(Photo courtesy of Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.)
Posted on 04/22/2012 11:23:32 AM PDT by NYer
The question, uttered with equal parts puzzlement and anger, surprised me. In hindsight, it should have been about as surprising as an afternoon drizzle here in Eugene, Oregon, in early spring. The question—almost an accusation, really—was made one early spring day over fifteen years ago. It was said in the middle of an intense discussion about the reasons why my wife and I, both graduates of Evangelical Bible colleges, had decided to become Catholic.
I’m happy to note, all these years later, that I have a good and healthy relationship with the man who made the remark. We both uttered strong words that day, but time and some further conversations—more calm and measured in nature—have brought peace, if not perfect understanding.
I’ve sometimes joked, in recounting the full story to close friends, that I came up with the perfect retort several hours later: “At least I’m entering a Church that knows what the word ‘think’ means!” It would have been a low blow, but it touches on two issues that continue to resonate with me, now fifteen years a Catholic, nearly every day in some way or another.
The Mindless Scandal
The first is the intellectual life. The Fundamentalism of my youth was, in sum, anti-intellectual; it looked with caution, even fearful disdain, on certain aspects of modern science, technology, and academic study. But it wasn’t because we were Luddites or held a principled position against electricity, computers, or space exploration. The concern was essentially spiritual in nature; the guiding concern was that televisions, radios, “boom boxes” (remember?), and movies were potential tools for conveying messages—often subliminal in nature—contrary to a godly, Christian life. The general instinct was, in fact, actually sound. Only the creators of “Jersey Shore” can deny the power and influence of popular culture, and then only with a smirk. But the permeating fear was rarely controlled, critiqued, and concentrated through rigorous thought and study. It was reactionary and highly subjective, and so it became a sort of rogue agent, undermining the most innocent activities: reading the Chronicles of Narnia, listening to any “non-Christian” music, or studying art or literature not including any overt references to “Jesus” and “the Gospel”.
My time in Bible college proved helpful in many ways, as several of my professors were certainly not fearful of going outside the box, even—gasp!—assigning books by Flannery O’Connor and Gerard Manley Hopkins (there was also some reading of Augustine, but in an extremely abridged form). But for every question answered, others sprung up like dandelions, multiplying with maddening surety. When I read Mark Noll’s controversial bestseller, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994), I was confirmed in many of the intuitions and thoughts I had mulled and culled over the years. Noll opened his book with this withering shot of lightning: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Readers can disagree on the level of hyperbole used; Noll, a dedicated Evangelical scholar, seemed dead serious in his assertion. “For a Christian”, he wrote, “the most important consideration is not pragmatic results, or even the weight of history, but the truth.” These and other statements rang true. I had become convinced, at a relatively early age, that if something is true and good, it must be of God.
The Need for Authority
Of course, how did I know what was “true and good”? Enter the second issue: authority. I won’t regale readers about the details of my struggle with sola scriptura. (Readers can catch a few of them in my 1998 account our journey into the Church.) Instead, I’ll skip to something I wrote in February 1996, from a list of “several points of consideration” I put down regarding the claims of the Catholic Church. “I have become increasingly convinced”, I wrote, “that the idea of sola scriptura is in the end untenable … Again, this does not render judgment on the inspiration or infallibility of Scripture, it just moves the question to a different arena—that of authority.”
Nearly every non-Catholic adult who chooses to become Catholic will admit, or least should admit, the centrality of the matter of authority. As a Fundamentalist, I had been fed the standard, Jack Chick-ean version of Catholic authority: bloody, despotic, dishonest, power-driven, and so forth. The hike from there to looking squarely and honestly at authority in the Catholic Church was lengthy, but one key mile post was studying St. Paul’s description in his first letter to Timothy of “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth” (1 Tim 3:15). A passage by Abp. Fulton Sheen, written in the 1940s, sums up the matter quite well:
There is nothing more misunderstood by the modern mind than the authority of the Church. Just as soon as one mentions the authority of the Vicar of Christ there are visions of slavery, intellectual servitude, mental chains, tyrannical obedience, and blind service on the part of those who, it is said, are forbidden to think for themselves. That is positively untrue. Why has the world been so reluctant to accept the authority of the Father’s house? Why has it so often identified the Catholic Church with intellectual slavery? The answer is, because the world has forgotten the meaning of liberty.
