Posted on 05/31/2013 2:44:05 PM PDT by NYer
Do our Catholic children and most adults know what these images teach?
All of us know one of the elephants in the room of the Catholic Church. Our religious education programs are not handing on the essence of our Catholic Faith, our parents are befuddled about their role in handing on the faith and the materials we use are vapid or if good do not make an impression on young minds. We are afraid of asking for memorization and thus most don't remember anything they've learned about God and Church other than some niceties and feel good emotions.
I teach each class of our grades 1-6 (we don't have 7th or 8th) each Thursday, rotating classes from week to week. For the last two years I have used Baltimore Catechism #1 as my text book. It is wonderful to use with children and it is so simple yet has so much content. If Catholics, all Catholics, simply studied Baltimore Catechism #1, we would have very knowledgeable Catholics.
These past two years I've used Baltimore Catechism #2 with our adult religious program which we call Coffee and Conversation following our 9:30 AM Sunday Mass, which coincides with our CCD program which we call PREP (Parish Religious Education Program).
This #2 book has more content and is for middle school, but upper elementary school children must have been more capable of more serious content back when this book was formulated and used through the mid 1960's because it is a great book to use with adults and not childish at all. We all use this same book as a supplemental book for the RCIA because it is so clear, nobly simple and chocked full of content!
Yes, there are some adjustments that need to be made to some chapters, but not that many, in light of Vatican II and the new emphasis we have on certain aspects of Church that are not present in the Baltimore Catechism. But these are really minor.
What is more important though is that when the Baltimore Catechism was used through the mid 1960's it was basically the only book that was used for children in elementary and junior high school. It was used across the board in the USA thus uniting all Catholics in learning the same content. There was not, in other words, a cottage industry of competing publishing houses selling new books and different content each year.
The same thing has occurred with liturgical music, a cottage industry of big bucks has developed around the sale of new hymnals, missalettes and new music put on the open market for parishes to purchase. It is a money making scheme.
Why do our bishop allow this to happen in both liturgical music and parish catechesis? The business of selling stuff to parishes and making mega bucks off of it is a scandal that has not be addressed.
In the meantime, our liturgies suffer and become fragmented because every parish uses a different resource for liturgical music and the same is true of religious formation, everyone uses something different of differing quality or no quality at all.
Isn't it time to wake up and move forward with tried and true practices that were tossed out in favor of a consumerist's approach to our faith that has weakened our liturgies, our parishes and our individual Catholics?
That is not saying that I therefore have a license to sin.
Being sure of one's salvation because it is sealed by the Holy Spirit, is not the same as those people who treat it as a get out of hell free card.
Did you not read the verses I posted?
Romans 6:1-2 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
Romans 6:12-16 12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. 13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
Being sure of one's salvation is not a license to sin and anyone who thinks so is most probably not saved.
When you are saved and have had a change of heart and realize what you have been saved from, you don't want to sin.You want to live a pure and holy life that would bring honor and glory to God for the work He has done in you out of gratitude for what He has done in you.
Do we sin? Sure. Everyone does. We still have this body of flesh that is weak. There's that conflict in us between the old and new nature (ala Romans 7) but we're still saved and the conflict, much as we hate it, is a good sign because someone who is not saved does not have that conflict in them.
God looks on the heart, not the outward appearance. He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust.
He's a loving heavenly Father who is loving and gracious and merciful when we slip up, willing to forgive us and not condemn us for not being perfect.
No one with any kind of inkling of that is going to sin without reservation and flaunt it and trample the blood of Jesus underfoot.
wow!
More 'teachings' from the Magic guys!
Ain't NUTTIN' engraved in stone any more?
It REALLY doesn't mean what it plainly says.
Chuckle, HE did??
Where's THAT 'written down'?
Yes, what the majority of the Magisteriums says, goes. It does not have to be unanimous.
Divorce used to be permitted, “because your hearts were hard”.
No kidding is right.
Lots of religions have beliefs that parallel Scripture. Having a belief that parallels Scripture is no great accomplishment. All it does is prove that sometimes other religions get something right.
Satan knows that he's not going to get his best mileage out of outright lies. That's why there's truth mixed in with everything he lies to us about.
It's far more effective to mix truth in with the lies than to lie outright. People can see the outright lies immediately. Sorting lies out from truth is often more difficult. And that's where Scripture comes in. It's the standard by which truth is measured.
We are commanded to test the spirits to see if they are from God, and the ONLY thing we have to hold up as truth and the standard by which to measure anything, is the Holy Spirit, God breathed word of the living God.
Then the Catholic church, and Catholics in general, need to stop hypocritically using Scripture to support their doctrines and just man up enough to admit that the only reason they have for people to believe them is because they said so.
It is not because we say so, it is because He says so.
And where does HE say so?
There’s only one place I can find it recorded.
John 10:27
Peace be with you
The Assumption of Mary was unheard of for 400 years after the resurrection.
