"Catholicism would ultimately be the strongest, most stubborn bastion of conservative, religious truth in the United States."
"Despite sexual abuses, liturgy wars, and episcopal malfeasance, the Church retains its magisterial authority and serves as a bastion of traditional, objective religious truth."
Which you can only wish was the case for the last 60 years, for in reality Catholicism is an admixture of mostly liberal and semi liberal members (as Rome manifestly considers them) and a minority of sects of conservatives, while those who most strongly esteem Scripture as the accurate and wholly inspired word of God, with its basic literal hermeneutic, have long testified to being far more conservative and unified in polled core beliefs and values than overall those whom Rome counts as members in life and in death . Which even includes proabortion prohomosexual public figures. And if you think those RCs who reject the pope or who call him a heretic are guilty of departing from the Catholic faith, then you could try to tell them.
And as another poster delineated:
so-called traditional Catholics have split themselves into almost as many sects as Protestants have. There are:
1. Church Militant who chastise the Bishops but not the Pope
2. The Wanderer supporters
3. The Remnant led by the brother of the publisher of The Wanderer who now disowns The Wanderer
4. The SSPX
5. Those that believe the SSPX is a valid Catholic organization but aren't members.
6. Those who believe the SSPX is in apostasy
7. Those former members of the SSPX that believe Fellay is too deferential to the Pope
8. Sedevacantists who believe Francis is the first anti-Pope or non-Pope
9. Sedevacantists who believe John XXIII was the first anti-pope or non-Pope and that the Second Vatican Council is invalid
10. Those that believe in various conspiracy theories that the Church is now completely controlled by: The Vatican Bank, Gays, Masons, Space Aliens, the Illuminati or some combination of the above
11. Various groups of reasonable Catholics who either quietly or on record disagree with the Pope but are unwilling to go all the way and call him a heretic
12. Various groups of reasonable Catholics who are willing to call the Pope a heretic but are also willing to wait for the process of replacement to unfold in an orderly manner
(NOTE: Church Militant may have changed its position recently to be more directly in opposition to the Pope but I haven't kept track.)
And as another poster wryly summed it,
The last time the church imposed its judgment in an authoritative manner on "areas of legitimate disagreement," the conservative Catholics became the Sedevacantists and the Society of St. Pius X, the moderate Catholics became the conservatives, the liberal Catholics became the moderates, and the folks who were excommunicated, silenced, refused Catholic burial, etc. became the liberals. The event that brought this shift was Vatican II; conservatives then couldn't handle having to actually obey the church on matters they were uncomfortable with, so they left. ” - Nathan, https://christopherblosser.wordpress.com/2005/05/16/fr-michael-orsi-on-different-levels-of-catholic-teaching (original http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com/blog/2005/05/fr-michael-orsi-on-different-levels-of.html)
Thus we have, Is Catholicism about to break into three?
Archbishop Viganò: We Are Witnessing Creation of a ‘New Church ’
The SSPX's Relationship with Francis: Is it Traditional? post #6
Is the Catholic Church in De Facto Schism?
The Impossibility of Judging or Deposing a True Pope...If Francis is a true Pope …
"[Catholicism’s] destructive power has resulted from this: that it has not been the invention of any one cunning and hostile mind, but a gradual growth, modified by hundreds or thousands of its cultivators, who were the most acute, learned, selfish, and anti-Christian spirits of their generations, perpetually retouched and adapted to every weakness and every attribute of depraved human nature, until it became the most skillful and pernicious system of error which the world has ever known. "
Which would be consistent with the modern adaptations which TradCaths rail against.
"Nevertheless, Dabney was wise enough to recognize that the character and qualities of the Church—however pernicious he might view them—were attractive to many people, including American Protestants."
Well of course: every cults usually excels in areas in which generally doctrinal sound churches neglect. Mormons have their strong families and authorities., etc.
"“When the atheistic doctrine begins to bear its natural fruits of license, insubordination, communism, and anarchy…democratic Protestantism does not know how to rebuke them.”"
Actually while Rome and liberal Prots were engaging in liberal revisionism - which notes and helps in your official Bible for America has provided for 60 years - and promoting Marxism, the fundamental/evangelicals were at the forefront of exposing and combating such.