One Surprise: The Bad
We entered the Catholic Church on March 29, 1997, Easter Vigil at Saint Paul Catholic Church in Eugene, Oregon. It was a joyful night and I can say with complete honesty I have never regretted becoming Catholic. But I have been surprised a few times as a Catholic. Two surprises stand out; they also, in a way related to the two points above, stand together.
As an Evangelical, I was very familiar with “church splits”. I endured my first as a four-year old (our family and several others left the local Christian and Missionary Alliance assembly) and my wife and I stopped attending our last Evangelical church while it was in the middle of a dramatic split. I soon learned, as a new Catholic, that “splits” aren’t really part of being Catholic. I also learned that disgruntled Catholics, especially those upset about Church teaching on sexuality, authority, and the priesthood, don’t always leave the Church; on the contrary, they often simply try to take over the Church. And by “Church”, I mean both the local parish and the Church as a whole. My first big surprise, then, was finding out that while I (and many other former Protestants) had spent months and years working through Church doctrine and moral teaching, we were entering a Church apparently dominated and largely run, at least in practical terms, by Catholics complaining incessantly and obnoxiously about Church doctrine and moral teaching.
Moving toward and then into the Church, I wasn’t unaware of such problems. But the sheer scope of the situation was confounding. It helped that I had a relatively low view of the human state; I didn’t expect pews full of Catechism-quoting saints. But I had hopes that most of them knew about the Catechism and had some desire to live holy lives. And so the farmer boy arrived in the city.
It’s not surprising that Catholics sin. It is surprising how some Catholic insist certain sins are not only sins in name only but are actually virtues in disguise! It’s not shocking that many Catholics misunderstand the nature and mission of the Church. It is shocking how some Catholics deliberately distort and misrepresent the nature and mission of the mystical Body of Christ. It is not scandalous, per se, that many Catholics don’t have a close relationship with Jesus Christ. But it is scandalous when Catholics insist they don’t need Christ or his Church in order to be Catholic.
A case in point is the recent statement released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) about the status of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The CDF noted its serious concerns with long established patterns of “corporate dissent” indicating LCWR leaders often “take a position not in agreement with the Church’s teaching on human sexuality.” In fact, from its founding in the early 1970s, the Conference has thumbed its corporate nose at a host of Church teachings, including papal authority, the male priesthood, sexuality and contraception, the uniqueness of Christ, and so forth. It is the height (or depth) of irony that the LCWR site has this quote from Margaret Brennan, IHM, President from 1972 to 1973: “One danger for us is that we may become legitimators of society's commonly held values.” It ceased being a danger long ago, perhaps even before the quote was uttered. The CDF also highlighted the deep influence of radical feminist theology within the LCWR, and the undermining of the fundamental and “revealed doctrines of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the inspiration of Sacred Scripture.” Details!
To judge by the mainstream news, the Vatican has been forcibly removing old nuns from convents and shuttling them to live beneath bridges and overpasses in southern Utah. One headline declared, “Vatican targets US nuns' reps”; another darkly stated, “Vatican condemns American nuns for liberal stances”. None of this surprising, of course, as the secular media is fixated on sensationalism, conflict, and opposition to traditional Christian teachings. You won’t see a headline stating, “Vatican offered LCWR a chance to save itself from self-inflicted death.” It would not fit the narrative, even if it fits the facts: the average age of LCWR women religious is at least twice that of those women religious in the CMSWR (Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious). Instead there are delicious sound bites, such as when Sister Simone Campbell, head of the lefty Network (named directly by the CDF), tells NPR it’s all about out-of-touch men in the Vatican who “are not used to strong women” and then blithely—arrogantly, really—says:
Women get it first and then try to explain it to the guys who - I mean, as the women did to the Apostles. So, we will try to explain it to the guys. We'll keep up our roles from the Scriptures.
Because every good Scripture scholar know that what Mary Magdalene and the other women did, to their eternal credit, was publicly thumb their noses at the Apostles' teachings and actions!
