Protestants don’t even WANT Catholics to join them at their Reformation celebrations - and who can blame them?! Pope Francis invited himself to those parties in Germany last year, and the Lutherans were too polite to tell him he was not wanted. He looked like a clown there, celebrating the anniversary of the second formal split of Christendom. Pope Francis is a loser. If the Reformation was good news, why isn’t Frankie able to beguile the Protestants back into reunion right now?
Whew!
From the headline I was concerned it was Todd Akin. We don’t need any more help from him.
Thank God that He used Saint Martin Luther, a flawed man and Catholic priest, to recover the Gospel of Grace.
Catholics should be grateful. They need eternal life too.
This is pretty frustrating speaking as one who is, this very evening, teaching the history of the reformation and the proceedings of the Council of Trent.
The source material is very clear that Luther taught heresy, and the Council clearly stated the true teaching.
“...thirty-five years after the outbreak of the reformation, the problem was no longer disagreement over this or that doctrine. The Protestants had developed and appropriated an operational paradigm that was incompatible with the corresponding paradigm of the bishops and theologians at Trent. There was no possibility that the council would or could accede to the Protestant demands, just as there was no possibility that the Protestants would or could yield to the council as it was in fact constituted.”
> Catholics Should Commemorate the Reformation
That’s insane. Protestants slaughtered whole families of Catholics in there beds during the Reformation.
Another important post, ebb tide.
The neo-Catholics will be posing to the Western world this Akins modernist opinion, and it deserves a proper push back.
This writer brings it and I appreciate it. In this era, exhausting the Traditionalists seems to be half the winning of the battle. We are exhausted of our tools, of old timers, and of theologians who can mount a defense, who know the dangers of diluting Catholic identity, by mixing it with the world and world opinion and with the world’s near total ignorance.
Anti-Catholics are running the Church, in the West. This is one battle the Lord Himself will engage, because it is so clear that He is permitting, for a time, this grave test, a measure of loss to the faithful, bringing us properly to our knees to rely on God Himself, alone, bring Justice.
I cannot see anyway that celebrating their spit from the Catholic faith is going to help with creating unity with Protestants. Even Protestants can understand that from the Catholic perspective the reformation was a tragedy for Christendom. It is inherently contradictory to say that unity within the Church is a good and necessary thing and to celebrate a breakage in the unity of the Church that caused so much chaos and destruction.
Oh yes please let’s keep old arguments or hatred going because that is the best way. /s
Except that Vatican II very clearly also states that the non-Catholic churches are "means of salvation". Never has the Catholic Church even suggested such a thing.
Not so. Here's the rest of that section of Paragraph 3 of Unitatis Redintegratio (Vatican II):
The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect. The differences that exist in varying degrees between them and the Catholic Church - whether in doctrine and sometimes in discipline, or concerning the structure of the Church - do indeed create many obstacles, sometimes serious ones, to full ecclesiastical communion. The ecumenical movement is striving to overcome these obstacles. But even in spite of them it remains true that all who have been justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ's body, and have a right to be called Christian, and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church.
Vatican II absolutely supports the new teaching that those that grew up and attend non-Catholic churches are not heretics. According to Vatican II, they are just in "imperfect" communion.