Posted on 07/23/2007 3:36:15 PM PDT by annalex
Sunday, July 22, 2007
As a young Catholic I was unaware of the amount of irrational hatred that was directed toward the Catholic Church and Catholics themselves. Growing up in Los Angeles I was not subject to the Fundamentalist “tracts” being placed on my family car while we were at Mass as I would have been had I lived in the “Bible Belt”. My exposure to people of other faiths was frequent and always positive. The majority of my friends growing were Jewish as were the girls whom I had the honor of dating. My babysitter growing up was Mormon, as was my Paternal Grandfather. My Paternal Grandmother is a Methodist and my Father was an atheist for most of his life. My Maternal Grandfather was a Presbyterian from a family that produced many deacons. However, my Maternal Grandmother was an Irish Catholic and thus my Mother was a Catholic and therefore we were raised Catholic. None of this was seen as a conflict. None of the above people in my family ever acted as though anything was “wrong” with my siblings and I being raised Catholic.
In my college years I essentially fell away from the faith. I still called myself a “Catholic” but had no particular belief in any of the dogmas that makes one a Catholic. I just knew that I was of Irish ancestry and thus was “Catholic”. My beliefs were for the most part agnostic. I thought that true believers were absurd (I included both theist and atheist true believers as absurd).
While in college I heard all about how the Catholic Church was responsible for the Dark Ages, the destruction of the Native Peoples of the Americas, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, pimples on teenagers, Milli-Vanilli and just about everything else that negatively effected anyone anywhere at anytime everywhere. I learned how peaceful and wonderful Muslim societies were and how Christians lived very well under Islamic rule. And how the Crusades were an evil move by a corrupt Pope to throw off that wonderful balance and have a huge land grab for greedy Churchman and Nobles. I heard how nothing good happened in the Christian world and no good men were produced in the Christian world until Marin Luther and later "the Enlightenment". I look back now and marvel at how I remained a Catholic even if it was in name only. All my history professors with their fancy PhDs thought Catholicism was a force for evil in the Western World who was I to disagree? Of course I just went along and got good grades and degrees not really challenging the idiocy that I was being taught.
There I was just a young guy going through life not contemplating the great issues of life and certainly not contemplating being a Catholic when I had the misfortune to meet a Rabbi that was a friend of my wife’s family. During our discussion, the rabbi told me about things that Christians “buy into” like the Trinity and the fact that Jesus was God. I was told that I could never understand Jews and their suffering at the hands of Catholics. I was told that I “would never know what it is to be a Jew or how it feels to have your children forced to sing Christmas carols (oh the horror! the horror!)”. I would never know what it is like to look at someone like me and see the Inquisition and the Crusades. Now, anyone who is not a self absorbed bigot would know that talking to a person who is half Irish and Catholic knows a little something of prejudice and persecution. My ancestors could not own land in their own country. They had to pay taxes to a foreign English master and support his foreign Church that was a parasite on their own land. They had real persecution. If they could have gotten off with simply singing Church of Ireland songs rather than pay taxes to and be persecuted by the British, I'm sure they would have gladly accepted. But why look past ones on victim-hood in order to see truth, when victim-hood is so much more of a commodity in our modern society.
At that point I made a commitment to understand my faith. I would never let someone attack the beliefs of my ancestors as this rabbi did without making a strong defense. My ancestors were willing to be persecuted (the real kind of persecution not the Christmas Carol kind) rather than abandon their faith. The least I could do is understand what they found so important as to endure what they did. Thus starting my journey toward becoming a passionate believer. The irony of a anti-Catholic bigoted rabbi bringing me closer to the truth of Christ is absolutely wonderful.
I started reading books by the usual authors that are sold at Borders and Barnes & Noble like George Weigel. While informative they were, upon reflection, very superficial. However, I happened upon a book called “Catholicism verses Fundamentalism” by Karl Keating. I thought it was simply going to be an analysis of Catholic beliefs versus Fundamentalist beliefs. What I had purchased was a wonderful combination of satire and apologetics. It has become the definitive apologetics book produced in the last 30 years. The title of the book itself mocks Jimmy Swaggarts silly book “Catholicism and Christianity”. Throughout the book I was baptized by fire into the world of anti-Catholicism. I learned about such Fundamentalist writers and “thinkers” as Lorraine Boettner, Alexander Hislop, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack Chick and others. Keating dismantled their arguments so thoroughly that one wonders how these people are not all routinely dismissed even by honest Fundamentalists. Sadly, low rent bigots like Hislop, Boettner and Dave Hunt are still widely read in Fundamentalist circles. Swaggart has fallen out of favor as we all know. Keating opened up a new door to me. I now was ready for the next step and started buying every book by Chesterton and Belloc I could find as they are the greatest apologists for the Catholic faith in the last 100 years.
