Furbi?
Surely you mean something other than this ... but what?
Posted on 06/30/2003 2:53:51 PM PDT by NYer
VATICAN CITY Pope John Paul II again reached out to the Orthodox Church on Sunday, saying his efforts at reconciliation weren't just "ecclesiastic courtesy" but a sign of his profound desire to unite the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.
John Paul made the comments during his regular appearance to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter's Square. Later Sunday, he welcomed a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople at a traditional Mass marking the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul.
"The exchange of delegations between Rome and Constantinople, for the respective patron feasts, goes beyond just an act of ecclesiastic courtesy," the pontiff said. "It reflects the profound and rooted intention to re-establish the full communion between East and West."
John Paul has made improving relations with the Orthodox Church a hallmark of his nearly 25-year papacy, visiting several mostly Orthodox countries and expressing regret for the wrongs committed by the Catholic Church against Orthodox Christians.
Despite his efforts at healing the 1,000-year-old schism, he hasn't yet visited Russia because of objections from the Russian Orthodox Church.
During the Mass on Sunday, 42 new archbishops received the pallium, a band of white wool decorated with black crosses that symbolizes their bond with the Vatican. Two of the archbishops received the pallium in their home parishes; the rest took part in the Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.
What's 2 3/4 by 5 inches and can scare the hell out of you?
Gotta be one of these miniature comic books put out by Chick Publications. You've probably seen them before, maybe picked one up in a phone booth or fast-food joint. Each booklet is about 20 pages long, and makes a pitch for the gospel through a dramatic story told in cartoon format.
You might be generally successful at avoiding gospel tracts, but Chick comics tend to appear under your fingers. "Over 500 million sold world-wide" boasts the homepage at www.chick.com, and at 13 cents each, would-be evangelists can scatter them like confetti. The tracts are available in nearly 100 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu; the home page itself can be read in Chinese, German, or Spanish.
The theology in these tracts is old-time Protestant, proposing that all humans sin, that the just reward of sin is hell, and that even piles of good deeds can't buy a ticket out. Only Jesus' death on the cross could pay that debt. The "Good News" is simple: stop trying to justify yourself, and accept Jesus' free gift. Thus Chick tracts are full of tatooed, stubble-chinned bikers waltzing into heaven after a tearful "sinner's prayer," while prim, self-righteous types who declined Jesus' offer are tossed into the flames. The depths of sin are displayed in lurid, if sometimes clumsy, terms. Two citizens of Noah's wicked pre-flood town have this exchange: "I love drugs. Do you?" "No, incest and murder are my thing."
The force behind Chick Publications is Jack Chick, a WW II veteran who underwent a powerful conversion experience while listening to a revival radio show. Launched from that rocket pad, his work has a revival-tent flavor, and it steps on people's toes, as evidenced by the proliferation of parody sites. In the 1980s, Canada’s attorney general called for a countrywide ban on the tracts. Still the comic tracts keep pouring out, and haven't stopped for 36 years.
The tracts are designed to solve a specific problem. Although Jesus commanded his followers to try to convert others to the faith, they hate doing it. It's embarrassing and liable to make people mad at you. But if they can be anonymous--leave a tract on a restaurant table under the tip, or in the back pocket of an airline seat--they'll do it. The whole Chick strategy is to get ordinary Christians to fulfill "the Great Commission" by enabling them to do it in their safety zone. If you've ever picked up a Chick tract, it's likely some shy evangelist left it there in hopes you would.
The Chick folks also know that people won't read a tract full of tiny words, but they will look at cartoons, and these short booklets can be read in 60 seconds. As their ad literature repeatedly insists, dramatic cartoon stories this short are well nigh impossible to resist.
Take, for instance, the tract titled "The Little Princess." On the cover is a little girl in a princess costume, carrying a jack o' lantern full of Halloween candy. But something is wrong--the girl's eyes have dark circles and beads of sweat indicate a fever.
We learn that Heidi is dying, but wants to go trick-or-treating one last time. That evening her brother Josh takes her to a few houses, including the Smiths', where she is given a Chick tract with her candy. (There are about 70 tracts, and they make cameo appearances in each other's stories.) Back in her bed Heidi reads the tract and prays, asking Jesus to be her savior.
Then Heidi has her dad invite the Smiths over, and says, "Dad, remember when you said nobody knows what happens after you die? Well, these people know." Mr. Smith begins, "I'm sure the thought of your daughter dying breaks your heart. Well, God was even more heartbroken when he sent his son from heaven to die on earth." Five minutes later Mrs. Smith tells her, "Heidi...they did it!" They, too, have accepted Jesus.
Later that night a beautiful strong angel lifts Heidi from her wasted body on the bed, and the caption below reads, "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints" (Psalm 116:15). In the next panel Heidi is running toward Jesus who kneels and extends to her his nail-scarred hands. "Welcome home, child. You will live in heaven with us forever." In the last panel Josh places Heidi's princess crown on her gravestone and says, "My little sister is in heaven because she trusted Jesus. What about you?"
Okay, yeah, I'm choked up, you wanna make something of it? These Chick folks know what they're doing. They know that a powerfully sentimental story, even one this blatant, can still give you whiplash of the heart. A cartoon story comes across in a way a theological treatise would not.
Chick is described as a professional artist, but the artwork is one of the strangest things about these comics. The quality varies from book to book, but in no case could it be called sophisticated. Facial expressions are the hardest for an artist to depict, and these stories involve extreme emotion, from anguish to rapture. The art isn't quite up to these challenges, with results that can be unintentionally creepy.