From http://www.ewtn.com/library/answers/aofmary.htm
The Assumption is the oldest feast day of Our Lady, but we don't know how it first came to be celebrated. Its origin is lost in those days when Jerusalem was restored as a sacred city, at the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 285-337). By then it had been a pagan city for two centuries, ever since Emperor Hadrian (76-138) had leveled it around the year 135 and rebuilt it as in honor of Jupiter.
For 200 years, every memory of Jesus was obliterated from the city, and the sites made holy by His life, death and Resurrection became pagan temples.
After the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 336, the sacred sites began to be restored and memories of the life of Our Lord began to be celebrated by the people of Jerusalem. One of the memories about his mother centered around the "Tomb of Mary," close to Mount Zion, where the early Christian community had lived.
On the hill itself was the "Place of Dormition," the spot of Mary's "falling asleep," where she had died. The "Tomb of Mary" was where she was buried.
At this time, the "Memory of Mary" was being celebrated. Later it was to become our feast of the Assumption.
For a time, the "Memory of Mary" was marked only in Palestine, but then it was extended by the emperor to all the churches of the East. In the seventh century, it began to be celebrated in Rome under the title of the "Falling Asleep" ("Dormitio") of the Mother of God.
Soon the name was changed to the "Assumption of Mary," since there was more to the feast than her dying. It also proclaimed that she had been taken up, body and soul, into heaven.
That belief was ancient, dating back to the apostles themselves. What was clear from the beginning was that there were no relics of Mary to be venerated, and that an empty tomb stood on the edge of Jerusalem near the site of her death. That location also soon became a place of pilgrimage. (Today, the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition of Mary stands on the spot.)
At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when bishops from throughout the Mediterranean world gathered in Constantinople, Emperor Marcian asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem to bring the relics of Mary to Constantinople to be enshrined in the capitol. The patriarch explained to the emperor that there were no relics of Mary in Jerusalem, that "Mary had died in the presence of the apostles; but her tomb, when opened later . . . was found empty and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven."
In the eighth century, St. John Damascene was known for giving sermons at the holy places in Jerusalem. At the Tomb of Mary, he expressed the belief of the Church on the meaning of the feast: "Although the body was duly buried, it did not remain in the state of death, neither was it dissolved by decay. . . . You were transferred to your heavenly home, O Lady, Queen and Mother of God in truth."
All the feast days of Mary mark the great mysteries of her life and her part in the work of redemption. The central mystery of her life and person is her divine motherhood, celebrated both at Christmas and a week later (Jan. 1) on the feast of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. The Immaculate Conception (Dec. 8) marks the preparation for that motherhood, so that she had the fullness of grace from the first moment of her existence, completely untouched by sin. Her whole being throbbed with divine life from the very beginning, readying her for the exalted role of mother of the Savior.
The Assumption completes God's work in her since it was not fitting that the flesh that had given life to God himself should ever undergo corruption. The Assumption is God's crowning of His work as Mary ends her earthly life and enters eternity. The feast turns our eyes in that direction, where we will follow when our earthly life is over.
The feast days of the Church are not just the commemoration of historical events; they do not look only to the past. They look to the present and to the future and give us an insight into our own relationship with God. The Assumption looks to eternity and gives us hope that we, too, will follow Our Lady when our life is ended.
The prayer for the feast reads: "All-powerful and ever-living God: You raised the sinless Virgin Mary, mother of your Son, body and soul, to the glory of heaven. May we see heaven as our final goal and come to share her glory."
In 1950, in the Apostolic Constitution , Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption of Mary a dogma of the Catholic Church in these words: "The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven."
With that, an ancient belief became Catholic doctrine and the Assumption was declared a truth revealed by God.
Father Clifford Stevens writes from Tintern Monastery in Oakdale, Neb.
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Jesus created His Church. The teachings of the Church matter. The teachings of the individual may be irrelevant. Those sho spurn the Church and prefer their own interpretation fall afoul of everything that the teaching ministry of the Apostles, sent by Jesus, are supposed to be doing.
If God didn't see fit to have it recorded in Scripture, I don't see that anyone is obligated to believe any *teaching* no matter how old it is, or is claimed to be, or who puts it forth.
It is not binding on those outside the Catholic church. For those who choose put themselves under the Catholic church's authority, then whatever the Catholic church declares for its adherents is what they have to believe.
But if it's not found in Scripture, it's just say so.
That's just great, NL: just GREAT!
Now you'll tell us that the CHURCH is now the VOICE of Christ on earth and the Magestic Ones are His mouth; right?
But WAIT!!!
The 'foundational' rock the CHURCH is built on is PETER!
Rome SAYS so!
Yup. You've got some BAD apples in your barrel alright!
Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.[1]
Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.
Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who "sold" the Papacy
Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante's Divine Comedy
Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.[2]
Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and whose unattended corpse swelled until it could barely fit in a coffin.[3]
Pope Leo X (1513–1521), a spendthrift member of the Medici family who once spent 1/7 of his predecessors' reserves on a single ceremony[4]
Pope Clement VII (1523–1534), also a Medici, whose power-politicking with France, Spain, and Germany got Rome sacked.
--Catholic_Dude(Return to the Mother Church... or else!)
yay 11
hundred
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