I Catholicism—An Assessment
The early Roman church, now known as the Roman Catholic Church(RCC), is presently the largest Christian church, with a claimed membership of 1.2 billion worldwide. Since the 4th centuryAD it is one of the oldest religious institutions in the world and has played a prominent role in the history of Western civilization. The Catholic Church teaches that it is the one true church founded by Jesus Christ, that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles, and that the Pope is the successor to Saint Peter. The Church maintains that the doctrine on faith and morals that it presents as definitive is infallible.
Catholics teach that the church, as an external, visible society consisting of those who profess to be followers of Christ(thus Christians) united in communion of the same sacraments and subjection to lawful pastors, and especially to the Pope of Rome, is divinely appointed to be the infallible teacher of men in all things pertaining to faith and practice. They claim this office by the divine revelation of the truth in the written and unwritten Word of God, and by the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit transmitted to the bishops as official successors of the Apostles, or, to the Pope as successor of Peter in his supremacy over the whole Church, and as vicar of Christ on earth.
There is something simple and grand in this theory. It is wonderfully adapted to the tastes and wants of men. It relieves them of personal responsibility. Everything is decided for them. Their salvation is secured by merely submitting to be saved by an infallible, sin-pardoning, and grace-imparting church. The RCC teaches that Christ left on earth a visible representative of Himself(the Pope) clothed with His authority to teach and govern, and an order of men(priests) dispersed throughout the world endowed with the gifts of the original Apostles, -- men everywhere accessible, to whom we would resort in all times of difficulty and doubt, and whose decisions could be safely received as the decisions of Christ Himself.
In these opening paragraphs I have presented a brief overview of the Roman Catholic Church as it is now understood by most observers. This appendix was added to provide evidence for the claim that the Roman Catholic Church(now apostate as an institution) is the single most important aspect of Satan’s effort to thwart the plan of God.
Satan and the Roman Church
The gigantic system of the Christian faith known as Roman Catholicism is a perfect monument to the effort of Satan to seat himself upon the earthly throne to rule according to his will. Where better to carry on his own plan—the plan to achieve the power of God? Scripture tells us very clearly the plan of Satan. We may ask, if Satan is so wily , so intelligent, so powerful, why doesn’t he know what the Scripture says about him? The answer is, he is blinded by God whenever God chooses. God does the same with all unbelievers; only believers are privy to the Will of God.
What, and how God achieves what He does is incomprehensible to us. We do know that Satan is at the center of what we call the paradox of God’s sovereignty versus our free will. To make a choice there has to be at least two positions on which to choose. Satan represents the choice for evil. God represents the choice for good. Man, in his deficient wisdom has, for centuries considered this paradox, but we must rely on our faith to trust God in His infinite wisdom. All that God has revealed to believing man is now contained in the Bible—so I defer to the Bible for my answers.
According to Scripture, Satan once endeavored to form a compromise with Jesus Christ. He came to the Son of God in the wilderness, and showing Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, offered to give all into His hands if He would acknowledge the supremacy of the prince of darkness. Was the world Satan’s to make such a bargain? Yes, Satan remains the god of the world until God the Father fulfills His own plan at the end-time. So Christ, the Son of God rebuked Satan, and forced him to depart(citing Holy Scriptures). But Satan meets with success in presenting the same temptations to man. To secure worldly gains and honors, the Church was led by Satan to seek favor and support of the great men of the earth. Satan also knew that the Holy Scriptures would enable believing men to discern his deceptions and withstand his power. It was by the written Word that even the Savior of the world resisted the temptations of Satan. At every assault, Christ presented the shield of eternal truth, saying “it is written.” To every suggestion of Satan, Christ opposed with the wisdom and power of the Word. In order for Satan to maintain his sway over men, he must keep men in ignorance of the Scriptures. His plan to solve this problem was to infiltrate the Church.
How Satan Infiltrated the Roman Church
There is evidence of Satan’s presence in the early Church from its inception following the death of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul makes note of that. We believe Satan was the force behind the widespread division and acrimony that existed throughout the early Christian churches. But in spite of this, God’s intervention assured the True Christian Church(the Body of Christ) would continue to survive and thrive to the end of the age (Matthew 16:18--"and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it"). Even the Satan- inspired persecutions against the True Christian Church did not slow its growth.
With the Apostle Paul as the principle founder of the early churches, he felt strongly about heretical teaching and teachers. They were to be treated accordingly. Some were delivered to Satan (1 Tim. 1: 20). Others were to be rebuked (Titus 1: 13) and to be taught, so that they could escape from the snare of Satan, after having been caught by him (2 Tim. 2:23.). During the first three centuries Satan attacked the Christian Church from without as well as within. But to his chagrin, Satan found that the more the Church was persecuted and attacked, the more it grew and prospered. The blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. The martyrs died, but others were saved and took their places. Christianity not only spread but it thrived and prospered. The Church of Jesus Christ could not be exterminated. It survived each and every persecution against it. The Church could not be defeated. It came out of every persecution victorious and strong. The Church we are speaking of here is “My Church”, the Body of Christ.
