Posted on 07/04/2015 12:23:13 PM PDT by Morgana
This is a tough Vortex to speak. I’m as patriotic as the next guy. I remember being a young lad of 15 as my country celebrated its bicentennial back in 1976.
I watched TV that day from six in the morning until well past midnight as the non-stop, commercial-free, wall-to-wall coverage on the giant national birthday party was broadcast from sea to shining sea.
I watched the tall ships sail into New York harbor, saw the explosive fireworks show over D.C. I listened and sang my lungs out with a lump in my throat as Arthur Fielder conducted the Boston Pops on the Esplanade playing one stirring American hymn after another. I watched Walter Cronkite move effortlessly from one sprawling scene of Americana to another. There was no other place I would have rather been on that glorious Fourth of July all those years ago.
But that is all gone now.
What I did not know in my innocent youthful naïveté was the seeds for America’s self-destruction had been in place from the beginning. See, America at her core has always been at war with the Catholic Church.
Few know that it was illegal to be Catholic in 10 of the original 13 colonies. Even after the War of Independence, hostility to Catholicism remained intense. But more importantly, it is the philosophical underpinnings of America that are the very heart of the problem.
America was born from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Those philosophers were driven by their hatred of scholastic philosophy — the mind of Aquinas, you might say. Aquinas expounded a philosophy as solid as rock: that God is the center of the Universe and man is bound to certain codes and creeds in face of that reality.
In order to break away from those codes and creeds, Enlightenment philosophers set out to change the perception of reality. What sprang up in place of Aquinas and the Catholic Church was a new system of thought: that MAN was the center of the universe — or at least the functional center.
Sure there may have been a God of Nature, but that God had little to do in reality with man’s day-to-day life. So man was free to set course to develop his own religions, moral codes, even separate truths, when the time was right to pull that trigger. All of this social philosophy came to a legal, formal construct in the birth of the American nation.
As an aside, a few years later, this same philosophy would be responsible for the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror where thousands and thousands of Catholics were beheaded.
Here in America, a new nation emerged from the Age of Enlightenment, and although it was decidedly divorced from the past politically, it still took a couple of centuries to shake off the morality it had learned from the Catholic Church. The PEOPLE were now the arbiters of truth. No longer crushed underfoot by kings and monarchs, power would be derived from the consent of the governed.
And THERE is the problem, the decidedly anti-Catholic proposition. What happens when the consent of the governed now agrees with contraception, abortion and sodomy? What happens when the majority of the governed accept no-fault divorce, cohabitation, pornography, single parenthood, explicit sex education in schools and a host of other evils?
In America, these are all allowed because the majority of the governed accept them — and that places faithful Catholics on the outside looking in. America says man gets to decide. The Church says God gets to decide. Those two principles cannot co-exist. Either America will be converted by the Church, or the Church will be converted by America. We know how that turned out.
Too many Americans who are also Catholic have twisted themselves into theological pretzels to insist a person can be a good Catholic while also being a good American. As long as America remained essentially Catholic in its morality, that tightrope could be walked, however gingerly.
But once Protestant-majority America — with all the diversity that description contains — realized it was living Catholic morality, without adhering to the underlying Catholic theology, it threw off the morality and turned secular. Catholic Americans took more pride in their country than they did their Church, always struggling for a place at the table, always ready to compromise or accommodate their Protestant neighbors.
Even John F. Kennedy in 1960 was willing to sell out his faith in front of an audience of protestant preachers to be accepted and win the White House. He learned that groveling act from a succession of bishops in the American hierarchy stretching back more than a couple hundred years, and who the present crop for the most part continues in that sad tradition.
The silly appeals to so-called religious liberty will fall flat. What Catholics in America have not understood is that the will of the governed could be turned on them at any point — and now has.
This is one of the topics Church Militant was able to discuss with Bp. Athanasius Schneider when we were in Rome recently when he sat down with us and granted us an exclusive far-reaching interview.
We’ll be presenting that to you soon, so look for it.
My parents were Catholics, and taught me morality, but were utterly clueless when it came to Heaven and Hell, and how to go to the first, and avoid the second. I learned that by reading the Bible, and making my own personal interpretation of it. It's a beautiful thing. I might be guilty of the sin of presumption, but that's ok. I can live with it. 😇
It reared its ugly head in England. Check out John Milton. He wrote tracts against the episcopacy. Marx and the enlightment era went from there. You need no hierarchy...it’s just me and my bible.
