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Satan, through the Papacy ... says otherwise. He says focus on Literal Israel, not him and the Papacy.

Reality check, Phil -- "the Papacy" is not onboard with "Literal Israel" (of today) being connected with "Biblical End time prophecy," and never has been.

About all Rome has said on the topic is that the conversion of the Jews (which may, or may not, have anything to do with the contemporary nation-state of Israel) has to precede the Second Coming.

There are no good deeds nor any amount of good deeds we can do to earn our salvation or keep it.

Now your back to changing the subject because you can't stick to one topic at a time. I have work to do.

The folks who’ve been saying believers can’t read the Bible for ourselves are your fellow Roman Catholics on these forums.

There is no such thing as "Catholic Internet poster infallibility," is there?

Active cooperation is necessarily enabled by actual grace. Look it up.

I said nothing about anything being "valid" or "binding". Don't put words in my mouth.

Why do you immediately jump from "not infallible" to "not valid or binding"?

(And btw, something can be "valid" but "not binding" quite easily. Clement XIV's decree suppressing the Jesuits was absolutely valid. It is not binding on me in any way; this is not the 18th century, and I am not a Jesuit.)

We’ve been told repeatedly we cannot read the Bible for ourselves.

Who's "we"? If you mean "Catholic laypeople," you're quite wrong. In fact, private Bible reading is an indulgenced act, and has been for a long time. The Church can't promote anything more highly than to attach an indulgence to it.

Only Rome can tell us what is or isn’t right.

Wrong. God didn't give you a conscience as a vestigial organ. It's your duty to form your conscience by studying correct teaching, among other things. Sitting around waiting for Rome to rule on every jot and tittle will keep you waiting for a very long time.

It's been 2000 years, eagleone. Most question have been posed before, most of the answers, with varying degrees of authority, are written down in books. Much of it is even on the Internet. If I had trouble understanding something or it seemed contradictory, it's not that hard for me to find a solid priest and ask him.

Your question is a little bit like asking how anyone do mathematics without the International Mathematics Union issuing an authoritative decree that every line of every solution to every problem is correct. If you're just trying to compute how much fertilizer you need for your lawn, you don't really need to go to the world's highest authority on math to figure it out.

How do you know your local Bible study leader, if the RC has one, is right in what they’re teaching?

I don't go to parish lay-led Bible studies, because they're usually really bad. (Not goring any individual ox here; I'm just speaking generally, in my experience ...) As I say, if I have a question, the answer is usually written down (I have a fairly big bookshelf) or on the Internet.

He must be right because of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility according to dogma prescribed in Pastor aeternus.

Would it be fair to say that you've not actually read Pastor Aeternus?

It never directly uses the term "Papal Infallibility". Here is the money quote (and also the only instance of the term "infallibility" in the document).

... we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, **1** in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, **2** in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he **3** defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals **4** to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.

I helpfully noted the FOUR conditions required for a Papal **teaching** to be infallible: **1** **2** ... so on.

That infallibility belongs to the Pope only when he proclaims a doctrine meeting all four conditions; it doesn't somehow inhere in him personally on a continuous basis.

Even if a priest is there to help them the Roman Catholic cannot be assured what they are hearing from their priest is actually the correct interpretation of the Word.

Tell us all about the "assurance" that you have that your minister is giving you the "correct interpretation of the Word".

How do you know it's correct? Because you agree with it? Hardly an objective test. Hardly a test that matters to anyone except you and God.

Rome has only dogmatically defined less than 40 verses of the Bible

Ex cathedra teachings do not, generally speaking, "dogmatically define" verses of the Bible. (What would that even mean? How would you "dogmatically" exhaust all possible meanings? Why would you even want to do that? "Hey Scripture scholars, your job on this verse is done; nothing more need be said." ... why?)

They do dogmatically define specific teachings concerning faith and morals. So that, for example, when Arius taught that God-the-Son incarnate in Jesus was a "lesser god" who was created by the Father at a point in time ("there was a time when He was not" was their slogan), the Nicene council authoritatively, dogmatically, said, "NO" ... God the Son and God the Father are homousios ("of one substance") and God the Son was eternally "God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God".