Now enter the Roman church and the plan of Satan. Christianity had been seen as a threat to the Roman Empire as Christians refused to worship the pagan Roman gods or the Emperor. This resulted in the persecution of the early Christians, many of whom were killed and thus became martyrs to the Christian religion. The pagan Roman government observing the presence of the Christian Church began to realize the Christians were surviving all their persecutions. In the year 311 A.D. Galerius (along with his co-emperors, Constantius and Licinius) signed the Edict of Toleration into law which granted toleration to all religions throughout the Roman empire, including Christianity. Galerius was not a fan of the Christians, nor was he a friend. He was a foe of the Christians but he was smart enough to realize that the past persecutions under the Romans had not accomplished anything. The more the believers suffered the more they multiplied. Somewhat later when Constantine came to power, he did them one better. “If you can’t beat them-join them,”
Constantine then gave the Roman Church freedom and power they never dreamed possible. Since all of this activity was initiated in the city of Rome which was the center of world power at the time, it was logical for Satan to concentrate his efforts on the local Roman Church with his long range plan.
Was Satan really behind this move? We have no direct evidence to prove that, but when you sum up the apostasy that took place in the Roman Church in the centuries following Constantine, everything supports our thesis.
Satan created an apostate Roman church through its hierarchy, and the laity became innocent, docile, indoctrinated victims. Absolute power and a total distortion of the biblical message by the church hierarchy was used to keep the laity in bondage. Once in place, the system was easily and permanently perpetuated. It isn’t something that happened overnight. It took time to mature. Satan is not hurried.
The exact mechanism by which Satan achieved this apostate hierarchy is not clear, but there are some clues to follow that may provide some insight to this idea. I would suggest Satan separated out a cadre of Roman church leaders who were operating outside the gospel of grace, those with a weak or non-existent value system, as opposed to men with strong virtuous values which includes wisdom, self-control, justice, transcendence, kindness, and courage. He knew those weak men when faced with challenging decisions, who did not have an internalized value system that includes these values, would respond to his plan. Satan knew all this perfectly well, and after he picked and chose enough bad apples, he was in a position to spoil the whole bushel. It was primarily in that situation in which those Roman church leaders who did not have an internalized value system caused them to turn to mental gymnastics and sinful mind games instituted by Satan.
Of course there is more to it than that. This was a grandiose scheme based on Satan’s knowledge of human nature. The hierarchy Satan formed acted as a peer group. Within this closed system the priest’s anonymity can be induced by acting in an anonymity-conferring environment that adds to the power of being in control. Institutional forces and peer pressure can lead otherwise sincere priests to disregard the potential harm of their actions on the other priests. You don't need a motive, all you really need is a situation that facilitates moving across that line of good and evil. So is it a few bad apples that spoil a barrel? We would like to believe that we could never be a bad apple, we're the good ones in the barrel. But as Satan found with Adam and Eve, men are subject to sinful influence, regardless of their best intentions to resist.
Complicity with the system itself controls the individual's behavior. These men slipped mindlessly into their accepted role. Peer pressure is influence on a peer group, the idea of “going along,” encourages others to change their attitudes, values, or behaviors to conform . A peer group of men have similar interests, age, background, or social status. The members of this group are likely to influence and reinforce each other’s beliefs and behavior.. Peer groups develop their own hierarchies and distinct patterns of behavior, "love of the same,” is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. Sort of a birds of a feather flock together syndrome . We tend to associate with others who think in similar ways, regardless of differences in status. Thus the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Tradition and the Bible
The concept of tradition was made to order for Satan and the Catholic hierarchy. It was the perfect means of defending the indefensible. Tradition was the perfect way to neutralize the Bible as the final proof of God’s Word. With Tradition no proof for any action need be cited, all one needs to do is claim divine institution(ius divinum), against which there can be no argument. Only Satan could have conceived and carried out such a ruse.
The Roman Catholic concept of Tradition mimics exactly that of the Pharisaic use of tradition practiced by Israel in the centuries preceding the Incarnation. It was a perfect model to follow. The Pharisees were an educated elite who controlled and dominated the religious lives of the Jewish people. They considered themselves to be the only ones that could interpret scripture correctly. To disagree with these spiritual leaders was to risk severe penalties of censure, ostracism, imprisonment, torture and even death. The torture and crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate example of the hatred the Pharisees had for the Truth which was at odds with their doctrines. It was the oral tradition that was necessary for the "correct" interpretation of the law. By the words of Jesus in Matthew 15:6 such oral traditions did nothing for the law but only against it as He said, "You have made the commandment of God void because of your tradition." It was the oral tradition of the law that enabled the Pharisees to want Jesus killed and yet believe they were not in violation of the commandment, "Thou shall not kill." To the Pharisees, as long as they did not commit murder by their own hands, they were absolved of all blood guiltiness. So, they invalidated God's command, "Thou shall not kill" by their oral tradition.
This same disparity between the Catholic hierarchy and the laity is maintained today exactly as it was 2,000 years ago by the Pharisees. Specifically, it is the disparity between the Christian "layperson" and the doctors of theology, priests, and all those who have been trained and ordained by Catholic institutions. Through the official certification of such "priests "the distance between the hierarchy and the laity is maintained. It is exactly the same relation the Pharisees had with their Jewish congregations. The election of God often has little to do with the calling and training of such modern Pharisees which are the leadership of today's apostate church.
