Okay, if "tolerance" is actually hypocrisy, then perhaps many of the early American colonists had it correct. The Mass. Bay colony wouldn't allow anyone to live in Mass. who wasn't a Puritan. Heck, they killed Quakers and R.I. was settled by escapees from Mass.! And they weren't the only ones who acted this way.
After the colonies became a nation, the separation between church and state came about. This, no matter what the ill educated an do LIBERALS tell you, was meant to prevent this country from having a state religion....NOT to keep; religion out of this nation.
Yet you come onto this thread and post all kinds of what you claim to be the Catholic church's positions, which look like bigotry to the rest of us. And if this stuff is true, then it would really be best for you to have kept it to yourself; especially since it makes the Catholic church look terrible.
American is NOT a theocracy, but if it was one, YOU would be the one getting the dirty end of the stick; not Protestants, since the vast majority of those involved with founding this nation were Protestants, whom you think are all consigned to hell.
The funniest thing, though, is that with every reply you make, you refute the article that heads this thread. It is NOT that there is an anti-Catholic nature to Freemasonry ( though if there was, it would be well deserved ! ); rather, there is an anti-everyone but Catholics, in the Catholic church and by some Catholics, such as yourself.
If you ever want to change your nic, I suggest that you use Savonarola.
reductio: Hence, it would be the self praise that stinks for reductio to adopt the honored name of Savanarola just as the Society of St. Pius X dishonors St. Pius X by misappropriating his name for their nefarious purposes of impersonating Catholics.
It also seems unlikely that reductio had Jesuit teachers. The Jesuits who taught me so long ago that Jesuits were still Catholic would have made short work of him. Later Jesuits were possessed of the more leftist types of error such as were condemned as "modernism" (read secular humanism) than reductio who flirts with SSPXism and Feeneyism (most particularly).
Unfortunately, there are those who regard themselves as Catholic who are all too familiar with partial readings of ancient texts and not at all familiar with more contemporary materials and ignore the context of both. Hurling anathemas from on high (or wherever) at the specks in others' eyes helps them to ignore the motes and beams in their own eyes.
Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled against Hitler on behalf of the persecuted Jews, came to America, was welcomed as a hero by many sympathetic Americans who raised funds to fuel his efforts but he went back to Germany to personally confront the evils of nazism and was hanged by Hitler as a last minute effort before Hitler blew his own brains out in the bunker with Eva Braun. BUT, despite such noble works (apologies to reformation views of works) and the burning faith in and love for God which was exhibited by his works, he just must be in hell because he was not Catholic at death. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Moral hero and good and faithful servant or denizen of hell simply for not being Catholic??? Apparently the latter or so we are expected to believe by reductio. I don't believe that.
Ditto the Protestant ten Booms. Ditto Dismas, the good thief, crucified with Jesus Christ and who was never baptized Catholic or otherwise. Just because Jesus Christ said that Dismas would join Him in paradise that day doesn't mean that Jesus Christ had any business contradicting the Council of Florence not to be held for 1400+ years in the future, right, reductio????
When I attended a Jesuit prep school of the illustrious actually Catholic sort (in olden days), we never wondered about the eternal destination of the Bonhoeffers or of the ten Booms or of Dismas (Christ's own words were good enough for us before Marcel Lefebvre and Leonard Feeney's acolytes discovered their supposedly superior wisdom). We went immediately to the outer shores, the worst we could imagine and asked our Jesuits whether Hitler or Stalin could possibly have been admitted to heaven. Now, no one regarded those outcomes as likely but the Jesuits admonished us that no one can possibly know whether either had enjoyed a grace of final perfect repentance in those last moments of consciousness and therefore, we could not be certain that either was in hell.
Reductio is not an authority on Catholicism (based on his posted opinions) nor is he authorized by the Church to be one. He is far closer to the Feeneyite heresy condemned by actual Church authority in the 1950s (Fr. Feeney repented and returned to the Catholic Church before he died) or the SSPX schism condemned as such by John Paul the Great in his Ecclesia Dei in 1988 in which he excommunicated SSPX leaders and adherents. Marcel Lefebvre, the founding schismatic of the SSPX, never repented publicly before he died, but, like Hitler and Stalin, we can never be sure that he did not respond to a grace of final perfect repentance.
It ill behooves Catholics in the United States to harangue against Protestants or Masons since we have generally enjoyed the hospitality of both and have flourished here. We are not required to deny objective truth nor should we. There have been brief periods of anti-Catholic activity in various places here. If we want to complain, we will have to confess anti-Protestant and anti-Masonic behavior of our own.
