Posted on 05/31/2013 2:44:05 PM PDT by NYer
Do our Catholic children and most adults know what these images teach?
All of us know one of the elephants in the room of the Catholic Church. Our religious education programs are not handing on the essence of our Catholic Faith, our parents are befuddled about their role in handing on the faith and the materials we use are vapid or if good do not make an impression on young minds. We are afraid of asking for memorization and thus most don't remember anything they've learned about God and Church other than some niceties and feel good emotions.
I teach each class of our grades 1-6 (we don't have 7th or 8th) each Thursday, rotating classes from week to week. For the last two years I have used Baltimore Catechism #1 as my text book. It is wonderful to use with children and it is so simple yet has so much content. If Catholics, all Catholics, simply studied Baltimore Catechism #1, we would have very knowledgeable Catholics.
These past two years I've used Baltimore Catechism #2 with our adult religious program which we call Coffee and Conversation following our 9:30 AM Sunday Mass, which coincides with our CCD program which we call PREP (Parish Religious Education Program).
This #2 book has more content and is for middle school, but upper elementary school children must have been more capable of more serious content back when this book was formulated and used through the mid 1960's because it is a great book to use with adults and not childish at all. We all use this same book as a supplemental book for the RCIA because it is so clear, nobly simple and chocked full of content!
Yes, there are some adjustments that need to be made to some chapters, but not that many, in light of Vatican II and the new emphasis we have on certain aspects of Church that are not present in the Baltimore Catechism. But these are really minor.
What is more important though is that when the Baltimore Catechism was used through the mid 1960's it was basically the only book that was used for children in elementary and junior high school. It was used across the board in the USA thus uniting all Catholics in learning the same content. There was not, in other words, a cottage industry of competing publishing houses selling new books and different content each year.
The same thing has occurred with liturgical music, a cottage industry of big bucks has developed around the sale of new hymnals, missalettes and new music put on the open market for parishes to purchase. It is a money making scheme.
Why do our bishop allow this to happen in both liturgical music and parish catechesis? The business of selling stuff to parishes and making mega bucks off of it is a scandal that has not be addressed.
In the meantime, our liturgies suffer and become fragmented because every parish uses a different resource for liturgical music and the same is true of religious formation, everyone uses something different of differing quality or no quality at all.
Isn't it time to wake up and move forward with tried and true practices that were tossed out in favor of a consumerist's approach to our faith that has weakened our liturgies, our parishes and our individual Catholics?
I know you are trying to make a point . . . but failed. We are not talking about an act of Jesus. Just some justification for the worship of Mary. I know you use the words "adore" or "revere" but let's be honest. Let's call a spade a spade. I've been to a Catholic Church before. I go by the Word of God in which it says all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God.
Yeah, you and the other 10,000,000 denominations.
Ok who decides what constitutes Scripture then? Surely, if you believe in scripture alone in order for their to be doctrinal agreement, there must be agreement on this point first.
The Gospel of Luke (c. 60 A.D.), (Luke 1:28) calls Mary “Kecharitomenae” (“Full of grace” or “perfectly graced”). Thus, when we first meet Mary in Scripture, even before she assents to become the mother of the Messiah, she is already Baptized into Christ and free of all sin.
Also the idea of Christmas being Jesus’ birthday seems like a stretch as well.
The date of Christ's birth is not dogma. The history behind how that date was arrived at, goes back to ancient times.
Ruidoso, NM
“Just some justification for the worship of Mary”
Which we don’t teach.
“I’ve been to a Catholic Church before”
Did you stay in a Holiday inn express too?
I was severely criticised for commenting on very lengthy posts some time ago. I doubt if anyone reads them.
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Unless you concede that that was a rhetorical point and not an absolute statement you have to conclude that Jesus too sinned.
Peace be with you
Your post is wrong. My post was a jab at your bipolar friend for making posts that take up the entire screen.
Given his level of animosity I should have been able to guess this. Thank you for letting me know. It explains so much about his personality disorders
Nowhere. Now as to the definition of Church, we would have a divergence in thought. Mine would be more etheral whereas you think of the worldly manmade institution you call the Catholic Church. Tell me, did your Church really put Galileo under house arrest and threaten him for asserting the world was round rather than flat as your Church officials taught?
"Understanding this first, that no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation. For prophecy came not by the will of man at any time: but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Ghost." 2 Peter 1:20-21
"And account the longsuffering of our Lord, salvation; as also our most dear brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, hath written to you: As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction." 2 Peter 3:15-16
You do realize exactly who St. Paul was instructing in your citation, or don't you?
So, you’re saying Jesus was wrong.
That’s a myth:
“Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St. Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed amongst the apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecciesiasticus, as is plain from the Protogus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned as canonical. For the words as well of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. Now, according to his judgment, in the epistle to the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, these books (and any other like books in the canon of the Bible) are not canonical, that is, not in the nature of a rule for confirming matters of faith. Yet, they may be called canonical, that is, in the nature of a rule for the edification of the faithful, as being received and authorised in the canon of the Bible for that purpose. By the help of this distinction thou mayest see thy way clearly through that which Augustine says, and what is written in the provincial council of Carthage.” (Cardinal Cajetan, “Commentary on all the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament,” cited by William Whitaker in “A Disputation on Holy Scripture,” Cambridge: Parker Society (1849), p. 424)
The earliest Latin version of the Bible in modern times, made from the original languages by the scholarly Dominican, Sanctes Pagnini, and published at Lyons in 1528, with commendatory letters from Pope Adrian VI and Pope Clement VII, sharply separates the text of the canonical books from the text of the Apocryphal books. Still another Latin Bible, this one an addition of Jerome’s Vulgate published at Nuermberg by Johannes Petreius in 1527, presents the order of the books as in the Vulgate but specifies at the beginning of each Apocryphal book that it is not canonical. Furthermore, in his address to the Christian reader the editor lists the disputed books as ‘Libri Apocryphi, sive non Canonici, qui nusquam apud Hebraeos extant’ (Bruce Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford, 1957), p. 180).
Hippo and Carthage were regional. The only ecumenical council on the matter, Trullo, endorsed canons ranging from Athanasius all the way to canons that included 3 Maccabees and books not today considered canonical by the RCC. The majority view in the West throughout the middle ages was that of Jerome’s, with the apocrypha only serving a role as “brought forward for the edification of the people,” but not “for the confirmation of the faith.”
The New Testament that is accepted by all, on the other hand, even when resisted by a few groups, was used and accepted by the entire church from the beginning.
What do you think it teaches, since you’re obviously reading it for the first time, even though you claim to be a fallen away Catholic?
Sorry if the Great Commission offends you.
Learn how to properly format, not just cut and paste.
Scripture is complicated and legalistic.
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