Witness the awkward facial contortions of the Davidsons, stars of "Flight 144." An un-squeamish depiction of what happens when you trust in works rather than faith for salvation, this is one of Chick's Top 10 tracts. The Davidsons are a missionary couple who have "built five schools and four hospitals, and fed and clothed thousands of dear natives" in fifty years' service in Africa. Their seatmate on the flight, Ed, has just been released from jail, where he served time for murdering a guy "in a drunken brawl." But as the plane crashes into the ocean it's apparent that the Davidsons believe they have earned heaven through their good works, while Ed, who has undergone a conversion in jail, simply trusts in God's mercy.
An angel pulls the three from their watery grave, taking Ed "to your beautiful mansion in heaven," and the Davidsons to judgment. There God, faceless on a white throne a hundred feet high, tells them good deeds have no bearing on salvation, and since they did not put their trust in Jesus (They didn't? Is this logical? What kind of missionaries are these, anyway?) they are lost. In the final panel giant angels fling the two into an abyss of fire as they scream "YAAAAAH!"
Other tracts critique Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, and other faiths, showing them as inadequate for salvation. Adherents are not personally the subject of attack, though; they're shown as regrettably misguided, not evil, and urged to join the community of Jesus. (Dialogue at the giant white throne: "But I was a very sincere Muslim." "I'm sorry, Abdul, but you were sincerely wrong.")
A tract titled "Love the Jewish People" insists that Israel is God's favored nation, and any power in history who opposed it has been crushed, a danger America now runs because of its pandering for Arab oil. Theological disagreement with Judaism is a small fraction of the message.
Members of other religions are treated with a measure of politeness, but there is one group that can't get no respect: Roman Catholics. According to Chick, the Roman operation was established by Satan solely to cheat Christians of their salvation, by teaching that good works are necessary to salvation. Monks and priests are depicted as loathsome, drunken orgiasts, enslaving simple people through fear and manipulation. The Roman church is the Whore of Babylon and a pope will be the Anti-Christ. The Eucharistic wafer is "the death cookie." Pope John Paul II at a crucifix is praying to "his dead Jesus idol." Catholics plotted the Holocaust. Jesuits killed Abraham Lincoln. On the whole, there just aren't a lot of nice things Chick can think of to say about Catholics.
Rod Dreher, now a columnist for the New York Post, was a Methodist adolescent in rural Louisiana when he ran across Chick tracts. "I thought, Here's a man unafraid to tell it like it is. I liked the lack of nuance and charity, which at that point in my confused teenage life I would have seen as evidence of backsliding."
The teenaged Dreher particularly enjoyed Chick's anti-Catholic literature. "Thinking back on it, it was fun to hate Catholicism. It fit into the general conspiracy-theory views I had developed about the world." But when he took a tract on evolution to a ninth-grade teacher, she demolished its logic and asked him what a smart kid was doing taking his view of the world from "these paranoid little comic books," Dreher says. "I came to see that that whole bloodshot way of seeing the world was in fact a shield against my desperate fear of the unknown."
Dreher concluded that Christianity was either hysteria or "timid, drippy" mainline faith and wanted no part of either. Years later he discovered an alternative, "an ancient church that produced some of the most profound art, architecture and philosophy the world has known, whose priests and laity have often led lives of radical opposition to the world and its values." He became a devout Roman Catholic.
In a world of subtle and high-tech forms of persuasion, there is something refreshingly blunt about these little comics. Stories are vivid and full of sharp contrasts; conclusions are catastrophic or astonishingly blissful. You don't put one down and wonder what it was hinting at. Chick comics don't beat around the bush. How could they? Your eternal soul is at stake.
The irony of the second-last paragraph is wonderful.
Just curious: are his tracts distributed in Russia? I know there are a lot of Fundamentalists here, who think there aren't any Christians in Russia and want to go over there and convert you.
You were rude because you cannot read or understand simple English. Don't post to me anymore.... and that is NOT an implied request... that's a real one!
There you go again. Just amazing.
The Pope is not God. Anyone who thinks so is misguided. At best.
Anyone who thinks the Catholic Church teaches so is misguided. At best.
Anyone who says the Catholic Church teaches so, knowing such to be false, is a liar.
That authors of great Russian Literature have subscribed to this falshood is no excuse for believing it.
Furbi?
Surely you mean something other than this ... but what?
You got that right, at least. And not 'til the end of time, either.
Fine by me...then war it is. I spent many years in military...not so big thing...but next time your regime fall, maybe we take note from your book and force convert all you...but some icons up in Vatican City....hmmm, to bad that not Christian. What ever, with you attitude, we fight you to end times...your dumb choice.
What the heck does that mean? Really. If you think I, or any other Catholic, has a problem with Icons ... wow. Iconoclasm has been formally condemned by Rome ever since it was invented in Constantinople. The protestants and mohammedans accuse us of worshipping statues. You want to accuse us of iconoclasm? That's just idiotic. And, of course, wrong.
And what are "Furbi" and "Fugi"? That's an honest question, asked in good faith.
There was no point except to post it. To you, that is. For your enjoyment.:-)
Two words don't mean anything, I listed peoples who try in vane to take our faith and added nonsense to demonstrate how rediculous and far ranging all groups are in spectrem...
I was curious about that and did some searching and apparently his view of the EO seems almost as bad...
"which to build doctrines and teaching far removed from Biblical truth. Others such as Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox take the Bible and incorporate it with pagan based rituals and traditions, thus making the scripture "of no effect."
"Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox claim to worship the Biblical Jesus but in practice turn Him into a wafer god worshipped and eaten by "the faithful." Thus dispensed of, He is largely replaced in practice by a pagan goddess called the Virgin Mary who becomes the advocate, mediator, and comforter."
There's probably more, but I'd rather not...
Where? Show it. Show me a single Father of the Church who said it is heresy. Quote me the Council. Don't just make wild accusations, demonstrate your point or withdraw it and admit you were wrong.
Your debating methods leave much to be desired.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.