Yeah, they do a lot of oppressing. It's a hobby with them. In fact, one of them recently decided not to go on vacation; she said to me, "Why go to the beach when I can stay home and oppress me some bishops?"
Tell me, do people run when they see you coming?
You said it can’t possibly happens because you know some Catholics who...
You canno’t possibly, not even remotely know what it is to be Catholic ... because you aren’t Catholic.
Thinking you are ‘in the know’ doesn’t make it so.
It still cracks me up that little old Protestant you, knows more about Catholicism and what a Catholic experiences, than a lifelong faithful Catholic.
Protestants are funny - you think you’re Catholic.
For the Greater a Glory of God
Oppression of Catholics is nothing new - this from the 1500s in England.
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England by Eamon Duffy is an excellent study of the Protestant reformation in England by a top-notch historian. Mr. Duffy has delved deeply into the period’s primary sources including hundreds of church logs, primers, manuals, wills, and diaries. An intellectual tour de force, it is accessible to the average reader.
“The Stripping off the Altars by Eamon Duffy
The Stripping of the Altars is the story of traditional Catholics desperately trying to preserve their faith against tyrannical rulers who tear down their altars, change the language of their Mass, mock their devotions, destroy their statues, and decimate their liturgical year. It is a tale of courage amid great tragedy and it proves that the Faith in England was stolen, not lost. Most of all it presents the beauty and power of traditional Roman Catholicism.
The Stripping of the Altars is a wonderful examination of the faith of medieval Englishmen and it is an excellent complement to Cranmer’s Godly Order by Michael Davies.
The main thesis of Duffy’s book is that the Roman Catholic faith was in rude and lively health prior to the English Reformation. Duffy’s argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large.
Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.), Duffy argues that every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with well-meaning piety. Feast days were celebrated, fasts solemnly observed, churches decorated, images venerated, candles lit and prayers for the dead recited with regularity. Pre-Reformation Catholicism was, he argues, a deeply popular religion, practised by all sections of society, whether noble or peasant. Earlier historians’ claims that English religious practice was becoming more individualised (with different strata of society having radically different religious lives) is contested by Duffy insisting on the continuing ‘corporate’ nature of the late medieval Catholic Church, i.e. where all members were consciously and willingly part of a single institution.
AMDG