I am a Roman Catholic for nigh onto seventy years now and always have been and shall be one to the moment of my death. That is not criticism of your faith or of anyone else's faith that I do not share fully.
In the early days of Christianity, it was said by our mutual enemies that you will know the Christians. They are the ones that LOVE ONE ANOTHER. And so we should always be. I wish that people here of whatever persuasion would calm down, respect one another even when we belong to differing faiths, demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ in our daily lives and in exchanges with one another.
Heaven would be a far poorer place for me if it was not the eternal home of my mother's best friend Hilda, an old school Methodist, who loved everyone around her and returned love for each and every insult for more than ninety years. When Methodist Churches in the New Haven area no longer had pastors worthy of respect and instead all had relentlessly leftist pastors, Hilda repaired to her living room and her easy chair and took up her beloved Bible and read it lovingly digesting every word until the words were worn off the pages.
Heaven would be a far, far poorer place without the wonderful Reformed Christians who post here and, when I was in coma from Thanksgiving to Christmas last year, many of them and many of my fellow Catholics here prayed me back to a semblance of normal life despite my heart trouble, diabetes and kidney failure. For the first seventeen days of that coma, I was in Intensive Care and I was not expected to survive until the next day. With the help of those prayers and of the God that you and I worship, I can drive 20 miles each way to dialysis three times a week. Soon I will have an operation that will allow me to dialyze myself at home while I sleep. Thank you, Jesus!
I used to rail and rage against the more aggressive Reformed Christians here when they argued against Catholicism. You know what? I grew up at an advanced age. I stopped arguing like that and trading insult for insult. First of all, I respect your absolute right to choose your own faith commitment. I'm not going to stop being Catholic and you likely aren't going to leave your faith behind either. Let's try to get along anyway.
I'd love to see the entire world be Tridentine Roman Catholics but it is not going to happen any more than there will be a worldwide Caliphate under Mohammed el Kaboomski converting the whole world to Islam and any more than the entire world will be Reformed Christians.
As an attorney (now recovering permanently) I had the privilege of representing hundreds of people who shared your faith and sometimes your approach, taking the time to talk to each one to learn HIS or HER beliefs and to represent each person accordingly and not according to my Catholic beliefs unless the client was Catholic and of reasonable facsimile of my beliefs. That worked better for all of us and for the babies.
When the Inquisition burned Jan Hus and others who were Christian victims, the Inquisition also burned Catholics such as St. Joan of Arc and corruptly caused the death by being hanged, drawn and quartered and beheaded Sir William Wallace, the noble Scottish rebel and burned the Dominican monk of Florence, Fr. Savanarola for resisting the authority of the absolutely notorious Pope Alexander VI.
I agree with Alberta's Child that Kim Davis is soon to swim the Tiber, like many before her, maybe her husband as well. Many swim the Tiber in the opposite direction as well. Is that any skin off your nose? We should all: Catholic, Reformed and others stand in solidarity with her, regardless of her denomination, for her brave witness and in opposition to US District Court judge David Bunning, allegedly a Catholic although I see no Catholicism in the wretch. Whatever her Faith, she is one of us as the judge who jailed her is not.
I would gladly see Bunning arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to extraordinary time in jail or something more permanent, not because he is a heretic or a schismatic but because he deprives people like Kim Davis of her God given right to freedom of worship in violation of his judicial oath of office. He has thus violated his promises to God Himself. He is no more Catholic and no more Christian than Nancy Pelosi, the late Ted Kennedy, a lot of other Kennedys, Rosa DeLauro, Chris Dodd, Little Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, John (did you know he served in Vietnam but whom did he serve?) Kerry, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum ad nauseam. Off with their heads, each and every one and NOT for heresy but for crimes for which each citizen should expect to be hanged.
I would certainly condemn "separation of Church and state" which appears nowhere in the text of the US Constitution or its First Amendment which does mandate that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Please recall that Maryland was originally a Catholic colony but, when the leaders of Maryland invited Protestants into the colony as citizens thereof, they took over, terminated the status as the Catholic colony (from the grant to Catholic Lord Calvert by Charles I, king and martyr, as Catholic, moved the capital from St. Mary's to Annapolis. burned St. Mary's to the ground and plowed its wreckage under the ground, including its Church, and "established" Anglicanism instead. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia. and other states had established Reformed religions.