Daniel1212, your posts are always instructive, thoroughly thought out, and solidly backed with legitimate sources.
May God grant you a long life such that you may stand for Him ever longer into the future.
Thank you, brother.
The Protestants, on the other hand, began splitting up almost immediately after the beginning of the Reformation.
My earlier comments regarding the fracturing within the Church were not to imply that the Catholic Church is no different than all the Protestant sects, of which there are more in number than the sands on the world's beaches it seems.
It was just to rue the present condition. I think the reason for so much difference of opinion within the Church is due to the twin dogmas of "apostolic succession" and "no change in Church teaching". We are put in a bind where we have to believe that what is now being taught is somehow compatible with long held teachings, or that we lost apostolic succession with the election of John XXIII.
There is a group who believes that as long as there is a placeholder "pope" that apostolic succession is retained and we can "recognize and resist", i.e. count the recent "popes" as Popes while disagreeing with their redefinitions and sacrilegious acts. This to me appears to be too clever by half.
There are a number of important choices that one must make when one decides to join up with a group. If you work for a corporation that was perfectly normal, but then decides to get woke, do you speak up and risk getting fired, stay quiet, or just quit and put you and your family at financial risk? Especially if every other firm in your industry has simultaneously gone woke.
When you decide to join a particular church, similar choices have to be made. If your church starts veering toward heresy do you speak up and risk being separated, not just from the church, but from all of the individuals who may be close friends and family? Do you stay quiet and hope the course will be corrected? Or do you leave and go to yet another church which may also be heading in the wrong direction?
The easiest choice seems to be to call yourself a believer and emphasize your "personal relationship with Christ". This way you never have to worry about dealing with heresy. After all you know exactly which Bible is the best. You know exactly how to properly read those parts that have confounded theologians for millennia. You know exactly which doctrines, not specifically called out in the Bible, are ones you have to believe. Yes you can join up with fellowships, but you'll make sure to have one foot out the door in case the members fall short of your perfect understanding of God's Will.
Even better you don't even have to claim that it's your opinion or your will. You can put it all on God and the Holy Spirit. After all, you were born again in Christ and now are guided by the Holy Spirit. Anything you do is no longer your will, but God's will. You may occasionally sin, but that's OK because Jesus will see to it that you get back on track in a timely fashion.
There is a lot of dissension now on Free Republic, not of a religious nature, but of a political one. There is a big question of what does it now mean to be an American. Is there such a thing as an American, or has the term been taken over by political heretics? When talking about RINOs, there are some that say if we really want to be accurate we should call conservatives the RINOs, because the "heart and soul" (if there is one) of the Republican Party today is Romney and his ilk. Do we speak up at the next Republican Caucus and risk being silenced? Do we stay quiet and hope that sanity returns? Or do we leave and join another party or just become independents?
I notice similar traits in those who are individual believers free of any particular organized religion, and those who are Independent and free of any particular political party. They are so much more smarter than the rest of us. They see through all the facades. They will make their own decisions and support who they want regardless of affiliation.
Similar are those who have decided that America is Done (Put a fork in her!) and are busy moving to some remote part of Tennessee to prep for the next civil war. They no longer "identify as American". They are just poor schlumps stuck on a piece of land currently called the USA which may or may not last out the century or even the decade. They just need to find a safe place for themselves and their closest of kin.
Humans are social people. We can be dazzled by the individualism that we claim makes America special, but we also need to be members of larger organizations and fight to keep those organizations from rotting out.
If the only thing left is Big Government, Large Corporations, and "rugged individuals" (more like "ragged individuals") then we should know which of the three groups is going to get the short end of the stick, or the large end shoved up their butts.
You say that an awful lot. I wonder if you realize what you are admitting.
You are essentially admitting that you have no organic connection with the ancient and "original" chrstianity but are, like an archeologist or paleontologist, trying to scientifically reconstruct the long lost one true religion by referring to evidence. What if you have made a mistake? What if you have added a bone from some other animal to the neck of a giant lizard (theoretically, as I reject evolution altogether)?
First of all, any "one true religion" that fell so totally that it has to be reconstructed scientifically centuries later in this manner was never "true" to begin with.