In the early Church the word was used in this widest sense. Appeal was made to “the traditions,” i.e., the instructions which the churches had received. It was only certain churches at first which had any of the written instructions of the Apostles. And it was not until the end of the first century that the writings of the evangelists and Apostles had been collected. The fathers spoke of them as containing the traditions, i.e., the instructions derived from Christ and His Apostles. They called the Gospels “the evangelical traditions,” and the Epistles “the apostolic traditions.’ In that age of the Church the distinction between the written and the unwritten Word had not yet been clearly made.
Now the "traditions" of the apostles was what? They were the same tradition they learned from both the scriptures and the Lord Jesus Christ ! Are the ways of God outlined in the Old Testament? Were they not adhered to, and even expounded upon, by Jesus in the New Testament? Yes, of course they were.
We know that the Apostles taught these precepts both verbally and written, and then expounding upon it. The scripture is what gave credence to the speaker. The spoken words had to be in accord with the scripture or the person was not to be listened to. We see that Paul taught these precepts verbally and by written letters of faith (epistle). We also take note that both forms of transmission carried the same data! “But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth: 14 Whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions (paradosis i.e. law or ordinance)which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” (2Thessalonians 2:13).
There weren't scriptural rules and then also different rules transmitted orally. These were the same precepts taught by either method to some individuals - and both to others. One did not supersede or contradict the other. One did not contain information that the other didn't. Paul wrote that they should obey the 'paradosis' whether you heard it, or read it, or heard it read. God's word is true whether spoken or written.
But as controversies arose, and disputants on both sides of all questions appealed to “tradition,” ie., to what they had been taught; and when it was found that these traditions differed, one church saying their teachers had always taught them one thing, and another that theirs had taught them the opposite, it was felt that there should be some common and authoritative standard. Such a standard was necessary to eliminate the confusion and introduction or error as a result of the vagaries of tradition. Hence the wisest and the best of the fathers would argue for the authority of a common consciousness and a common faith, or common sense of the Church which could only be found in the divinely inspired written Word. The written Scriptures as God’s final Word eliminates any attempt to circumvent the truth.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the Bible and Sacred Tradition (that is, things believed to have been taught by Jesus and the apostles that were not recorded in the Bible but were transmitted through the church) are considered a rule for all believers for judging faith and practice.
For non-Catholic Christians, Romans 12:6 “Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith;” is viewed as the biblical reference for the term "analogy of the faith" . The Bible alone is considered the word of God and the only infallible standard for judging faith and practice, therefore, for non-Catholic Christians, the analogy of the faith is equivalent to the analogy of scripture – that is, opinions are tested for their consistency with scripture, and scripture is interpreted by the Holy Spirit speaking in scripture, i.e., sola scriptura.
But once the concept of two equal sources of revelation was incorporated into the Catholic Church as dogma in 1546, the hierarchy did everything in its power to utilize Tradition to reduce Scripture to a secondary role as the source of final proof.
The Catholic Church and the various Protestant churches attempt to lure each other into a strange circular argument regarding the doctrinal debate over "Tradition vs Sola Scriptura" (the bible alone). The Catholics will not regard scripture because they are pushing so hard on the point of traditions that they attempt to prove traditions by traditions, or extra biblical writings, rather than with scripture. Protestants won't consider the oral transmission of God's word because they push the written text only. The circle is a dizzying spiral that leads to nowhere fast. The Catholic apologists cleverly sets Protestants arguing against all traditions rather than just the inventions of men; and more specifically, the inventions of the Catholic Church. The argument is really against traditions of men that are not supported by the written word of God.
Then there is Satan’s well-known use of the lie. If we’ve been lied to long enough, we tend to reject any evidence that we have been used. We’re no longer interested in finding the truth. The lie has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give Satan that kind of power over you, you almost never get it back. That is what happened to the top echelon of the Roman Church hierarchy. Satan cleverly caused a general erosion of morality and a haughty sense of entitlement and a hubristic willingness which knew no bounds; when thrown together in secret sessions, they formulated so much mischief some of which was approved outright, some of which took years of in-house debate; none of which in truth has been rescinded. The result was a program of Satan-directed innovations in church doctrine, liturgy, and ritual, that were deliberately made to order for an innocent, docile, laity, while at the same time retaining the autonomy of the hierarchy.
The advancing centuries witnessed a constant increase of error in the doctrines put forth by the hierarchy. Even before the establishment of the papacy, the teachings of the secular philosophers had received attention and exerted influence in the Church. Many who professed conversion still clung to the tenets of their secular philosophy, and not only continued its study themselves, but urged it upon others as a means of extending their influence among non-Christians.
The Roman church was divided into two absolutely inseparable parts—the hierarchical priesthood and the laity. The hierarchy became an alien structure which was built up within the church and superimposed on it. The laity had been led into spiritual bondage to a professional priestly caste, a hierarchical order, which dispossessed the church of organs and functions that belonged to it, resulting in absolute independence and autonomy. The effect of this usurpation was to degrade the church into an irresponsible multitude of docile subjects and followers, instead of the corporate body of the faithful which is directly responsible only to Christ its living head.
The preceding thesis on how Satan infiltrated the Roman church rests on what I would call “The proof of the pudding.” That is, the historical record which provides all the evidence one needs to expose and verify Satan’s plan that is still ongoing to this very day. The scope of this Treatise has its limits, so I defer to the comprehensive histories of Christianity that are readily available to anyone seeking additional confirmation. For now, I will examine only enough snippets of history pertaining to the scandals of the RCC to support my thesis regarding the plan of Satan.