When our Reformed Founding Fathers and the sole Catholic, John Carroll of Carrolton, wrote the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, they were assuring those states that there would be no establishment of any denomination in the federal government that would interfere with the various "established" religions of many states (all Reformed religions). It was never meant to be a weapon against religion as such as the ACLU advocates.
Nonetheless, despite the overwhelming numbers of Reformed Christians in the early US, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Bahai, Muslims, Mormons and many other religious minorities have enjoyed the hospitality here envisioned by the Founding Fathers and prospered by following the rules, working hard, and being good citizens, now with NO established Churches. We have flourished and made our contributions to this country each in our own way, blood on battlefields, service in the military, participation in public life, charities and many other things and, of course Reformed Christians have made stunning contributions as well.
I respect your zeal, your commitment to our Savior, to His Father in heaven and to the Holy Spirit and to Scripture. I may disagree with this or that tenet of your Faith but I will not insult you over any differences. If you are persistent enough or rude, I will simply walk away. That would be a shame not because I cannot convert you or because you cannot convert me but because we will be unable to stand shoulder to shoulder fighting the good fight against our actual common enemies for the wide cornucopia of beliefs that we DO share.
An excellent example of ecumenism in action!
Ignore theology and share the love.
Joan and Wallace and Savanarola were political executions using religion as a mask. Remember that the Popes were temporal kings at this time. Doesn’t invalidate the point. It wouldn’t surprise to find that most of the deaths in the Inquisition were to acquire property or settle a grudge.
Henry VIII killed plenty of Catholic for that.
What kind of Catholic? Latin or Eastern Orthodox, or do you deny the title Catholic to the latter? If an RC, are you one that wholly affirms Vatican Two reforms and the present pope and his social teaching, and rejects the premise that RCs are to seek to ascertain the validity of modern teaching by examination of past teaching, and or the magisterial level of each teaching to see if he may dissent, but are to just submit to all the church teaches, with present teaching defining the past? Such as this RC basically judges you are to do:
Praxis [practice] is quite simple for faithful Catholics: give your religious assent of intellect and will to Catholic doctrine, whether it is infallible or not. That's what our Dogmatic Constitution on the Church demands, that's what the Code of Canon Laws demand, and that is what the Catechism itself demands. Heb 13:17 teaches us to "obey your leaders and submit to them." This submission is not contingent upon inerrancy or infallibility. - http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?p=1565864#post1565864
(Note that within this category are variations.)
For to do less creates division. As one poster wryly commented,
The last time the church imposed its judgment in an authoritative manner on "areas of legitimate disagreement," the conservative Catholics became the Sedevacantists and the Society of St. Pius X, the moderate Catholics became the conservatives, the liberal Catholics became the moderates, and the folks who were excommunicated, silenced, refused Catholic burial, etc. became the liberals. The event that brought this shift was Vatican II; conservatives then couldn't handle having to actually obey the church on matters they were uncomfortable with, so they left. — Nathan, http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com/blog/2005/05/fr-michael-orsi-on-different-levels-of.html
Or are you one of the RCs which determines whether modern teaching requires assent based upon his judgment of its conformity with past papal teaching, and thus are accused by the other party of basically being as Protestants? And thus they reject parts of V2 as well as latest papal encyclical as a whole from requiring religious assent (excludes public dissent), although past papal teaching requires assent to all such ?
Note that within this category are variations.
and always have been and shall be one to the moment of my death.
So a RC is forbidden by no less than Trent from assuming they will never fall, but they can assert they will never leave the Catholic church? Which either means one can be a Catholic and die outside of grace, or that you are engaging in unholy presumption, or that Trent is wrong. Of course, the Scriptural reality is that as a Catholic you are part of the largest deformation of the NT church , which at best is basically invisible in Scripture, and in rare cases means that to remain in Rome means that one will end up in Hell, to their eternal horror. I pray God grants them repentance.
