Posted on 10/25/2007 9:24:05 AM PDT by NYer
The Other Christ: Padre Pio and 19th Century Italy, by the historian Sergio Luzzatto, draws on a document found in the Vatican's archive.
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The document reveals the testimony of a pharmacist who said that the young Padre Pio bought four grams of carbolic acid in 1919.
"I was an admirer of Padre Pio and I met him for the first time on 31 July 1919," wrote Maria De Vito.
She claimed to have spent a month with the priest in the southern town of San Giovanni Rotondo, seeing him often.
"Padre Pio called me to him in complete secrecy and telling me not to tell his fellow brothers, he gave me personally an empty bottle, and asked if I would act as a chauffeur to transport it back from Foggia to San Giovanni Rotondo with four grams of pure carbolic acid.
"He explained that the acid was for disinfecting syringes for injections. He also asked for other things, such as Valda pastilles."
The testimony was originally presented to the Vatican by the Archbishop of Manfredonia, Pasquale Gagliardi, as proof that Padre Pio caused his own stigmata with acid.
It was examined by the Holy See during the beatification process of Padre Pio and apparently dismissed.
Padre Pio, whose real name was Francesco Forgione, died in 1968. He was made a saint in 2002. A recent survey in Italy showed that more people prayed to him than to Jesus or the Virgin Mary. He exhibited stigmata throughout his life, starting in 1911.
The new allegations were greeted with an instant dismissal from his supporters. The Catholic Anti-Defamation League said Mr Luzzatto was a liar and was "spreading anti-Catholic libels".
Pietro Siffi, the president of the League, said: "We would like to remind Mr Luzzatto that according to Catholic doctrine, canonisation carries with it papal infallibility.
"We would like to suggest to Mr Luzzatto that he dedicates his energies to studying religion properly."
Amen !
I read your quote from Proverbs and I think of Acts 2:39
“This promise is for you and for your children and for those still far off”.
Do not be too harsh with us Catholics, dear Dr. E.
The promise is for us also and we do, by our Divine Liturgy, acknowledge Him as the one Lamb of God slain for us, as we have done from the beginning.
Pax Christi.
Would you be asking Queen Mother Bathsheba to bring your request to the king after he what had just happened to Adonijah??? I don't think that she was taking any more requests after that disaster.
That was the role of the Queen Mother to bring requests to the King.
Baloney -- it was their role to stay out of the King's business. The Queen's interferences in the business of the King resulted in more disasters than can be recounted -- aka Queen Jezebel and King Ahab.
Queen Esther's request was honored but that was an exception to the rule rather than the rule. It was touch-and-go for her and she knew it was not her role to make requests. She was also not the Queen Mother but the King's wife -- perhaps that had something to do with it.
Just because it isn’t written didn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Without witnesses, how would you know that it happened at all. Try that reasoning of yours in a court of law sometime when someone presents documented evidence and witnesses against you.
And evidently you did, without doing your research first. To say
The Catholic church thinks sex is sinfulis so vague and yet sweeping. Do you mean the Church TEACHES that sex is sinful, or SOME members think sex is sinful or what EXACTLY do you mean? DO you have an exact meaning?
Why MUST Mary remain a perpetual virgin?
Well, I would have said that you might ask Jesus, but now I see that asking Jesus for knowledge is compared to consulting a ouija board.
But allow me to suggest an analogy: To stand up to one's mother-in-law and to attack a vicious enemy are both virtuous, both examples of fortitude, but one is higher than the other. Neither (assuming the mother-in-law needs to be stood up to - which, of course, goes without saying) is sinful in itself.
Similarly, chaste intercourse, that is, loving sexual intercourse with one's spouse and open to life and consecrated virginity are both virtuous. But since in heaven "they neither marry nor are given in marriage", as my ouija board says, consecrated virginity is what you might call a "higher" estate, bieng more like the heavenly state, in certain sense. (For example, no mother-in-law.) Not all consecrated virgins are "higher" than chaste spouses, but the situation is "higher". Paul says something about this.
But as to the "MUST", I'm not sure what you mean.
I DO know that Episcopal Bishop Spong of New Jersey or Newark or something levelled pretty much the same charge and with similar arguments. Then he went on to talk about how virtuous homosexual acts are.
Further, it used to be that we required laity not to eat for quite some time before Mass, but we've never said the eating was intrinsically sinful, and haven't been accused of saying it. But for your arguments to stand, you'd have to find us saying the eating is sinful, wouldn't you?
One can SAY anything. To say something truthful, though, is hard.
Are you making this up? Do you have a real live official source, like Aquinas, an Encyclical, or the Catechism where you find, in so many words, Mary can ONLY be loved and honored if she never had sex?
WE may look like idolaters, but people who levy charges without thinking them over, what do they look like?
NAsbU Revelation 19:6 Then I heard something like the voice of a
great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of
mighty peals of thunder,saying,
"HalleluYah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.
BTTT.
Its called reading and understanding History of how the The Kingdom of Juda worked.
So what does this mean?
Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.
Does this me they didn’t happen? Suffer not the fool. 2000 years of teachings vs one guy who didn’t like the belief of praying for the dead.
As Albert Brooks said in "Mother"...
"I know you think you do."
(Just joshin', ROE. That's one of my favorite lines from a favorite movie. It used to be funnier when our family was chortling over my mother's "protective ice crystals." Now, I fear, the mantle has passed to moi. As Spartacus might have said if he had done the dishes, "I am Mother.")
AMEN! Now and forever.
INDEED.
Arguing from silence is a persistently hazardous exercise in folly.
This is the second time (that I know of) where you've incorrectly stated John the Baptist was without sin his entire life.
