“It prevents what happens when tradition is discounted and everyone can make up their own interpretations. As evidence consider the state of protestant theology in the US at present ( or Europe for that matter ). If you look at raw numbers well over 60% now teach either abortion or same sex marriage are perfectly ok and its growing rapidly.”
To reflect your words back to you...
Scripture preserves God’s truth from drift into all kinds of foolish pagan practices.
It prevents what happens when Scripture is discounted and any leader can make up new traditions - even ones that didn’t exist during the first one hundred years of Church history - and you end up with a situation where anything becomes tradition that invalidates the Word of God for the sake of traditions.
“As evidence consider the state of protestant theology in the US at present ( or Europe for that matter ). If you look at raw numbers well over 60% now teach either abortion or same sex marriage are perfectly ok and its growing rapidly.”
As evidence consider the state of the Roman Church worldwide, where regardless of what the church teaches, a huge number of members use birth control, get abortions and are perfectly ok with same sex marriage.
Dear AMorePerfectUnion: The teachings of the Catholic Church are to be evaluated according to their truth, and not their popularity.
Obliviously in the Catholic Church were a democracy, she would be teaching whatever is being taught by the ruling elites who control the law, the schools, and the mass media.
Nobody can plausibly conclude that the Catholic community is flawless. On the contrary, it is full of infidelity to its own teachings, darkened with dissent and loaded with sin. What the Church does have, though, is sound moral doctrine: which is precisely why it faces daily these relentless assaults from without and within.
We are in a situation --- predicted by Our Lord --- where the tares are growing thick in the field with the wheat; or, to use a different analogy, where the dragnet pulls in all kinds of fish, some of them pretty ugly. The Lord says the tares will not be gathered and burnt, nor the fish sorted, til the Day of Judgment. Until then, we cling to the truth which Christ teaches us through the Church.
I will be grateful--- grateful forever--- for this truth, which, battered and embattled on all sides, still stands.
Here's a thought experiment: As the others give way on one contested point after another --- civil divorce/remarriage, contraception, sterilization, indiscriminate WMD's, total lethal assaults on the conceived child, artificial reproductive technologies, the radical deconstruction of sex, gender, marriage and family --- 20 years from now, which Church, do you think, will still have the the same, sound, unchanged moral doctrines that Christianity preached 80 years ago, 150 years ago, 500 years ago?
Well?