While Jesus himself discouraged those who wanted to treat him as a supernatural being and chose to be known as nothing more than a poor carpenter's son, the popes and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church have gone out of their way assuming titles and honors that would patently offend Jesus, Perhaps the most egregious of these is the title of "Vicar of Christ". ( The word "vicar" means "stand-in" or "substitute", just like the word "vice-" does in titles like "vice-president".) When the famous British Lord Acton wrote to the Catholic Bishop Creighton, in 1887:"All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." he was only expressing a theory. But, as we will show in the pages which follow, it becomes evident how accurate that theory is when applied to the RCC; and how tragic the consequences when so-called "men of God" turn their backs on the teaching of Jesus and strive to dominate, rather than love and serve mankind.
Here are a few of the proclamations made by arrogant men posing as "men of God" :
Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) :
"The pope cannot make a mistake."
Pope Paschal II: (1099-1118)
"Whoever does not agree with the Apostolic See
is without doubt a heretic."
Pope Innocent IV (1243-54):
described himself as
"the bodily presence of Christ."
( presumably by a kind of
transubstantiation at his election)
Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) :
"Every human being must do
as the pope tells him."
Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903):
"We hold upon this earth
the place of God Almighty."
( Encyclical Letter, June 20, 1
Here is what Jesus himself said, (according to Matthew 23:1-14) : Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.
But you are not to be called 'Rabbi', for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your 'father' on earth, for you have one Father – the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'instructors', for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. "
How can anyone who claims to take Jesus Christ seriously hear or read the words above and not be troubled by the behavior of today's "princes of the church"? Does it really matter that we now call our houses of worship "churches", instead of "synagogues", and "reserved pews in the synagogue" have been superseded by ornate cathedral thrones, and the pompous garments worn by today's hierarchy differ in superficial ways from those of the high priests of Jesus' day ?
How can anyone read Jesus' demands that his disciples shun titles of honor, and never suspect that, if Jesus considered the titles "Father" and "Teacher" objectionable, he would hardly approve of "Monsignor" (which is French for "My Lord"), "Your Excellency", "Your Eminence", "Your Holiness", "The Holy Father", "Supreme Pontiff", and perhaps most presumptuous of all, "Vicar of ( i.e. stand-in for ) Christ", the equivalent of "Vice-Messiah" !
The following is a list of some Roman Catholic scandals and innovations, and the dates of their adoption. As you can see, items on this list began just prior to Nicea, and continue to this very day. Once the church hierarchy rose to absolute power they were solely responsible for everything that appears on this list in one way or another.
List of innovations by the RCC hierarchy
In recent years(i.e.2014) because of a shortage of priests, many new innovations have taken place. In the Catholic Church there are any number of ways to accommodate the laity by bending a few previously “written in stone” rules. Since Vatican II one goes to confession infrequently or not at all. A new ritual called “communal penance” has been introduced. It is no longer a sin to eat meat on Fridays. The priest now faces the congregation over the altar and speaks in English. Laypeople are admonished to “search the Scriptures,” but cannot interpret. Nuns no longer wear traditional habits. Marriages are easier to have annulled. There are new innovations related to abortion. Purgatory and indulgences have been downplayed but have never been rescinded. The sacrament of extreme unction, and the cult of Mary have been downplayed. Novenas are almost unheard of. Parents wonder what they did wrong if their son wants to enter the priesthood. Father O’Malley says there is really no difference between Christians and Muslims. And the bishop seems embarrassed when you try to kiss his ring. The idea of the “communal Catholic” has gained a certain currency. One need not be a liturgical Catholic, a doctrinal Catholic, nor an ethical Catholic who tries to keep the rules; it is now sufficient to identify with the community that calls itself Catholic.
Has the Catholic Church really changed? No, not really. The Catholic Church shows no sign of relinquishing her claim to infallibility. The papacy that Protestants are now ready to honor is the same that ruled the world in the days of the Reformation. It is not without reason that the claim has been put forth that Catholicism differs less widely from Protestantism than in former times. There has been change; but the change is not in the papacy. Catholicism indeed resembles much of the Protestantism that now exists; because Protestantism itself has so greatly degenerated since the days of the Reformers.
The question can still be asked, has the claim of Divine Institution by the Roman Church been relinquished? The answer is no! This claim was affirmed in the nineteenth century with greater positiveness than ever before. As Rome asserts that the church “never erred, nor will it, according to the Scriptures, ever err,” how can she renounce the principles which governed her course in the past ages?
The hierarchy cleverly hide themselves from their misdeeds behind specious arguments such that if pressed by the temporal power, they have affirmed and maintained that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them, but, on the contrary, that the spiritual power is above the temporal. Then if it is proposed to admonish them with the Scripture, they objected that no one may interpret the Scripture but the Pope. And lastly, if they are threatened with a council, they pretend that no one may call a council but the Pope.
