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.

[af_vet_1981]

Here is the story of reconciliation between the Catholics and the Jews, as recorded by the Jewish Virtual Library. Please share the Jewish testimony about your faith group and then we can judge who is friendly, side by side. Or perhaps your earlier comment about Pentecostals means I should assume Pentecostals instead ?

Pope John Paul II:
Relations with Jews and Israel
Pope John Paul II: Table of Contents | Biography | Israel Pilgrimage


John Paul II was born Karol Wojtyla on May 18, 1920, in the Polish town of Wadowice, where he had Jewish friends and neighbors and was an eyewitness to the Holocaust. A few months before the war ended, Wojtyla rescued a starving 13-year-old Jewish girl at a train station by carrying her to the rail car in which he was traveling, feeding her and covering her with his coat. Later, he would affect even more Jewish lives.

While Wojtyla was a bishop, he took part in the historic Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII, which modernized aspects of church practice and doctrine. The Council also radically changed the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people when it issued the Nostra Aetate declaration in 1965, which cleared Jews of responsibility for the death of Jesus, renounced its traditional claim that Jews had been rejected by God, condemned anti-Semitism, and called for “mutual understanding and respect” between Catholics and Jews. As Pope, John Paul II would turn these words into actions.

After his election as pope in October 1978, John Paul often devoted his energy to improving relations between Jews and Catholics. He frequently met with Jewish leaders, repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism, commemorated the Holocaust, and established diplomatic relations with Israel.

One of his first acts toward reconciliation occurred during his visit to Poland in 1979 when he knelt and prayed at Auschwitz. Seven years later, on April 13, 1986, he made an even more dramatic trip, this one just across the Tiber River, to Rome’s Great Synagogue, becoming the first pope to visit a Jewish house of worship. There he warmly embraced Rome’s chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, and described Jews as the “elder brothers” of Christians.

“In his speech, everyone felt his love, his affection,” Toaff recalled. “He made a tie between Judaism and Christianity and, in doing so, he found a way to move us all.’

On the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Pope John Paul II issued this appeal:

As Christians and Jews, following the example of the faith of Abraham, we are called to be a blessing to the world (cf. Gen. 12:2 ff.). This is the common task awaiting us. It is therefore necessary for us, Christians and Jews, to be first a blessing to one another (L'Osservatore Romano, August 17, 1993).

In 1994, John Paul established full diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel. He said, “For the Jewish people who live in the State of Israel and who preserve in that land such precious testimonies to their history and their faith, we must ask for the desired security and the due tranquillity that are the prerogative of every nation . . .”

The Pope also was instrumental in the publication of “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” the 1998 document expressing the Church's “deep sorrow for the failures of her sons and daughters in every age.”

He visited Israel in 2000, publicly apologizing for the persecution of Jews by Catholics over the centuries, including the Holocaust, and depositing a note pleading for forgiveness in a crack in the Western Wall.

While many of John Paul’s teachings about the Jews have become official church policy, even he recognized that differences would remain. In a 1985 speech, the Pope took some credit for helping bury ignorance, prejudice and stereotypes about Jews, but he also acknowledged that Catholics and Jews would continue to have disagreements. “Love involves understanding,” he said. “It also involves frankness and the freedom to disagree in a brotherly way where there are reasons for it."

In addition, while John Paul was regarded warmly by Jews, not all of his statements and actions were sympathetic. He was, for example, frequently critical of Israeli actions, and largely silent on the mistreatment of Christians by Arabs and Muslims. In February 2000, the Pope and Yasser Arafat issued a joint condemnation of any unilateral decision that would “change the unique character of Jerusalem,” terming such a decision “legally and morally invalid.” Arafat and the Pope, meeting in the Vatican, called for an international status to be granted to Jerusalem.

The Pope was also unwilling to criticize his predecessors or accept the church’s institutional responsibility for anti-Semitism in the past. He was also criticized for efforts to Christianize the Holocaust as, for example, when he visited Auschwitz and compared the camp to Golgotha, the hill where Jesus was crucified. The decision to canonize the Jewish-born nun, Edith Stein, who was murdered in Auschwitz, and celebrate the date of her beatification as “Holocaust Day” was also controversial.

Jews were also dismayed when John Paul beatified Pius IX, who was known for countenancing the abduction and conversion to Catholicism of a Jewish child in 1858. John Paul was also criticized for refusing to fully open the Vatican archives to allow scholars to examine the actions of Pope Pius XII, who John Paul also supported for sainthood, during the Holocaust.

Still, when John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, at the age of 84, he made one final gesture to the Jews when he mentioned “the rabbi of Rome.” Toaff and John Paul’s longtime secretary were the only living people mentioned in the will.

Toaff called the reference a “significant and profound gesture for Jews” and “an indication to the Catholic world.” John Paul, he said, “wanted to indicate a road aimed at further destroying all the obstacles that have divided Jews and Christians through the centuries.”

[daniel1212]

How original. I will let the Lord and the readers decide. Bye.

[annalex]

Those do not say anything about justification by faith alone; they only speak to the Catholic teaching that works of law, or for temporal gain, do not contribute to salvation. In most of your quotes “of law” is right in the quotes, in others, if you expand the context to three-four verses wider than your prooftext, you will see an exhortation to good works.

