Posted on 05/24/2004 9:17:25 PM PDT by churchillbuff
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- As president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, John Giles is no stranger to a pew. Yet he remembers well the time he got lost in a Roman Catholic church.
"I couldn't even follow the order of service, it was so foreign to me," Giles says of that day some six years ago.
Since then he's found his way and a new home in the Roman Catholic church — a home that might seem foreign to the overwhelmingly Protestant church population of Alabama.
"I have to admit to you that the whole time that I was in that church service, I was reduced to tears, and I couldn't explain it," Giles said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press.
"In fact," he jokes, "you would have thought I had been spending the whole weekend down at the House of the Rising Sun down in New Orleans, that I had all this sin in my life that I had to get out."
In any case, Giles and his wife, Deborah, were received into the Catholic Church at St. Peter's Parish in Montgomery on Easter Sunday.
Such a decision normally wouldn't be a matter of public interest, but Giles says he anticipated the questions that have followed his conversion from the Protestant faith.
"It would be nice if my private, Christian walk could be my private, Christian walk, but it's very difficult in my job for that to be the case," he says.
Giles says he knew the questions would come because as a Protestant he, too, had mistaken notions about Catholics. And the most frequent question he gets from his friends is "why?"
With that in mind he wrote an eight-page letter explaining his reasoning. In it, he explains that he had attended a variety of Protestant churches in Montgomery, including Christian Life Church and River of Life Church.
But once he visited the Roman Catholic church, he found himself in awe of its history and ritual, particularly its use of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in each service.
Trips to Israel and Rome spurred his curiosity. And the deeper he looked into the faith — which is the largest in the United States but lags behind Southern Baptists and other Protestant denominations in the South — the more he says he realized that many of his beliefs about Catholicism had been wrong.
"There is a perception among Protestants — you kind of have this perception that if you're Episcopal or Catholic, you're not even saved, you're not born again, which is totally a myth," he says.
He recalls one example from the New Year's holiday, which he spent in Florida with the chairman of his board. He had told the chairman of his and Deborah's plans to convert, and he says they were well-received.
"But we went to some other friends of theirs' house on one of the nights we were down there," Giles remembers. "And so we're sitting around visiting and this one lady was teaching a Sunday School class on cults. And she began to name off all the cults that she'd be teaching and named Catholic in there."
He acknowledges that the reaction by his Protestant constituents may be mixed.
"We didn't make this change to win friends and influence people and do it from a popularity standpoint, because we knew that in the state of Alabama, this is probably not a popular position to take in the Christian movement," he says. "So it remains to be seen."
But he hopes they, like he and his wife, will keep an open mind.
"We hope that we could have a small contribution to building bridges where there weren't bridges," he says. "Because Christians are Christians. There's no such thing as Christians and Catholics."
You seem to have been driven out by one person who was not a member of a religious teaching order. You don't seem to have been driven out by the church's teachings, but by someone's attitude.
***4) Catholics do not teach that Mary is God or that they should pray to her. We do ask her to pray for us.***
I beg to differ. Carefully consider the following prayers from the EWTN website...
"O Mother of Perpetual Help, grant that I may ever invoke thy most powerful name,
which is the safeguard of the living and the salvation of the dying.
O Purest Mary,
O Sweetest Mary,
let thy name henceforth be ever on my lips.
Delay not,
O Blessed Lady,
to help me whenever I call on thee,
for, in all my needs,
in all my temptations I shall never cease to call on thee, ever repeating thy sacred name,
Mary, Mary."
This is ALL about Mary, and what SHE can do and the help SHE can give.
"Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that any one who fled to thy protection,
implored thy help or sought thy intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired with this confidence,
I fly unto thee,
O Virgin of virgins my Mother;
to thee do I come,
before thee I stand,
sinful and sorrowful;
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in thy clemency hear and answer me.
Amen."
Except for the reference to motherhood, this sounds like a prayer to God with the name "Mary" inserted instead of "God"
"Most Holy Virgin Mary,
Help of Christian,
how sweet it is to come to your feet
imploring your perpetual help.
If earthly mothers cease not to remember their children,
how can you, the most loving of all mothers forget me?
Grant then to me, I implore you,
your perpetual help in all my necessities,
in every sorrow, and especially in all my temptations.
I ask for your unceasing help for all who are now suffering.
Help the weak, cure the sick, convert sinners.
Grant through your intercessions many vocations to the religious life.
Obtain for us, O Mary, Help of Christians,
that having invoked you on earth we may love and eternally thank you in heaven."
I swear, without reference to God or Christ this sound like a prayer to a female diety! She is being asked to grant request out of her own resources.
Now clearly the line between "praying to" and "seeking the intercession of" in the above is blurred to to the point of being indistinguishable.
If this practice was acceptable to God don't you think we could find just ONE example of a person in the Bible praying to anyone other than God? Or even one example of a person calling on someone in Heaven besides God?
***5) I pray that we may respect each other as intelligent people who love Jesus. I ask you to pray for me that I may have patience and charity.***
I do have the greatest respect for you and will pray for you.
I am just up to the first fifty threads. Yours struck a note. I cannot only not sing, I am so flat that even tone deaf I can tell. I just keep it very low and soft. I have only one note nearly in tune and sing just about everything in that monotone. The wife still looks at me funny when I am loud enough that she can hear.
I prefer a choir. It's safer that way.
Remember "Vicar of Christ". That title came from the Roman Emperors.
That's exactly what you said. That "Vicar of Christ" was a title of the Emperors.
Dave, I'm done with it. If you wish to put words in my mouth that I didn't say instead of dealing with the history, have at it. It is dishonest and peripheral and I'm not going to sit and pick knits with you instead of dealing with the central arguements. This has nothing to do with the central arguments and is a generalization - perhaps overgeneralization that is being sniped at for that very purpose, to distract. Which is why snipes are brought in in the first place - to ask a gazillion general questions, flood the thread with non answers and destroy the cohesion of the debate.
Did I hallucinate post 929? Can anyone else see it? Is it a "generalization" to post your own words and ask you what you mean? Is it a "distraction" to wonder if the things you spout off have any meaning or relation to history?
Is it destructive to the "cohesion" of the debate to ask for backing and clarification for the nonsense you write?
Now, did post 929 mean something or was it just whatever words popped into your mind at athe time, with no relation to reality?
SD
Havoc plays serious havoc with both sanity and truth, my brother. I would not advise wasting your time on it.
Nor with its wild-eyed heretic chronies.
The Orthodox and the other Eastern Churchs are Christian and were always part of the overall Christian church. The differences between the two main branches are mostly political (except for the filioque bit for which I don't quite understand the Orthodox church's position -- could any Orthodox fellow Christian detail their view?) and due to their existance in different states
More red herrings? None of the points raised make any logical sense
The problem is that those lies spread further, turning people away from the faith. They are as bad as the sickening Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nay, they endanger people's souls as well as their lives.
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