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To: Joseph DeMaistre

The scholarship is interesting and the texts compelling.

However, this would have been better served up as an answer on a thread bashing Catholics.

It is not good that Catholics should start fights like this.

We are, all of us, beset by the Devil. And the world is plunging headlong into darkness and the greatest danger in world history, with the proliferation of nuclear fire. Within the West, in Canada a Catholic councilman has been fined and forced to apologize for expressing his opposition to gay parades, and in England, the Catholic Church is about to be forced by law to provide gay adoptions. In California, Catholic Charities has been forced by law to provide birth control services as part of its medical plan.

And all of this is against the backdrop of 40 million dead babies in the US over the past 30 years, and other 150 million+ worldwide, the worst continuous slaughter of completely innocent human beings in all of history.

Now, in this crucible in which we find ourselves, in America, who are the most stalwart defenders of the good against the Devil? Catholics, yes (but see Pelosi and Kennedy), but also Baptists, especially, and Evangelicals.

And in China, where Christianity is expanding in spite of criminalization and martyrdom, who is driving most of the expansion and gaining the crown of martydom? Not, for the most part Catholic or Orthodox missionaries. No. It is Pentecostals. Jesus said many things, but one thing he did say is "You will know them by their fruits."

The fruits of our Protestant brethren in China have been exceedingly rich, and the most stalwartly anti-abortion regions of the United States are not the "blue states", which are almost invariably predominantly Catholic, but the Baptist "red states".

Pope after Pope, for 40 years, has called Christians to unity, and as Catholics we bear a special burden to foster unity with Christians and to try to heal the wounds to the Body of Christ that disunity of His Church have wrought. Were the Protestants wrong, doctrinally, in the Reformation? Yes. But the Catholics were wrong, desperately wrong, in matters of Church discipline. Corruption, sleaze and murder emanating from the See of Peter itself raised such a stench of evil that the Catholic Church itself, too, was responsible for the Reformation, just as the cover-up of gay priestly abuse of minors is today driving many Catholics out the doors in legitimate and righteous moral disgust at the sleaze and baseness of some Catholic clergy.

No.
We as Catholics cannot pick fights with Protestants.
Not any more.
We have been called to do something different.
We have to call them back to arms, under the Cross, all of us, against the Devil whose forces are surging around us all as never before. We cannot demand an admission of doctrinal error in them until we well and truly admit and atone for our own beastly sins and errors of a disciplinary nature.
There is a Devil to fight, and we are living in the direst and most murderous time ever: the slaughter of innocents continues unabated, and is threatening to make inroads into Latin American now as well.
We have to patiently bear the insults, and bear with good humor and humility the rebukes against us and our Church for the real sins, egregious and bloody, of our forebears, and the real sins, sleazy and pernicious of sexual predators in the present. Our doctrine may be pure, but we are known by our fruit, not just our doctrine. Jesus said you will know them by their fruit, and our fruit, though often very good, has also been very bad.

We cannot simply stand up and offer to refight the Reformation, because we were WRONG about much during the Reformation. So were the Protestants. That Christians mass murdered Christians, both wrong, was the work of the Devil carried out in the name of Jesus.

Simply hitting the reset button and going back to the doctrinal fights will not do. As Catholics, we ARE the One True Church. Our job is to LEAD. Not taunt. That means NOT launching doctrinal missiles at the Protestants. They are never persuaded in this way. But they do stand up and fate, and we renew all of the hatred and stupidity of the ages, both sides.

As Catholics, called to ecumenism, we cannot permit ourselves to do that anymore. When the truth of our doctrine is attacked then, and only then, is it appropriate to respond with the sort of detailed missive as you did, as a CORRECTIVE, and with humble and careful language, NOT with language calculated to give offense and insult.

I applaud your efforts at Biblical exegesis. They were effective at presenting much of the doctrinal truth. Unfortunately, the scholarship was put to a bad use: picking a fight with our Protestant brethren, fellow Christians, soldiers in Christ. That is wrong. We must not do that anymore. Our doom is upon us all; the Devil is thronging all around. Us shooting into a circle and embittering each other at each other with all of the old issues of doctrine is not a fight we should be having unless we MUST, and not a fight we should be INITIATING at all.

I like the scholarship. It is very good.
I dislike the purpose to which it was put: starting a fight.

Ask yourself this: to whom does the glory of God chiefly go in the sweeping conversion of Korea and China?
Not to the Catholic Church.
Fighting Protestant words here is easy.
Fighting Communists there, as individual Protestants are doing in record numbers, that is very hard.
It is to those ends our efforts should be bent, not to dividing the body of Christ further.


126 posted on 01/24/2007 9:27:52 PM PST by Vicomte13 (Turin Turambar turun ambartanen.)
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To: Vicomte13

Listen, if the Protestants want to go around throwing stones here on FR, they shouldn't go unchallenged. I agree there are larger threats here, but if they're willing to stop posting their anti-Catholic venom, I'll respond in kind and stop posting anti-Protestant polemics.


135 posted on 01/24/2007 10:20:20 PM PST by Joseph DeMaistre (There's no such thing as relativism, only dogmatism of a different color)
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To: Vicomte13

Astounding. Thank you.


166 posted on 01/25/2007 7:15:03 AM PST by Bainbridge
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