Is this some new and fallacious doctrine of your church which perhaps seeks to take some of the heat off of Mary supposedly being sinless, and thus to spread the lies around?
Now we have a sinless Mary and a sinless John the Baptist?
Like Calvin warned, "Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols." We are all by nature prone to fill our heads with idols.
Some of us, sadly, can't tell the truth of this even when silver and gold are falling from our lips and nostrils.
I find it amazing that you a lay person argue with a set of church beliefs
lol. We are commanded to "receive(d) the word with all readiness of mind, and search(ed) the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11).
And so much of the RCC is just not "so."
"And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." -- John 17:3
That does not answer why Mary had to remain a perpetual Virgin is sex with your husband and having children are not sin
I was comparing the challenge of praying to Mary for the next six weeks and see if you don't feel better. That sounds like something you would see on a late night infomercial.
Of course I pray to our Lord Jesus for knowledge and wisdom. Some of my posts should be evidences that God doesn't always give us what we want.
Who says that "staying his fury" is the role of Mary as intercessor, etc.? Who said anything about "need"? I am taking you seriously in your desire to learn (and I'd recommend "Why Do Catholics do that?" as a pleasant not too inaccurate book as a starting point), but that is a "have you stopped beating your wife?" type of question. We do not "need" Mary, and certainly not to "stay Jesus's fury". We're happy to have her and a whole cloud of witnesses as well.
IF Jesus is High Priest, as we say with you, then is the person who intercedes for us with Jesus, is not necessarily a priest.
(I HAVE (need?) to mention that, to talk to OUR priests here at our parish, we DO have to go through Suzie the secretary - but here the question is who will stay HER fury, not the fury of the priests.)
A friend of mine converted to the RC church. Part of the process is to make your first confession. Understandably she was anxious, needlessly anxious, as she herself realized at the time, but anxious nonetheless. So she asked me to come with her and to sit with her before the confession. (I told her I wanted to be there after the confession to share her happiness.) I wasn't necessary, but even I can be nice to have around.
And she said it was nice to have someone to share the afterwards feeling with too.
I note a number of people coming onto Free Republic with requests for prayers. I imagine some of them are Protestants. We wouldn't say they are asking us to exercise a priestly function when they are already themselves kings and priests to God? It's nice to have friends in one's corner, in good times and bad, and that seems to be true for Protestants as well as Catholics.
Try this concept - before the jackals and hyenas come and rip it to shreds with "over the transom" accusations about things we neither believe nor do: We tend to think, and to demonstrate (or to TRY to demonstrate) not only in our lives but in our devotions and prayers and liturgies, the mind-bogglingly rich, overflowing, ever-new, never in short supply but always astonishingly abundant Love and Grace of God. We trust Him to give not just enough but more than enough, not only happiness but pleasures, for at his right hand is pleasure for evermore (Ps. 16)
He "goes the second mile" before He asks us to. And He does it again after He asks us to.
And, I think, especially for the timid and fearful (and who is not timid and fearful now and again?), he provides helps and encouragements. And the experience of the communion of the Saints, the sharing in Christ's body of all its members , is one such. Certainly, it is always good to cast all one's cares on Him who cares for us. But, when my child was sick unto death (she lived, don't worry) it was nice not only to have my faith and my realtionship with God through Christ(and I was a Calvinistic leaning Episcopalian in them thar days) but my friends.
Now, I just feel like I have more friends. Mary certainly, but two French women? French women of not so long ago? I never in a hundred years would have thought that I would be comforted by Terese and Catherine! And Catherine I just kind of accidentally ran into, so to speak, since I needed to sit down since I had walked much too much 41 days after foot surgery. And a chapel dedicated to Catherine Laboure was the place I sat down. And since I was in a chapel, I decided to pray -- to God, it being Saturday in Easter Week and all ....
Long story short, my tag line is now a prayer revealed to Catherine Laboure, though my time set apart or prayer is still about 90% explicitly spent in prayer to Holy Trinity or one of the Divine Persons.
It's not a need. It's a delight and a help.
Come to think of it, we don't REALLY NEED food, if we're in Christ. But things go a lot better if we can have lunch.
Sorry, after turning aside (or trying to) the classic accusations of subconscious crypto-gnosticism, I wanted to write about something nice.
But the suggestion was not to pray TO Mary, I thought, but to pray to Jesus ABOUT Mary.
Boy HOWdy! Me too, bro'!
imho,
the history of the RC fossilized edifice has been for many centuries of the last 20
a process of repeatedly evolving new dogmas, doctrines
for virtually purely political power mongering reasons.
The faithful get bored with; habituated to the old ones such that the hierarchy’s power over the individual through such twisted dogmas and doctrines of demons and doctrines of man weakens—intolerably—to the RC elites.
And, so successive iterations of new dogmas keep the faithful always paying attention to and kowtowing to the MAGICsterical—a major control mechanism.
That’s one reason, imho, that the MARY AS CO-REDEMPTRIX heresy is even now, in our era, winding it’s way up to a new “INFALLIBLE” doctrine for the faithful to agree with and support—God forbid.
This gives us the silly spectacle of RC folks who !!!!TRADITIONALLY!!!! INSIST that the RC edifice’s doctrines and dogmas have been a consensual 100% homogenized whole from the moment John stopped writing Revelation until now—THOUGH HISTORY CLEARLY SHOWS STARKLY OTHERWISE.
So, we have some RC folks promulgating and pontificating adoringly about Mary as Co-Redemptrix and others rightly noting that said new dogma/doctrine has NOT been passed as a new RC edifice construction on reality for the faithful to all adhere to . . .
YET!
LOL. ROTFLOL. GTTM.
Sigh.
Did you get your “had to remain a perpetual Virgin” from the same place you got the false accusation about sex?
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