Posted on 07/23/2008 2:47:21 PM PDT by Pyro7480
When Gov. Alfred E. Smith ran for president in 1928, his candidacy was derailed in large part by anti-Catholic prejudice. It has been nearly 48 years since John F. Kennedy became the first (and so far only) Roman Catholic president, but experts say that anti-Catholic sentiment — much of it originating in, or as a response to, immigrants in New York — remains an enduring force in American culture.
That was the consensus of a panel assembled at the Museum of the City of New York on Tuesday night to consider the question, “Is Anti-Catholicism Dead?”
...The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus — a leading conservative intellectual, a former Lutheran pastor and the editor of the leading Catholic journal First Things — offered a surprising view on the question.
“To be a Catholic is not to be refused positions of influence in our society,” he said. “Indeed, one of the most acceptable things is to be a bad Catholic, and in the view of many people, the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic.”
...He added that anti-Catholicism was as likely to come from the left — sometimes from commentators who believe that a “threatening theological insurgency is engineered and directed by Catholics,” with evangelical Protestants merely as the movement’s “foot soldiers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com ...
I know...I’m wearing mine out. ;)
My assessment is that he was wrong. Feeney taught that formal membership in the visible Catholic Church is necessary for salvation. My post here, I believe, reflect the Catholic teaching that it in a conversion of the heart to the truths of the Catholic Church that is necessary. A formal conversion for a number of reasons may not happen and yet the converted soul will be save.
Thank you for the pertinent question, that contrast should have been drawn sooner.
Not yet. My dentist is making me one, LOL.
Mexico is a special case, as the Church was under very serious persecution in Mexico in first half of 20c.
The United States has a good history of religious tolerance generally and has, no doubt distinctly Protestant character. It would be fair to attribute the past economic successes of the US to Protestantism among other factors. For that reason, taking a parochial view, one might say that the Protestant line of thinking mattered in the United States more than Catholicism did.
But the United States is a brief history. As soon as the United States lost its Protestant character, — and that happened decades ago, — it is agian, the Catholic Church that matters in the West, and the denominations only matter insofar as they retain their Catholic kernel of truth.
This is the reason why the energies of the lying Left are primarily focused on defaming the Catholic Church, often co-opting the Protestant denominations along the way.
And he’s in Brooklyn?
Why would you sell me your dental bridge?
The left hates Christians, period. Doesn’t really matter what denomination they’re in. Sad, isn’t it?
I actually saw a two-story four-holer...
Now there's a caution. ;)
P.S., That’s the Holy Spirit’s job, not Mary’s.
I wasn’t sure...
What a silly sense of exclusiveness. As if Christ would say "do not come to Me unless lead to me by the Holy Spirit," or maybe "What's that? You came to Me through My mother? Be gone!"
Do you think Christ would do such a thing?
Most born again Christians I know agree on one truth—that Jesus Christ is the second part of the Trinity, that He died for the sins of mankind, that he was crucified, buried in a tomb, rose again, was seen by at least 500 people, and is seated at the right Hand of the Father in heaven. He will come again and take His children with Him. Those are the basics.
How long were you in the Army?
Why, liberal Christians are used by the left, often to attack the Catholic Church. There are several aspects of Catholicism that are hateful to the left:
- insistence on biblical inerrancy free from fundamentalist literalism;
- hierarchical structure with immutable 2 thousand year-old agenda;
- absence of independent local leadership;
- moral absolutes that derive from natural law and therefore apply to Catholics and non-Catholics alike;
- monastic tradition;
- independent from the government education by celibate clergy;
- conditional obedience to civil laws: a law that the Church sees as unjust does not have to be obeyed no matter how many people voted for it.
I see a whole lot of hate towards pentecostals “fundy’s” and so on. Moonbats hate everything remotely God equally IMO.
Is there some scriptual reference explaining that salvation via Jesus is to be gained through Mary? Or even people led to or exposed to Christ through Mary?
In answer I would characterize the complaint as comparing what happened in the Church to the BEST that could happen rather than to what was actually happening outside the Church and so-called Christendom
Yes, viewed from the POV of modern judgments, informed as they are by the misjudgments of the past and their outcome, the power-grubbing Church AND the power-grubbing ANTI-Church tribes, duchies, principalities, earldoms, and other thug-havens with their ever changing boundaries and their brutal solutions to, say, the housing problem ("I know, let's go over to the next village, county, riverbank, valley, or plain, or petty kingdom, kill them and take THEIR women, houses, and crops - yeah! that'll work!") the Bible COULD be said to seem clearly to say that we should all assemble with electric guitar, drums, sax, tambourine, cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick and, lifting up our hands and voices and praising God, let the police and the army handle our security and freedom to worship as we see fit.
But when you consider that as late as the mid 17th century the penalty for treason was to be castrated (if you were of the guy persuasion) and have your organs of generation burned before your eyes, then be hanged but NOT until dead, then to be cut down and eviscerated and have your innards burned before your eyes and then to be quartered, (and THEN to be sent to bed without any supper) ...
When you consider that that was considered a reasonable punishment for some crimes, I think that we can get a more reasonable view of how easy it might have been to fall into thinking the way to protect the Gospel, learning, and so forth was thick walls, tall towers, large armies -- and the revenue to support them -- as well as prayer and devotion.
Not appreciating the freedoms we have, and criticizing the behavior of those through whose efforts God bestowed them upon us will lead to some new captivity and exile. I'm planning on dying first, but I'm worried about the world my (I hope) Catholic grandchildren and great grandchildren may live in if in this age we sneer so readily at those who saw Turks mustering navies and not only prayed but also used every means available to summon counts, dukes, and princes to defend Christendom.
If we compare the ideal that never happened to reality, reality will always look bad. I'm surprised to see that argumentative tactic used here. It is generally confined to liberals and Democrats.
“Don’t you think that if it had been a self-pity party the NYT would eagerly have pointed that out?”
How would I know? I never claimed such a thing.
Who said you did claim such a thing?
I once ownwd a transcript from a hearing at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 1960’s. (Unfortunately, I lent it to someone who lost it and my efforts to get another from the Library of Congress have not yet been successful).
The hearing involved the interception of a Chinese Communist directive that had been transmitted by way of Canada to operatives in the US.
I still remember the first paragraph in that transcript of the intercepted message from China; it has remained in my memory:
“The most virile institution in the United States of America is the Catholic Church, with it’s educational system, charitable and hospital institutions and social institutions. We cannot bring down the United States unless we first bring down the Catholic Church”.
It went on then to describe their plan for infiltration of the Church in order to bring it down. This included a plan to infiltrate the seminaries, the bishoprics; to clamor for the democratization of the Church structure; to incite the clergy and the religious women to abandon their habits so that they would be “homogenized” with the laity. It also mentioned that some of these actions would cause resistance from the more faithful and in that way they could foster the “flushing out” of the “counter-revolutionaries”.
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