What the media also won’t say (again, understandably) is the situation with the LCWR is about a crisis of faith that has been festering and spreading for decades as an affront to genuine Church authority. One result of this crisis of faith is, I think, a laity weary, numb, angry, or simply confused. How to make sense of it? Stepping back as much as possible, one can situate it somewhere in the stream of parasitical, self-loathing, and self-righteous pseudo-religiosity that may be best defined as “modern, pantheistic-secularist liberalism”. Its heaven is earth; its authority is self (wrongly identified as “conscience”); its goals are horizontal (“social justice”); its rhetoric is both morally charged and completely bankrupt. “When you set out to reform a people, a group, who have done nothing wrong,” opined the endlessly opining Joan Chittister about the CDF statement, “you have to have an intention, a motivation that is not only not morally based, but actually immoral.” This is the same woman who praised and eulogized the radical, lesbian, Church-hating Mary Daly, saying Daly’s work “was an icon to women”. She fails completely, by any decent standard, to comprehend the meaning of “immoral”.
But this, I’ve learned, is the way of heresy within the Church, going back to the very beginning (think, for example, of Paul’s fight for the Galatians): to abuse trust and power, to misuse language, to undermine genuine authority, to dismiss essential truths, to claim the morally superior ground, to be a victim but never a martyr, and to distract and deflect at all costs.
The Second Surprise: The Good
This past Thursday marked the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the Chair of Peter, despite the assurances of the usual suspects with unusually suspect intuition. This was a moment of great joy for me; Cardinal Ratzinger had long been a favorite theologian and author. His books helped me in becoming Catholic and they’ve helped me in becoming a better thinking and, hopefully, better living Catholic.
But, of course, just as the narrative about the LCWR presents disobedience as goodness, the narrative about Benedict XVI has often been as follows: an angry, narrow-minded, Nazi-sympathizing reactionary is now Pope, and he is intent on dragging the Church back to the dreaded Dark Ages. Perhaps some of this utterly banal silliness could be forgiven in the first week following the election. But since then it has reflected unlearned arrogance (a media specialty), or petulant and personal smearing (a media delight), or slovenly regurgitation of falsehoods (a media habit). Or all three (a media trinity).
I won’t bother with an apologetic. Simply read the man’s writings. And if you haven’t read the recently published collection, Fundamental Speeches From Five Decades (Ignatius Press, 2012), which contains a fabulous talk given in 1970, when then Fr. (and Professor) Joseph Ratzinger was just about my own age now, forty three or so. The talk was titled, “Why I am still in the Church”. It begins with a nuanced and thoughtful reflection on the confusion faced by many Catholics in the years after the Council, which Ratzinger described as “this remarkable Tower of Babel situation”. He noted some Catholics wish to make the Church into their own image, reflecting their desires and goals, not those of the Church herself. Behind all of the struggles over what the Church “should be”, Ratzinger said, is a “crucial” point: “the crisis of faith, which is the actual nucleus of the process”.
Then, answering the question implicit in his talk’s title, he said:
I am in the Church because, despite everything, I believe that she is at the deepest level not our but precisely “his” Church. To put it concretely: It is the Church that, despite all the human foibles of the people in her, gives us Jesus Christ, and only through her can we receive him as a living, authoritative reality that summons and endows me here and now. … This elementary acknowledgement has to be made at the start: Whatever infidelity there is or may be in the Church, however true it is that she constantly needs to be measured anew by Jesus Christ, still there is ultimately no opposition between Christ and Church. It is through the Church that he remains alive despite the distance of history, that he speaks to us today, is with us today as master and Lord, as our brother who unites us all as brethren. And because the Church, and she alone, gives us Jesus Christ, causes him to be alive and present in the world, gives birth to him again in every age in the faith and prayer of the people, she gives mankind a light, a support, and a standard without which mankind would be unimaginable. Anyone who wants to find the presence of Jesus Christ in mankind cannot find it contrary to the Church but only in her.
And therein lies the answer to the question that opened this essay, the question presented to me not long before I became Catholic. How could I join a Church that tells me how to think? How could I not join the Church founded by Jesus Christ, the household of his Father, infused with life by her soul, the Holy Spirit? How could I think—or desire, or choose, or will—to do otherwise? And how can I, given the grace to be a Catholic, not stand up for my mother, the Church? “Because she is our mother, she is also our teacher in the faith” (CCC 169). She teaches us how to think because, alone, we know not how. Or why. Or Who.
You wrote:
“He has the book . I gave him Ligouri’s book myself so don’t accuse him of going to any anti catholic site .”
That’s a pity because that means he deceptively edited the quotes himself. Thanks for stipulating that with your post.
“He has the entire book and the book is to old for copyright so he can post lots of it straight from the book .”
Yes, he can post “lots”. Strange that he can’t seem to post complete quotes. Why do you think that is?
