Yes! I'm jumping up and down. One of my big points all through this thread is that the Catholic Church is based solely upon the teachings of the modern Magisterium. Scripture and tradition really don't matter because they both mean only what the Magisterium says they mean.Given the corruption that has reigned in Rome for much of the last two millennia, I don't view Protestants as having left the Church so much as the Church having left Rome.If you remember the old Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, Calvin often played a game called Calvinball, where he made up the rules as he went along -- and always won. The Magisterium plays the theological equivalent of Calvinball. No matter how much scripture or tradition you can find that obviously debunks a Catholic teaching, the Magisterium has defined the rules so that they always win.
I'm doing the wave! It was gross Simony and the selling of indulgences that brought on the Reformation. Yet one poster on this thread (I can't remember whether it was "Clinton's a commie," so I'll give him a break here) insisted that the Catholic church has always prohibited the selling of "spiritual goods." I don't see how anyone can write that with a straight face.
Yep. I used to get in these debates a lot, but I got burned out chasing a goal line that was always being shifted just a few feet more. (Evolutionists, by the way, do the same thing.)
Of course, pretty much everyone does the same when it's their religion/worldview at stake. The average Catholic is simply repeating what they've been taught--as is the average Protestant or Evangelical or evolutionist. Very few on any side have done their own research, other than finding a site that happens to agree with them that they can link to. My goal these days is not to "win" the debate, which rarely changes minds, but to encourage people to question their authorities and do their own research to see if what they've been taught is really true, in accordance with Acts 17:11.
I don't see how anyone can write that with a straight face.
Again, it goes back to trusting what you've been told. Now, I'm quite sure that the RCC did indeed write official bulls condemning selling indulgences at various points of its history . . . but that didn't stop them from accepting the money Tetzel made from such sales and using it to build St. Peter's Basillica, did it?
To be fair, the RCC and its Eastern counterpart have done some good in the world, especially when it comes to having preserved history and literature through the Dark Ages. But when Pope John Paul II himself has acknowledged that the RCC has some grave sins in its past (though he was politically non-committal about what he thought those sins might be), it's a bit disingenuous for the individual followers to try to find cop-outs for every single historical example, whether we're talking about the sale of indulgences, the Inquisition, the Reign of the Harlots, preventing the Bible from getting into the hands of the common folk, the persecution of Protestants, or whatever.
Either the Roman Catholic Church is truly one ecclesiastical body, as Catholics hold when they condemn Protestants for being denominationalized--in which case it is collectively guilty of all of the above and more, and needs to admit that it is not without error--or it's as fragmented as the Protestant Church and so can distance itself from the above sins--in which case no Catholic should ever again complain about the number of Protestant denominations.
They can't have it both ways, and I'd really wish that they'd pick one and stick to it.