Posted on 07/02/2010 6:56:08 PM PDT by Desdemona
“Those were SOME busy apostles! I don’t see how they had time to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to write their Epistles, what with all the tradition that had to be squirreled away, for the future.”
Yes, they were. Eleven of the Twelve died as Martyrs. You could call them dedicated. Christ instructed them.
Best not to put limitations on God. He can do anything He desires.
Thirty one of the first Thirty two Popes died as Martyrs.
They were on a serious Mission from God.
Severe Faith and Hard things and Hard Works indeed.
But, hey Calvin says be saved, so you’re done... reruns on PTL Club and Angely
Always looking or the easy way out.
Let there be Prosperity gospel.
I see. It’s the dern Protestants fault that Romanists don’t take personal responsibility for the lack of responsibility of their Bishops. With all that free will and good works one would think that those Protestants would be such a dern nuisance.
Another case of the RC’s having their bile and flinging it too?
LOL.
Thanks for saying that,I totally agree. I have often been asked to what or to whom I attributed my "free spirit" and the asker is usually surprised at my answer,which is to my Catholicism.
It is very liberating to know that God gave a promise to His Apostles and their successors to be with them to the end and understand what that means. It allows me to focus on the myriad of problems confronting the world and humankind undergirded and encompassed by by my Faith with confidence,knowing that my decisions and actions will be in concert with God's Will.
Additionally,it is also a great time saver to be able to establish whether or not a fellow Catholic will discern and see things as I do by merely asking if they are an orthodox Catholic,if they are we can get right down to the issue at hand and not spend time with the asides.
The only thing Luther is at fault for is misleading the ignorant and easily deceived.
It always gets back to that lack of vocabulary thing. But, hey our public schools are great at remedial reading innovation.
Thanks.
If you think that's something, just imagine how liberating it is for Christians to know that Christ promised to be with them to the end.
Read the Bible. Learn a better way.
"Be not afraid; only believe." -- Mark 5:36
“For starters, one could stop pretending to be God and self judging your salvation...thats up to the Big Guy.”
The scritptures say otherwise.
2Cr 13:5’ “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?”
“The unexamined life is not worth living” is scriptural.
It is true that even a Protestant is not likely to produce good works unless he has a mature Catholic faith, doctor.
You can have the resonable hope of salvation if you do what the Holy Catholic Church proposes for your salvation and stay away from sin. That hope is a Christian virtue and a necessary component of sanctification (Rm 5:5). However you really know when you die and your works are judged (Hb 9:27, Mt 25:31:46, or shorter and more accessible Rm 2:6-10).
There is no quota of good works; you do them as the opportunity is given to you by our gracious Lord (Lk 17:7-10). In fact the temptation to retire from discipleship is itself a sin (Lk 9:62).
That works great, doesn't it?
The crimes of Catholic priests are the fault of the these priests and secondarily of their superiors, just like with crimes in any other occupation and affiliation. When a loose Protestant pastor molests children, that is primarily his fault and secondarily those who were duped by the Protestant clergy to listen to their theological heresies, because he has no structure on top of him to be responsible to. But the noxious moral atmosphere of the 20c is the fruit of the Reformation primarily, yes.
I agree that direct comparison is difficult because much of Protestant churches are administratively independent, have no deep pockets to sue for, keep no records, and do not represent a significant enemy of the secular left.
I think you may have really stepped in it this time annalex. Always remember it's okay to say oops, I was wrong about that.
Prior to the USA in a RCC dominated Europe the model was religion determined by the state, freedom of religion was not allowed let alone promoted as an ideal. Personal responsibility has also never been a RCC ideal. Your church has constructed it's teachings in such a way that the individual must go through your church to correct any error on their part, or to find any chance for salvation. Your church never promoted the personal responsibility of searching the Scriptures, "which are made to make you wise for salvation" but instead taught/teaches that the individual must submit to the church in all things and never disagree, or question anything.
I'm sure the last point accounts for part of the reason RC's get so frustrated by the Sola Scriptura crowd saying lets look in the Bible and see what it says.