That is not criticism of your faith or of anyone else's faith that I do not share fully.
So you can take a stand for one faith which claims to be the one true one without (implicitly at lest) criticizing another? Or do you deny the exclusive claims of Rome, or even the historical teaching of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus? Some even are glad for the Inquisitions which dealt with "heretics" by the use of torture and death, and obedience to the pope required extermination of the heretics. Again, just what kind of Catholic are you? You seem to want everyone to get along, but you differ with those in your own church.
In the early days of Christianity, it was said by our mutual enemies that you will know the Christians.
Which Scripture tells us, and likewise testifies that NT Christianity was without an perpetual infallible papal office to whom all the church looked to as such in Rome, or Eucharistic belief as being same sacrifice as Calvary, and thus the source and summit of the Christian life around which sacrament all else revolved, by which one obtains spiritual life by literally consuming the "real" body and blood of Christ, or praying to created beings in Heaven,, or a class of clergy distinctively titled "priests," or baptism effecting justification on the basis of one's own holiness, thus again becoming good enough through postmortem purifying torments in purgatory, etc.
But which were told to "earnestly contend for the faith once delivered," (Jude 1:3) which is revealed in Scripture as supreme.
They are the ones that LOVE ONE ANOTHER. And so we should always be. I wish that people here of whatever persuasion would calm down, respect one another even when we belong to differing faiths, demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ in our daily lives and in exchanges with one another.
Which i do try to do, but the same love that is shown in changing a flat tire in the temporal realm is also to be shown in regards to the eternal spiritual interest of a soul. Both for salvation and to glorify God via worship in spirit and truth. And thus the Lord corrected by Scripture those who sat in the seat of Moses. (Mk. 7:2-16) and Paul contended with the same.
When Methodist Churches in the New Haven area no longer had pastors worthy of respect and instead all had relentlessly leftist pastors, Hilda repaired to her living room and her easy chair and took up her beloved Bible and read it lovingly digesting every word until the words were worn off the pages.
Yet infallible teaching of Rome damns non-RC souls to Hell, and some of your own brethren here affirm such must convert to Catholicism to be saved. Thus the question remains, just what kind of Catholic are you?
Heaven would be a far, far poorer place without the wonderful Reformed Christians who post here and, when I was in coma from Thanksgiving to Christmas last year, many of them and many of my fellow Catholics here prayed me back to a semblance of normal life despite my heart trouble, diabetes and kidney failure. For the first seventeen days of that coma, I was in Intensive Care and I was not expected to survive until the next day. With the help of those prayers and of the God that you and I worship, I can drive 20 miles each way to dialysis three times a week.
I am sorry for your health problems, and glad for they mercies yet realized, and may you see God's salvific mercy on your body and soul. it is very apparent that you are unlike the majority of RCs we deal with here, and who express scorn for us while incessantly promoting Rome, but which (as a veteran of the RF by God's grace) I have never seen you reprove. And as foe ecumenism, the fact is that while we often can enjoy fellowship of the Spirit with other evangelicals of various different churches, due to a share transformative conversion, and in which Christ and His word is central, we rarely realize this with RCs, since they find security in a church and Mary, and trust in their baptism and that they will merit eternal life and enter glory thru purgatory, and know of a day of transformative regeneration. Thus if we esteem the word of God and the salvation of souls, then we will contend for doctrine.
I used to rail and rage against the more aggressive Reformed Christians here when they argued against Catholicism. You know what? I grew up at an advanced age. I stopped arguing like that and trading insult for insult.
Railing and raging and resorting to ad hominem arguments is all to typical of RCs in particular, but which is not necessarily the same as contending via evidence and reason against the promotion of Rome as the one true church, which has constantly been done here. Do you expect us to stay silent? If an imam gave Davis a Qur'an, and then accepted it to pass on then would be out of line in criticizing it? Pray to Mary is heretical.
First of all, I respect your absolute right to choose your own faith commitment. I'm not going to stop being Catholic and you likely aren't going to leave your faith behind either. Let's try to get along anyway.
