with the Pope, meet to teach the universal church, typically in response

...