As I've said elsewhere, every study I've been shown of "Protestant" abuse (which include many of the websites your Google search links to) included volunteers and laypersons. The John Jay Study did not address these groups when they looked at Catholic parishes. If we exclude volunteers and laypersons from the "Protestant" studies (thereby creating a "pastor vs priest" apple-to-apple comparison), we arrive at a roughly 1% abuse rate for all "Protestant" pastors, or (in other words) at least a four times greater likelihood that any given Catholic priest will be a sexual predator, as compared to any given "Protestant" pastor. And that's according to the numbers and studies that Catholics keep telling me about.Let me throw in one caveat to those comparisons. I found something interesting when I broke down the "Protestant" abuse cases by denomination / affiliation / theological leanings. The more free will / Arminian / synergistic the theology is, and the more independent the association is (as opposed to denominational affiliation), the higher the abuse statistic goes - and conversely, if you just look at the Reformed Protestant denominations, the number of "Protestant" abuse cases statistically drops off the chart by comparison. It's only the average of all "Protestant" pastors that is around 1%. Some independent churches have statistics that are far, far higher than the Catholic average of 4%.
-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008"(S)hould denominational ratios be skewed by independent ratios?"....AFAIK, no one has ever attempted to quantify abuse statistics to show where abuse runs high (or low) among Protestant, Evangelical, and Independent church leadership. My attempts appear to be the first. And I would agree with you that we should compare apples to apples by keeping it ratios to ratios, and not raw numbers to raw numbers. See especially the thread Teachers Vs. Priests - Unequal Treatment In the Media? in which I say
While 25,000 hypothesized "accusations" is roughly six times the number of Catholic "accusations", 25,000 cases out of 1,600,000 teachers gives us a 1.3 to 1.56% ratio of sexually abusive teachers out of the entire public school system over a fifty year period - more than twice the volume of Protestant pastoral abuse, and less than half the volume of Catholic priest abuse.-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008If we're after equal treatment in the media, I would expect there to be at least double the number of Catholic news stories as Public School stories, and four times as many Catholic news stories as Protestant news stories based on the percentage of perverts that exist with their respective organizations. IMO the disproportionate amount of coverage is the result of increased interest, when those organizations are caught protecting the abusers at the expense of the victims.
"...the scandal was never really about the 4% abusers in their ranks. The real scandal was that 66% of bishops covered for the 4%, negatively affecting 95% of the dioceses in the United States - actions which cost the Catholic Church over three billion dollars paid in settlements and awards to the victims."
-- Alex Murphy, September 29, 2009
Don't accuse Evangelicals of this, we were persecuted during the Dark Ages for believing it is enough. The insufficiency of the Cross is what the RCC teaches and affirmed at Trent when the last to leave the RCC were trying to reform it.
IMO the disproportionate amount of coverage is the result of increased interest, when those organizations are caught protecting the abusers at the expense of the victims.
The cover up makes a terrible crime even worse and more sensational because it involves so many more people. I doubt there is any way to objectively determine if the speed at which a crime is reported to law enforcement corresponds to a lower incident rate, but human nature tells me that would be the case.
One would think that “zero tolerance” would be a GOOD THING in these situations. The sooner the VICTIM is restored, the better for all. One would THINK...
With all of the banning and suspending going on, just to be sure you are the real you and not the virtual vision of you, on the side, out of the sight of any nosey busybodies, slip me the secret handshake.
Now, concerning the www.reformation.com.lists, notice that the “Protestant” clergy are not serial abusers with a parade of victims. No excuse; just an observation.
And yet it was Protestant Europe that the colonists fled from in pursuit of religious freedom, or at least the right for they themselves exclusively to practice as they choose and Protestant England that they ultimately rebelled against.
The notion that Calvinist Geneva was in any way the model for the American Republic is also laughable. The American Republic was modeled upon the works of Plato and the Roman republic. The Soviet Politburo was modeled after Calvin's Geneva.
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