Posted on 04/05/2007 5:42:47 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Thank you Vicomte for your valid teachings, but I disagree with you. You, nor your Church has any idea whatsoever whether or not I hold the Bible up in a more lofty place than I hold my Lord. I absolutley do NOT.
It is all about Christ. The Bible is simply a tool to introduce me to him. I hope that you do not presume to judge me, but I understand too the falliblilty of man and so I forgive your judgement.
Peace to you brother. I am glad to have met you, but if you continue to presume that I have no relationship with Christ, then I will assume you don’t know what you are talking about. But I still love you. I know that you know God and that your intentions are His.
cc
D&C 20:1 - “The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days, being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh, it being regularly organized and established agreeable to the laws of our country, by the will and commandments of God, in the fourth month, and on the sixth day of the month which is called April—”
The LDS Church was legally organized on April 6, 1830. Later commentary by Joseph Smith indicates that we can take the “one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming...” part literally as being precise to the day.
What I wrote about the Word and the Bible and the Church was a specific answer to something you wrote, specifically this:
“We discover Him through the Bible, and/or through the Church. They are dependent upon each other. For if the Bible was not a necessary component and the Word also, then why do they both testify of the other?”
You corrected this to read:
“For if the Church was not a necessary component and the Word also, then why do they both testify of the other?”
I saw in this a conflation of “The Word” and “The Bible”, to which I responded with my characteristic vigor.
If that is not what you meant, than I apologize (and ask you to restate what you DID mean, because I read you saying that the Church and the Word - by which in that context you mean the Bible - are a necessary component of each other).
I always capitalize Word when I mean Bible simply because it is the written word and Bible is capitalized. I revere the Bible...I do not worship it. I worship the Savior who is written in it. I don’t mean to confuse word (Bible) with LOGOS as in John...but I do think John was indicating a relationship between Christ/Logos/word/thought. God spoke the world into existence.
...It really is very difficult to convey meaning in this type of format. As I said, I do appreciate the time you have taken to teach me.
Do you think it is not possible for inerrancy to creep into the Church? Because I do. Now granted, again my experience with the RC is limited. I am talking about..um..let us say...the LDS Church. You see, I saw all kinds of errors in their doctrine, their authority, and their hierarchy... and so I was led far, far away from God. I distanced myself as far from religion and Jesus Christ as I could because of it.
If you please.
“Do you think it is not possible for inerrancy to creep into the Church? Because I do. Now granted, again my experience with the RC is limited. I am talking about..um..let us say...the LDS Church. You see, I saw all kinds of errors in their doctrine, their authority, and their hierarchy... and so I was led far, far away from God. I distanced myself as far from religion and Jesus Christ as I could because of it.
If you please.”
I will amend your word “inerrancy” to be “error” because I think you are asking if I think it is impossible for error to creep into the Church.
I will answer two ways: with what the Catholic Church teaches officially, and with what I personally think about that.
What the Church teaches is that Jesus gave the power of the Keys, to loose and to bind, to Peter and the Apostles, and promised that the Holy Spirit would be with the Church. I emphasize the point that Jesus didn’t leave a Bible, and there was no Bible for the first 400 years of the Christian Era, because the Catholic Church couldn’t agree on it, until finally it was proclaimed by a Pope and entered its final form (until Luther amended it and abridged it). The reason I emphasize this is because Protestants in general assert the infallibility of the Bible, produced by the Church under the auspices of the Holy Spirit, while making the challenge you do: that the Church itself can err. Catholic dogma is that on matters of faith and morals, of actual pronouncing true doctrines of faith and morality, the Church cannot err. The Bible, to is inerrant, but that is because it was written by bishops under the auspices of the Holy Spirit and selected by the Church. In other words, the Bible is inerrant BECAUSE the Church, which write it and compiled it, is infallible. The Church will acknowledge that the men of the Church can make grievous errors on disciplinary matters and other matters not involving the core faith and morals of the Church. Thus the excesses of the Inquisition, for example, are sins of the men that did them and were disciplinary errors of the Church hierarchy. But the Inquisition never proclaimed doctrine of faith and morals. Those doctrines are rarer, indeed very ancient, and they, and only they, are protected by God from erring. Note that the Church cannot simply make up new doctrines of faith and morals. For a doctrine to be infallible, it must be really, really old, and Catholics have to essentially have always been doing that since the days of the Church Fathers. That’s what the Church teaches.
I personally think that the Church’s doctrine makes sense from the perspective of logic and in the divine economy. However, I do think that the doctrine of infallibility is of necessity and prudence a LIMITED one, and that the only people who should ever be using it are high officials of the Catholic Church. When I see lay Catholics, in places like FR, bandying about charges of infallibility and heresy, I think this is a travesty. There is no official codex of the infallible doctrines of the Church. Most of them are OBVIOUS, but the Church is NOT a Protestant Church, it is NOT based on a text, and nobody has ever reduced all of 2000 years of traditions and beliefs to a written codex. There is the catechism of the Catholic Church, which contains thousands of pages of doctrines and dogmas, but it doesn’t specify which is infallible and which isn’t. Some are obvious: anything in the Creed is infallible. In general, if it is a rule of the Church, because of the power of the keys it doesn’t really matter if the doctrine is fallible or not. The Bishops and priests in the Apostolic Succession legitimately possess the keys and thus have the power to bind Catholics to doctrines. If the doctrines are disciplinary doctrines, and imperfect, or even if they err, the Catholic may privately and respectfully raise his concerns, but he has no right to lapse into the sin of defying the power of the keys, openly flouting the law and embarrassingly defying the Church. He is to be, if neccessary, long suffering.