“The only thing mindless about it is the trash that is in the book that so many people believe .”
No matter what “many people believe” it would still be wrong to deceptively cut the quotes. Do anti-Catholics consider it to be morally justified to be dishonest?
“Oh and by the way the book has a stamp of approval from the catholic church too”
No reason why it shouldn’t. Does the deceptive quote cutting of such a book have your sect’s stamp of approval or is that something left up to the individual sectarian?
“Your accusing him of lifting stuff off of anti catholic sites sounds an awful lot like projection to me .”
Well, I will no longer ask him about that since you have already admitted that he has the book and - as you have now tacitly admitted - is deceptively quoting the book entirely on his own. Thank you for so graciously stepping forward and confirming that anti-Catholics are dishonest people who will not hesitate to stoop so low as to deceptively cut words from quotes in attacking the Catholic Church. You have been more of a help to me than you probably realize. Thanks.
You know we don’t think like you
We don’t hate Catholics
We don’t spend countless hours on these boards showing you things because we hate you
We do it because we want you to open your eyes
We do it because we don’t want to see you lost
JUst because someone doesn’t agree with you doesn’t mean we hate you
If we hated you we would not bother to say anything to you
Oh but we do know how you feel about us
It spews forth on your post
Here why don’t you tell these people they don’t know how to spell mo’s name too
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/mohamed-the-messenger-of-allah-465442.html
and you can tell this guy that he doesn’t know how to spell his own name while you are at it too
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mhefeeda/
but then you could have just clicked the link I gave you before and it would have showed you a bunch more ways to spell it since they are just transliterations of the same Arabic name.
Ever see how many different ways they spell Hussein?
May God bless you and yours!
May God bless you and yours nevertheless.
The Tridentine Mass is more widely available already and will be increasingly available as time goes by and as today’s young seminarians are ordained. God bless you and yours!
Catholics always like to trot out the name of Bathsheba as being queen during the reign of king Solomon but never mention king David’s mother Nitzevet who was never queen even though she was the mother of David. If it were true that the mother of the king was the queen Nitzevet would have been the queen in David’s kingdom.. You really need to start reading the Bible,... Seriously... even once will do you god.
David Had 8 wives (2 Samuel 3:2-5,) plus Michal and Bathsheba).
Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. So which one was Solomon going to pick as his Queen?, Duh His mother as was the normal practice.
Did Ligouri say it or not? Do you dispute that he said it? Is there other reference to like attitudes and quotes from others in the Catholic faith. Of course there is and yes he did. No one other than a Catholic would claim they get things from Mary. If you dispute what he said show how he meant it other than what I claim.
Not only that but it’s the typical way many try to get out of facing the fact that what we say about what the Catholics believe is true and contained in the RCC documents. This whole “lifted off of anti-Catholic websites” meme gets old. Why not discuss the information? If you believe the information to be wrong show how it’s wrong. I’ll readily admit that I’m “anti-Catholic”. I view it as a cult which has perverted the teachings of scripture. They can’t defend their beliefs from scripture.
So how about you show us where what he said is not what he said? You claim the quote is “lifted” to try to portray that what he said is not what we think he meant. Can you show that he meant something different than what he said?
Are you serious,satan did not know God would become incarnate with Christ at this time and did not know this until after the resurrection
satan had thought he won victory over Christ when Christ died on the cross and it was not until after the Resurrection that he could have fully known Christ was God Incarnate ,and at that time satan knew his time here on earth is short.
1 Corinthians 2:8 backs this up..
"Which none of the princes of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory."-1 Corinthians 2:8
This is EXACTLY the whole point, mitch5501. THANK YOU. Please read, stfassisi. And prayerfully, you will understand.
You wrote:
“You know we don’t think like you”
What I know is that deceptively cut quotes were posted. Why?
“We don’t hate Catholics”
So love necessitates deceptively cut quotes be posted? What kind of love is that?
“We don’t spend countless hours on these boards showing you things because we hate you”
So what does spending hours on this board posting deceptively cut quotes and then avoiding basic questions about them show?
“We do it because we want you to open your eyes”
My eyes are open. That’s exactly how I knew deceptively cut quotes were posted. So, if someone won’t come clean about what he did - posting deceptively cut quotes - whose eyes really are not open?
