Catholicism is not popular in China because the underground churches where Christ is flourishing don’t have priests and popes to tell them what to believe. They have The Bible. Therein lies their faith. No silly church traditions. No worshiping Mary and other dead humans. Christ alone.
I haven’t read anything as remotely ill-informed and silly as that remark in a long time.
where in the catechism of the catholic church are we taught to “worship” mary or dead humans?
Exactly.
I know a chinese-american woman whose parents raised her with Chinese spiritual beliefs. She had a little shrine in her house, of some sort. I asked her what her family actually worshipped. She had never thought about it, she just did it. So she went and asked her father about it. He said, “we worship our ancestors”. I told her that we Catholics had a special reverence for and closeness to our ancestors in faith— the Saints. Eventually my friend married a Catholic chinese-american.
I think maybe the Chinese would find Catholicism very comforting, precisely because of the heritage involved. They might find a faith without “silly traditions” to be very un-chinese.
>They have The Bible. Therein lies their faith.<
.
Yeah. And every city block will have their “own true” interpretation of that bible.
Hundreds of them.
“Catholicism is not popular in China because the underground churches where Christ is flourishing don’t have priests and popes to tell them what to believe.”
Abortion and contraception - which are the defacto law in China - that’s why Protestantism is more popular.
Dr. Thorne, perhaps you are unfamiliar with Hong Xiuquan. He was a Chinese man who had to learn about Christianity directly from the bible. He accomplished many great things, as he purged demons from China. His record is far from evil; he may well have laid the ground work for later Christians. But he got caught up in a war that resulted in more deaths than either World War... 20 million directly killed; 50 million eventually died. He also inspired Mao Tse-Tung.
From Wikipedia, “The Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping.”
The movement’s founder, Hong Xiuquan, had tried and failed to earn his shengyuan civil service degree numerous times. After one such failure in 1836, Hong overheard a Chinese Protestant missionary (Liang Fa) preaching and took home some Chinese translations of Bible tracts which had been translated by Robert Morrison, including a pamphlet titled “Good Words for Exhorting the Age” by Liang Fa. “Hong and his cousin were both baptized in accordance with Liang’s directions.[9] The missionary was probably Edwin Stevens of New England, who operated illegally in China.[10] In 1843, after Hong’s final failure at the exams, he had what some regard as a nervous breakdown and others as a mystical revelation, connecting his in-depth readings of the Christian tracts to strange dreams he had been having for the past six years. In his dreams, a bearded man with golden hair and a black robe called himself Jehovah, gave him a sword, and taught him to slay demons beside a younger man whom Hong addressed as “Elder Brother”.[11]
Hong Xiuquan came to believe that the figures in his dreams were God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son, and that they were revealing his destiny as a slayer of demons and the leader of a new Heavenly Kingdom on Earth.[12] The demons were later interpreted by him to be the Qing and false religions.
Hong developed a literalist understanding of the Bible, producing a set of his own annotations. He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, saying “God is the Father and embodies myriads of phenomena; Christ is the Son, who was manifest in the body... The Wind of the Holy Spirit, God, is also a Son... God is one who gives shapes to things, molds things into forms, who created heaven and created earth, who begins and ends all things, yet has no beginning or end himself...” and “God and the Savior are one.”[13]
“Christ is flourishing don’t have priests and popes to tell them what to believe. They have The Bible. Therein lies their faith. No silly church traditions. No worshiping Mary and other dead humans. Christ alone.”
I thought it was more related to being able to abort a child, desert a wife/family, engage in homosexual behavior, and all that other stuff protestants allow that Catholics don’t...