WorldNetDaily: Pope: So, you're not Catholic? Then you're not in true Church
Ok, so? What's the problem here? This is news? I know that there has been alot of heretical thinking out there but has everyone been asleep for the last 40 years too? I don't think that I have ever heard anyone who was credible in the Church say that other "churches" were on an equal footing with the Catholic Church and that includes the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestants. Sorry to burst their bubbles, but they did it to themselves when they scampered across the Tiber to do their own thing. They voluntarily gave up parts of the whole Truth which is still contained in the Catholic Church. Gosh! What did you expect the Pope to say? If they had asked me I would have told them to "GROW UP!"It's just starting folks. Benedict XVI is an orthodox Catholic and they will never forgive him for releasing the Traditional Mass. They will beat him like a rented mule every chance they get. And if they don't get a chance, they'll beat him up anyway.
WorldNetDaily: Pope: So, you're not Catholic? Then you're not in true Church
Labels: Benedict XVI, Catholic, Catholicism, conservative, Latin Mass, Liberal
posted by Norm Johnson @ 5:29 AM
12 Comments:
Norm
You are using the Church to feel as though you are above others. The Catholic Church has the "fullness of the means to salvation" and no one else does. That is true.
But it is also true that a sincere Protestant who does constant work for the poor....or constant prayer for those who ignore God....is superior to a Catholic who does neither nor does hardly anything else motivated by zeal.
It is also true that Protestants seem to produce better preachers than we do with Fr. Corapi be one of very few of ours that really enervates an audience with many of our sermons being as dead as that rented mule of yours. Just monitor every religious station and compare their sermons with ours. We have no one as good as Joyce Meyers and I don't like her personally since donations of her non profit allowed her too much personal real estate. But she preaches better than over 95% of our priests.
It is also true that we spent 400 extra years being wrong about usury when Calvin had our exact answer in 1545 yet out writers say that we were wisely waiting as economies changed....baloney...a simple loan to an affluent relative always carried the risk he might die and that can allow for a fee for risk....in any time period regardless of changes in financial instruments.
We opposed slavery yes and no while our writers simply say that we opposed it. Our moral theology books supported it into the 20th century despite papal bulls that seemed to denounce it..... including St. Alphonsus accepting just titled slavery in the 17th century after a number of papal bulls against it seemingly....and that is why we had papal bulls against the "trade" and against new native slavery but our religious orders and bishops had slaves into the 19th century due to the loop holes in our moral theology which no Pope sought to close until the 19th century's end.
So Catholicism is the true Church but she has problems that Protestants solved faster than we did at times with Quakers opposing all slavery 300 years ahead of us and with no loop holes....and with Calvin rejecting our natural law explanation of interest and with our finally agreeing with him 300 years late.
Catholicism is the real deal....the center of the archery target..the bulls eye....but the human falleness of Catholics has made the outer rings of Catholicism problematic. The bull's eye of Catholicism...the actual de fide dogma, the sacraments, the store of graces from Christ and the saints etc....that bulls eye center is wonderful. But the outer rings outside the bulls eye are additions that men and history have added on to the core and sometimes those rings are great and sometimes they are not...like the gold painted French desks and chairs in the Vatican or the very having of a summer residence for Popes while we tell the world they are poor like Christ. We carried that nard incident a little too far.
The bulls eye of Protestantism is not pretty because it is their essential separation from the apostles and Peter. But the outer rings of Protestantism are often beautiful...the way Amish help each other when their house burns down.....the way an entire choir in some reform churches will attend every funeral of each layman while some Catholic funerals of tiny families have to pay men to be pall bearers and have no one at the funeral but family.
Run from simpleton cheer leader versions of Catholicism. It's a drug that depends on living a life of moderate to lite reading.
And it is the new pharisee school of "I am defending the church but I am really telling you that I am great for being a Catholic while other humans are not".
Well gee Bill. It's good to know that at least you have got everything figured out! Thanks for pointing out the obvious: the Church is full of sinners. Doh! Now if only the rest of us will join the "Church of Bill", we can all go straight to heaven since our only required work is to slam Christ's Church at every opportunity. Good work Bill.
It appears that you can dish it out to Prots but can't take it when criticism goes against you. Perhaps you are young.
Not so young Bill, just weary of Prots cruising the Catholic Blogs, throwing out baseless arguments like they were Molotov Cocktails. There's no point in answering any of your accusations because no answer would be good enough. Why don't you read what the Pope's letter before you start cutting him down instead of the Jack Chick version? Then maybe we will have something to discuss.
I agree with his letter. Check the Murdoch award when you get a chance.
Well Bill, if you agree with what the Pope stated, then I really don't understand what your complaint is. As for this Murdoch award, I am not familiar with it. Perhaps you have a link so that I can read about it and I will let you know what I think. If I think that it is fishy, I'll agree with you.
We agree about the core which is really Catholicism per se being important. We probably disagree about how much bric a brac the core includes. The pomp at Rome...the pointy hats and Baroque clothing... and the summer residence and helicopter trips to the airport, the gucci glasses, the prada loafers are historical accidents and appendages...not Catholicism at its core. My complaint is that the bullseye of Catholicism...the core....the jewel like interior of the geode...is hardly the whole story of Catholicism yet it is presented as though it is....as though we had no warts outside the bullseye section. Read Romanus Pontifex from 1455 by Pope Nicholas V which gave Portugal the right to "enslave in perpetuity" "all other enemies of Christ" in newly discovered lands and the next three Popes reconfirmed that bull.