ROME BEFORE THE REFORMATION
In Europe during the Middle Ages the only recognized religion was Christianity, in the form of the Roman Catholic religion. The lives of the Medieval people of the Middle Ages was dominated by the church. From birth to death, whether you were a peasant, a serf, a noble a lord or a King - life was dominated by the church. Various religious institutions became both important, rich and powerful. The lives of many Medieval people were dedicated to the Catholic church and religion. From 590 to 1517, the RCC dominated the western world. The Roman Catholic Church controlled religion, philosophy, morals, politics, art and education. This was the dark ages for true Christianity. The RCC was theologically sick and its theology led to atrocious corruptions. It was spiritually exhausted, enfeebled and almost lifeless. Rome had seriously departed from the teaching of the Bible and was engrossed in real heresy. Many of the clergy had come to their offices through political maneuvering and simony. Simony was the sinful practice of giving or obtaining an appointment to a church office for money. This was a common practice in the Middle Ages, even in the obtaining of the office of pope. They no longer had to learn and teach the Scriptures, for the church told them what to do. Even the superior clergymen were sunk in great ignorance in spiritual matters. They had secular learning, but knew very little of the Bible.
Some Specifics
1. The Donation of Constantine was probably the most famous forgery in World history. It was a document supposedly written by emperor Constantine (285-337 A.D.) granting the Catholic Church ownership of vast territories within the western Roman Empire. The document stated that he made this generous gift out of gratitude to Pope Sylvester I who had converted him to Christianity and had cured him of leprosy. It has never been proved who faked the Donation, but it was written ca. 750 to c.800 in Latin. It is believed to have been written to aid Papal attempts to challenge Byzantium’s spiritual and secular interests in Italy, probably being created in the mid eighth century at the behest of Pope Stephen II, in order to aid his negotiations with Pepin the Short. The idea was that the Pope approved the transfer of the great central European crown from the Merovingian dynasty to the Carolingians, and in return Pepin would not just give the Papacy the rights to Italian lands, but would actually ‘restore’ what had been given long before by Constantine. It appears that the rumor of a Donation or something similar had been traveling round the relevant parts of Europe since the sixth century, and that whoever created it was producing something people expected to exist. It was during the reign of Leo IX in the mid eleventh century that the Donation was quoted as bona fide evidence, and from then on it became a common weapon in the struggle between the RCC and secular rulers to carve up power. Its legitimacy was rarely questioned at that time.The Donation was proved entirely fake beyond a doubt by Lorenzo Valla in 1440, as even the RCC eventually acknowledged. Forgery be damned, the RCC made full use of the forgery for hundreds of years to promote its own purposes and ill-gotten gains.
It is important because this document is what the Roman Catholic Church used in order to establish its authority for centuries. When it was proved a forgery, the Roman Catholic Church – with power already firmly established – stopped referring to that document but did not admit it was a fake for another hundred years. They did the same thing with Galileo—not admitting their error for hundreds of years.
2. The Inquisition—Totalitarianism RCC Style
The Medieval Inquisition was the most common name for the Inquisition that was created by the Catholic Church. After the Roman Catholic Church emerged following the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., it immediately achieved expansive influence at all levels of the imperial government. As The True Church of Christ(The Body of Christ) separated themselves from the Church of Rome, which they saw as apostate, they represented a formidable potential threat to the official new imperial religion. As in the early days of the infant Church, persecution in varying degrees of severity was instituted not by emperors but by popes over the centuries following.
By the 11th century, in their zeal to establish their power, the Roman popes began utilizing a new tool -- the Crusades. At first, the Crusades had as their object the conquering of Jerusalem and the "Holy Land". Along the crusaders' paths, thousands of innocent civilians (especially Jews) were raped, robbed, and slaughtered. In time, however, the crusade concept was altered to crush all non-Catholic dissidents within Europe itself. In other words, armies were raised with the intent of massacring whole communities of non-Catholic Christians.
Pope Innocent III believed that those non-Catholic dissidents were worse than infidels for they threatened his absolute power. So the pope sponsored four "crusades" to exterminate the opposition. He called upon Louis VII to do his killing for him, and he also enjoined Raymond VI to assist him.
The Cistercian order of Catholic monks were then commissioned to preach all over France, Flanders, and Germany for the purpose of raising an army sufficient to kill all dissidents. All who volunteered to take part in these mass murders were promised that they would receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life.
In July of 1209 A.D. an army of orthodox Catholics attacked Beziers and murdered 60,000 unarmed civilians, killing men, women, and children. The whole city was sacked, and when someone complained that Catholics were being killed as well as "heretics", the papal legates told them to go on killing and not to worry about it for "the Lord knows His own." At Minerve, 14,000 Christians were put to death in the flames, and ears, noses, and lips of the "heretics" were cut off by the "faithful." This is but one example from the long and sordid history of Catholic atrocities committed against their perceived enemies. Much worse treatment of dissidents was forthcoming during that stage of bloody Catholic history known as the Inquisition.
The Inquisition was purely and uniquely a Catholic institution; it was founded for the express purpose of exterminating every human being in Europe who differed from Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. It spread out from France, Milan, Geneva, Aragon, and Sardinia to Poland (14th century) and then to Bohemia and Rome (1543). It was not abolished in Spain until 1820.
"Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first 3 centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required by an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.”--William Durant(noted historian).
