That's right. And soon our Holy Romanist plan of converting the United States into a Papal state will come to fruition and all heretics will convert or be burned at the stake.
This will be our new national flag. Prepare to show your obedience.
Posted on 06/15/2014 4:12:26 AM PDT by markomalley
There was the man inspired by the written words of Pope Francis. There was the agnostic professor. And there was the widow of a Baptist preacher.
All of them Tennesseans, and all of them recent converts to one of the world's oldest Christian faiths.
In the South, Catholicism is growing. The Diocese of Knoxville was recently ranked among the top 10 in the nation for its rate of adult conversions.
All Southeast Tennessee Catholic parishes, including Chattanooga's, fall under the umbrella of Knoxville's diocese, one of 195 in the United States. A diocese is a geographic collection of parishes grouped together under the governance of a bishop. And many of the dioceses producing the most converts to the church are right here in the South, according to a recent study by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
Rates of Catholicism have always been strong in the Northeast and Midwest. But not in the protestant-heavy South.
So it's no wonder that Catholicism is growing faster here.
Mark Gray, a senior research associate at the Georgetown Center, said marriage is a common driver of Catholicism, as non-Catholics marry Catholics. And in Tennessee, non-Catholics and Catholics are more likely to marry simply because there are not enough Catholics to marry only other Catholics.
In the Volunteer State, about 8 percent of people are Catholic. That compares with 40 percent in Massachusetts and the national average of 24 percent.
"Tennessee is the third-least Catholic state in the country, which is exactly where we would expect these conversions to occur, because that 8 percent are likely marrying non-Catholics," Gray said.
In the Catholic Church, conversion is a commitment. It's more formal and involved than switching from one protestant church to another. And conversion is a commitment to the faith, not necessarily a particular church.
Before joining the church, converts take part in a college-like class that can last from nine months to a year.
"It is a very long program, and it's not something we take lightly, nor do the people becoming Catholic take it lightly," said Marvin Bushman, the director of religious education at Cleveland's St. Therese of Lisieux. "It is a big commitment."
Knoxville Bishop Richard F. Stika said the church is growing from rising minority populations, mainly Hispanics. Knoxville recently established a Vietnamese parish. And this part of the country is attracting more retirees and families, many of whom are Catholic.
"We're a growing Church, both in people who are choosing to become Catholic as well as people moving in from out of town," Stika told the diocesan newspaper, The East Tennessee Catholic.
At St. Therese, Brenda Blevins oversees the Catholic conversion program, called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, or RCIA. The Diocese of Knoxville, which includes 47 parishes, receives about 350 adult converts each year through RCIA.
Some come after marrying or dating a Catholic, but Blevins said many of their recent converts were single. And the RCIA program doesn't want people to just marry into the church.
"We want people to be here because they want to be and because they feel a call," she said.
And each convert has his own story. There are the college-age brothers who just joined together. And the widow of a Baptist minister who married a Catholic. Some come from protestant churches; others have never been baptized into any faith.
"I think part of the reason the Catholic Church is growing so much in Southeast Tennessee is because Southeast Tennessee is part of the Bible Belt," Blevins said. "And there are a lot of faithful Christians here."
Country before God. How wrong is that?
This bizarre screed is in response to another FReeper observing the fact that a majority of Catholics have historically voted for pro-abortion candidates? How is that putting God before country, since you seem to believe Catholics superior to Protestants in this regard? Have you ever even read the mission statement of this site you're posting upon?
That's right. And soon our Holy Romanist plan of converting the United States into a Papal state will come to fruition and all heretics will convert or be burned at the stake.
This will be our new national flag. Prepare to show your obedience.
God
Country
Family
Work
Other interests
is how I have always aligned it.
What about you?
One means of doing so appears to be voting for pro-abortion Democrats.
You didn’t deny that JFK and democrats did it, nor express regret for what it has done to America and conservatism and the pro-life movement and how it cost us California, and as the democrats pray, Texas in time.