Later in the same century, Pope Alexander VI gave Spain the right to despoil the newly found lands and people in the western world. We actually were a main cause of both imperialism and slavery in the west and it was never mentioned in my 16 years of Catholic school. Outside the center of Catholicism, we are defensive salesmen of a myth....that we werre always nice.
Link below. Go three paragraphs down. In general, just put Murdoch Order of St. Gregory in google and it will come up with a lot including prot criticism of same. No point in criticizing Prots for keeping Murdoch in their church if we gave him an award without looking at how he earned those millions he gave us.
http://www.greeleynet.com/~maxalla/OKHSSub/Gallantry.html
Ok, Cardinal Mahoney nominated Rupert Murdoch for the Order of St. Gregory. Cardinal Mahoney has always been unorthodox so I can't say that I'm supprised. If you read my other posts on Cardinal Mahoney you'll see that I have been very critical of many of his other stances and actions. Although I wouldn't believe them, I'm sure that the good Cardinal has his excuses on this one as well although to be fair, he may not been aware of Murdoch's business deals.
"But what of all the bad things in the Church's past?" You will say. Ok, nobody has ever claimed that anyone has been sinless except for the Blessed Virgin and that includes the Popes. If you want to find a church with no sinners in it, then good luck. Once anyone signs up then there goes their perfect score. I only hope that they repented of their sins before they died.
On slavery, it is not acceptable by today's standards and nobody wants to go back to that however, at the time it was a legal and accepted institution and it is accepted even in the bible. The New Testament encouraged slaves to be obedient to their masters so you have to take the issue of slavery in context. Remember, the Europeans believed that their faith was the greatest gift in the world. Yes, there was a profit motivation but they also fervently believed that they were saving the natives from possible eternal damnation. Agree with it or not, that's what they believed. I find it hard to blame them too harshly based on the time in which they lived.
Yes, the wealth of the Church in Rome is considerable. Over the centuries great works of art were commissioned by men who later became known as the great artists of their times. Donations were also made. But these treasures are held in perpetuity for the enrichment of all people. The Pope does not own any of that. That's just where he lives and works. When he dies, the treasures will not go to his heirs, they will stay there for the next generation to enjoy. Let's face it: even if the Church sold every scrap of art and gave it to the poor, you would have a one year benefit, a shabbier Church and many great works of art hanging in private galleries where the general public are not welcome. Wouldn't that be grand?
Yes Bill, there are warts as you say. But I see more good than evil. I see the preservation of Christ's teachings and the Sacraments. I see the knowledge that was preserved during the Dark Ages and the contributions and writings of the greatest thinkers in Christendom. I see the great works of charity that are performed quietly by the Church throughout the world every year, year after year. Compared to all that, the warts are not so great.
Well then Christ should have started an art collection....but He did not. He should have had a palazzo as a summer residence but He did not...in fact, when He urged us to live lean, He and John the Baptist and Paul had credibility therein precisely because they had no art collections and no residence at all. That's why Mother Teresa had credibility. She was broke...two changes of clothes.
The New Testament accepts slavery as fate since a just war requires the possibility of success as one of its requirements and Paul knew there was a snow ball's chance in hell of anyone changing the Roman Empire's rules on slavery so he simply instructs Christians how to cope if they are slaves..."slaves obey your masters". Jewish slavery was unrelated to Western slavery and they had to let their slaves free every seventh year so it was at worst a 7 year stint but the slave could opt to stay and if he did, an awl was put through his ear into the door lintel...so he even had to undergo something rough in order to get to stay so we can conclude, that it was not like the slavery wherein mothers and children were separated as happened in the sale by the Sulpician order of land to the Jesuits wherein the Sulpicians sold a mother away from her child at the start of the 19th century.
PS Non Jewish slavery in Israel was permanent but probably was like divorce which Christ said God allowed to the Jews due to the hardness of their hearts. Prior to sanctifying grace and the NT, man was different....Jn1:17 "the law came through Moses, grace and truth through Jesus Christ."....thus the law also included some non truths like divorce.
I guess there you have it Bill. Things are not as cut and dried as we would like when taken from an historical perspective. The Israelites massacred whole cities, took slaves and divorced their wives and Jesus did not preach that the temple treasures should be sold to the highest bidder even though He did not own a Rembrandt. Well, they make good rocks to throw at the Church anyway and that's what is really important isn't it?
What is important is that Catholic education include the warts so that Catholics and Protestants don't find out the warts that Catholic educators were trying to hide by neglecting to mention them.
There is Catholicism and there is the Catholicism of the 12 year old. When you are 12, the Church is perfect, the Pope is perfect, the doctrine never changed for 2000 years. That paradigm is a myth and that myth is nurtured as Catholicism. Catholicism believes the Pope is infallible only at certain rare moments; the paradigm of Catholicism of the 12 year old in each of us believes the Pope is always infallible....even when he turns over centuries of Popes accepting the death penalty and even when he so confuses husband headship that it is no longer in the catechism though it is in the NT 6 separate times explicitly as it could be.
PS...the massacres of the Canaanites actually were ordered by God who gives His reasons for ordering them in the 12th chapter of the book of Wisdom which the Protestants don't have. In short, the Canaanites were sacrificing their children bodily to false gods by killing them and first God "punished them little by little that they may have space for repentance"....but they kept it up and only then did God order the Jews to wipe them out. It was a rare case of God using an army rather than a tsunami eg to wipe out a people by explicit command.
In fact Saul was dethroned from the kingship for failing to kill Agag, the leader of the Amalekites whom Samuel then killed "before the Lord in Gilgal".
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