3. RCC Cover-ups
The Tip of the Iceberg was Pedophilia
The widespread problem of sex abuse within the Catholic church has existed for centuries, but its ability to cover up its transgressions has finally come to an end. Actually it was the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid 15th century that was the eventual death-knell for Catholicism’s grip on its internal sordid activities and world thought. The other side of the coin was that besides disseminating the truth, censorship reared its ugly head. From 590 to 1517AD, the Roman Church dominated religious thought in the western world. The Roman Catholic Church controlled religion, philosophy, morals, politics, art and education. This was the dark age for true Christianity. The vital doctrines of Biblical Christianity had almost disappeared, and with the neglect of true doctrine came the passing of life and light that constitutes the worship of the One True God as declared in Christ.
Pope Paul IV ordered the first Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. The Index was issued again 20 times by different popes. The last Index of Prohibited Books was issued as recently as 1948, and then finally abolished in 1966. These lists of books banned for their heretical or ideologically dangerous content, were issued by the Roman Catholic Church. The Holy Bible especially was on their list of restricted reading. Zealous guardians carried out the Sacred Inquisition, banning and burning books and sometimes also the authors. The most famous of authors that the Catholic Church banned is undoubtedly Galileo (1633), and the most famous victims of the Inquisition’s trials must be Joan of Arc (1431) and Thomas More (1535).
Finally, in 1776 with America showing the way by means of freedom of the press, and an educated public world-wide, the RCC lost its greatest weapon for deceit. Since Vatican II numerous cases of sex abuse have surfaced following a series of allegations, investigations, trials, and convictions of child sexual abuse crimes committed by Catholic priests, nuns, and members of Roman Catholic orders against boys and girls, some as young as 3 years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. There is no way to put accurate numbers on the problem because of the secretive methods employed by the Church hierarchy. The accusations began to receive wide publicity in the late 1980s; many span several decades, and were brought forward years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who did not report sex abuse allegations to the legal authorities, moving sexually abusive priests to other parishes where abuse sometimes continued. There is hardly a single parish in America that hasn’t been affected.
In the year 2000, Pope John Paul made a mock apology for atrocities that occurred over the centuries, pretending that it was only certain members of the Catholic church who were responsible for committing the gruesome acts of torture and murder, when in fact it was the official policy of the papacy that was responsible. Furthermore, the "Pope" made no apology for, nor did he even mention, the nearly three quarters of a million innocent non-Catholic Christian Serbians slaughtered by Roman Catholics in Croatia, Yugoslavia, during World War II.
Catholic apologies of 1998 and 2000 are quite pathetic: Apologies are made on behalf of some unidentified "sons and daughters" of the church, but not on behalf of the church itself. The apologies are vaguely worded so that it is sometimes difficult to identify which past atrocity is being referred to -- whether it be genocide against the Cathars, burning "Witches" and other heretics at the stake, castrating boy singers so that they would preserve their soprano voice into adulthood, etc. It does not include any mention of present behavior that is sinful or deficient. It does not describe any plan to prevent the recurrence in the future of past crimes against humanity
Recently(6 May, 2014) the UN Rapporteur on Torture questioned the Vatican on clerical sexual abuse, and for “crimes against humanity” because of the widespread scheme, orchestrated by the church hierarchy, to facilitate and cover up the mass rape and sexual abuse of children. Many argued that the very term “crime against humanity” was over the top, fueled by anti-Catholicism or secularism, and effectively undermined itself by its extreme language.
At that time, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child accused the Vatican of fostering a climate of impunity with regard to child sexual abuse. In a two-hour hearing in Geneva, CAT launched a barrage of questions to the Vatican delegation, asking about past policy decisions, the juridical distinction between the Holy See and Vatican City, and information on specific cases.
The Vatican, said the Church has been "doing its own house cleaning" for 10 years. It says it is determined to protect children and that measures put in place have led to a decline in cases of sexual abuse of children by priests.
George Tugushi, a committee member from Georgia, said a recently formed international commission advising Pope Francis on how to deal with sexual abuse, was a very positive step but not enough. "The commission may need help to ensure all cases are reported properly and begin to change the climate of impunity, but it cannot be considered in our opinion as a substitute for a functioning investigation system," he told the Vatican delegation.
Another committee member, Satyabhoosun Gupt Domah of Mauritius, asked if the Holy See was taking steps to eliminate the "chemistry that creates the conditions" for sexual abuse of children by priests.
The Holy See's position is its adherence to the UN Convention against Torture applies only to the territory of Vatican City. The head of the Vatican's delegation, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, said the Holy See's powers did not extend beyond the Vatican, but added the church was taking action to address past wrongs. Archbishop Tomasi said while the Holy See can be a moral force, the "agent of justice" for crimes committed by Catholics was the local state where the crime was committed. "It should be stressed, particularly in light of much confusion, that the Holy See has no jurisdiction ... over every member of the Catholic Church," he said in opening remarks.
Barbara Blaine of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) accused the Vatican of ducking responsibility. "They are splitting hairs when they should be embracing the victims and stopping the sexual violence," she said. The committee's chief rapporteur, Felice Gaer of the United States, told the Vatican delegation that its position "seems to reflect an intention for a significant portion of the actions and omissions of Holy See officials be excluded from consideration by this committee, and this troubles us".
Ms Gaer and Mr Tugushi presented dozens of questions to the delegation, asking them to respond to reports presented to the committee by non-government organisations. "We have received numerous allegations of intimidation of witnesses and shifting of finances to avoid payment (of compensation)," Ms Gaer said.