“We do it because we don’t want to see you lost”
I’m not lost. And again, if someone won’t come clean about what he did - posting deceptively cut quotes - who really is lost here?
“JUst because someone doesn’t agree with you doesn’t mean we hate you”
So if someone acts dishonestly towards me, and repeatedly refuses to take responsibility for it, is that a sign of love? What kind of love is that?
“If we hated you we would not bother to say anything to you”
So, again, posting deceptively cut quotes, and then refusing to take responsibility for them, is an act of love according to you? What kind of love is that?
“Oh but we do know how you feel about us
It spews forth on your post”
I am not being dishonest toward you nor am I refusing to take responsibility for what I have done. I freely admit I hate the dishonesty, lack of accountability, and generally low personal morality I see in lying, deceptive, anti-Catholics. If you see that in my posts, good. And hating deception, cowardice, and mean-spiritedness so deep it results in public lying, is simply not wrong.
Why were the quotes deceptively cut? When will someone take responsibility and admit he deceptively cut the quotes?
You wrote:
“Here why don’t you tell these people they don’t know how to spell mo’s name too”
Nope. I’ll just let the dictionary you youself cited continue to stand against you. I think it is far more telling that you contradicted the very source you cited as evidence in your favor than that a UK newspaper used a non-standard spelling. It doesn’t matter that the newspaper agreed with you. It only matters that you didn’t agree with your own evidence.
You wrote:
“Did Ligouri say it or not?”
Is what you posted the full quote? If not, then no, he never said it that way. Deceptively quoting someone can be tantamount to actually inventing quotes.
I’ll demonstrate using your own words:
This...
“No one other than a Catholic would claim they get things from Mary.”
...is dramatically different than this...
“No... Catholic would claim they get things from Mary.”
It’s only four words different, but it has an entirely different sense doesn’t it? Even you should be able to admit that point.
By the way, when you wrote this: “No one other than a Catholic would claim they get things from Mary” you were wrong in any case. Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and even some Protestants claim they “get things” from the Virgin Mary. So, not only are you wrong about the Ligouri quotes - while still apparently unable to simply admit you cut them as Lera has tacitly admitted you have done - but you’re wrong in your own statement. Gee, you’re really not doing well here, are you?
Historical Christianity and the Early Church Fathers Understood satan’s lack of knowledge about Christ before the Crucifixion as well
From Saint Leo the Great (6th century)
“That God might deliver humanity from the bonds of the death-bringing transgression, He concealed the power of Christ’s majesty from the fury of the devil(1 Cor 2:8) and offered him instead the infirmity of our lowliness. For had this proud and cruel enemy known the plan of God’s mercy, he would have striven rather to temper with mildness the hearts of (those who crucified Christ) rather than to inflame them with evil hate, so that he might not lose the slavery of all his captives, while he pursued the liberty of the one who owed him nothing.”-Saint Leo the Great
This ought to make perfect sense to anyone!
You wrote:
“Not only that but it’s the typical way many try to get out of facing the fact that what we say about what the Catholics believe is true and contained in the RCC documents.”
That is an entirely false statement. I never doubted that Ligouri wrote a book, The Glories of Mary. I pointed out that the quotes from it were deceptively cut and even posted the complete quote which showed the ones you posted were inaccurate representations to say the least. But why let a full quote get in the way of an anti-Catholic attack, right?
“This whole “lifted off of anti-Catholic websites” meme gets old.”
Gets old? Is that an admission that you have done it before? Maybe it “gets old” because anti-Catholics have a habit of doing it so often. Let’s demonstrate. Take your deceptively cut quote:
“.......We often more quickly obtain what we ask by calling on the name of Mary than by invoking that of Jesus.....” She...is our Salvation, our Life, our Hope, our Counsel, our Refuge, our Help”
Now, that’s exactly how you posted it in post #144. I cut and pasted it into google just as you had it. What came up? Two types of webpages: 1) anti-Catholic webpages, and 2) actual google books of Ligouri’s Glories of Mary.
Here’s the first point, however. ALL of the anti-Catholic webpages - ALL OF THEM on the first page of google - fail to mention that Ligouri is quoting St. Anselm.