The Holy Spirit has a funny way of working. I became friends with a wonderful guy who happens to be a Fundamentalist Christian. As we would talk he would mention some of the things that Keating talked about in his book. I was informed that Peter never went to Rome and that the Church was founded by Constantine the Great, and that Easter is really “Ishtar” and other scholarly insights that occupy the minds of Fundamentalist writers. I was told all about Catholicism and how it is really just paganism re-written. To his and most Fundamentalists credit, they literally do not know they are repeating lies. These books are sold at Protestant Book Stores and Churches. Also, he informed me of these things out of love as he believed my soul was in peril. So he could not process the refutations that I would make to him and just go on to the next attack. Most Catholics know about this tactic that Fundamentalists use. They will tell us what we believe and how stupid we are for believing it. 99% of the time they are wrong. The problem is that they have been told by Dave Hunt (his bio is from "rapture ready") or James White that the Calumnies that they are stating are Gospel truth.
After a while I began to pick up more and more apologetics material to refute my friends claims. I also decided that I would no longer play defense with him. I would attack his belief in sola scriptura (scripture alone) and sola fide (faith alone). When I would press him and ask about where those teachings are found in the Bible he would have no answer. This lead to his anger that I was asking too much to show me where the Bible taught either one of those Protestant Traditions (Traditions of men, not of God I might add). I would also repeat what he would say to me but re-phrase it to see if he really was willing to stand by it. For instance, he once told me that he was passionately anti-Catholic. I responded “Really? So if I were Jewish would it be okay for you to tell me that you are passionately anti-Jew?” He was taken aback and responded “Of course not!” I then responded “I guess some hatred is acceptable while others is not”. His response….silence. And then move on to the next attack. That is generally the tactic of the anti-Catholic. Never acknowledge that they are wrong, just move on to the next attack until they find something that the Catholic cannot answer. Usually it ends with some obscure Pope from the 7th century that no one knows about.
Anti-Catholicism rots the mind. It blinds people and they become obsessed with the destruction of something that they cannot destroy. People have been trying for 2000 years. Churchmen like Roger Mahoney have done their best. But the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it. So this leads to desperation. Which then leads to all kinds of ridiculous theories and outright lies about what Catholics believe and do. It does not stop with Fundamentalist Christians though. Before we think “well that’s just those weird bible-thumpers” let’s examine some things that people just “know”.
People "just know" that the Catholic Church did nothing in the Americas but persecute the indigenous people and massacre them. We "just know" that Priests never stood up to the Spaniards. Of course this is untrue. It is true that there were Catholic Priests who conducted themselves terribly during colonial times. However, it was Catholic Priests who sought to make life better for the indigenous people. Jesuits armed Indians against the Spanish in Paraguay, Francisco de Vittoria pleaded with the Spanish King in defense of the Indians. Most people in the Americas have never heard of Bartoleme de las Casas. Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican Priest has been called the Father of anti-imperialism and anti-racism. There is also Antonio Montesino who was the first person, in 1511, to denounce publicly in America the enslavement and oppression of the Indians as sinful and disgraceful to the Spanish nation. There of course were villains in the Spanish system but so were there in the American and English systems that were dominated by Protestants. We don’t hear about the brutality of Protestant lands in the US. We hear about those backward Spanish Catholics (who built the first Universities in the Americas) but not about the theocratic police state established in Geneva by John Calvin or the massacres carried out by Anabaptists in Munster.
In some cases anti-Catholicism is not only profitable it can allow for common bullies to slander and desecrate the memory of men finer than themselves without repercussions. Take the case of Daniel Goldhagen. He has made a career out of slandering the Catholic Church. Commenting on Mr. Goldhagens slanderous book A Moral Reckoning, Rabbi David Dalin, described Goldhagens work as "failing to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship.” He went on to say “That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn't surprising. But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf would print the thing is an intellectual and publishing scandal." This statement is absolutely correct. Let us be honest though, Goldhagen simply represents the double-standard that exists in our society. He is a left wing Jew who attacks the only group that it is acceptable to attack in modern American society, the evil Catholics. If a right wing Catholic were to make his living by attacking Judaism and slandering a prominent rabbi while blaming Judaism for the Marxist massacres under the NKVD he would be an out of work “conspiracy kook” and a anti-Semite. He would certainly not be published in the New Republic. Goldhagen has made the absurd statement that Christianity is anti-Semitic at its core. Imagine if one were to say that Judaism is anti-Gentile to its core. They would be isolated as an anti-Semite. The message is clear. A Jewish bigot like Goldhagen gets published by Knopf and the New Republic while his mirror image would be isolated and vilified.
