The Council of Trent by Pasquale Cati (1588)
Posted on 07/07/2013 1:01:18 PM PDT by NYer
“I believe what the Church teaches.” To utter this sentence sparks surprise, laughter, horror, or even disdain from non-Catholics – and not a few Catholics. A number of replies may follow. “You can disagree if you wish.” “The Church cannot tell you what to do, especially in the bedroom.” “Don’t you want to think for yourself?”
There are assumptions underlying these glib responses. First, the teachings of the Church are burdensome, archaic, or irrelevant. Second, these teachings do not need to be obeyed; the individual can disagree, if he/she desires. Third, to believe these teachings is a denial of freedom; the individual should decide what to believe and how to act without being compelled by the Church.
These assumptions have become so widespread that for Catholic teenagers and adults they have become part of the contemporary religious landscape, unwittingly and insidiously absorbed from the individualistic and relativist culture. They have helped loosen the bonds that Catholics have with the Church from the grace of baptism, replacing filial devotion with tension or angst. In a tragic irony, the Church that was founded by Christ to lead us to the ultimate fulfillment is perceived by some Catholics as a barrier to self-fulfillment.
To explain why we ought to believe what the Church teaches therefore requires upfront quite a bit of apologetic work – belief, freedom, and the Church all have to be liberated from the shackles of the dictatorship of relativism. Once these are free, we learn that those who willingly believe what the Church teaches are the ones who are truly free.
To believe is to accept as true what someone else knows and has seen for himself. The believer, not having access to what the witness knows, relies entirely on the witness’s account; he fully assents to its truth because he trusts the witness. To believe, therefore, is an act of freedom, since immediate reality does not compel his assent, as does, say, the acts of addition or subtraction. The believer wills his belief, not because he has seen the evidence, but because, in the words of Josef Pieper, he wants “to participate in the knowledge of the knower.”
Belief is a major source of our knowledge. Many of our ideas about the world, the economy, politics, religion, and more come from the trust we place in others who report what they have seen from their own firsthand perspective.
Religious belief is similar in structure, but has a crucial difference: it relies upon the testimony of God, who cannot be met and cross-examined like a human witness. God’s testimony is what we call revelation – the content of the Church’s teachings that has been passed on in Scripture and Tradition to the present day.
The Council of Trent by Pasquale Cati (1588)
But how can we trust the testimony of an invisible and unassailable witness? More still, why should we obey his testimony? There are several ways to approach these questions, but let us choose just one. Catholics believe that God revealed himself to human beings gradually over the centuries until he became human himself. “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18:37)
Jesus Christ is the witness par excellence to the reality of God. Many heard what Jesus said and saw what he did, and they freely chose to believe in him. They became witnesses of God’s testimony given through the God-man, and because they spread this testimony to others in hostile territory, they became a new kind of witness – they became martyrs, men and women who died because they also bore witness to the reality of God.
For twenty-one centuries men and women of all walks of life have died for God as martyrs. Invariably, the accounts of the martyrs portray their lucid minds and inspiring devotion in the face of the cruelest tortures. They did not oppose death because they were certain from their complete trust in God that all of what God has revealed and passed on through his Church was true and worth dying for.
The heroism of the martyrs presents a bold challenge to the dictatorship of relativism and its doctrine of self-fulfillment. True freedom is not the ability to self-indulge, but to self-surrender. In surrendering themselves to their executioners’ hands, the martyrs achieve true freedom and its joy from their prior surrender to God, the ultimate truth, who has willed that he be made known to the world through his Church.
To believe what the Church teaches is ultimately to believe that God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, has truly spoken to us, and that his testimony of life with him – both now and in eternity – is worth giving up everything this side of paradise. To believe in this way, to commit fully to God whom we cannot see, is admittedly difficult and risky. And this belief cannot be coerced, since the rewards it promises transcend the limits of physical gratification.
Hence to believe what the Church teaches is to be truly free. The Church was endowed by God with his grace and with his laws for traveling the path to him. Countless witnesses have attested to the authenticity of the Church’s testimony with their lives and with their blood. If we wish to be free as they are, we must have the will to believe the Church.
Catholics have often claimed on FR that the Bible was written by the Catholic church. Does that make the Bible "a Catholic publication" that can be discussed here?
What are you butting in for?
We can discuss the Catholic Church here for three days or more, as I have recently done, as far as I am concerned.
