Posted on 09/25/2003 9:18:42 AM PDT by Greg Luzinski
No Catholic has ever believed anything you've described.
No one ever sold any indulgences ever. Name one person who sold an indulgence, name the price paid, name the buyer, give us the date.
The entire idea is a complete myth and is utter propaganda.
The religious leaders of Jesus' day didn't think that their traditions could contradict scripture either.Where does the Bible tell us that the church would be preserved from error and why do you think that the Christian church is protected from something that the Israelites were not protected from? Indeed, the writings of Paul were often motivated to correct errors within the church! God never promised error-free doctrines to either Israel or the church.
Not true at all... He told His Apostles (and Peter in particular) that whatever they bound on earth would be bound in Heaven ... He promised that the Gates of Hell would never prevail against His Church ... He promised to be with His Church until the end of ages. All these promises were not made to the nation of Israel. Perhaps your church is capable of teaching error. Mine is not.
True. But the vast bulk of all inquisitional activity took place in Spain between 1460-1580.
and it was about a lot more than the investigation of irregularities.
What it was mostly about was (1) The Spanish throne informing Moslems and Jews that non-Christians would be deported; (2) Hundreds of thousands of Moslems and Jews instantly converting to Christianity in order to keep their Spanish property and (3) the Spanish crown accusing the conversos of being backsliding apostates who had rejected their baptismal vows.
Tens of thousands of people lost their lives because they dared to disagree with the Roman Catholic church.
It really depends on what you mean by "disagree." Were the conversos executed for lying to the Spanish crown about their religious allegiance executed for disagreeing with the Church or lying to the crown?
Were the Huguenots slaughtered on St. Bartholomew's Day killed because they were Protestants or because they represented a threat to the political ambitions of the Medicis?
I sincerely doubt that if the Spanish Moslems and Jews had no land in Andalucia that they woudl have been put in the position of conversion or flight.
I also sincerely doubt that if the Huguenots had backed the Medici family politically there would ever have been a massacre.
The number of people specifically executed solely on the basis of their religious opinions at the behest of the Catholic Church might run into the hundreds - but not into the tens of thousands.
And, I also know lots and lots of people have died at the hands of the Protestants.
Yet, it's the Inquisition which comes up again and again, while the far bloodier persecution of the Recusants is rarely mentioned.
Again, my sub-point (one of them anyway) is that it don't matter whose doing the killing in the name of Christ, it's not of Christ.
This is true.
Of course, for every Catholic theologian who grudgingly approved of such measures, a hundred can be produced who disapproved and spoke out against them.
Bernard of Clairvaux and Dominic of Calaroca are two of the Church's most revered saints. Torquemada is not.
But that isn't what the Catholic Church teaches about Indulgences. It's the most misunderstood doctrine in Christian History. Go here for the teaching:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm
Yeah, so where's the part about being free from error? Why does the New Testament teach that we must be on guard against error if we're automatically protected from it?So do the teachings about selling indulgences still stand? What about the other documented errors taught by the church through the centuries?
Your church's claim about being free from error is its biggest error.
If you don't mind, could you ping me as well?
Before you take this gentleman's well meaning but wrong advice, please read the works of the Fathers of the Church. Sola Scriptura was definitely not the position of the Early Church, and was unheard of until the late Middle Ages.
If He is with us, error is not. But error is constantly appearing from jumped up, self appointed experts who think they have access to the truth, but don't. They have a long pedigree, beginning with the Arians and Nestorians. The heretics have been amongst us from the beginning, and it has been the ongoing job of the Church ("my" Church) to correct their errors.
So do the teachings about selling indulgences still stand?
What teaching? That such behaviour is sinful? The "selling" of spiritual goods has been consistently condemned, by my Church, since Apostolic times. So yes, those teachings still stand.
1 Timothy 3:15
The so-called documentation is in error.
A complete and utter falsehood. I suggest you read a book on the history of the Inquistion by Henry Charles Lea, a Protestant who was quite biased against the Catholic Church. He conservatively estimates the number killed by the Inquisition as being a few thousand over a four hundred year period, hardly "tens of thousands" or the absurd claim of "100 Million" that Catholic baiters make.
I'm sure the Protestants in Europe, Great Britian and in the Salem Mass. area put just as many people to death as sinful members of the Catholic Church did.
You really believe that? It was Simony and the selling of "indulgences" that sparked the Reformation in the first place. Pope Leo X needed money to rebuild Saint Peter’s Basilica, so he did what popes and bishops had been doing for 4 centuries -- he raised a fortune by selling indulgences. Leo X asked the famous Dominican indulgence seller, Johann Tetzel, to offer a plenary indulgence to those who donated funds for the reconstruction of the Basilica. That's a fact and there's no dancing around it.If the selling of "spiritual goods" has been condemned by "your church" since Apostolic times, then you must not be a Catholic. Either that, or you're believing bad information that's being fed to you.
I agree with you on this one. The Catholic church almost certainly killed more, but the numbers are close enough.
While I would say that far too many have died at the hands of those who claimed to have the interests of Christianity at heart, there is little verifiable information availiable to suggest that the Protestant community was in any way better than the Catholic, although there are abundant claims to the contrary. As a rule of thumb, though, Europe has always been better at being Barbarous than the Romans. (something to keep in mind),
"Contrary to widespread belief in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Inquisitors were, with few exceptions, not psychotic sadists who were insatiably seeking vengeance upon heretics through death penalties. The Inquisitors were normally well trained canon lawyers and frequently Dominican friars or members of another religious order.RECENT RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT THEY WERE SUFFICIENTLY ASTUTE TO BE SKEPTICAL OF THE WITCHCRAFT CRAZE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES AND TO FIND THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST OLD WOMEN AND SIMILAR MARGINAL PEOPLE WHO WERE ALLEGED TO BE WITCHES TO BE WITHOUT SUBSTANCE.
Therefore, the courts of the papal mandated Inquisition should never be considered in the same category as the Nazi holocaust or Stalinist purges. Surviving Inquisitorial records are sparse. But it is a good guess that even including the Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which in a more Draconian fashion operated directly under the aegis of the Spanish crown rather than the papacy,
THE TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE CATHOLIC INQUISITIONS DID NOT EXCEED FIVE FIGURES AND PROBABLY DID NOT TOTAL MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE." [over hundreds of years]
N. F. CantorThe Civilization of the Middle Ages. Harper: New York 1994
The Protestant "Inquisitors" were much less astute and they did mostly burn old women and other marginal people. The Roman Inquisition was executing a few tens of people a year, while in Germany thousands of innocent women were burned at the stake by Protestant (mostly) fanatics. The difference was that the men burned by the roman Inquisition are very famous, like Giordano Bruno, while the women burned in Germany are largely nameless.
I should have stated that my only reason for believing that more died at the hands of "Catholics" than "Protestants" is that the "Catholics" have been around longer. I tend to disount these murders because I don't believe that true Christians -- either Catholic or Protestant -- committed them. The murderers were wolves masquerading as sheep and I'm not going to blame the sheep or the shepherd for something that the wolves did.
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