We hear that same cry from Obama and Hillary! Sadly, Baptist and Evangelicals comply wholly. They don’t seem to realize that this was meant to destroy Christianity! That’s not to say in this country...many a Catholic has fallen for this as well. Destroy Peter...destroy Christianity. How clever is the enemy of humanity.
Reading through history, it’s easy to understand why some would feel this way with bad Catholic clergy and bad Catholics and so I’m not pointing fingers.
But like Peter, we have to look beyond that regardless if the Pope, the clergy, and the people aren’t the best...her teachings are perfect. John 6:68 - Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.
The Catholic Church is Christ’s...not ours. Keep fighting for Our Lord and his Catholic Church...God is truth and the truth is HIS CHURCH regardless of us sinners.
All truths come from the Catholic Church because it is Christ’s! Catholic schools were banned...we had to attend the prottie’s PUBLIC schools, we couldn’t vote or run for office.
When JFK ran, he was questioned again and again demanding that he wouldn’t bring his Catholic beliefs in the White House. It hasn’t changed if you have watched any of the nominations for SC Justices. Keep your Catholic God out of public service or you won’t get our vote. The irony is that all truth comes out of the Catholic Church, regardless of us sinners because the Church is Christ’s Church!
Sadly, throughout American history...some Catholics caved to truth to ‘get along’. Henceforth, we get the Kennedys, Pelosis, Durbins.
And it is the rejection of the most fundamental distinctive of the Reformation, that of Scripture as supreme as the wholly inspired and accurate word of God, that is a fundamental aspect of secularism.
Nonsense, and inconsequential even if it was true. The NT church which provided the NT, which itself supplemented the OT, stands in fundamental contrast to the church of Rome, which is a progressive deformation of it .
Yet in any case, even being the instrument and steward of Divine revelation does not require or mean that all that such says it is be followed. If you want to disagree, do so and see what this premise leads to.
Not on faith and morals.
Wrong, as even social teaching is based on faith and morals, including the latest papal encyclical, and Catholic papal teaching, as invoked by your own comrades, conveys that you are bound to give assent of mind and will to such, and not to engage in public dissent, even though (unlike infallible teaching) you may internally disagree.
Dispute it if you want, but the evidence will be against you.
The alternative is to not follow the pastors as docile sheep, but seek to ascertain the validity of papal church teaching by examination of evidences for it, as evangelicals are to do, and are censured by RCs for so doing.
This is totally incorrect. Sorry.
When it cleans up the priesthood we can talk.
Then they got smart and saw just what was being taught by Catholics and wanted no part of it.
Some Protestants have fallen by the roadside just like some Catholics. They all need to start reading the Bible and believing what it says
Why is it you believe the Bible is the Word of God?
**My parents were Catholics**
So you got your faith handed down to you by your parents, correct?
Thing is — you are still a Catholic if you were baptized in the Catholic Church.
Did you miss all the teams that Benedict XVI sent to seminaries?
They have been cleaned up.
Be glad I don’t have all my links or you would get them.
The Catholic Church stands for the Catholic Church and nothing else.
The Bible says that the Catholic Church stands for all.
The One true Church — the Catholic Church — and how to recognize it.
Use this guideline as a measure...
*It was founded by Jesus Christ Himself in Mt 16:18.
*It would be built on Simon Peter, Mt 16:18.
*It would be defended by GOD Himself, Mt 16:18-19.
*It would have authority given by Jesus Christ, Mt 16:19,18:17-18.
*It would be guided by the Holy Spirit who will dwell within it, Jn 14:15-17, Act 15:28,16:6.
*It would be one and undivided, Mk 3:24-25.
*It would have one fold and one shepherd, Jn 10:16.
*It would have Priests, Bishops, and Deacons, 1Tim 3:1-13.
*It must have the Holy Eucharist celebration, Jn 6:42-70, Acts 2:42.
*It must be found in all nations, Mt 28:19.
*It must be found in all centuries, Mt 28:20.
*Jesus Christ said He would be with His Church every day, in every year, until the end of the world, Mt 28:20. (This means no gaps in time.)
“Not on faith and morals.”
Francis “Who-Am-I-To-Judge” El Pope
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