Mocking us doesn’t change the cold reality for us pro-lifer conservatives.
As time goes on, I’m more and more convinced that we’re debating a bunch of sede vacantists who have pounced on FR for a soapbox. They’re more Catholic than the pope they reject. They exhibit all the traits.
Country - Family
Other interests
Work
To be honest I don't know one way or another. And I'm not all that interested in investigating the matter. It's really not all that important in the scheme of things. What good would it do? But let's say for the sake of argument I accept EVERYTHING you say on faith without having examined the matter myself, my question to you would then be: what are you going to do about it?
You think I'm going to stop being Catholic because Ansel proved statistically and mathematically that Catholics elected Obama in greater number/proportion that protestants. Is your understanding of the existential threat facing the United States pinned to a Pew research poll? You think that is going to have any bearing on my pro-life and pro-marriage beliefs? You, like others in the RF are stuck on some sort of narrative that has been built up in your minds as the measure of all things and yet advances nothing.
Why should I express regret? Since when do we believe in collective guilt? What are you some sort of black liberation theologist who believes in the collective guilt of the white race?
I mock not you, but the obsession. You've glommed onto what you perceive as some sort of deep truth and it has been allowed to skew the mind. It's created a deep furrow that we would consider the epitome of the "one-track mind".
Importing Catholics and their resulting offspring by the tens of millions feeds the democrat party, you can be something that we can’t find on FR, an anti-immigration Catholic, that want to end all mass immigration for a few generations. that means allow administrative cases of a few 10s of thousands of situations that don’t really figure into the issue of immigration, bringing in wives, some scientists, etc., and sure isn’t “mass” immigration.
If you are pro-life, then do whatever you can to cut off the supply of pro-abortion voters.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.
In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.
After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
Apparently you do:
This is a pathology that is evident in protestant thinking. Because their theology is so aligned with their political philosophy they can’t help but believe that ensuring the survival of the United States is a holy quest. For them, God does not exist outside of the Stars and Stripes.
So, tell me something, JPX2011. What form of governance would be better, in your opinion? A monarchy?
For all of you discussing this voting pattern. From the last election. So what are the Protestants doing about the black vote? And what are the Evangelicals doing about that Hispanic vote. It cannot all be laid at the threshold of the Catholic Church.
8 out of 10 white Protestants voted for Romney...95% of black Protestants voted for Obama...
6 out of 10 White Catholics voted for Romney...75% of Mexican Catholics voted for Obama...
Another source: Pew: The Evangelical Hispanic vote went 50-39 in favor of Obama in 2012. Hispanic Protestants in general went 55-33 for Obama in 2012.
That's how I've always understood it.
I don’t think many of us are members of the black churches, and we aren’t importing masses of black Protestants.
We are importing Catholics and their resulting offspring by the 10s of millions.
Are there any Catholics here who care about pro-life politics and defeating the left?
I never see them.
I don't think so. I'm not asking for apologies, expressions of regret or reparation from the protestant community. You fail to differentiate between the individual and the theology. Would you feel more comfortable if I said protestantism instead of protestants? I'll grant you that one.
So, tell me something, JPX2011. What form of governance would be better, in your opinion? A monarchy?
Nice try. I've seen what happens to Catholic monarchists on this forum. But I will say this: Those of us who frequent the RF better check the other side of this site for the level of skepticism about the voting process today. if the ballot box is as rigged as we trumpet on a daily basis, it will not be our salvation. Which renders the entire Catholic voting pattern argument moot. I'm prepared to go to ammo box. Are you RegulatorCountry?
Here's the more pertinent question: In your opinion can a person Be Catholic, pro-life and against the left?
Don’t get silly.
We know what the issue is and so does the left, that is why they are fighting tooth and nail to support immigration.
Why are the Catholics on FR with them on mass immigration?
It's actually not a silly question. It goes to the heart of your entire position. I want to know if it is your opinion that my being Catholic represents an existential threat to the United States?
Why are the Catholics on FR with them on mass immigration?
