Posted on 09/30/2003 9:32:47 AM PDT by Fifthmark
Protestantism is founded on many lies: (1) That Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did not create a visible, hierarchical Church. (2) That there is no authority given by Our Lord to the Pope and his bishops and priests to govern and to sanctify the faithful. (3) That each believer has an immediate and personal relationship with the Savior as soon as he makes a profession of faith on his lips and in his heart, therefore being perpetually justified before God. (4) Having been justified by faith alone, a believer has no need of an intermediary from a non-existent hierarchical priesthood to forgive him his sins. He is forgiven by God immediately when he asks forgiveness. (5) This state of justification is not earned by good works. While good works are laudable, especially to help unbelievers convert, they do not impute unto salvation. Salvation is the result of the profession of faith that justifies the sinner. (6) That grace is merely, in the words of Martin Luther, the snowflakes that cover up the "dungheap" that is man. (7) That there is only one source of Divine Revelation, Sacred Scripture. (8) That each individual is his own interpreter of Sacred Scripture. (9) That there is a strict separation of Church and State. Princes, to draw from Luther himself, may be Christians but it is not as a Christian that they ought to rule. These lies have permutated in thousands of different directions. However, they have sewn the fabric of the modern state and popular culture for nearly 500 years (I shudder to think how the Vatican is going to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther's posting his 95 theses on the church doors in Wittenberg fourteen years from now).
Here below are explanations of these lies and their multifaceted implications for the world in which we live:
(1-2) The contention that Our Lord did not create a visible, hierarchical church vitiates the need for a hierarchical, sacerdotal priesthood for the administration of the sacraments. It is a rejection of the entirety of the history of Christianity prior to the Sixteenth Century. It is a denial of the lesson taught us by Our Lord by means of His submission to His own creatures, Saint Joseph and the Blessed Mother, in the Holy Family of Nazareth that each of us is to live our entire lives under authority, starting with the authority of the Vicar of Christ and those bishops who are in full communion with him. The rejection of the visible, hierarchical church is founded on the prideful belief that we are able to govern ourselves without being directed by anyone else on earth. This contention would lead in due course to the rejection of any and all religious belief as necessary for individuals and for societies. Luther and Calvin paved the way for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution that followed so closely the latter's deification of man.
(3-6) Baptism is merely symbolic of the Christian's desire to be associated with the Savior in the amorphous body known as the Church. What is determinative of the believer's relationship with Christ is his profession of faith. As the believer remains a reprobate sinner, all he can do is to seek forgiveness by confessing his sins privately to God. This gives the Protestant of the Lutheran strain the presumptuous sense that there is almost nothing he can do to lose his salvation once he has made his profession of faith in the Lord Jesus. There is thus no belief that a person can scale the heights of personal sanctity by means of sanctifying grace. It is impossible, as Luther projected from his own unwillingness to cooperate with sanctifying grace to overcome his battles with lust, for the believer to be anything other than a dungheap. Thus a Protestant can sin freely without for once considering that he has killed the life of sanctifying grace in his soul, thereby darkening his intellect and weakening the will and inclining himself all the more to sin-and all the more a vessel of disorder and injustice in the larger life of society.
(7-8) The rejection of a visible, hierarchical Church and the rejection of Apostolic Tradition as a source of Divine Revelation protected by that Church leads in both instances to theological relativism. Without an authoritative guide to interpret Divine Revelation, including Sacred Scripture, individual believers can come to mutually contradictory conclusions about the meaning of passages, the precise thing that has given rise to literally thousands of Protestant sects. And if a believer can reduce the Bible, which he believes is the sole source of Divine Revelation, to the level of individual interpretation, then there is nothing to prevent anyone from doing the same with all written documents, including the documents of a nation's founding. If the plain words of Scripture can be deconstructed of their meaning, it is easy to do so, say, with the words of a governmental constitution. Theological relativism paved the way for moral relativism. Moral relativism paved the way for the triumph of positivism and deconstructionism as normative in the realm of theology and that of law and popular culture.
(9) The overthrow of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ as it was exercised by His true Church in the Middle Ages by the Protestant concept of the separation of Church and State is what gave rise to royal absolutism in Europe in the immediate aftermath of Luther's handiwork. Indeed, as I have noted any number of times before, it is arguably the case that the conditions that bred resentment on the part of colonists in English America prior to 1776 might never have developed if England had remained a Catholic nation. The monarchy would have been subject in the Eighteenth Century to same constraints as it had in the Tenth or Eleventh Centuries, namely, that kings and queens would have continued to understand that the Church reserved unto herself the right to interpose herself in the event that rulers had done things-or proposed to do things-that were contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law and/or were injurious of the cause of the sanctification and salvation of the souls of their subjects. The overthrow of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ deposited power first of all in the hands of monarchs eager to be rid of the "interference" of the Church and ultimately in the hands of whoever happened to hold the reins of governmental power in the modern "democratic" state. Despotism has been the result in both cases
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlecatholic.com ...
I do not have a comprehensive list of all the things that CATHOLICS manage to disagree upon.
Could you enlighten me by posting one?
Father Bernard Kramer in "Book of Destiny" says that the woman in Rev. 13 is not Mary. The book has an imprimatur.
I believe his position was that the woman in Rev. 13 is the church and the 12 stars represent the apostles. Is there a source where the church proclaims definitively that the woman in Rev. 13 is Mary?
You mean it was THAT much later????
Uh, no. Not quite right. Certain Protestants want to say this or that. And Catholicism renounces anything not Catholic. But what's Catholic covers a lot of ground. I would say you just don't have different names for all the disperate beliefs, that isn't true, there are different rites and different beliefs not only from one region or country to the next but from one church to the next - evidenced in extensive discussions with other Catholics and ex-catholics and documented even in threads on this site.
I say that Protestants and Catholics alike have fallen into the same lie - that of believing they have the authority to combine the covenant with their philosophies and pretend their philosophies are an ammendment to the covenant. Both decieve themselves. One cannot serve two masters for he will prize one and hate the other. One cannot serve God and philosophy. It's one or the other. And if one wants to see who is being served, attack the philosophy and then attack scripture. Scripture takes a back seat and is minimized for importance in defending the philosophy. Thus the master is betrayed.
Shall we pick a few bits of philosophy that are renounced by scripture? Easy ones. Let's try, Peter in Rome for the writing of his first Epistle - my favorite. Scripture belies it and not without flourish. Some of you know what's coming. Don't give it away. I want to see him defend it.. lol
Ah, I now understand you're role. You are the designated ankle biter that constantly and purposedly mistates his opponent's statements - thinking himself clever, and above the fray for the lie. And that gains you what in way of any athority in what you say? How many popes died of poisoning. It isn't that difficult. Put pope and poison in google and watch what turns up. Or if your arms, feet and eyes work, take the collection of them to a library and read about it there. You might learn something. Or is that as anathema to you as listening to someone else who might be right?
Well dang, my high school English teacher SAID that someday I'd really wish I had learned to diagram sentences correctly!
Au Contrare. This is not only a lie, it is a bad lie. The word 'catholic' is an adjective and was employed by a writer presuming to be ignatius in that form - as an adjective. You'll note the absence of capitol form in the writing. You'll also note there are more than one version of this text and both are contested as to proper attribution and as to which is the original. Even if the text were proven genuine as original and as ignatius, it still shows nothing more than proper usage of an adjective.
And you'll note I alluded to this earlier - ie I was ready for it. And I was ready for it precisely because I have been over this many times before. The problem is that most who note the lie about it don't stop quoting it even knowing the lie. So what do you suppose that says?
Try again
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