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 ...
Heh heh, even so, wouldn't it be nice if all the other RC's would fess up that this is what their church teaches instead of trying to hide it or deflect from it?
I'd rather deal with the Hermann's of the RCC who are honest about RC doctrine than those who try to cloud it up to make converstaion/debate/arguing difficult if not impossible.
BTW, your new boat looks real nice!
Baptists do, but then again we don't claim to be Protestants. ;^)
I don't have the time to do that, I'm 50, expect to live 85 or 90.
I guess the hook just poped out of my mouth, better luck next time.
BigMack
Your absolutist language is what I personally find problematic. You believe you have "the truth", and therefore what Protestants believe are "lies". Can you prove that what you believe is true? Of course not, or else there would be no need for faith. And this is just as true for Protestants, Jews, or any other religion. Ideally, religious statements should begin, at least implicitly, with "I believe that...".
It would be nicer if they ceased entirely to believe this way. IMO, of course. ;o)
Well.....that goes without saying.
Did you see the new trailer yet?
Only you can consign yourself to hell. Teachings are just guideposts for our behavior and belief. We don't judge the fate of individual Protestants or anyone else.
Christ assures us in the Gospels that we will be judged based upon our faith in Him, our following of His laws, and our charity towards our neighbor.
If some teaching of the Catholic Church seems to be saying we will be judged based upon that teaching, we need to examine it and see to which of these areas of judgement it is really point us towards.
Regarding adherance to the Church for salvation, it points us towards a sin against fraternal charity. To live purposefully seperated from our brothers is an offense against the bond of unity which Christ wills to give all who would believe in Him. When we withdraw from this union, we place our pride before our love of our brothers and our Father in heaven. Essentially, we seem to be saying "I am better than all this, and certainly know better for myself what Our Lord wants than does His Church."
If this is the true teaching of the Catholic Church, and I believe it is, then why do so many other Catholics try to deny it?
Human respect and false charity. They want to offer salvation to all without having to go out and preach the Gospel. Its much easier to fret about what to have for dinner or who will win the football game than to concern oneself with the eternal fate of ones neighbors. And it is certainly much more comforting to think of everyone being saved than it is to worry about a world that is a pit of vice and falsehood because of the efforts of the devil
There are many Christians who are persuaded that the Redemption will be completed in all environments of the world, and that there have to be some souls — they do not know which ones — who will contribute to carrying it out with Christ. But they see this in terms of centuries, many centuries. It would be an eternity, if it were to take place at the rate of their self-giving. (St. Josemaria Escriva, Furrow, 1)
We believe in one God the Father all powerful, maker of all things both seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten begotten from the Father, that is from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, cosubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came to be, both those in heaven and those in earth; for us humans and for our salvation he came down and became incarnate, became human, suffered and rose up on the third day, went up into the heavens, is coming to judge the living and the dead. And in the holy Spirit. (Creed of the Council of Nicea)
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