I agree with all of that.
But I do have a caveat. There is a certain cadre of things, namely killing and torturing people, where the blood cries out SO STRONGLY to me that my willingness to meekly submit to the authority of the Church breaks down. In such cases, even the charge of heresy and the risk of my immortal soul are not enough to cause me to simply assent to that which is an abomination. The Catholic Church is doing no such thing now, and hasn’t killed anybody for about 400 years now. But it DID kill people, wrongly. Those people were killed under the disciplinary rules of the Church, so dogmatically the Church didn’t preach false faith and morals. But there is still a weakness here, because I see in the fact that the killers did not realize that they were actually committing mortal sins of murder means that they were actually under the emprise of a doctrine that did hazard the very existence of their soul. This starts to look dangerously like failure.
So, infallibility is one of those things that is both necessary for Catholicism and indeed Christianity, to work (specifically, if the Catholic Church can fail on matters of faith and morals, and does fail, then the Bible cannot possibly be inerrant, given that it was written and compiled by Catholics), but which must not be pressed too far as a basis for authority in any simple theological debate such as we are having on this thread. It will not do for some Catholic to get up and start bellowing that so-and-so is a heretic because my Church says so and we’re infallible! Even if it’s true, it won’t do. Infallibility is a necessary doctrine, but the ABUSE of infallibility is an error. And although there is a difference between disciplinary matters and matters of faith and morals, and the Church CAN err on the former matters, and is only infallible on the latter, that set of assertions has a thin-gruel feel to it, and it is best not to argue on the basis of infallibility in anything, to the extent it can’t be helped.
Hope that answers your question.
You are absolutely correct in that the reason we have a Bible is because of the Church.
The written Bible is one of the very instruments that keeps us grounded in fact. It is written and any changes that occur can be traced.
So when Mormons stand and say polygamy is not only condoned but is “required” then we can go to the history of the Bible and see that this is not so.
Before Martin Luther, no one but clerics had access to the Bible. If error crept into the local Churches, without congregations who were knowledgeable, then it went unnoticed. The people hungered for a Bible, just as they do now in countries like China where is is not available.
The publishing of Bibles was a work of God. Because now we have individual congregants with a basic knowledge of the writings of the Apostles and others. Clerics are kept in check by this knowledge. If authority is given to a man who is allowed to be led by the spirit of Satan, then we have chaos in our Churches. This is where we see abusive situations taking place. By empowering indiviuals to become educated about the Bible, we see less of these abuses. That is my humble opinion.
I think the Bible is a work of God and He intends for it to be used and understood. You believe it must be understood in context with a Church - and you are right because that’s what the Bible tell us. The Bible is the balance that keeps the Church in check and keeps abuses from running rampant due to satan-inspired men. You can’t tell me the Borgias were inerrant.
Thank you. It is difficult to put that story out in such a public, humiliating way, but I had to.
I wrote that letter to a Mormon Freeper in a PM, I asked him not to use it against me but he has used it at least twice. The only thing I could do from then on was to make it public.
Now Mormon’s blame my anger over a long-ago relationship as the cause for my leaving. If only it were that simple!
They disregard the entire letter and focus on the one event they think scarred me for life, and they twist the knife. I doesn’t work on me.
My reward is my success in life and I keep pointing it out. It is not that I am wealthy or powerful, it is that I love, and I am loved. I have a Savior that loves me, and this allows me to love others.
I have been getting private messages from Mormons telling me that even Dr. Phil would recognize where my anger stems and that I need help. And oddly enough that they (Mormons) will be there for me. (gag)
If my story helps just one person, then my entire life is a glory to God.
You have said much that is interesting, and warrants a reply. I will start here:
“You can’t tell me the Borgias were inerrant.”