I don't belive I've ever expressed an immigration-related opinion on this forum one way or the other. And as somebody who resides in SoCal I'm well aquainted with the issue.
If all FR Catholics are with Democrats on the matter, then we can only conclude that Catholicism is the underlying factor which threatens the continued existence of the United States. So, then, is it your opinion that Catholicism, like Communism and Nazism, should be suppressed as an Anti-american ideology?
I hope this approach is OK with you.
"Since both [Catholic and Orthodox] claim ...to be the one true church, and the EOs reject papal infallibility and his full claim to power, the distinction is fitting."Good, that's clear. EO and RC theology are very much akin, even on points where they are not identical. The EO's maintain the unbroken Apostolic Succession, thus maintaining the validity of the Sacraments and the truth of the Faith. And although these may not be the very words they use --- I'm pointing to a divergence in technical theological language --- I would say the EO's nevertheless maintain the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium of the Church. This is our common patrimony.
The Catholics acknowledge our unity with them in terms of One Faith, One Lord, One Baptism --- in fact, the validity of all their Sacraments --- so in that sense we are one Church. That (to me) is what makes our division so painful, like a divorced couple who put a wall through the middle of their house. There was a 1,000 year unity, followed by a 1,000 years of "divorce" based on ecclesiastical structure. But to my mind anyway, we're still married; and what God had joined together, nobody should have put asunder.
Now, I think perhaps you brought the EO position into the discussion because you thought it highlighted a foundational division in how we see the work of the Holy Spirit in making the implications of doctrine ever deeper, wider and clearer to the Church. But I don't see a foundational division. The way I see it, we have a shared sense of "Ordinary Magisterium," which is pret'near the whole ballgame.
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Even the Vatican I (1870) declaration on Papal Infallibility was not such a huge game-changer. As you may know, many RC Bishops and theologians went into the council with somewhat divergent views, which they had been thrashing about openly for centuries.
(I mention this because I can only LOL at your idea that the RC Church was always crushing independent thought and stomping on questioning. Somehow you've missed centuries of questions and controversies there, sustained within this same Church! Just for one high-voltage example: as if Aquinas didn't utilize penetrating and persistent questions on every page, as the very method of his massive theological works!)
I alluded to Blessed John Henry Newman in one of my earlier remarks, and I'll now take Newman as my model (LINK). His "Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine," acknowledged as a key work in understanding the Catholic Church, he wrote and virtually completed when he was a Protestant (!), becoming a Catholic only shortly before its publication in 1845.
It's also notable that he opposed the "Ultramontane" view of his fellow British Catholic prelate, Cardinal Manning, going into Vatican I, since he was afraid that if you got the definition of Papal Infallibility wrong by a millimeter, particularly in the direction of Papal Maximalism, you would end up distorting the whole historic dynamism of "Ordinary" Magisterium, which is not dependent on extraordinary papal pronouncements.
He ended up satisfied with the definition that did come out of Vatican I, since it was right-sized. I was not some despotic monarchialism; it was something that fit into the much larger picture of the Sacred Tradition-based, Scripture-based, Reason and History-based process by which Revelation is comprehended more thoroughly through the ages.
I'm pinging don-o into the discussion because he is Orthodox and might want to correct or add to it from the EO point of view.
| My bottom line: it would be misleading to contrast Scriptural evidence and reason VS Magisterium, since the Magisterium itself is based on Scriptural evidence and reason. It unfolds gradually as the Church, mysteriously guided by the Holy Spirit, continues on Her pilgrim way though history, from Pentecost to the end of the age. |
I don't belive I've ever expressed an immigration-related opinion on this forum one way or the other. And as somebody who resides in SoCal I'm well aquainted with the issue.
That is close enough to what I was pointing out about Catholics and immigration at FR.
It seems that now you want to find a way to attacking my anti-immigration position, still without you stating one, using the "Nazi" gambit.
We see that from libertarians when they have to deal with gay marriage.
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