And when Pelagius said that grace consisted of us being able to save ourselves by our own efforts and that the Cross was just Jesus giving us a good example, the Church authoritatively -- dogmatically -- stepped in, most notably at the II Council of Orange (a local council given dogmatic force by a later Papal decree) and said, "NO" ... apart from grace you are dead in your sins and can do nothing at all to gain God's favor.

I'm betting that you agree with both of those positions. Christians don't have to re-fight those fights because the Church, at a very early stage, ruled dogmatically on them. If my priest teaches contrary to those dogmatic positions, I know he's not teaching the faith.

They didn't though. And all of the hardware exists in museums and could be reverse-engineered if we wanted to. Most of the blueprints exist, too, but aren't very useful inputs to a modern, computerized, manufacturing process. The tooling and other purpose-built manufacturing equipment does not, however.

There are even extra F-1 (Saturn V first stage) engines sitting in a warehouse. A team reverse-engineered one of them -- their story is on the Internet, read it yourself -- and designed an upgraded F-1 that would have been much cheaper to manufacture, using modern methods, than the original F-1 was, at only a small cost in thrust/efficiency. It was proposed as the booster engine for the SLS.

NASA rejected it in favor of the "killed seven people on Challenger" solid-fuel booster rockets. [shrug]

The Council is not a dogmatic but a pastoral one; we are not seeking to define new dogmas but to put forward the truth in a pastoral way

True enough ... so then why do some act as though the Council is the object of a quasi-idolatrous reverence, as though nothing the Church did or said before it has any substantive value?

Yes, his question was about language. The real issues at stake have little to do with language.

I think the spread of literacy had quite a bit more to do with a certain Catholic gentleman named Johann Gutenberg than it did with Mr. Luther. If it hadn’t been for Gutenberg making books and pamphlets relatively cheap, Luther’s rebellion would probably not have amounted to much.

If you're thinking the argument is just about language, it's not. There used to be an indult allowing the Tridentine Mass to be celebrated in Serbo-Croatian instead of Latin (called the "Glagolitic Mass"), but it was still the same liturgy, just in translation. The Novus Ordo is not the same liturgy, even if you celebrate it in Latin. Different books, different prayers, different readings, different calendar, everything.

Killing the Latin Mass killed a whole culture that united Latin Rite Catholics all over the world. You could go to France or Poland or South Africa and still recognize the Mass you were familiar with. Now you can't even go across town and have that.

Yeah, it won’t work that way. +Francis expects absolute and unquestioning obedience from real Catholics. He only plays nice with people outside the church and on the periphery.

When you read paragraphs like this:

“Additionally, I, like many of my classmates, signed a nondisclosure not to tell anyone, including our parents, about the program,” added Hudgins. “My classmates and I were particularly warned by a David Lynch Foundation representative not to tell our parents if our parents were ‘religious.’”

... and then reflect that it would never ever be even remotely possible that a "program" like this would be trying to hide proselytizing kids into Christianity, it becomes very hard at least for me to conclude anything other than that this "program," and all of the people who knowingly authorized it, are totally controlled by the devil.

Rocks erode over time. Who knows what it looked like 2000 years ago?

The traditional explanation for "Place of the Skull" is that it's where Adam was buried. That's why some pictures of the crucifixion will show a skull and bones at the base of the Cross. Those aren't the bones of Average Joe; they represent the bones of Adam.

It’s a mozilla fork. I used to use it a few years back. It’s okay. May choke on some more modern websites.

On the other hand, Noem doesn’t throw Republicans under buses like Mittens regularly does.

There’s a corridor in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that descends to one of the deepest and oldest chapels in the building. The walls of the corridor have innumerable little crosses and chi-rhos scratched into them ... put there by Crusaders, 800 years ago.

It was in a proportional font, and supposed to be from 1967 or something. There were a few (very expensive) typesetting machines available at that time that could do that, but they wouldn't have been used to type up orders and reports in an Air Force reserve office.

Either the documents were very poorly executed fakes, or they were relating the truth, but weren't the originals, but a word-processed retype of the originals.