No, they were not inerrant. They erred very much, in many ways, so much so that Dante describes several Borgia Popes boiling in Hell in his “Inferno”. They were pigs and everyone knew it. But yes, astonishingly, I WILL tell you that every one of the Borgia Popes was indeed and in fact infallible as to doctrines of faith and morals of the Catholic Church. This was perhaps in the breach: the Borgia Popes were interested in money and political power, art and women, and not a bit interested in theology. And so none of them bothered to take the Seat of Peter and pronounce, ex cathedra, to the entire Church, expressly on a matter concerning the doctrines of faith and morals. Had any one of them done so, given their utter moral turpitude, it cannot be doubted that what they would have pronounced would have been abominable. But that’s just the point: none of them did. None of them did because the Holy Spirit is in fact upon the Church, and though Church men have erred mightily, and sinned terribly, God never let it happen that a Pope mounted the See of Peter to pronounce ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals anything that was morally questionable, or heterodox, or contrary to the ancient teachings of the Church. In theory is COULD happen, because men have limbs and mouths, so a Pope could, in theory, put on the full miter and vestments, take up the crozier, mount the See of Peter, hearken the Church to listen to him as he pronounced on a matter of morality concerning the Church, and then proclaimed an orgy. Nothing physical prevents the Pope from doing it. But in 2000 years and 265 Popes, with the passage of thousands of wars and governments and passions and billions of people through the Church, no Pope ever HAS taken the See of Peter and pronounced an infallible doctrine that has ever been reversed or rejected or censured as heretical. Not one time. Recall, too, that the first twenty or so Popes were all tortured to death by the Romans. Even under the extreme conditions of fatal bodily torture, not one of them ever pronounced a fallible doctrine.
The reason is that Jesus was serious about the Power of the Keys he gave to Peter, to bind and loose on earth and in heaven, and the solemn vow that he gave that the Holy Spirit would ever be with the Church. Some Popes have been horrid men - you mentioned the Borgias - but God never let them open their pieholes to pronounce an evil doctrine under the conditions of infallibility. That’s what infallible means. It does not mean that Popes cannot be human beasts. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be murderers. Some were. It DOES meant that God - the Holy Spirit that dwells in the Church - will not permit any Pope, however bad, to ever mount the See of Peter and formally lead Christendom into moral error. How do we know? First, there’s the Bible and the Keys and Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit. And then is 2000 years of Popes, 265 in all, many of them villains, and not one of them has ever done it. They all know they have the power, and wouldn’t that really solve the problems within the Church for someone like a Borgia Pope, to simply start pronouncing infallible doctrines to destroy all enemies? Yes, it would have solved their problems. So, why didn’t even they take the See of Peter and DO IT? They had no compunction for their soul when they killed men or slept with their whores in the Vatican, so why not just sweep away all opponents and proscribe them by pronouncing infallible doctrines to destroy them? No earthly reason. They didn’t do it, logical though it would have been, not because they didn’t DARE - they DARED everything - but because God would not let them do it. That’s really it. That’s all. The Borgia Popes were infallible on faith and moral doctrines, like any other Pope. None of them ever pronounced an infallible doctrine. That in itself is mute testimony to the power and protection of the Holy Spirit over the Church and the See of Peter. Would it not be the easiest thing in the world for Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict, both of whom oppose birth control, and both of whom are firmly committed to the all-male celibate clergy, to take the See of Peter and pronounce these doctrines infallible, thereby ending all debate within Catholicism for all time? Yes, it would be easy. But neither one of them does it. Not because any human person is stopping them, but because these are disciplinary doctrines only - they CAN’T be infallible. Even if the Pope went crazy he could not do it: God would not LET him do it. God has never let his 264 predecessors do it, even to save their own lives.
“The written Bible is one of the very instruments that keeps us grounded in fact. It is written and any changes that occur can be traced.”
So far, so good. We need to be grounded in fact.
“Before Martin Luther, no one but clerics had access to the Bible.”
Now see, this is where we need to go back to the facts. It’s not true. Think of the Gutenburg Bible, the first printed book, by the inventors of moveable type. What did they make and sell on that printing press? Bibles. And to whom did they sell them? Anybody who wanted to purchase them. And to whom did they sell them, and where, and when? In Catholic Germany, to Catholics, a century before Martin Luther. If Catholics had not generally had personal access to the Bible during the thousand years preceding Luther, it was not because the Church jealously hid it. It was because it was medieval Europe, only about 20% of the population could read at all, and there was no printing press. All Bibles and all other books were laboriously copied by hand, by monks in monsteries and ecritoriums. Note, please, that unlike today, the “clergy” were not some tiny fraction of the public. Young unemployed men, and unmarriageable women or poverty-stricken women, etc., tended to become Christian brothers or sisters, laboring in the monastery fields or workhouses, producing things for sale and use. The Church was an employer of many, and taught many to read. The nobility were always literate, but so were “clergy”, and basically anybody who could read was considered “clergy” and had some role in the Church. Reading and writing were NOT restricted or jealously guarded by the Church - quite the opposite! The problem is that Europe then was poorer than the poorest parts of Africa today, and more full of disease and fighting to boot. There was no great margin in society for expensive books. Most people could not read anyway. And yet, everyone knew the Bible, much of it by heart.
This is the second part of the history that is really lost. If you start attending Catholic Mass every Sunday, as Catholics must, from birth onward, by the time you are 66 years old you will have heard nearly the entire Bible read to you out loud, in related pieces, and explained in a related homilym a whopping 22 times over the course of your life. The Lectionary of the Church, by which the Bible is read to the Congregation, is on a three-year cycle. Virtually the entire New Testament (things like the complete genealogy of Jesus are abridged) and probably 80% of the Old Testament, is read to every Catholic, and explained to every Catholic, every three years. Moreover, the psalms are sung in the Mass, and the hymns of the mass make reference.
