Is Prayer/Veneration/Worship to Mary Biblical?

self | 12-14-14 | ealgeone

[ealgeone]

The reason for this article is to determine if the worship/veneration given to Mary by the catholic church is justified from a Biblical perspective. This will be evaluated using the Biblical standard and not man’s standard.

[MamaB]

Are people really that dumb as to make a statement like that? Guess so. It looks like if they say something often enough, it is true. How can anyone support a fake religion like that?

[Elsie]

Indeed!

A wave of the hand should be sufficient!

[Mrs. Don-o]

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[MamaB]

I do not understand why anyone belongs to a group like that and then some say Protestants are wrong. Just wow. Do they actually think the pope is on a level with Christ?

[MamaB]

That does not matter to them. It is tradition, after all.

[Texas Songwriter]

I did notice that Clement did say...."commit them to the fire..."....does this mean the Inquisition goes on. It did until the Pope signed the Concordate with Mussolini and went in league with the fascists during world war II to murder (in the former Yugoslavia) 700,000 Croats, 60,000 Jews, and 26,000 Gypsies. They were in league with the Serbs. They told the Croats...."Convert or Die". It was considered the most concentrated killing field of the Axis, far beyond even that of the death camps of Poland.....all with the Pope turning a blind eye and assisting the Ustazi (Mussolini's equivalent of HItlers SS) in the murders. This is not ancient history. This is recent.

Even now, Ratzinger was head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the renamed Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. How anyone can know this and read and continue in association with this group is bewildering. But it seems Clement , in his 1776 encyclical explained that.....They are not allowed dissent. They cannot ask questions lest they become victim of those fires to which Clement referenced.

[ealgeone]

I don’t defend it. Why should I?

because a catholic said it.....ya'll are like the borg....think with one mind....no deviations.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Another misconception, my dear ealgeone.

A misconception showing an almost limitless capacity to resist evidence.

[ealgeone]

So you’re saying catholics think diffeently? Understand Scripture differently?

[daniel1212]

They knew, as has been shown by the Reformation, that once people begin reading the Bible for themselves they will see that Rome's teachings are incorrect.

Indeed, as they are not of Scripture , but which RCs labor to egregiously extrapolate from Scripture then convince themselves they have shown they are from Scripture. And then employ strawmen or specious argumentation to refute basic Prot. beliefs.

A classic example is that of trying to make praying to created beings in Heaven to be Scriptural. Faced with the utter absence of even one prayer or offering by even one soul (except pagans) to anyone in Heaven but the Lord, and over 200 prayers to God, and which only address the Lord in Scripture;

And which declares Christ as the only heavenly mediator btwn God and man, and only shows communication btwn created beings as requiring both to be in the same realm (even in by a vision) but never hearing prayers addressed to them in Heaven, and that only God is shown able to hear and respond to virtually infinite multitudes of prayers addressed to them in Heaven;

and that "saints"refers to all believers, not a distinct class, and that the postmortem place of all believers is with the Lord;

they can imagine the Holy Spirit would leave this common practice unrecorded, which is absurd, while only manifestly teaching us to pray directly to the Lord,

and that since saints are to pray one for another here then this supports praying to them in Heaven, which is the very thing that needs to be proved;

and that the reason we see no prayer to angels in the Old Testament is because they believed God was inaccessible by ordinary people, and had too much fear, yet they prayed plenty to God, conversed with angels on earth, and understood reverence as protocol in gaining a hearing by dignitaries, and sometimes prayed to idols.

And (getting more desperate) because prayer is for counsel, which requires human experience, yet prayer is more for deliverance and intercession, and Caths. pray to angels.

And that PTDS is not mentioned bcz the NT church had only 3 saints to pray to, which is refuted by the fact that this would have sufficed, plus they could have prayed to angels as Caths do now. Instead what took a while to develop by Christianized paganism.