And what I recently discussed was, before giving up, the squirmy denial of a simple request to cite facts of a statement.
The facts never came through just a lot of anticatholicism, as you well know.
The Catholics on this site can state whatever they want, as you can.
It doesn’t mean the statements are either true nor what the Catholic Church states
Interesting. Tell me more!
If you want to argue against the Church then read the Catechism to see what the Church actually teaches. Otherwise you are arguing with other uninformed positions, claiming to profess catholicism or not, and wasting efforts.
Who has uninformed positions? The other Catholics on this board?
Anyone saying the Church wrote the Bible
So just for my verification and clarification here: you're saying that it is an uninformed opinion for anyone to say that "the Catholic Church wrote the Bible?"
For clarification and finality, read the Catechism, if you wish to argue with me about the Church.
It is available at the flip of a google switch.
And spare me your silly anticatholicism
By the way, read the article we are posting under.
Here’s what the Catechism says about the author of the Bible:
PART ONE
THE PROFESSION OF FAITH
SECTION ONE
“I BELIEVE” - “WE BELIEVE”
CHAPTER TWO
GOD COMES TO MEET MAN
ARTICLE 3
SACRED SCRIPTURE
I. CHRIST - THE UNIQUE WORD OF SACRED SCRIPTURE
101 In order to reveal himself to men, in the condescension of his goodness God speaks to them in human words: “Indeed the words of God, expressed in the words of men, are in every way like human language, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the flesh of human weakness, became like men.”63
102 Through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely:64
You recall that one and the same Word of God extends throughout Scripture, that it is one and the same Utterance that resounds in the mouths of all the sacred writers, since he who was in the beginning God with God has no need of separate syllables; for he is not subject to time.65
103 For this reason, the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God’s Word and Christ’s Body.66
104 In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, “but as what it really is, the word of God”.67 “In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them.”68
II. INSPIRATION AND TRUTH OF SACRED SCRIPTURE
105 God is the author of Sacred Scripture. “The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”69
“For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.”70
ROTFL
Weird.
This is very bad and dangerous advice...
We are warned in the scriptures that fakers will and have come into the church to teach false doctrine...
We are warned that ministers of Satan will be portrayed as ministers of light in many religions...
We are told in the scriptures to 'prove all things'...
We are told to search the scriptures that we may know that we have eternal life...
Do not trust any man when it comes to what God says...
Jesus Christ is the witness par excellence to the reality of God. Many heard what Jesus said and saw what he did, and they freely chose to believe in him. They became witnesses of God’s testimony given through the God-man, and because they spread this testimony to others in hostile territory, they became a new kind of witness – they became martyrs, men and women who died because they also bore witness to the reality of God.
The heroism of the martyrs presents a bold challenge to the dictatorship of relativism and its doctrine of self-fulfillment. True freedom is not the ability to self-indulge, but to self-surrender. In surrendering themselves to their executioners’ hands, the martyrs achieve true freedom and its joy from their prior surrender to God, the ultimate truth, who has willed that he be made known to the world through his Church.
Your religion, like the Izlaminazies are always talking about how great it is to die for God...I don't see much in the Bible about dieing for God as a goal we should seek...In fact, the Bible spends a lot of time speaking on living for God...
I guess it would make a good pep talk for a group of Christians talked into going into battle against insurmountable odds...
Countless witnesses have attested to the authenticity of the Church’s testimony with their lives and with their blood.
The fact some Catholics died over the years does not attest to the authenticity of your religion's testimony...It only attests to the the idea that they believed what another man told them...
If we wish to be free as they are, we must have the will to believe the Church.
Au contraire...You guys are under bondage...To be truly free is to know that no one can take you out of Jesus temple and no one can take Jesus out of a Christian...To be free is to know that we are the adopted children of God and will forever be part of the family...Never to be disowned...To be free is to know that no matter what we do or where we are at, Jesus is standing there with his arms open to welcome us back home...
Great, so you interpret the required practice of your religion, but at the same time deny others the right to do it for themselves. Or disdain them for exercising it.
I do not have any religion.
I do not deny any one from worshiping the way they choose.
Catholics have often claimed on FR that the Bible was written by the Catholic church. Does that make the Bible “a Catholic publication” that can be discussed here?
If you don’t follow or practice any religion, then I indeed misinterpreted what you had written and I thereby apologize.
If you don’t follow or practice any religion, then I indeed misinterpreted what you had written and I thereby apologize.
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