Posted on 10/28/2014 2:18:29 PM PDT by edwinland
Of all the columns I imagined writing when I started out at this job, it’s safe to say that Sunday’s piece, in which I suggested that conservative Catholics should “resist” their pope if he seems intent on leading the church off a doctrinal precipice, was not one of them. So it’s worth saying something briefly about my own personal religious perspective on the church to which I belong.
I am a Catholic for various contingent reasons (this is as true of converts as of anyone else), but on a conscious level it’s because I am a mostly-faithful Christian who is mostly convinced that Roman Catholicism is the expression of Christianity that has kept faith most fully with the early church and the words of Jesus of Nazareth... A point that Cardinal George Pell[made] ... — that the search for authority in Christianity began not with pre-emptive submission to an established hierarchy, but with early Christians who “wanted to know whether the teachings of their bishops and priests were in conformity with what Christ taught” — is crucial to my own understanding of the reasons to be Catholic: I believe in papal authority, the value of the papal office, because I think that office has played a demonstrable role in maintaining the faith’s continuity, coherence and fidelity across two thousand years of human history. It’s that role and that record, complicated and checkered as it is, that makes the doctrine of papal infallibility plausible to me ... and indeed if you asked me to write a long defense of “infallibility” as a concept I’m sure I’d end up caveating it ... The language that I think the historical record supports is more like impressive continuity on the most important questions.
One of those important questions is the nature of marriage ...
(Excerpt) Read more at douthat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
You do know how many hundreds of years your institution was in power in tandem with secular Roman emperors, don’t you? Your wonderful church-state arrangement. In times when they would not blink an eye to murder anybody whose beliefs they viewed as a threat to their power. You are only fooling yourself, lady. You are not fooling Protestants.
I’m not magnifying anything, truth is, the RCC is one of the most tyrannical and totalitarian institutions in history. It has more in common with Islamic terrorism than anything else.
“Cute toes, but I’d rather not keep them in a bottle on the bar.”
No doubt you could pray to them for healing - bunions, for example. You will find greater power, inspiration and bottom line healing, if you can handle them, kiss them and actually pray to the toes.
Not like when that dead guy’s body was chucked in Prophet Elisha’s grave and he came back to life again.
Woooo. Bones. Biblical.
Yeah, Elisha’s bones were in HIS GRAVE.
It’s not like they were gilding and blinging them with precious metals and stones. Pagans claiming Christianity didn’t carry Elisha’s bones around, bow to them nor kiss them.
Nothing else? Not even your neighbor? Does love of your neighbor distract you from love of Christ? And if not then why not love of the saints?
Yashua. All else falls into place.
So if you asked me, as a secular or Protestant reader might be inclined to do, “do you believe that marriage is indissoluble because the pope is infallible and he says so?”, I might answer: “Mostly the reverse: I think the papacy might well be guided on the Holy Spirit because it has taught so consistently that marriage is indissoluble, while almost every other Christian body has succumbed to the pressures and political incentives to say otherwise.” (And those incentives were powerful long before modernity.) I respect the papacy’s authority precisely because it has kept faith with one of Jesus’s harder teachings, in other words, and shown flexibility or made compromises only in a way (through an err-on-the-side-of-the-petitioner annulment process, most recently) that I think has left the teaching’s basic integrity intact.
Catholic ping!
LOL!
Bye Bye Miss American Pie, I drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry...
Don’t know which history books you use but you are so off the mark it’s unbelievable.
Learn baby, learn.
So much for Protestant Sola Fide theological sleaze.
You consider a quote from Jesus "Protestant Sola Fide theological sleaze"?
That was supposed to be ~500 years ago.
Unless I'm confronted by a dear Orthodox who gets me with "What? Respect you? After what you did in 1204?"
Me neither. I like them on my feet.
After non-violently bearing bloody persecution for three non-resisting centuries, Christianity legalized by Constantine: 313 AD.
Subsequent Emperors such as Gratian and Theodosius stopped State funding for the maintenance of pagan temples and priesthoods, imposed penalties on animal sacrifice and the reading of entrails, and cut off State subsidies for pagan institutions such as the Vestal Virgins and the Altar of Victory.
All this was done by Emperors, not by Popes. It was defended at the time on the grounds of public order, because there were many mob clashes between pagans and Christians, and the Emperors found the Christians -- who had endured 300 years of sporadic persecution without armed resistance --- to be, on the whole, the more peaceable of the rival communities.
Christian leadership, for their part (e.g. Bishops Augustine and Ambrose) preached that the destruction of pagan altars of animal sacrifice was consistent with what God commanded good Jewish kings to do in the Old Testament.
The last emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustulus, deposed by barbarians: 476 AD.
So that's--- how many hundreds of years of crimes against pagans in the Roman Empire?
I don't defend any historic crimes. I am a complete supporter of Nostra Aetate. I must note my amazement, though, that the Catholic Church gets to assume ALL the blame, both for "adopting paganism" and for "destroying paganism."
You may, if you wish, of course, get yourself off the hook by disowning all Christian history until the 16th century. That works.
Some might just want to throw Elisha's bones in a pit. That wouldn't be me.
The only place the phrase "Faith Alone" appears in the Bible is as follows:
"You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone." (James 2:24)
It's not, by the way,that I think this age-old controversy can be settled by slinging one-liners back and forth, or shouting them louder and louder. I think, rather that different kinds of "faith" have to be distinguished. James said that a "living" faith is detected by the presence of works;without that, James says, it is a "dead faith."
And Paul himself says that if you have faith so great as to move mountains, but have not love, you are nothing.
So these things go together. It seems to me fruitless to dispute about "Which blade of the scissors is more important, the top blade or the bottom blade?" - "Which is more important: inhaling or exhaling?"
Isn't love the main thing? Didn't Jesus say the whole Law and the entirety of the Prophets depend on this? Isn't God, by His very nature, Love?
If we would just partake of this great Goodness, partake of His nature more and more!
[Why I Am Catholic]: Because Vincent de Paul Was Once A Muslim's Slave
[Why I Am Catholic]:Welcome to the Ever Persecuted Church! [Catholic Caucus]
[Why I Am Catholic]: Lent And Holy Week (A Primer) [Catholic Caucus]
[Why I Am Catholic]: Because God Became Man (Despite His Flawed Human Ancestors)
[Why I Am Catholic]: Because of the Protestant Reformers Beliefs On Mary
Why I Am Catholic: For Purgatory, Thank Heavens (Ecumenical)
(Why Am I Catholic?) For Peace While Suffering (A Few Words for Wednesday)
[Why I am Catholic]: Because I Love the Bible
(why am I Catholic?) Because I Awoke from a Long, Bad Dream
Why I Am Catholic: For All the Saints: Bernard of Clairvaux
Some might just want to throw Elisha’s bones in a pit. That wouldn’t be me.
Where did the power that raised the men from the dead originate, from Elisha or God?
All things of this world will pass away but the Lamb of God is eternal.
But answer me this: why would God raise a man from the dead because he had touched the bones of His holy Prophet, Elisha? Strangw, is it not? And what might be a plausible message or purpose here?
(I don't think there may be an exact "bingo" right answer available, but I'm pondering, and wondering if you're pondering, too.)
Read what Mrs. Don-o, in her infinite patience, explained in #56. Also read the Holy Scripture every once in a while if you are interested in authentic Christianity.
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