I would like to wrap up with some other observations. All Catholics are told endless stories about Catholics persecuting people. Generally it starts with a Catholic King who orders the persecution of a group and despite the Bishops or Pope condemning it, "the Catholics" are to blame. An example of his would be during the Crusades when Crusaders massacred Jews along the Rhine. That was “the Catholics” despite the local Bishops hiding and protecting Jews. When a Protestant barbarian like Oliver Cromwell slaughters Catholics at Drogheda and sells the women and children into sex slavery or sacks Wexford that’s not “the Protestants”. That’s just Cromwell.
Much is made about Hitler being a baptized Catholic by ignoramuses like Dave Hunt. Other bigots like Goldhagen argue that Nazism was an extension of Catholic bigotry through the ages. Yet these people do not mention that Karl Marx was a Jew and that the ranks of the NKVD, some of the greatest murderers of all time, were filled with Jews. By using Goldhagens logic should we not attack Judaism and Jews? If we Catholics are and our faith are responsible for a former Catholic who later went so far as to persecute the Church, should not Jews be held responsible for Karl Marx and Genrikh Yagoda and the fact that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish. The answer is of course not. Your Jewish neighbor has likely not heard of the NKVD, Yagoda let alone support what he and they did.
As I wrap up my thoughts on this I should say thank you to all of the people that I mention above. Especially the Rabbi who started my journey. Had he not been a self absorbed bigot, he would not have angered me and I would not have explored my own faith. I would have continued in my ignorance and would not have understood the faith that built Western Civilization and sustained my ancestors. I would not have understood the faith that Christ taught to the Apostles, that was passed on to their successors, our Bishops. I would not truly know the joy of being a Catholic. His ignorant statements brought about my reversion back to the true faith and my wife’s conversion to it. For that, I will literally be eternally indebted to him.
**Get them OUT of the god-less government schools!**
The following was written by Bruce Shortt ( a Protestant) but has application to the education of Catholic children:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48001
“Interestingly, a careful study by Orthodox Jews strongly confirms that how a child is educated clearly trumps all other factors with respect to whether a child retains his faith into adulthood.”
“The authors of the study, Anthony Gordon and Richard Horowitz, spent years researching the effects of educating Jewish children in Orthodox Jewish day-schools. Their findings demonstrate the pivotal role that parochial education plays in the religious formation of a child: “... multiple research studies have come to the same conclusion: Within three generations there will be almost no trace of young American Jews who are currently not being raised in Orthodox homes with a complete Jewish Day School education ... the less time-intensive forms of Jewish education have almost no effect on intermarriage.” [emphasis added]
“How is it that giving Jewish children an education based on the worldview of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings has such a profound effect? Gordon and Horowitz find that the child so educated is equipped to answer the ultimate question, “Why be Jewish?”:”
“Orthodox parents and Orthodox day schools seem to give their children enough good reasons for staying Jewish that even when the children are grown and have the option to intermarry and disappear from Jewish life, virtually none of them do. Somehow, they reach adulthood with solid answers to the question of “Why be Jewish?”
“Moreover, as Gordon and Horowitz point out, a less committed approach to the training up of children leads to catastrophe:”
“There is finally a dawning recognition that Jewish continuity and survival cannot be sustained in what has been an American lifestyle devoid of serious Jewish education and Jewish living. One might have believed in the 1950’s or 1960’s that it was sufficient to have minimal Jewish exposure. Examples of such exposure includes simply to be a member of a Temple, have Jewish friends, play basketball at the Jewish Center and live in a generally Jewish neighborhood to ensure that one's children would be Jewish. However, we now have the data and studies to know that children who are left without an education leading to deep Jewish beliefs and practices have little chance of having Jewish descendants.”
“No less than Christians, Jews are enjoined to train up their children in the way they should go all of the time. But, also like Christians, relatively few do. Moreover, just as our disobedience in the education of our children has weakened Christianity, Jewish leaders are concerned about the loss of future Jewish generations as their children become more estranged from Judaism as a result of their parents’ failure to provide their children with a Jewish education and intermarriage. “
“Not surprisingly, then, at virtually every point in the Gordon-Horowitz study, we could substitute the word “Christian” for “Jew” and the result would be an accurate picture of the situation facing Christians today. As Christian Smith, George Barna and others have pointed out, our children neither know what Christianity is nor can they answer the question “Why be Christian?”