Archbishop Tomasi told news agency Reuters that the reduction in the number of cases of abuse showed that "effective" action taken by the Church was working. "I think that in this kind of situation there will never be enough done. The damage has been done, reparation has to continue," he said.
Church groups defend "strong" reforms and protocols .The Church in the United States had invested $US2.5 billion in compensation for the victims. Archbishop Tomasi said "most of the abuser priests that we know of have been defrocked".Church groups defended the Catholic Church's efforts to stem abuse and criticised committee members who said the Church's opposition to abortion had harmed women. "Attacking the Church's moral and religious beliefs violates the religious liberty of the Church, a human right which the United Nations affirms," said Ashley McGuire of Catholic Voices. "Over the last decade, the Church has put into place reforms and protocols so strong that they are now being modelled by other institutions, like public schools," she said.
This past February, a UN committee on the Rights of the Child accused the Vatican of systematically turning a blind eye to decades of abuse and attempting to cover up sex crimes. The Vatican called the report unfair and ideologically slanted, but this is no more than the cry of a desperate church.
But what can possibly describe the following unless it is a crime against humanity? In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and live in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.
More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.
A mass grave for eight hundred children, buried with no dignity, no humanity, no trace of decency. And the mass grave may well have been facilitated by rampant, disgusting and callous neglect:
According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. “If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”
Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.” According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”
“Let us call this what it is: a concentration camp with willful disregard for the survival of its innocent captives, a death camp for a group of people deemed inferior because of the circumstances of their birth. When we talk of mass graves of this kind, we usually refer to Srebrenica or the crimes of Pol Pot. But this was erected in the name of Jesus, and these despicable acts were justified by his alleged teaching.”
“It seems to me that we have to move past the church’s current doctrines on sex if we are to fully seek justice for the victims of this pathology and if we are to ensure that never again is a phrase that actually means something. It is not enough to ask for a change in governance (and even that has been hard); what this evil signifies is the need to root out this pernicious obsession with sexual sin. This pathology – perpetuated by Benedict and the sex-phobic theocons – perpetuates the mindset that led to this barbarism. The nuns – and yes, this was abuse practiced by women as well as men –they did not for a moment internalize Jesus’ emphatic insistence on the holiness of children as those most likely to enter the kingdom of Heaven. No, these precious images of God were consigned, after years of abuse and neglect, to unmarked early graves in a septic tank.”
“That is not a sign of a church gone astray. It’s a sign of a church given over to evil. A church that leaves young children to die of malnutrition and then dumps hundreds of them into a mass grave is not a church. It’s an evil institution that robs the word “church” of any meaning, and twists the Gospels into their direct opposite. We failed these children in their short lifetimes. Never, ever forget them if we are to have a chance at restoring a Christianity worthy of Jesus.”
In June, 2016 Archbishop Christian Lepine, issued a decree to Catholic priests in Montreal to “ensure the safety and integrity of the people to whom we bring the Gospel message and offer our pastoral care”. But, it added, it was also “to preserve the integrity, security and good reputation of God’s people”.
The New policy, which includes church workers and volunteers, is intended as ‘safety net’ against allegations of sex abuse, but critics say move is ‘too little, too late’ Catholic priests in Montreal will be banned from being alone with children to provide a “safety net” against allegations of abuse.
According to the decree, the move was in an accompanying letter, Lepine said: “Recent events brought to light the horrific reality of abuse of minors and vulnerable people by members of the church. These intolerable situations have shocked and shaken the Universal Church as well as the entire population.”
Pope Francis and his predecessors had issued clear instructions that every Catholic diocese must take necessary measures to prevent the abuse of children and vulnerable adults, the letter said.
Implementation of the policy is to begin with a pilot project involving a dozen parishes from September, and will subsequently be rolled out across the diocese.
The policy would cover anyone “in the orbit of the church” to create a “safety net”, Canon Francois Sarrazin told the Canadian Press.“Imagine if you are alone in a room and a child accuses you of hitting them, how will you react?” Sarrazin said. “Whether it’s true or not, you need a witness. Not being in the room alone with someone who is vulnerable is simply being prudent.”
But Carlo Tarini, representing survivors of abuse by priests, said the move was “too little, too late”, and the church was trying to protect itself from legal action.
In February, 2016, the church agreed a $30m settlement after around 150 people claimed they had been abused by the Clerics of St Viateur, who ran a school for deaf children in Montreal between 1940 and 1982.
The policy was dismissed as “window dressing” by David Clohessy of the US-based Snap (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests).“The single most effective step would be to publicly disclose and discipline every cleric who committed or concealed child sex crimes. That immediately protects children,” he said.“We’ve literally seen hundreds of policies, procedures, protocols and pledges like this that sound good on paper but are virtually never enforced. So we are extremely sceptical.”
The new policy is thought to be unprecedented in the Catholic church, although the Anglican church in Australia has had similar guidelines in place since 2004, said Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Abuse victims in many countries have been demanding such a policy, in the case of Canada at least since 2007,” he said.
The new measures “provide safeguards for vulnerable children against the assaults of pedophile priests or other church workers. Given the volume of cases across time and place, it’s quite shocking that such measure[s] haven’t been adopted in all dioceses across the globe, if for no other reason than for the church to preclude future lawsuits which have cost it billions of dollars in Canada and the US alone.
“Despite its tardiness, the new policy in Montreal should be universally adopted, above all for the protection of children at Catholic churches and organizations.”
