Thomas A. Droleskey on the Lies of Protestantism

Seattle Catholic ^ | September 29, 2003 | Thomas A. Droleskey

[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

[Elsie]

Catholics have a saying: "If you want to know what the Bible says, ask a Protestant"

Is that because most of them don't read it themselves, but merely rely on being TOLD what it all means?

[PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain]

Good post

Becky

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Would you be surprised that nobody takes your gratuitous assertions seriously?

[Hermann the Cherusker]

A "good man" does the right thing when it counts.

You are extremely judgemental. Did you read St. John Chrysostom's discourse on the difficulties of being a Bishop?

[Elsie]

 Communicating with the dead is outlawed in every form in the Old testament. For someone to pray to you would be a sin. This is pretty basic stuff. It hasn't changed in Judaism. They all know it's a sin. How is it you don't?

EXACTLY!!

 

Isaiah 8:19-20
 19.  When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
 20.  To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.

[drstevej]

Yep, I read it. Shielding pedophiles still falls below the "good" mark.

***You are extremely judgemental.***

For calling shielding pedophiles something other than good? OK, guilty.

[Havoc]

I haven't made any gratuitous assertions. And you sitting there telling me you aren't listening is no surprise, your posts show that. You don't think - you react. I'm used to that. So are you expecting me to be shocked and surprised that you don't listen?

[Elsie]

We believe babies are born sinless and graceless.

I guess if we can just keep them away from adults, they'll REMAIN that way!

 

 

I guess Paul was wrong......................

Romans 3

 10.  As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one; 
 11.  there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.
 12.  All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."
 13.  "Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit." "The poison of vipers is on their lips."
 14.  "Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness."
 15.  "Their feet are swift to shed blood;
 16.  ruin and misery mark their ways,
 17.  and the way of peace they do not know."
 18.  "There is no fear of God before their eyes."  
 19.  Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.
 20.  Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.
 21.  But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.
 22.  This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference,
 23.  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (unless they're just babies)
 24.  and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
 25.  God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement,  through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished--
 26.  he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
 27.  Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith.
 28.  For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.

...he should not have been QUOTING that David fellow!

[malakhi]

That's why there are so many devout Protestants in Germany, England, Scandanavia, and Holland today, eh? All, what, 5% of the population?

How many orthodox Catholics are there? This is an issue facing all denominations.

[malakhi]

Does the concept of following Christ's Church and thinkings for oneself somehow seem contradictory to you?

On matters of faith and morals, where the magisterium has spoken, there is no allowance for thinking for yourself.

Canon 752 While the assent of faith is not required, a religious submission of intellect and will is to be given to any doctrine which either the Supreme Pontiff or the College of Bishops, exercising their authentic magisterium, declare upon a matter of faith or morals, even though they do not intend to proclaim that doctrine by definitive act. Christ's faithful are therefore to ensure that they avoid whatever does not accord with that doctrine.

[Ex-Wretch]

Hermann:
The fruit of Catholicism - billions of souls in heaven ...
The fruit of Calvinism - millions in hell ...

drstevej:
A "good man" does the right thing when it counts.

Hermann:
You are extremely judgemental.

There are none so blind as those who cannot see.

[malakhi]

You are extremely judgemental.

Oh, that is rich.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

[PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain]

Attention!

This thread is full.

Time to pump this baby out!

It will take about 15 mins to empty, and then y'all can start filling her up again.

This has been a public service announcement.

:)

BigMack

[dangus]

Mary is used as a prophetic example of what the church does; IOW, She's the *example* for the new church. Typically, Prophecies start with an image people will understand, in this case, Mary. Then they show how this example speaks to us about the future. In this case, how the church will be experience pain as they bring forth Christ, and will be persecuted, but that they have a glorious reward.

Revelations does this is several places; For another instance, it takes events described in Daniel (the desecration of the Temple) to warn that even something in which God dwells (Christianity) can contain evil, and thus warns of a future desecration. Elsewhere, it takes recent events whom the target audience is familiar (the persecution of Nero, the beast, whose number was 666), reassures them of God by using previous prophecy, and uses the current crisis to say something about the ultimate ends.

So does the woman in Revelations represent Israel? Yes. Does she represent the Church? Yes. Does she represent the Virgin Mary? Obviously, for it was she who gave birth to Christ!

[drstevej]

Thanks for your non-judgmentalism.

[malakhi]

LOL! :o)

[RnMomof7]

Fifthmark wrote

...you have nothing but caustic sarcasm to hurl at those you don't wish to hear.

Elsie replied

I thought I was mostly 'hurling' Scripture!

You are Elsie and it is doning exactly what it is supposed to do

Isa 55:11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper [in the thing] whereto I sent it.

Hbr 4:12 For the word of God [is] quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and [is] a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

[RnMomof7]

whereas you have nothing but caustic sarcasm to hurl at those you don't wish to hear.

Seems you have something is common with Elsie he was told

...you have nothing but caustic sarcasm to hurl at those you don't wish to hear.

[ppaul]

This is pretty basic stuff. It hasn't changed in Judaism. They all know it's a sin. How is it you don't?

I do. Just wanted to see what you had to say.

[RnMomof7]

Gee, I guess we forgot the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, the flight into Egypt, etc

Was that the desert? Did she sprout wings? Did she stay 1260 days ?

Actually, the Immaculate Conception did not exempt Mary from the punishments of Eve - it allowed her to be born full of grace. She was still subject to death and disease since she is human.

So Mary got punished for the sin of Eve? Maybe she IS our savior

He could hardly sanctify childbearing for women ("Yet she shall be saved through child bearing" [1 Timothy 2.14])

She did not REQUIRE sanctification she was sinless remember

BTW I would point out that Mary needed to be cleaned from childbearing (The temple visit)