“Gordon and Horowitz make their point poignantly to Jews by asking Jewish parents, “Will your grandchildren be Jews?” For Christians the relevant question is, “Will your children be Christians.” Unless parents and pastors decide to change their priorities, the data from Barna and others demonstrate that the answer is clearly “no” for 90 percent or more of Christian parents. Do you care? If you do, you and your church will follow Dr. Mohler’s advice and begin developing an exit strategy from the public schools today. Now.”
In my college years I essentially fell away from the faith.
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The author of this article was likely educated in government K-12 schools and was utterly unprepared to defend his faith in the hostile environment of the university
The RCC is an apostate denomination as proven by the worship of Mary.
the example was Marx (born a Jew, but hardly a Jew) with Communism as compared to Hitler (born a cAtholic, but hardly a Catholic) with NAziism.
>>Well, there are Protestant and Orthodox posters who debate Catholic doctrine, but do so in a civilised manner — they won’t pop up and down and say “You worship a goddess” and then, when you refute that, they don’t say “you don’t know what you’re talking about — I’m telling you that YOU worship a goddess, so stop trying to tell me that I don’t know what you do, better than you!” <<
Spot on.
We don't worship Mary. (That is, unless you're using "worship" in its original sense of "render honor to", as in the traditional wedding vows which have the groom saying to the bride, "With my body I thee worship.")
And, if honoring Mary makes one apostate, then your Bible is apostate (see Luke 1:48) and all Christian denominations were apostate for about 1100 years, which I guess means that the Holy Spirit was asleep on the job.
***Guiness is kind of heavy — smooth, but heavy.***
Since moving to the US, I’ve experienced a number of American beers - most of which are like making love in a canoe.
Soda pop, not beer. :)
Point the 1st: You must prove that Catholics worship Mary.
Point the 2nd: You must prove the condition of apostacism.
Point the 3rd: It is the Catholic faith, not the faith of Joe the snake oil salesman started sometime last year when snake oil sales hit a new low and he had to find another means of income.
G-d used human vessels to write the Prophets and the Writings. G-d wrote the Torah Himself. It has no human element whatsoever. This is the ancient and unchanging tradition Israel has understood since Mt. Sinai. What, don't you believe in tradition? What are you, a Protestant or something?
I know what they mean. Where is that in the Scripture? I can show you where the authority of the Church is in the Scripture.
opposing the death penalty
The Church also abandoned the major Biblical tenet of not eating pork and lobster. The parts of Jewish Law that we as Catholics obey we obey because Jesus repeated them for us (and He often expanded those, see Sermon on the Mount), or because it is a part of natural law. That capital punishment was a part of Old Testament law is not a reason to hold to it.
However, you are not well informed in this particular case. The Church does not oppose death penalty in principle, only in societies where criminals can be securely imprisoned instead. Further, that is not a teaching of faith and morals and Catholics are free to form their own conscience on that, and many do.
the Bishop of Rome was always considered first among equals; he is not the head of the Body of Christ, Jesus is
Jesus is the head of the Church indeed, and the Pope is His vicar, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean the pope is infallible in all he does or says; I can name many popes that were wrong on a number of things. The doctrine of papal infallibility is much stricter than you probably think it is.
the economic/political problems of Latin America have been increased by the poor teachings of the Catholic Church
May be so, -- it is a complex issue. What that has to do with anything?
Yes, I agree.
Firstly, you need to refer to The Church correctly, it is The One Apostolic and Catholic Church. This Church includes branches of the LAtin Rite, the Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankar, Chaldean, Maronite, etc along with the Assyrian, Oriental and Orthodox branches.
I will appreciate an intelligent comment to which I then will give a serious response.
RCC doctrine that says that Christ reigns through Mary puts Mary in Christ's place. That makes Mary the subject of false worship.
Point 1 proves point 2.
It's very difficult to give a conversational response to such an absurd statement. All I could do is try to point out that absurdity. If you can justify the worship of Mary biblically then I might have to listen to your point about the position of the RCC.
If course veneration of Mary is biblical: she is the mother of Christ who gave us our Savior; she is His first disciple who never betrayed Him or gave in to fear. That is in the Bible, you know.
If course -> of course.
This makes no sense at all.
First disciple: Mary was made aware of Jesus’s future ministry by the angel and by prophetic statements of Holy Simeon (Luke 1-2); she was urging Him to begin His ministry at Cana which attracted the first believers other than His family and seers like Holy Simeon (John 2).
Never betrayed Him: do you contend that she did? Where is that in the Bible? Her constancy is shown as she was at the foot of the Cross while all but John ran off or betrayed Him (John 19) and at the Pentecost (Acts 1-2).
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