Second point: This anti-Catholic website has the quote verbatim as you had it just with none of the extra and non-standard caps you used:
‘We often more quickly obtain what we ask by calling on the name of Mary than by invoking that of Jesus.’ ‘She … is our salvation, our life, our hope, our counsel, our refuge and our help’ (pp. 254, 257). http://www.hissheep.org/catholic/the_cult_of_mary.html
This one too:
‘We often more quickly obtain what we ask by calling on the name of Mary than by invoking that of Jesus.’ ‘She … is our salvation, our life, our hope, our counsel, our refuge and our help’ (pp. 254, 257). http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=22347
Then here, a poster named pagan66, quotes it just as you did WITH THE CAPS JUST AS YOU HAVE THEM!:
“We often more quickly obtain what we ask by calling on the name of Mary than by invoking that of Jesus. She…is our Salvation, our Life, our Hope, our Counsel, our Refuge, our Help” (The Glories of Mary by Bishop Alphonse de Ligouri (Brooklyn: Redemptorist Fathers, pp. 254, 257).
He even says “This is seen by the statement by Bishop Liqouri” before the quote while you wrote a startling similar, “Statement by catholic Bishop Liqouri” before the quote. http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/reports-of-the-popes-death-within-a-year-vatican-assassination-fears-revealed/
Interesting, no? And look at those caps again: “...Salvation, our Life, our Hope, our Counsel, our Refuge, our Help.” Strange that caps would be used by you and pagan66 since caps like that appear in none of the editions of the book, huh? But they do appear on anti-Catholic websites:
“This is seen by the statement by Bishop Liqouri “We often more quickly obtain what we ask by calling on the name of Mary than by invoking that of Jesus. She...is our Salvation, our Life, our Hope, our Counsel, our Refuge, our Help” (The Glories of Mary by Bishop Alphonse de Ligouri (Brooklyn: Redemptorist Fathers, pp. 254, 257).” http://www.letusreason.org/RC7.htm
Strange isn’t it? You claim you got the quote out of the book, but the book never NEVER uses caps in the quote your posting. Yet anti-Catholic websites do use caps like that. Imagine that. And anti-Catholic websites often say “statement” from Bishop Ligouri before the quote - just like you did. Nothing like that appears in the actual book, however. In fact, as mentioned above, Ligouri was quoting St. Anselm - and he does it TWICE in the book and names St. Anselm as the author of the quote and uses quote marks as well. And caps are not used as you used them.
I think it is obvious why you don’t want to talk about the source of the quote. The fact that, in your version of the quote, St. Anselm is not mentioned, the fact that caps are used when they don’t EVER appear in the original book that way, the fact that a number of anti-Catholic websites have the quote verbatim as you have it (at times even including the caps which DO NOT APPEAR IN THE ORIGINAL) all show the source of the quotes was not the actual book, but an anti-Catholic website. Yet Lera says otherwise. He says you got it from the book passed on by him to you. So, which one of you is telling the truth?
“Why not discuss the information? If you believe the information to be wrong show how it’s wrong.”
I already did. Post #151
“I’ll readily admit that I’m “anti-Catholic”.”
I think we all knew that already. The question is when will you admit the source of the quote?
“I view it as a cult which has perverted the teachings of scripture. They can’t defend their beliefs from scripture.”
That’s rich when it is becoming all the more obvious you lifted the quote from an anti-Catholic website. Do you not believe what you do on earth can be seen by God?
After having read the initial article, I do not find the author convincing in the least.
Why didnt he join the Orthodox or Mormons who make the same claims of exclusive authority?
You wrote:
“So how about you show us where what he said is not what he said?”
Ligouri was quoting St. Anselm. Why didn’t you mention that when you quoted him?
“You claim the quote is “lifted” to try to portray that what he said is not what we think he meant.”
Read post #217. At this point there can be no doubt that you “lifted” the quote. Also, the way the quotes were deceptively cut show that in fact he meant something different than what you’re claiming. That is obvious and irrefutable. I already demonstrated that when I posted the full quotes. That’s probably why you won’t use those quotes, right?
“Can you show that he meant something different than what he said?”
I already conclusively showed - using his own words - that he meant something radically different than you were implying. It is not what “he said” but what you failed to post that he said that is key. I also demonstrated that with your own wrods. Remember?
Is this:
“No one other than a Catholic would claim they get things from Mary.”
the same as this:
“No... Catholic would claim they get things from Mary.”
No, the two statements are not the same. And I guarantee no one would find it honest for someone to take a quote that says “No one other than a Catholic” and change it to “No... Catholic” but that is exactly the sort of thing you have posted.
Because their claims don’t work.
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