Remember those statues and stained glass windows and icons all over the walls in a Catholic Church - the ones that silly people who don’t think say are “Graven Images” and Idols? Take a good look at them. What you will see there are depictions of key scenes of the Bible. Every Catholic Church has the 12 stations of the cross - a visual depiction of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Just thinking about my own Church, when you sit in the congregation and look at the altar, there is great stained glass wall behind it. My little daughter says “Daddy, look at the sheep!” all the time. And yes, there IS a sheep up there or rather, a lamb, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. And if you look more closely, you will see a red stream pouring from the chest of the lamb. It is beautiful on the glass mural, but you realize that this is the heart’s blood of the lamb, pouring out in all directions: the blood of the sacrificial lamb. And then if you look around the Church, you will see in the windows other scenes which, if you know your Bible, you will recognize instantly: Jesus healing the paralytic, Jesus healing the sick, Paul on the Road to Damascus. And if you look you realize that from the top of the stained glass panel down there is are red lines coming and touching each person, and you realize that the whole set of stained glass is connected to the window with the lamb, that these are the rivulets of blood of the lamb coming down from above and touching each character. When you sit up in the apse behind the altar, in the choir where I sit, the back end of the Church too has a stained glass window. In this one there is a man dressed in white, and he holds open a book, on which is written the words “Dear Lover of God” Now, of course, if your a Catholic in your forties and went to Mass faithfully, you’ve heard the Bible read to you about 15 times, and you’ve heard “My dear Theophilus...” 15 times, every time the Lectionary cycle gets to Saint Luke. And you’ve heard the Priest 15 times translate “Theophilus” as “lover of God” and weave that into his homily at least 15 times. So of course you know that “Dear Lover of God” is “Dear Theophilus”, and you figure that this must be a depiction of St. Luke...and that makes sense, considering that this is St. Lukes parish church.
My point is simple: in that illiterate age, Catholics knew the Bible. They couldn’t read it (and couldn’t afford to buy a hand-copied scribal work), but they knew the Bible, because the Lectionary of the Church has been around for the ages. Catholics have always had the Scriptures read to them, and all those statues and icons and other supposedly idolatrous things? These were nothing more than medieval tv: the one spot of bright color and majesty in otherwise drab, wretched, filthy, poor, vermin-infested and threadbare peasant lives bent in hard agricultural labor - which is what most people did in the Middle Ages. And what was on this “Medieval TV”? A rich tapestry of images from the Bible. Have a knowledgeable person take you through a medieval cathedral church sometime when you are in Paris. Every little panel has some artwork or figure in it, and if you are patient and look at the artwork, you will find practically the whole story of the Bible told in colorful pictures right there in the stained glass of a large medieval Church. There was a PURPOSE to all of that art and statuary in a Catholic Church: it was to teach the Christian story in shape, color and three dimensions, to augment and remind people of the story.
Luther, and especially Calvin and his ilk, decided that all of that was idolatrous and took it all down, leaving a bare white room with pews, a pulpit, a bare cross and a book. This austerity was supposed to focus the mind on what was said in the sermons, and perhaps it did, and does. But the Catholic mind in an ornamented Catholic Church, when IT wanders, lights upon artwork that ALSO tells the story of the Bible, maybe better than hearing the droning word because in three dimensions with color.
Anyway, my point is clear: Catholics have always had access to the Bible. But in medieval times, whence Luther arose, most couldn’t READ it, or - before the printing press - come close to affording this book they could not read. And yet those Catholics knew their Bible. They had heard the whole thing read to them every 3 years. They had been lectured on it. To be confirmed, they had had to attend Sunday School and be taught from the Bible, and every piece of art and statuary in the Church depicts biblical scenes. All of that decoration in Notre Dame Cathedral, far from being an embarrassing distraction, IS exposing the Bible to people. It is the whole history of the Bible told in stone and glass, in a way that an illiterate child or an illiterate peasant, if pointed the way, can understand.
As for this: “The people hungered for a Bible, just as they do now in countries like China where is is not available.”
And they had one too: in their Church. They were all instructed from it every week. They didn’t have one in their own houses unless they were rich. It was only by about a century after the printing press, in the time of Luther, that the price of books had come down to the point that a critical mass of private Bible ownership arose.
Still, it is not true that people did not have the Bible. Remember St. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, the standard Bible of the Latin West for centuries? Why did he translate the Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin? Simple: the Empire spoke Latin, and the desire was to have the Bible in their own language. Similarly, please remember that the New Testament in English, the Douai-Rheims version of the Catholic Bible, was translated decades before the King James Version.
And this is why, when you say this: “The publishing of Bibles was a work of God. Because now we have individual congregants with a basic knowledge of the writings of the Apostles and others.” I think you are only half right. Yes, the promulgation of the Bible was the work of God. But the Catholic Church had been promulgating Bibles for centuries, in a poor continent without the printing press. And where do you think all of those Germans who leapt to Luther’s cause had learned how to read at all? Not in the Lutheran Church schools. They didn’t exist yet. Not in public schools - they would not exist for another 450 years. In Church schools. Catholic church schools, which were the source of popular literacy that, along with the printing press, even made the Reformation possible at all. A hundred years prior, an illiterate population would have never followed Luther or Calvin. It was not Luther and Calvin who taught the followers to read: it was the Catholic Church. And everybody in Europe knew the Bible anyway. They’d been fed doses of it every week since infancy at math. Luther did not release the Bible from its chains and give it to the people. What he did was release himself and the Protestant clergy from the restraints and conservatism of the Catholic Church.
