Replies

You guys need to get your talking points in order.

We try to deal in facts.

A. "This council declares that if anyone disagrees with it, they are damned."

That's not a quotation from the council.

Ah, that would be me and mine, according to Trent and all subsequent Popes and current church doctrine who and which have affirmed Trent's curses to this very day.

It's nice to make up facts like that in order to keep the hostilities alive, but the facts are these:

An "anathema" was a formal excommunication. It didn't damn anyone any more than any other excommunication did; it did cut them off from the sacraments and consign them to the mercy of God.
Like all ecclesiastical discipline, it applied only to Catholics and those who claimed to be. Non-Catholics aren't subject to canonical penalty.
The penalty of "anathema" doesn't exist in the (current) 1983 code of canon law anyway.
The idea that all Protestants are certainly damned was clearly condemned in the letter of the Holy Office in regard to Fr. Feeney (1948). It was also rejected by Pope Pius IX back in the 1840's.
There are plenty of Protestants who say (a) "Catholics are not Christians"; and (b) "Only Christians can be saved". What do you have to say to them?

An "anathema" was a formal excommunication. It didn't damn anyone any more than any other excommunication did; it did cut them off from the sacraments and consign them to the mercy of God.

That is the politically correct answer, but is it the one INTENDED by the council at Trent?

1Cr 16:22 If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.

There was no church from which to be "excommunicated " when these words were penned

From the Greek

1) a thing set up or laid by in order to be kept
a) specifically, an offering resulting from a vow, which after being consecrated to a god was hung upon the walls or columns of the temple, or put in some other conspicuous place

2) a thing devoted to God without hope of being redeemed, and if an animal, to be slain; therefore a person or thing doomed to destruction

a) a curse

b) a man accursed, devoted to the direst of woes

They knew EXACTLY what they were writing and so do we.