When Connecticut was a formally Congregationalist state (until 1818), the Roman Catholic Mass was not allowed to be said there. Is it not reasonable to suggest that the Congregationalists were acting on a far older Catholic model of Christendom which merged church and state to a substantial degree??? The Baptist congregation at Danbury, Connecticut, complained to retired President Thomas Jefferson of Congregationalist hegemony in Connecticut in 1911. IIRC, the Baptist faith originated with Roger Williams' expulsion from Massachusetts by Congregationalists there across the border to Connecticut's next door neighbor Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Ironically, free will as a gift from God is a central tenet of Catholicism. How you exercise it will determine whether or not you are in a state of grace at death. If you are not in a state of grace you are not going to heaven, no matter what religion you profess. At least that is what we Catholics believe.
If I am fortunate enough to enjoy through eternity the Beatific Vision, I promise not to complain if my mother's best friend Hilda is there though Methodist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer though Lutheran, the ten Booms though reformed Christians, the good pagan centurion who (at the cost of his own execution) slew St. Peter by a sword rather than allow his sufferings in upside-down crucifixion to continue, post-Crucifixion Jews who lived good and righteous lives ("I come not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.") or the thoroughly moral member of a Fifth Century American Indian tribe who (despite never hearing of the Bible and never being baptized much less being Catholic and never having the slightest opportunity for either) obeyed the law written in his or her heart by God (why was it written there?), worshiped the Great Spirit as a sole Supreme Being and lived an extraordinary life of what we might call genuine piety (under such circumstances) and minimal sinfulness. As to the last, did God create such people with the specific intent that they go to hell or even limbo through no fault of their own???
No, actually.
"Okay, if "tolerance" is actually hypocrisy, then perhaps many of the early American colonists had it correct. The Mass. Bay colony wouldn't allow anyone to live in Mass. who wasn't a Puritan. Heck, they killed Quakers and R.I. was settled by escapees from Mass.! And they weren't the only ones who acted this way."
While yet being incorrect, it would seem that, yes, they might have carried themselves a bit less hypocritically, in that according to your account they at least didn't contradict themselves by on the one hand claiming to know the truth and on the other, underminkng the credibility of that truth as the pluralists do by pretending that contradictory religions can claim equality of status as truth. You see, if someone really, really believes what they claim they believe, it makes no sense whatsoever to pretend that everyone else who says something different must also possess the truth, or to believe that others must be left to wallow in error. This would the truly weak and essentially liberal position to take. All it really tells anyone is "hey, I not really even sure of my own beliefs". And what good is that?
"After the colonies became a nation, the separation between church and state came about. This, no matter what the ill educated an do LIBERALS tell you, was meant to prevent this country from having a state religion....NOT to keep; religion out of this nation."
Well check it out... you know what I'd say to that? I say that the separation of Church and state is ITSELF a liberal idea, and in fact, that all which calls itself "Christianity" but is apart from the Catholic Church qualifies as Liberalism.
"Yet you come onto this thread and post all kinds of what you claim to be the Catholic church's positions, which look like bigotry to the rest of us."
What I posted were the clear, unambiguous, unmistakeable teachings of the Catholic Church, which irrefutably state exactly the point I've made, which is that absolutely and without a doubt, the Catholic Church teaches that there is no salvation outside of it, and that Church and state are not to be separated according to Catholic dogma. And I am 100% correct that this is the exact and permanent teaching of the Catholic Church.
"And if this stuff is true, then it would really be best for you to have kept it to yourself; especially since it makes the Catholic church look terrible."
In all honesty I can tell you that I do not in the least care how the truth looks to people when it is told to them. The reason for this is simple: very few people like hearing the truth, and the problem is generally on their end of the equation. It is, in fact, why Christ Himself was put on a cross and killed: because few people wanted His truth, and they would not tolerate Him any longer. So no, I do not believe that the truth ought to be suppressed because the others will themselves to take offense at it.
American is NOT a theocracy, but if it was one, YOU would be the one getting the dirty end of the stick; not Protestants, since the vast majority of those involved with founding this nation were Protestants..."
The Catholic Church believes that the aims of the state are to be aligned with the aims of the Church. When you come across a genunine Catholic, that's what that Catholic will tell you. And then you'll understand very quickly that the principles of Americanism are incompatible with the principles of the Catholic Church. It's just a fact.
"The funniest thing, though, is that with every reply you make, you refute the article that heads this thread. It is NOT that there is an anti-Catholic nature to Freemasonry ( though if there was, it would be well deserved ! ); rather, there is an anti-everyone but Catholics, in the Catholic church and by some Catholics, such as yourself."
That's because the Catholic Church is the one true Church. Freemasonry's two principle aims are exactly what I stated above, and their aim is, at the root, primarily against the Catholic Church.