Anyway, there’s an answer for you. Now good night!
Yep, I look forward to my monthly hallucination. A bit of peyote helps, too.
...that’s not against the Word of Wisdom, is it?”
No, I don’t think praying and fasting is against the word of wisdom, neither is magic-mushrooms, LSD, or hashish!
What’s your point?
Again thank you.
Of course by bringing up the Borgias you knew that I was goading you, and you took it in stride.
This is what I like to see. Someone facing down the embarrassing and the tawdry, and clearly stating that some actions were wrong. You are a gracious man.
Now, I want to make my response personal if you don’t mind. My Father in Law was diagnosed with brain cancer in December, just before his 75th birthday. He was Catholic until he converted to Mormonism in his later 30s. I had a chance to talk with him yesterday, and told him of our conversation as a way to break the ice to the topic of religion. I have never spoken to him about Church, he doesn’t talk about it.
His answer to me was, “I don’t know anything, I was never taught anything in Catholic Church.” (note: he is also not a Temple attending Mormon, but he is a High Priest.)
Now this wonderful man is a Spanish speaking, native American from the Four Corners area (Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona.) He learned English when he went to public school. The town where he was raised was isolated and had a population of about 1200, of which about 800 were Mormon and 400 were Catholic Hispanics. He went to Catholic Mass every Sunday until he was in his 20’s yet he was never taught anything. I guess it happens in all Churches, even the RC. So learning of God and the Bible is not limited to the RC. If so, where would the world be?
He is dying. Is there something I should ask him regarding his Salvation (ie; Last Rites etc.) I’m guessing even though he converted to Mormonism (at least in an outward way) that there will be issues that are unresolved should he die without confession or rites. Would it be offensive to someone raised Catholic to be asked if he would like a Priest?
Too, I was born and raised in a small, isolated village in Southern Utah. 250 miles separated me from the nearest City in either direction. There were no Catholics there. (interestingly enough I was only about 100 miles from the town of my FIL but the canyons of Southern Utah kept these communities 300 miles apart by road) There was never an opportunity for me to garner any knowledge or contact with any Catholis. So how exactly did this ‘one and only Roman Catholic Church’ affect me or my ancestors, since six generations of us lived in Mormon isolation since 1847. (the answer of course is the Bible. By compiling and preserving the written ‘word.’ This is the single most productive thing the Church ever did in taking the Gospel to the world)
What chance did I or my parents or their parents have at hearing about God? Catholics are not very good at taking the message of the Gospel to the ends of the Earth. As far as missionary work, I must say (at least in Utah) they are woefully lacking.
Were not the Apostles and perhaps all Catholics admonished to take the gospel to the ends of the earth? Don’t you think the Bible is instrumental in this occuring?
>>>>>>>>>mark<<<<<<<<<<<<
“Someone facing down the embarrassing and the tawdry, and clearly stating that some actions were wrong.”
But the wrong was obvious. Dante was excoriating the evil behavior of Pope and cardinals in late Medieval Italy in his Inferno. There’s an ancient Catholic saying that the roads in hell are paved with the skulls of bishops.
Bishops, priests, cardinals and Popes can and do err and sin and commit abominable crimes to precisely the same extent as any other human being. The only thing the Pope cannot do is err materially when he speaks ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals. The last time a Pope did that was 1950. The time before that was 1835. There is nothing else that any Pope has said ex cathedra that was not already part of Catholic doctrine from the earliest times, and ratified at Councils of the Church. The Pope is not sinless, flawless. He errs on everything, if he’s a bad guy. God won’t let him take the Seat of Peter and pronounce ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals in a way that is in error. It never has happened. Even the Borgia Popes never approached the Seat of Peter to do that thing. They could not even if it had occurred to them. The Holy Spirit foreclosed the idea to them. Catholic DOCTRINE, the dogmatic heart of the Church, is as pure as the Bible, because it comes directly from the Holy Spirit, who is God. God dwells in the Catholic Church. And God doesn’t let the Church err on those things that will lead the inner spirits of men into error and away from God. Follow the doctrine, and you cannot err. Follow the MEN, and you absolutely will err, and sin, and do bad things, because they’re men, the Pope included.
