The Roman Catholic Church has stated our beliefs IN WRITING for over 1900+ years.
So you, belonging to a ‘church’ that is at most 500 years old have been ‘divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit’ to discern that the beliefs of our Catholic Church are in error.
So your 500 year old beliefs are correct and our 1900+ year old beliefs are wrong.
Well that is so special, you must be so proud of all your ‘so correct’ discernment.
BTW, have your ever heard the phrase ‘Vincible Ignorance’? No?
Well good luck with that.
Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.
Satan has fooled so many for so long... and that includes your 1900 year old cult! He was here before your cult came onto the scene and has made fools of too many.
Scripture stands solid in contrast to the movable goalposts of Roman Catholicism! Popes come and go, but the Holy Spirit/Jesus/God is the same today, yesterday, and forever! (Hebrews 13:8) His Word will endure forever. (Isaiah 40:8)
Oh come now. Your short changing the Catholic Church. Some of those written beliefs go back a lot farther than 1900 years. That “queen of heaven” concept was spoken of way back in Jeremiah’s day.
Not so, as Rome is contrary to Scripture while your basis for the veracity of RC teaching cannot be the weight of Scriptire, but is based upon the novel but false premise of perpetual ensured magisterial veracity of Rome.
Thus while for Reformers,
"Substantiation for this understanding of the gospel came principally from the Scriptures, but whenever they could, the reformers also quoted the fathers of the catholic church. There was more to quote than their Roman opponents found comfortable"
And who,
...To prepare books like the Magdeburg Centuries they combed the libraries and came up with a remarkable catalogue of protesting catholics and evangelical catholics, all to lend support to the insistence that the Protestant position was, in the best sense, a catholic position. (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 195948-49).
For RCs were see the recourse of no less than Cardinal Manning in response to which:
It was the charge of the Reformers that the Catholic doctrines were not primitive, and their pretension was to revert to antiquity. But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine.... I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity. It rests upon its own supernatural and perpetual consciousness...The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour. — Most Rev. Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, “The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation,”
And while much can be said about the state of the evangelical church today (and of my need for Christ-likeness), yet it is Catholicism and the church of Rome in particular (as the church taking up the most space on the broad way to destruction) that is most manifest as standing in critical and overall contrast to the NT church. Which church, as manifested in Scripture,
1. Was not based upon the premise of perpetual assured infallibility of office as per Rome, which has presumed to infallibly declare that she is and will perpetually be infallible whenever she speaks in accordance with her infallibly defined (scope and subject-based) formula, which renders her declaration that she is infallible, to be infallible, as well as all else she accordingly declares.
2. Never promised or taught a perpetual assuredly infallible magisterium was necessary for preservation of truth, including writings to be established as Scripture, and for assurance of faith, and that historical descent and being the stewards of Scripture assured that such had assured infallibility.
3. Never was a church that manifested the Lord's supper as being the central means of grace, around which all else revolved, it being “the source and summit of the Christian faith” in which “the work of our redemption is accomplished,” by which one received spiritual life in themselves by consuming human flesh, so that without which eating one cannot have eternal life (as per RC literalism, of Jn. 6:53,54). In contrast to believing the gospel by which one is regenerated, (Acts 10:43-47; 15:7-9; Eph. 1:13) and desiring the milk (1Pt. 2:2) and then the “strong meat” (Heb. 5:12-14) of the word of God, being “nourished” (1Tim. 4:6) by hearing the word of God and letting it dwell in them, (Col. 3:16) by which word (Scriptures) man is to live by, (Mt. 4:4) as Christ lived by the Father, (Jn. 6:57) doing His will being His “meat.” (Jn. 4:34) And with the Lord's supper, which is only manifestly described once in the life of the church, focusing on the church being the body of Christ in showing the Lord sacrificial death by that communal meal.
4. Never had any pastors titled "priests" as they did not engage in any unique sacrificial function, that of turning bread into human flesh and dispensing it to the people, or even dispensing bread as their primary ordained function, versus preaching the word. (2Tim. 4:2)
5. Never differentiated between bishops and elders, and with grand titles ("Most Reverend Eminence," “Very Reverend,” “Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord,” “His Eminence Cardinal,” “The Most Reverend the Archbishop,” etc.) or made themselves distinct by their ostentatious pompous garb. (Matthew 23:5-7) Or were all to be formally called “father” as that would require them to be spiritual fathers to all (Mt. 23:8-10 is a form of hyperbole, reproving the love of titles such as Catholicism examples, and “thinking of men above that which is written, and instead the Lord emphasizes the One Father of all who are born of the Spirit, whom He Himself worked to glorify).
