Posted on 10/11/2006 9:29:49 AM PDT by Antioch
Before criticizing Pentecostal churches that draw Catholics as members, Catholic leaders should ask why their own parishes aren't meeting the needs of those who leave, the Vatican's top ecumenical representative said yesterday at Duquesne University. "Our response cannot be in the form of a polemical approach, leaving ourselves to condemn the activities of other groups," said Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Such an approach "is not constructive and could even be counter-productive," he said. While Cardinal Kasper is known for outreach to traditional Protestant and Orthodox churches, he said it is crucial to be engaged with a diverse global Pentecostal movement that now claims 600 million adherents. He spoke to an audience of about 225, including Bishop Paul Bradley, administrator of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, Metropolitan Basil Schott of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh, Episcopal Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh and Metropolitan Nicholas of the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church of Johnstown.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
Excellent post, so well stated. Truly a breath of fresh air. Thanks!
Am humbled and blessed by your kind words.
That is simply absurd. The folks who are into "higher criticism" of the Sacred Scriptures tend also to be the folks who have no use for Marian apparitions, don't even know about the various Eucharistic Miracles, and very likely don't believe in Transubstantiation.
Wellllll, I don't find it absurd at all. I've known clusters of folks just as described.
I find the suggestion that it in any way describes anything usual or normal to be without merit. False. Incorrect. Wrong. Mistaken. I strongly suspect that my personal experience with Catholics in general, and with Catholic education in particular vastly exceed both yours and ZC's combined. So unless you have some sort of unbiased, properly conducted research to back up the notion that your "clusters of folks" are in any way representative of the Church as a whole, you might just want to consider that I know what I'm talking about.
Wellllllllll,
only where The Spirit managed to get through my clumsy fingers.
Blessings of The Most High on you and yours.
I again register my disagreement.
I think most nominal Catholics who reject the Old Testament miracles are also rationalizers of the New Testament miracles like the Eucharist and the Resurrection.
Find any biblical survey written by a nominally Catholic rationalist - you will simply never see such an individual "expose the myth" of the parting of the sea and then go on to defend Transubstantiation.
There are individuals who will chime in against the miracles of Moses and then keep mysteriously silent when the miracles of St. Francis are discussed - but they certainly don't chime in to defend the miracles of St. Francis.
I've heard that in Eastern Orthodoxy Adam and Eve are regarded as saints, yet there is certainly never much of an attempt to publicize this or to encourage a cultus to them.
Many Catholics, especially the millions who cultivate the Carmelite school of spirituality, have a strong devotion to Eliayahu HaNabi.
Please, you didn't use the right Scripture that was applicable to what I said:
You previously stated:
Those who promote docritinal divisions and diviseness Paul called immature Christians...
To which I replied that he also called those who do such things heretics and schismatics and he did!
"That there might be no schism in the body; but the members might be mutually careful one for another."
"A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid: Knowing that he, that is such an one, is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned by his own judgment.
"Be not led away with various and strange doctrines. For it is best that the heart be established with grace, not with meats; which have not profited those that walk in them."
So unless you have some sort of unbiased, properly conducted research to back up the notion that your "clusters of folks" are in any way representative of the Church as a whole, you might just want to consider that I know what I'm talking about.
= = = =
I've found that when groups number over 100 and certainly over 1,000 individuals
"representative of the [group] as a whole,"
gets to be a pretty silly construct for almost all factors and considerations.
There are more than a few of the clusters described in the Roman church. I've come in contact with a significant number considering my degree of association.
I wouldn't begin to presume that much of anything represented the RC church as a whole.
It's not a very homogeneous body.
Yet rationalist Catholics who have no objections to traditional Catholic miracles (transubstantiation, the liquification of the blood of St. Januarius, miracles associated with saints and relics, the Fatima sun dance) seem highly offended with Biblical (especially "old testament") miracles that are of utmost importance to Fundamentalist Protestants.
That is simply absurd. The folks who are into "higher criticism" of the Sacred Scriptures tend also to be the folks who have no use for Marian apparitions, don't even know about the various Eucharistic Miracles, and very likely don't believe in Transubstantiation.
I'm very sorry, but you're wrong. Even conservative Catholics are hostile to Biblical ("old testament") miracles. Do you have any idea how few Catholic FReepers are creationists? And in Catholicism non-creationism means a rejection of the literal historical truth of the entire first eleven chapters of Genesis.
