I've been there. I used to react to Catholicism with visceral hatred. We must remember that this was promised to us.
I have recently been characterized as patting myself on the back. Very well. I am blessed to be given the chance to suffer insult and slander for the Body of Christ.
Now may Christ give me further graces that I may never take my eyes off him and respond to the falsehood and gratuitous slur NOT with a return in kind -- as I have too often done -- but in the Love who has saved us.
The crypto-Gnostic notion that everything was given and worked out to the minutest degree before the closing of the canon leads to the misconception that there was nothing left to unfold.
But a millennium and a half pass and then, suddenly Luther says this, Calvin that, Zwingli something else, Arminius something else again, and then after there was silence for the space of a half hour -- or maybe a few hundred years -- Darby and Scofield unpack the distillation of all truth less than 200 years ago.
All these hundreds of years for the Scofield Baptists to surface (from the strangely undocumented continual existence from the time that Jesus came to the Jordan) while the Catholic Church is derogated for being dilatory in articulating the Trinity.
It's a tough sell.
FIRST coffee. THEN internet. It's a sequencing thing ....
Here's how I meant to end my post to you, dear ROE:
From today's Morning Prayer:
Ephesians 4:29-32
Never let evil talk pass your lips; say only the good things men need to hear, things that will really help them. Do nothing that will sadden the Holy Spirit with whom you were sealed against the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, all passion and anger, harsh words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be kind to one another, compassionate, and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven you in Christ.
I think I know what ->I'm<- going to be confessing tomorrow ...