6. Never required clerical celibacy as the norm, (1Tim. 3:17) which presumes all such have that gift, (1Cor. 7:7) or otherwise manifested that celibacy was the norm among apostles and pastors, or had vowed to be so. (1Cor. 9:4; Titus 1:5,6)
7. Never taught that Peter was the "rock" of Mt. 16:18 upon which the church is built, interpreting Mt. 16:18, rather than upon the rock of the faith confessed by Peter, thus Christ Himself. (For in contrast to Peter, that the LORD Jesus is the Rock (“petra”) or "stone" (“lithos,” and which denotes a large rock in Mk. 16:4) upon which the church is built is one of the most abundantly confirmed doctrines in the Bible (petra: Rm. 9:33; 1Cor. 10:4; 1Pet. 2:8; cf. Lk. 6:48; 1Cor. 3:11; lithos: Mat. 21:42; Mk.12:10-11; Lk. 20:17-18; Act. 4:11; Rm. 9:33; Eph. 2:20; cf. Dt. 32:4, Is. 28:16) including by Peter himself. (1Pt. 2:4-8) Rome's current catechism attempts to have Peter himself as the rock as well, but also affirms: “On the rock of this faith confessed by St Peter, Christ build his Church,” (pt. 1, sec. 2, cp. 2, para. 424) which understanding some of the so-called “church fathers” concur with.)
8. Never taught or exampled that all the churches were to look to Peter as the bishop of Rome, as the first of a line of supreme heads reigning over all the churches, and having the last word in questions affecting the whole Church.
9. Never recorded or taught any apostolic successors (like for James: Acts 12:1,2) after Judas who was to maintain the original 12: Rv. 21:14) or elected any apostolic successors by voting, versus casting lots (no politics). (Acts 1:15ff)
10. Never recorded or manifested (not by conjecture) sprinkling or baptism without repentant personal faith, that being the stated requirement for baptism. (Acts 2:38; 8:36-38)
11. Never preached a gospel of salvation which begins with becoming good enough inside (formally justified due to infused interior charity), via sprinkling (RC "baptism") in recognition of proxy faith, and which thus usually ends with becoming good enough again to enter Heaven via suffering in purgatory, commencing at death.
12. Never supported or made laws that restricted personal reading of Scripture by laity (contrary to Chrysostom), if able and available, sometimes even outlawing it when it was.
13. Never used the sword of men to deal with its theological dissenters.
14. Never taught that the deity Muslims worship (who is not as an "unknown god") is the same as theirs.
15. Never had a separate class of believers called “saints.”
16. Never prayed to anyone in Heaven but the Lord, or were instructed to (i.e. "our Mother who art in Heaven") who were able to hear and respond to virtually unlimited prayers addressed to them (a uniquely Divine attribute in Scripture).
17. Never recorded a women who never sinned, and was a perpetual virgin despite being married (contrary to the normal description of marriage, as in leaving and sexually cleaving) and who would be bodily assumed to Heaven and exalted (officially or with implicit sanction) as seen here
The Roman Catholic Church is very different from the church of 1900+ years ago. Over time, due to human unfaithfulness, it evolved into something else. The original Church apparently chose, by inspirtation of the Holy Spirit, not to preserve knowledge of a lot of things, including, for example, much about the lives of the original apostles and Jesus’s known family, including His brothers and Mary, His mother. If God had intended it, He could have made sure that knowledge was preserved, including preserving a “royal line” of Christians coming from Jesus’ relatives, as it’s likely some reproduced. We could have the same with the original twelve disciples. But we don’t have that. Just on the matter of Mary and Jesus’ brothers, it’s an inescapable conclusion that the Church consciously and deliberately opposed preserving knowledge of their lives here on earth, including after Jesus’ resurrection, and the reason for that is that Jesus alone is God and everyone was wholly devoted to Him alone. That is clear in the New Testament from the first to the last. But there is still a human tendency to get into such things, and while it was opposed in the original church, it crept back in over time, over many centuries.