Secondly, the first chrstians had no "acts through revelation" to consult. They had no "new testament," and even if they did they would be too expensive for everyone to own one (Zondervan and Thomas Nelson not having been around back then). Until it was written down and canonized, every single uniquely chrstian doctrine was extra-Biblical, even if only temporarily. This also shows the absurdity of the often-made claim that "the apostles themselves could only teach in accordance with ['old testament'] scripture." If that were true, no "new testament" book would have ever been written! Oh, and the scripture that the Bereans searched was also the "old testament."
Thirdly, as I often point out, you are pretending that Roman Catholicism is the only ancient form of chrstianity to develop into "baptized heathenism," and it was all because of Constantine. The Armenian church became the official established church in Armenia twelve years before Constantine legalized chrstianity. They aren't (and weren't) scripture-only Protestants. What about the Ethiopians? Did Constantine introduce "baptized heathenism" to Ethiopia? Despite its long subservience to the Coptic Church of Egypt, the Ethiopian Church has always been fairly isolated and idiosyncratic. Do you really think that every Ethiopian chrstian was a "born from above, scripture only" chrstian until 313 when Constantine snapped his fingers, magically transforming all those ancient Southern Baptists into monks??? It's a matter of historical record that what we now call monasticism began in Egypt before Constantine came along, though doubtless you will deny this for dogmatic reasons. What about the Syrians, who are ethnoculturally the closest to the Jews of ancient Israel? They were never Protestants (or proto-Protestants).
The most damning refutation of this naive belief in an "original" born again, "scripture only" chrstianity is the chrstians of Kerala on the southwest coast of India. They were supposedly converted by Thomas in the year 52 and for hundreds of years were geographically cut off from other chrstians. When they were first discovered in 1499 or 1599 this "pristine" apostolic chrstianity was not Protestant--it was Nestorian. The Nestorian church was never under the authority of the Roman Empire and had declared itself independent from the other churches at a fairly early date. So Constantine never had anything to do with them. They are similar to Protestants in only three ways: they do not use images, they don't have monks (for historical and not dogmatic reasons as they had monks at first), and they do not call Mary the "mother of g*d" (the only ancient church that doesn't do so). Other than that they have the priesthood, "the holy sacrifice," the sacraments, the set liturgical prayers, the liturgical calendar full of holidays and feast days, etc. Do you honestly believe that Constantine ruled over southeastern India? Or how about Chinese Turkestan, to which the Nestorian church once reached?
When one sees that every single ancient chrstian tradition is part of this and no traces of an "ancient Protestant church" have ever been found. Add to this that the "baptized heathens" Constantine initially made peace with were the same people who had been persecuted and in hiding, and that after Constantine there was another brief period of persecution during which they had to go hiding again, the claim that there is some sort of "trail of blood" tracing born-again Protestantism to the original chrstians is shown to be a total fantasy, cooked up because born-again Protestant theology (about which I'll not go into at this time) insists that insists that it simply must have due to its unique doctrines on sin and in how G-d deals with it.
I do not write all this to defend the ancient churches. Many many points and critiques born-again Protestantism makes against them are spot-on, though the extrapolation that the original chrstians relied only on canonized scripture is an unnecessary exaggeration. Nor do I claim that these ancient churches are identical to the original "first century chrstians." The whole story of chrstianity doesn't hold water in that there is indeed some sort of discontinuity between the original Jewish chrstians (who were probably Torah observant) and the chrstianity that developed historically (my belief is that the new religion declared the original religion heretical, and therefore is not in any sense a continuation of it).
I point this out to show that ultimately chrstianity has no leg to stand on, and there was already a true scriptural religion going all the way back to Mt. Sinai who's written scripture was governed by strict laws to ensure it would be identical to the Original Scroll.
Unfortunately you reject Judaism for the same reason you reject historical chrstianity--namely your beliefs about sin and how G-d deals with it. I know this won't make a dent in your thinking, but perhaps someone else will read it and think about it.
One day I really must explicate this unique soteriology of born-again Protestantism, but I've been at the keyboard a long time. G-d willing, I will do that some time in the future.