The Knights of Columbus is a conservative Catholic organization, yet their materials have long promoted evolutionism. Frank Sheed, a highly esteemed conservative Catholic theologian, accepts historical criticism in his "ultra-conservative" Theology and Sanity (which I have read). Most of the orthodox and conservative Catholic apologists of our day are evolutionists/higher critics (Keating, Stravinskas, OSV, Ignatius Press). Even New Oxford Review and The Wanderer are pro-evolution. Creationism, or even a simple belief in the facticity of the Biblical accounts, is simply regarded as "inherently Protestant" and a threat to the Magisterium.
British Catholic apologist Donal Anthony Foley has actually realized that the enthusiasm of so many Catholics for attacks on the integrity of the Bible is in part a reaction to the Protestant Reformation. Ie, the theories of critical scholars help to "prove" that the Bible requires a living interpreter (a position from which Orthodox Judaism is, thank G-d, almost totally free). If the Bible "means what it says" with regard to the dimensions of Noah's Ark, then (so goes the reasoning) Paul's Epistles similarly need no interpretation. This is nonsense but that's the way it is.
Note that with regard to such specifically Catholic devotions as Fatima that, while belief in them is not required, there are plenty of Catholics who do in fact believe in them and whose beliefs are promoted by the Church. Certainly there are no whole industries devoted to disproving the Fatima miracles as their is with Genesis. Biblical miracles are treated very differently from "new testament" and post-Biblical miracles. For some reason "old testament" miracles are regarded as inherently subversive and un-Catholic.
It is really too bad that Catholics are so afraid of "their own" Bible. What's the use of arguing with Protestants that "we gave you the Bible in the first place" if you're going to regard everything in it as a threat?
Certainly some very good points.
But these issues seem to set-up a fork in this thread. And going down the side which results in lots of brick bats instead of spiritual sharing and mutually edifying one another
. . . would be a huge disappointment to me, and, I think, to our Lord.
. . . would be a huge disappointment to me, and, I think, to our Lord.
Not being a chr*stian, I think the miserable attitude towards the Divinely-Dictated Word of G-d by so many chr*stians (especially the most ancient, authentic traditions) says something very important about chr*stianity as a whole.
Again, I don't buy it. I'm a cradle Catholic and I don't know a single Catholic, nominal or observant, who simultaneously claims that transubstantiation is real but manna never existed.
Cardinal Kasper has hit upon a home truth: Catholics leave the Church for the Pentecostal movement not because the Catholic Church has promoted a strict interpretation of its doctrine, but because the Church's pastors have permitted a neglect of fundamental doctrines and have allowed a wishy-washy spiritual vagueness to obscure the need for a holy life of prayer and charity.
I have listened to enough boring "homilies" by priests who ramble on and on about their personal lives and almost anything except the Gospel text they are supposed to be preaching on that day, that I don't blame anyone looking for more substantial spiritual instruction.
Where are these literalist/inerrantist Catholics of yours? Why are they AWOL on attacks on the Bible and its inerrancy? Why is there no cult of Adam and Eve? Why do Catholic apologists like Keating go to the Grand Canyon to attack the Hexameron? Why are the rationalist weapons that are trained on the "old testament" never trained on the miracles of Catholic saints, even when it is mentioned in passing that those miracles are "non-dogmatic?" Genesis isn't merely called non-dogmatic, any acceptance of it is assumed to be inherently Protestant and it is attacked relentlessly!
Would you care to guess how many of your fellow conservative Catholic FReepers are Biblical inerrantists? Mighty few. I've argued with most of them and I don't recall your support at any time.
If the ancient churches are so freaking afraid of "their" TaNa"KH why don't they just discard it like one of the early heretical movements? Then they wouldn't have that awful Genesis tempting good Catholics to become Protestants!
Sheep and goats
wheat and tares . . .
life in this sin polluted world.
Then there's the merely poorly taught and chronically idle clueless.
Oh, I think they are quite a small minority in most respects compared to the RC group at large.
But I have no doubt that they are there.
I haven't polled the ones I ran into on all those specifics . . . but they certainly evidenced the paradoxical constructions on such matters.
Don't think I'd have said it as well as you did.
Thanks.
They are suppose to be a sign for UNBELIEVERS not believers.
"Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to believers, but to unbelievers; but prophecies not to unbelievers, but to believers."
What were tongues used for in the NT?
"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they began to speak with divers tongues, according as the Holy Ghost gave them to speak.
Now there were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.
And when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded in mind, because that every man heard them speak in his own tongue.
It meant that when the gospel was originally being spread, people could understand it in their own language. It wasn't used for this:
It has nothing to do with the strange noises I see coming out of people in charismatic circles.
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