Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley presides at final commendation for Sen. Edward Kennedy.
1. Give up all belief in historic Christianity.
2. Assume Christ lied about protecting His Church.
3. Cut seven books out of your Old Testament.
4. Give up Jesus in the Eucharist. Yes, He gave you His body, but now you have to believe it’s just a cracker despite what Christ said.
5. Ignore the Early Church Fathers or pretend they never wrote what they wrote.
6. Extras: No longer will the great Christian patrimony of art, music, literature, history, philosophy, or architecture be yours. You’ll be like an atheist at a Church picnic. Everything will still taste good, but you will no longer see the point of it all. It will be like a foreign language to you.
What you must do:
1. Start being ignorant.
2. Post ignorantly on the internet about things which you do not understand - especially the Catholic faith.
3. Claim you know the Catholic faith because you went to a Catholic school for 6, 8 or 12 years.
4. Deliberately lie about the Catholic faith. As a Protestant this should come easily to you now because you’ll be able to rationalize that you’re lying for a good cause.
5. You can now use birth control, have abortions (shhhh! pretend your sect is sort of pro-life).
6. Feel free to divorce and remarry as often as you like. You’re a Protestant now so morals are almost completely subjective even if your pastor says otherwise. Example: “Abortion is wrong. . . except in cases of rape and incest.” Many Protestants believe that as if the actual act of murdering the baby somehow qualitatively changes because the baby’s father committed a morally evil act.
“Cut seven books out of your Old Testament.”
The Historical view of the church on the Apocrypha:
Pope Gregory the first, quoting Maccabees:
“Concerning which thing we do nothing irregularly, if we adduce a testimony from the books, which although not canonical are published for the edification of the people. For Eleazar wounding an elephant in battle, slew him, but fell under him whom he had destroyed.” — Morals, book 19, on 39th chap, of Job.
Notice how he mentions that they are put forward not for the “confirmation of the faith,” but for “edification of the faithful.” This is an important distinction. They considered these books useful for instruction in righteousness, kind of like a positive story, but not to be brought forward for the confirmation of doctrine. This same idea is repeated by many authors:
Athanasius on the apocrypha:
“But for the sake of greater exactness I add this also, writing under obligation, as it were. There are other books besides these, indeed not received as canonical but having been appointed by our fathers to be read to those just approaching and wishing to be instructed in the word of godliness: Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and that which is called the Teaching of the Apostles, and the Shepherd. But the former [standard new and old testament canon], my brethren, are included in the Canon, the latter being merely read.” (Thirty-Ninth Festal Epistle, A.D. 367.)
Rufinus on the Apocrypha:
“They were willing to have all these read in the churches but not brought forward for the confirmation of doctrine.” (Rufinus of Aquileia, Exposition of the Creed)
Cardinal Cajetan calls them not “canonical for the confirmation of the faith,” but “canonical” only in a certain sense for the “edification of the faithful.”
“Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St. Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed amongst the apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecciesiasticus, as is plain from the Protogus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned as canonical. For the words as well of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. Now, according to his judgment, in the epistle to the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, these books (and any other like books in the canon of the Bible) are not canonical, that is, not in the nature of a rule for confirming matters of faith. Yet, they may be called canonical, that is, in the nature of a rule for the edification of the faithful, as being received and authorised in the canon of the Bible for that purpose. By the help of this distinction thou mayest see thy way clearly through that which Augustine says, and what is written in the provincial council of Carthage.” (Cardinal Cajetan, “Commentary on all the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament,” cited by William Whitaker in “A Disputation on Holy Scripture,” Cambridge: Parker Society (1849), p. 424)
Official prefaces to Latin translations of the scripture making the same distinction:
“At the dawn of the Reformation the great Romanist scholars remained faithful to the judgment of the Canon which Jerome had followed in his translation. And Cardinal Ximenes in the preface to his magnificent Polyglott Biblia Complutensia-the lasting monument of the University which he founded at Complutum or Alcala, and the great glory of the Spanish press-separates the Apocrypha from the Canonical books. The books, he writes, which are without the Canon, which the Church receives rather for the edification of the people than for the establishment of doctrine, are given only in Greek, but with a double translation.” ( B.F. Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (Cambridge: MacMillan, 1889), pp. 470-471.)
“4. Give up Jesus in the Eucharist. Yes, He gave you His body, but now you have to believe it’s just a cracker despite what Christ said.”
“They said therefore unto Him, What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” For He had said to them, “Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto eternal life.” “What shall we do?” they ask; by observing what, shall we be able to fulfill this precept? “Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He has sent.” This is then to eat the meat, not that which perisheth, but that which endureth unto eternal life. To what purpose dost thou make ready teeth and stomach? Believe, and thou hast eaten already. (Augustine, Tractate 25)
“Wherefore, the Lord, about to give the Holy Spirit, said that Himself was the bread that came down from heaven, exhorting us to believe in Him. For to believe in Him is to eat the living bread. He that believes eats; he is sated invisibly, because invisibly is he born again. A babe within, a new man within. Where he is made new, there he is satisfied with food. (12) What then did the Lord answer to such murmurers? Murmur not among yourselves. As if He said, I know why you are not hungry, and do not understand nor seek after this bread. Murmur not among yourselves: no man can come unto me, except the Father that sent me draw him. Noble excellence of grace! No man comes unless drawn. There is whom He draws, and there is whom He draws not; why He draws one and draws not another, do not desire to judge, if you desire not to err.” (Augustine, Tractate 26)
“1. Give up all belief in historic Christianity.
5. Ignore the Early Church Fathers or pretend they never wrote what they wrote.”
LOL
Vlad, you’re something else, and I salute you.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
LifeSiteNews recently reported the unsurprising findings of a poll commissioned by The Washington Post and ABC stating that a majority of American Catholics are in favor of abortion in “all or most cases.”
You left out:
Pretend these were GOOD popes who did NOTHING that proves RC to be in error...
Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.[1]
Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.
Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who "sold" the Papacy
Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante's Divine Comedy
Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.[2]
Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and whose unattended corpse swelled until it could barely fit in a coffin.[3]
Pope Leo X (1513–1521), a spendthrift member of the Medici family who once spent 1/7 of his predecessors' reserves on a single ceremony[4]
Pope Clement VII (1523–1534), also a Medici, whose power-politicking with France, Spain, and Germany got Rome sacked.