Or even (in a classic case of compelling Scripture to serve Rome) to "have life more abundantly" includes being be as the angels of God in heaven, and for saints to judge angels means they have must superior faculties (wrong), and which means they could hear virtually infinite multitudes of prayers, but which again only God is shown having. And that since the prayers of some believers are more efficacious than others, then this supports a special class who alone are Heaven answering prayers to them, yet wherever the postmortem condition or at the Lord's return of believers is manifestly spoken of then it is always with the Lord. (Lk. 23:43; Phil 1:23; 2Cor. 5:8; 1Cor. 15:51ff; 1Thess. 4:17)

And that elders and angels offering up prayers as a memorial during the Tribulation is that of them basically being a postal service, yet would still not be hearing prayers addressed to them.

And that the above scenario is also a description of the Mass, which is desperate and absurd reliance upon another deformation.

and argue in any case that that if something is not forbidden then it can become doctrine, as with God everything is possible, which argument from silence is a slippery slope and is employed by cults for doctrine;

But such sophistry the RC imagines that he has established RC doctrine and refuted Protestantism, and after extensively showing others, one begins to suspect they are seeking to waste our time, and perhaps gain an indulgence. Thus why feed them.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Yes. As St. Augustine said:

In what is essential, unity;
In what is not essential, liberty;
In all things, charity.

[ealgeone]

So much for that nonsense about the rcc having the “unchanging” truth. Easy to claim that when you make it up.

[daniel1212]

The point is that the LXX nor anything else proves the apocryphal books were established as being Scripture proper, esp, not by those who sat in the seat of Moses to whom Christ enjoined general obedience to.

[daniel1212]

You can refute the idea that SS means only the Bible is to be used for formulating doctrine which as shown, was not what Reformers did (versus its sufficiency in formal and material aspects), and that it renders the magisterial office impotent and superfluous, or that sola fide means a faith that will not effect obedience is salvific, but these straw man are so essential to RC polemics that the just get posted again.

[metmom]

You always come through dan.

Thanks for all your hard work.

[metmom]

Even if Satan incarnate is representing Christ to the world?

It’s staggering to think that that would even occur to someone to say, much less the fact that it did and he said it.

There’s got to be something in that incense.

[verga]

I would be curious as to what the catholics on this board have to say about this. How is this even close to being defensible?

You want a response to a third hand quote that may or may not be accurate.

Here is my response: All of the non-Catholics and anti-Catholics need to spend more time in prayer and Bible study than you do trolling the internet for "gotcha" quotes and hateful anti-Catholic rhetoric.

[CynicalBear]

>>There’s got to be something in that incense.<<

Don't they call it "holly smoke"? It's comments like those from high level Catholics that give a peek into what they really believe.

[ealgeone]

A tad more detail.... EWTN Catholic Q&A Roman and seminary search Question from Bill Foley on 09-10-2002:

Roman wrote “unity with the pope at the expense of Catholic doctrine.” It seems to me that he is really not seeking a seminary that is truly Catholic, that is, one totally faithful to the papal magisterium. Please note what Saint John Bosco said to his spiritual sons as he was dying: “Do not ever forget these three things: devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, devotion to Mary Help of Christians, and devotion to the Holy Father.” Saint Catherine of Siena, a Doctor of the Church, has written: “Even if the pope were Satan incarnate, we ought not to raise up our heads against him, but calmly lie down to rest on his bosom. He who rebels against our father is condemned, for that which we do to him we do to Christ; we honor Christ if we honor the pope; we dishonor Christ if we dishonor the pope.” Roman is also confusing St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore with Mount St. Mary’s in Emitsburg. The Holy Father is the principle of unity in the Catholic Church; if one is separated from the Holy Father, then one is separated from the will of God. I suggest that Roman go into the document library of EWTN, enter “papacy” as keyword, and then read the wonderful essay by the late Cardinal Gilroy re the papal magisterium. This wonderful son of the Church refers to the papacy as a “sacrament of truth,” which it is. Answer by Matthew Bunson on 09-10-2002:

Maybe catholics should spend more time reading what their "doctors" have written and compare that to the Word. Then they would know they're in a false religion.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Nobody ever said St. Catherine of Siena was infallible. You do grasp that, don’t you?