So "getting along" means I cannot express criticism of false doctrine? That simply is not the kind of " getting along" approved by Scripture.
I'd love to see the entire world be Tridentine Roman Catholics but it is not going to happen any more than there will be a worldwide Caliphate under Mohammed el Kaboomski converting the whole world to Islam
Both would be a damnable error.
When the Inquisition burned Jan Hus and others who were Christian victims, the Inquisition also burned Catholics such as St. Joan of Arc and corruptly caused the death by being hanged, drawn and quartered and beheaded Sir William Wallace, the noble Scottish rebel and burned the Dominican monk of Florence, Fr. Savanarola for resisting the authority of the absolutely notorious Pope Alexander VI.
But if obedience to the pope and councils back then meant engaging in such then how can obeying the pope necessarily now be correct. And if each RCs must judge whether RC teaching is valid or nor, then how are they different from evangelicals who do so?
I agree with Alberta's Child that Kim Davis is soon to swim the Tiber, like many before her, maybe her husband as well. Many swim the Tiber in the opposite direction as well. Is that any skin off your nose?
The skin would be off her nose, and more than that, and would join the list of those who stood against compromise in one major issue but succumbed to another major one. And she would be joining a church which counts even proabortion, prosodomite pils as members in life and in death.
We should all: Catholic, Reformed and others stand in solidarity with her, regardless of her denomination, for her brave witness
Working together to stop Muslim invaders or the link, due to some shared basic convictions, is not the same as agreeing on other critical aspects which are the alternative to it.
nd in opposition to US District Court judge David Bunning, allegedly a Catholic although I see no Catholicism in the wretch.
Which is merely your opinion, while your church shows hers by treating such as members, joining the Teddy K Caths.
I would gladly see Bunning arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to extraordinary time in jail or something more permanent, not because he is a heretic or a schismatic but because he deprives people like Kim Davis of her God given right to freedom of worship in violation of his judicial oath of office.
Note in his judgment, or apparently SCOTUS. And under the RC model, we are to obey the supreme interpretive magistrate.
He is no more Catholic and no more Christian than Nancy Pelosi, the late Ted Kennedy,
But whom your pope wrote a nice letter to, thanking him for his prayers and we see not a word of rebuke, before giving him a glorious church funeral. Which in-deed manifests Rome';s interpretation of canon law, for all to follow.
Off with their heads, each and every one and NOT for heresy but for crimes for which each citizen should expect to be hanged.
And the "crimes" you cite are due to belief, and you just restrict such hanging to secular power, and the like sentiment is apparently held by many RCs toward the likes of us. You are just one brand of RC in a church of varied RCs professing unity, and condemning disunity.
I would certainly condemn "separation of Church and state"
And RCs here have advocated for a RC monarchy, under which we would be censored.
which appears nowhere in the text of the US Constitution or its First Amendment
But it does forbid the theocratic state which Rome used to effect her rule, and is what was being avoided.
Please recall that Maryland was originally a Catholic colony but, when the leaders of Maryland invited Protestants into the colony as citizens thereof, they took over, terminated the status as the Catholic colony...burned St. Mary's to the ground and plowed its wreckage under the ground
And how was Rome different in its past?
It was never meant to be a weapon against religion as such as the ACLU advocates.
Yet implicitly informally expressing the Christian faith implicit in its Founders and populace.
I respect your zeal, your commitment to our Savior, to His Father in heaven and to the Holy Spirit and to Scripture. I may disagree with this or that tenet of your Faith but I will not insult you over any differences. If you are persistent enough or rude, I will simply walk away. That would be a shame not because I cannot convert you or because you cannot convert me but because we will be unable to stand shoulder to shoulder fighting the good fight against our actual common enemies for the wide cornucopia of beliefs that we DO share.
That is Francisology, but Christians also held to a shared morality with the Jews of the 1st c., yet those who preach a false gospel are accused, which Rome does and is, though some within of simply faith know God, and if I care about souls and Truth then i must seek their salvation and contend for the Truth, for the glory of God, and by His grace.