Catholics don’t hide the evils of the Borgia’s, the Inquisition, the rape of children by pedophile priests in the present, and the coverup by cardinals. Of course men sin. And what does that have to do with the faith and morals of the Church? The reason they are exposed as sinners and rebuked and defrocked is precisely because the faith and morals do not change, and cannot change, and cannot BE changed, ever, because they come from God. Popes, Cardinals, Bishops and Priests can BREAK the rules, but the rules are still the rules. The faithful hold them accountable for it, if they find out about it. God does in any case. The only thing that the Pope is Infallible on is faith and morals doctrines, and only under extremely specific circumstances. That’s it. The Pope is not infallible otherwise, and no Pope in 67 years has pronounced an infallible doctrine. In 1950 a Pope did, reminding the Church of the ancient and infallible doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. He didn’t make it up. This is ancient doctrine. It was challenged. The Pope redressed the challenge, ex cathedra, from the See of Peter. Note that this particular doctrine is not in the Bible, as the dormition and Assumption of Mary, and the celebration of the feast of her Assumption, and very ancient late First or early Second Century events, so the knowledge of those events came to be at their happening, which was after all of the books of the Bible had already been written, and all of the apostles were dead. So of course the dormition and assumption of Mary into heaven isn’t recorded in the Bible. Who was there to record it. And yet the Church remembered it and celebrated it. It happened. You know it happened because the Church has said it happened for 1900 years. The Pope, in 1950, merely reminded the world that it DID happen, and rebuked those who said that maybe it didn’t, by taking the See of Peter and speaking ex cathedra with the power of God the Holy Spirit.
Similarly, the time before that that a Pope did that, was in 1832, concerning the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Once again, the doctrine was challenged specifically because it doesn’t happen to be in the canon of the Bible (it IS in the proto-evangelium of the Apostle James, but that is not in the Bible). Those who claim that the Bible Alone contains all revelation asserted the falsehood of the Immaculate Conception. And God moved the Pope to the Seat of Peter, in full array, and spoke through the Pope a rebuke to those strange doctrines and a reminder of the truth. And before that? Before that you can’t find a Pope taking the Seat of Peter to pronounce infallible doctrines unless you call the way back to the Council of Trent, and there, the Pope merely pronounced what the Council had also agreed to.
Infallibility is necessary for there to be proper faith. If the Church is fallible, then the Bible may be flawed. And if the Bible is flawed, what do YOU believe in?
“He went to Mass every Sunday, and yet he was never taught anything.”
This is simply not so. He says it, but it is not so. Was he confirmed? If he was attending Mass and taking the faith seriously he was, and in order to be confirmed he was taught plenty. He had classes. Did he pay attention at Mass during those 20 years of Sundays? If he did, he was taught plenty. Remember, he converted to Mormonism, so apparently he rejected his birth religion and moved to a new one, and therefore doesn’t have kind words to say about it. But it is objectively untrue that he was not taught anything. If he really was raised a Catholic and really did attend mass every Sunday for 24 years, he had the whole Bible spoonfed to him 8 times, and explained to him from the pulpit 8 times. And when he went to be confirmed, he had long classes and had everything explained to him. Perhaps the fact that he was a teenager and wasn’t INTERESTED in what was being said, and had other things on his mind, is why he didn’t learn what the Church taught him, but the Church read the bible to him eight times and - if he was confirmed - taught him the faith in great detail. It’s a Catholic Church. It doesn’t vary regionally on the Lectionary or the Confirmation Rite.
So, your uncle either didn’t really attend mass “every week” and wasn’t really a practicing Catholic, in the sense that he did not go through the study for Confirmation, or he did and he completely blew off what he was taught. If he didn’t go, the Church couldn’t teach him could it? If he DID go and didn’t learn anything, it isn’t because the Church didn’t teach him anything, it is because he didn’t listen. It’s just a fact that Catholic Mass and confirmation works a certain way and follows a certain pattern, everywhere it is the same, and it has been the same for two thousand years. If he paid attention and attended, he learned. If he had other things on his mind, it isn’t that the Catholic Church didn’t teach him anything. It’s that he blew off what the Catholic Church was trying to teach him. When he became older and settled down and was able to listen, he did so in the cadre of another religion.
So no, it does NOT happen in the Catholic Church that one attends mass and doesn’t learn anything. The Lectionary is mandatory, not optional. The Bible is read, four portions of it, every Sunday, and explained in the homily. Bad priests botch the homily, but everybody who sits in a mass hears the Old Testament, a Psalm, a New Testament Epistle and a reading from the Gospels, every time. Perhaps the faithful didn’t understand the Latin of the prayers back then, and couldn’t read English (or Spanish) to be able to follow along in the missal. But the homily has been given in the vernacular since the time of Christ. If one attends mass and learns nothing, it is not because the Church didn’t teach anything. It cannot be. The Church reads the Bible every time, and explains it. It’s because the person attending has shut his ears and decided to think about something else. I can say this with certitude, because the Church is like the Post Office: the same things are there, everywhere around the whole world, and the same basic things are done. He may have been bored out of his skull, but the Church DID teach anybody who would listen.