[annalex]

Just because a book, or books, are found in a collection of books, does not conclude that ALL the books enjoy the same status as the others in the collection

True; while St. Paul writes that "all" are inspired, there is some question of whether "all" should have the same status as canonical. The short answer is that the Septuagint is not really a well-defined collection of books. We should think of the Deuterocanon as of the set common to most Septuagint copies. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains:

there are considerations which bid us hesitate to admit an Apostolic adoption of the Septuagint en bloc. As remarked above, there are cogent reasons for believing that it was not a fixed quantity at the time. The existing oldest representative manuscripts are not entirely identical in the books they contain. Moreover, it should be remembered that at the beginning of our era, and for some time later, complete sets of any such voluminous collection as the Septuagint in manuscript would be extremely rare; the version must have been current in separate books or groups of books, a condition favourable to a certain variability of compass. So neither a fluctuating Septuagint nor an inexplicit New Testament conveys to us the exact extension of the pre-Christian Bible transmitted by the Apostles to the Primitive Church. It is more tenable to conclude to a selective process under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and a process completed so late in Apostolic times that the New Testament fails to reflect its mature result regarding either the number or note of sanctity of the extra-Palestinian books admitted.

Canon of the Old Testament

[annalex]

Only James is not teaching we are justified by faith AND works before God

Sure he does:

Seest thou, that faith did co-operate with his works; and by works faith was made perfect? [...] Do you see that by works a man is justified; and not by faith only? (James 2:22,24)

[annalex]

What “dead” exactly means St. James explains in the same passage: “Do you see that by works a man is justified; and not by faith only?” (James 2:24).

[annalex]

It is compatible with the gospel and early. Who exactly taught it, especially documenting it, we don’t know. What is this, police station?

[annalex]

I think what James is saying is...

And I, being Catholic, think that what James is saying is what he is saying, right in the inspired text he wrote. Where Protestants wonder, fantasize and obfuscate Catholics know.

[annalex]

When references to salvation are in the past, they refer to the process of salvation that started at the Cross. I gave you sufficient quotes that show that the process of salvation is not complete yet till death and judgment.

[annalex]

Yes, I wholly agree that grace precedes our works and that they are prepared by God for us to do them.

[annalex]

‘Cause you say so?

[annalex]

the woman in Revelation 12 is NOT Mary

Sure she is; she is identified as the mother of Christ. But Ealgeone did not ask what you might think of Rev 12. He asked where Catholics find something in the bible that makes the doctrine of Assumption scripturally compatible. I answered. What you think on the matter is just more Protestant garbage.

[annalex]

salvation is not a result of works

It is not a result of works alone.

[annalex]

Ah, finally. The Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks in 15 century. That is 14 centuries after St. John wrote the Apocalypse. Was the fall of Byzantium a result of their ways? Most certainly. For example, when Rome offered them a union and a military protection, they preferred Turkish occupation. They got what they opted to have.

[annalex]

accepts 7 of the 15 books that were in the [Septuagint].

Yes, the stable subset. Manuscripts vary.

[annalex]

I thought you could not interpret scripture without a priest?

True. I never interpret scripture. I read what it says and I explain it to you.

I don't agree

It is, sadly, your option.

[annalex]

Since there is plenty of real evidence that the Apostles did not refer to these books as Divinely-inspired

The only time the New Testament mentions divine inspiration of scripture is in the disputes passage from 2 Timothy, and there is only descibed the Old Testament using words "all" and "known from Timothy's infancy".

Roman Catholicism presumed itself in authority over God's divine word

The church certainly has the authority over what is and what is not the canon of the Holy Scripture.

[daniel1212]

Dead faith is a faith that does not save,

Indeed, and it is the kind of faith which effects works that is counted for righteousness, not being justified by the merit of any works, as Peter and Paul plainly teach.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; (Titus 3:5)

To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins. (Acts 10:43)

And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe. And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us; And put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. (Acts 15:7-9)

But RCs can only think what conforms to Rome, thus imagine this means a ritual and (usually) postmortem suffering makes one good enough to be with God, and must engage in egregious extrapolation in trying to dress up their tradition-based heresy with Scripture to make it look respectable to evangelicals.

[metmom]

True. I never interpret scripture. I read what it says and I explain it to you.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hey! gamecock, Here is another one for you!!!

I'm going to have to remeber this one for future reference.....

[Mark17]

I thought you could not interpret scripture without a priest?

True. I never interpret scripture. I read what it says and I explain it to you.

Alex, I am glad you finally admitted you can't interpret what the Bible says. You say you are just telling me what it says. Hello. That is interpreting it. You are not allowed to do that. It is obviously interpreting, because I don't agree with your interpretation of James, the half brother of Jesus, the natural son of Mary and Joseph, who went on to have a normal married life together. You do not seem to get who Jesus' half brother was writing to. We will have to agree to disagree. See you at the pearly gates😄😃

Guys, I wake up this morning and see a bunch of new threads. I can't keep up with it all, but I will try.