As far as asking him about Salvation, I cannot answer that. Go ask a priest. Honestly, I expect that the priest would simply ask you to pray for him, and include a mention of the man in the prayers of the Church. The priest MIGHT decide to go by the hospital to see if the man would like to talk to him, receive extreme unction, etc. He might not, because there is nothing served by troubling and upsetting an old man. Ask a priest your question. He has the authority and knowledge to answer. I don’t. You can ask your uncle, I suppose, but if you think he would be offended and agitated by the question - he made his choice to leave Catholicism long ago, after all, and he probably had his reasons - then I would be careful. His soul is in God’s hands. It would be good for him to reconcile with God through the Church, but if the mere mention of it is going to drive him into deep anger at the Church, at God, etc., then I wouldn’t do it. The Sacraments are efficacious for Salvation, but nobody can be forced to take the Sacraments. Ask a priest. Just call up your local parish and ask to speak to a priest on a family matter, perhaps set up a time or just talk on the phone. Explain to him the circumstance and see what he says. He may go visit your uncle. I don’t know.
“Catholics are not very good at taking the message of the Gospel to the ends of the Earth.”
That’s why a religion that started in Roman Palestine and is centered in Rome is the religion of Latin America, Mexico, the American and Candian Indians, the Filipinos, 60 million Indians, the Chinese of Macau, the Tahitian islanders, a third of sub-Saharan Africa, and was once the religion of the entirety of Europe and Russia.
Go take a look at the hospice, AIDS hospice, immigrant services, soup kitchen, homeless shelter and rehabilitation systems in your area. Go look up the adoption agencies. That is where you will find the Catholics working on the Gospel. There is only a limited number of laborers in the field. Go look across Africa, in the wildest outback, and who runs the schools and the hospitals. Think about Mother Theresa’s orphanage sitting in the bowels of Hindu Calcutta.
Physicians treat the sick, not the healthy. Jesus came for sinners, not the righteous. Where you look at the least and the poorest of society, there you will find the institutions of the Catholic Church as the primary safety net the whole world over, feeding them, clothing them, healing them, and giving them the Gospel by example. Why you don’t find very much of is Catholics priests in nice suits knocking on the doors of the well-heeled to come in and read the Bible with them. No. The Church stands open, and all are welcome. The Church preaches to all, but her servants, her missionaries in American cities, are running orphanages and battered womens’ shelters and hospice care for people with AIDS. There are only a limited number of servants of God, and they have to focus on the people who need the most help. Literate, well off, well fed, healthy adult Americans know about the Catholic Church, and are perfectly capable of making their way into the doors of the Church themselves. The Church speaks publicly on many issues: abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty, the treatment of immigrants, battered women, AIDS care, care for the sick, raising children. Everyone hears these things. Jesus stood in the public square and preached to those who would listen, and healed those who came to him. He did not go knocking at the doors of the well-off and the righteous and beg them to hear. They knew he was out there, and if they chose to open their eyes, they could see what he was doing it. It was up to them to come to him. He did not withhold himself from them. He was present, and teaching. He was in their midst. But the laborers are few and there is much to be harvested, and when he walked the Earth God never had the time nor the interest in going and expending any effort whatever trying to go knock on the doors of the well-off, the comfortable and the (self) righteous. In fact, he ignored them. He devoted his and the Apostles efforts to actually helping the poor, weak and sick directly. And they preached to everybody, in public. Whoever came and heard and believed, that was good. Whoever didn’t bother to come, or came and found it boring and left, to Hell with them. Literally. Notice that when Peter baptized Cornelius and his family (women, children, relatives), he only went there because he was invited. He didn’t go bang on the door and ask to come in and assert his doctrines. Invited, he came and shared, and baptized.
All are welcome, but the needy need the attention. They cannot get up off their mat and walk. The healthy and comfortable and self-indulgent can.
I think that one of the reasons the Catholic Church does not do very well at converting up-and-coming non-Catholic yuppies, first generation college types and pillars of their society is pretty basic: because they’re nothing special to the Church, and when they go into the Catholic Church, they’re just in anonymity with the rest of the laity. They confess their sins like everyone else. There’s no prominent position for them. They can put money in the plate, but it’s all anonymous. The priests don’t show them any deference, generally. There’s not much of a coffee klatch, and there’s no vestryman position where they, as laity, can have any decision-taking power in the Church. It’s just a place of uniform ritual, anonymous sacraments, laying one’s self bare in personal degradation at confession (which the self-righteous hate, claiming that they don’t NEED to confess their sins to a priest, that they just have to pray internally), etc. The Catholic Church is a bad place for people who need to have a lot of attention, unless its the sort of attention that desperately sick and poor people need to stay alive, or children need to learn to read. Adults are adults. They’re expected to take care of themselves if they have the means, and to attend Church and confess their sins and be introspective, give money, and try to be better people. There isn’t a lot of gladhanding. Catholic priests are never going to walk around middle class neighborhoods urging people to come to Church. The Church is there, everybody can see it, everybody knows what the Church does, generally. It’s up to the healthy to get their own butts down there to listen to Jesus. He stands in the marketplace and teaches. He doesn’t follow anybody home to beg them to save their own souls.
Catholic proselytization has always been predominantly through baptism of infants, education of children, and the accretions through marriage. There are substantial number of converts every year, lately lots of Episcopalians battered to tears by the apostacy of their own Church, weary of the politics, and finally willing to go and sit and be absolute nobodies in a congregation praying the Catholic Mass.
In the end, humility is required to be a Catholic. The Church is open. It does charity. It raises up children. Jesus is in the marketplace. You go listen to him. He is not going to come directly to you as an individual and ask you to hear him. He preaches to everyone, and those who chose to hear, hear. Those who don’t, go their separate ways. If they decide to repent and turn back, the Church is there for them. If they decide not to, well, the Church is there for them, but there are real sick people and real children who need to be taken care of now. Adults have to be responsible for themselves. All are welcome.
You didn’t really respond to my post at all.
It is my FATHER IN LAW, my husbands father who was Catholic (not uncle).
Did you respond at all to the charge that there were NO Catholics of any kind doing ANY kind of service AT ALL in Panguitch Utah during the years leading up to the mid 1970’s, and then there was only a traveling circuit priest who covered hundreds of miles per week.
I’m sure Catholics do a lot, but without the Bible they wouldn’t have expanded into the world the way that they have. That was my point.
“I’m sure Catholics do a lot, but without the Bible they wouldn’t have expanded into the world the way that they have.”
I cannot answer the question of what to do about your relative. I don’t have the authority to do so, and I don’t know anything about those sort of specifics. Ask a priest.
Peter, Paul and the 12 Apostles had no Bible when they converted many to the Faith.
There was no Bible when the Council of Nicaea was held and the whole Roman Empire converted to Catholicism.
Not one native person in the entire continent of North or South America could read a single letter when this half of the world was converted to Chrsitianity. Nor could anybody in the Philippines.
Without the Bible, they DID expand to embrace all of Europe and all of the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and millions in Asia.
The key to the Church’s expansion has always been the power of the Sacraments, not the Bible. The Bible is a useful tool, but it is not the center of the Church - the Sacraments are - and it is not the engine that has driven the Church. It’s the engine that drove Protestant missionary zeal and expansion, not Catholic.
As far as this: “Did you respond at all to the charge that there were NO Catholics of any kind doing ANY kind of service AT ALL in Panguitch Utah during the years leading up to the mid 1970’s, and then there was only a traveling circuit priest who covered hundreds of miles per week.”
I would answer with a question:
Did any Catholics live there? The role of priests is to consecrate the Sacraments so that Catholics can take them. There is always a shortage of priests. The faithful need the Sacraments. America is a severely Protestant country. Just how many Catholics were out thre in Panguitch, Utah, in the 1970s? Ten? One? Any? What, then, would a Church DO there, exactly? Sit open and waste the efforts of a priest and the financial resources of the Church whiling away the time waiting for someone to come in?
The Indians of the area were converted centuries ago by the Catholics, that’s why most American Indian people are Catholic, or at least their parents and grandparents were.
Your asking me about Panguitch, Utah’s lack of priests is like me asking why there are no Protestant missionaries in the Ostrovny Oblast on the Ussuri River in far Eastern Siberia. There are not enough laborers to harvest the whole crop. Decisions have to be made about where to put resources. Individual Catholics are not ordained, and should not be out there knocking on doors trying to teach fine points of doctrine. They’re not ordained, how do they even KNOW the fine points of doctrine? WERE there any Catholics in Panguitch?
America is a Protestant country. In the 1970s, it was a much more severely Protestant country than it is today. Catholics have not always been welcome or well-treated in this country. Until the Mexican laborer influx, you did not find very many Catholics in the rural areas of the deep South, where KKK and certain brands of Fundamentalist have violently HATED Catholics. Priests are where there are Catholics. Yes, there is missionary work, but it is devoted to places that desperately need the help, especially Africa and Asia and the inner cities (where, incidentally, there are a lot of Catholics).
You mentioned the itinerant priest who served a wide area in the 1970s. That was all the infrastructure that the local Catholic Church would bear. There weren’t many Catholics.
But look at Panguitch, Utah today. Is there a Catholic Church TODAY? Is there one nearby? Are there a lot more Catholics than there were? Probably yes. Catholicism is one of the very fastest growing religions in America. In absolute numbers, it is the fastest-growing religion.
What drove that growth is what always drove Catholic growth: there is a Catholic way of expanding. It is evidently working. The Church does not send missionaries into already Christian areas to strive with the local preachers “for the souls” of the baptized Christians in the area. It would be spending manpower and resources that could much better be spent serving people who need a lot more help than the people of Panguitch needed at any time.
Nope, still no catholics in Panguitch. I guess there are no sacrements needed. What the hey, those people deserve what they get.
And what with 20% unemployment and average income of $10,000 per year, the MOrmons are taking care of them anyway, so I guess the blessings of the one and only Church aren’t needed there ...there are more pressing needs.
Thank you, you’ve told me enough.
There are indeed more pressing needs.
LOL you don’t even know what you are talking about.
Garfield County Utah had the one of the highest rates of unemployment in the nation and the smallest amount of income. I no longer live there so I can’t tell you haow it fares today, but it still isn’t good by any means.
When I was a youngster into the 1970’s there were people there without plumbing, electricity or running water. There was one religion, Mormonism....nothing else for hundreds of miles.
How do you think I came to be an adult without any knowledge whatsoever about Catholicism. I understand you think Mormons are Christian...good for you. They believe in Jesus and so do the demons.
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