Globally, the Catholic church has paid tens of millions of dollars in compensation and costs relating to child sex abuse. An investigation by the National Catholic Reporter last year concluded that the US church alone had incurred costs of nearly $400 m.
In the year 2014, the Vatican said that 848 priests had been defrocked and more than 2,500 had been sanctioned. But the church has also been accused of systematically covering up crimes committed by priests.
Contemporary Catholic Opinion
As seen through the eyes of Prominent Catholic Priests.
For most of this country's 60 million Catholics, Vatican pronouncements are no laughing matter. Whatever comes out of the Vatican is accepted as the law of the Church. Because of its “death grip” on its laity through absolute power, there is no means to question or rebut. In fact, for the most part, the laity has no will to question. So who speaks for the laity? It is one thing for non-catholics to question the RCC, but within the Catholic Church there is no such thing as second-guessing the hierarchy. The hierarchy with its untold power and resources easily dispenses with all criticism by means of censure, ostracism, character assassination, and the threat of excommunication. The few Clergy who openly question the church have been silenced or even cut off from church membership.
What is it about some noted priests who have spoken out that deserve our attention? It is important to understand all were first, foremost, and forever Catholic priests with impeccable credentials. Most were “cradle catholics” trained into the priesthood and made privy to everything the church has to offer. They speak with the mind of a”dyed-in-the-wool” Catholic in total support of their church. Whatever viewpoints they expounded were sincere efforts on their parts for the betterment of the church. All were speaking for themselves, but in effect they serve as defacto spokesmen for the majority of the laity.
All in all, these priests referenced here present a vivid truthful snapshot of the status and current scandalous activities of the RCC, and call for reforms of a giant magnitude. We can never know the mind of the controlling hierarchy, but here we have a chance to see what is in the mind of credible intellectual Catholic men speaking and writing outside the usual censorship of the RCC . These men are baring their innermost thoughts. When one is confronted with overwhelming evidence of scandal in the RCC throughout its history, it lends credence to the presence of Satan and his plan to thwart God.
Uncensored Views of Noted Priests
Avery Dulles,S.J.(1918-2008).
Dulles was a noted American Jesuit theologian. and cardinal of the Catholic Church. He is considered by many scholars and fellow theologians as one of the premier theologians of the Roman Catholic Church.
Dulles served on the faculty of Woodstock College from 1960 to 1974, of The Catholic University of America from 1974 to 1988, and as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University from 1988 to 2008. He was an internationally known author and lecturer.
From his book “A Church to Believe In.” by Fr. Avery Dulles, S.J.(1982). “priestly and religious vocation have notably declined. A high percentage of ‘under forty’ Catholics no longer regard themselves as members of the Church. Many Catholics who enter marriages drift away from their former religion. Among Catholics who perservere, a large number reject the official teaching of the church on issues such as divorce, contraception, and, to some extent, abortion. Dogmas such as papal infallibility are widely misunderstood and disbelieved. Even among orthodox Catholics, increasing numbers are in canonically irregular situations, such as remarriage after divorce. With the decline of the Catholic school system, and with the increasing influence of mass media communications, the church finds it increasingly difficult to transmit its doctrine and values to younger members.”
Dulles observes, in an earlier day, when people were accustomed to being ruled by alien powers in every sphere of life, the institutionalism of the church caused little difficulty. People took for granted that they could have little control over their own lives and that someone would tell them what to believe and do. In a paternalistic society, a paternalistic church was felt to be appropriate. In some respects it even offered relief from the tyranny of other institutions. But today, especially in America, people take a critical view of all institutions. It seems almost impossible to look upon a huge bureaucracy as a loving mother, yet this, it seems, is precisely what the church is asking them to do. To large numbers of people, and to others not so young, the laws and dogmas of the church seem designed to control and crush rather than to nourish and satisfy the needs of the spirit. Dulles feels that until this fundamental difficulty is alleviated, all new techniques to shore up the institutional church will accomplish little.
Joseph L Bernadin
Joseph Louis Bernardin (1928 – 1996) was an American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983.
In August, 1996, Bernadin, of Chicago, in conjunction with 25 U.S. Catholic leaders compiled a 3,000-word statement titled, “Called to Be Catholic; Church in a time of Peril.” According to Bernadin the Catholic Church in America is in a time of peril. His statement painted a depressing portrait of Catholic life in the U.S.—a demoralized clergy, decaying institutional life, drooping attendance at Mass and declining financial contributions.
Some of the strongest criticism of Bernadin’s project arose from the age-old hierarchical anxiety that the exploration of differences could compromise the truth of Catholic doctrine or serve to legitimize dissent. Bernadin countered by saying, “The goal of dialogue is not negotiation or compromise but understanding.” He also pointed out that not all dissent is illegitimate. In conjunction with an essay by Archbishop Weakland, Berrnadin agreed that in spite of a movement for more respect for sex in Catholic theology, there was a gradual erosion of church rule on mandatory celibacy.
Bernadin ‘s comments are a good example of the crisis and turmoil taking place in the RCC involving laypeople, priests, theologians, bishops, and even “princes” of the church.
Karl Rahner,S.J.(1904-1984). Rahner was a noted Catholic theologian/teacher—a key figure at Vatican II. He entered the Jesuits in 1922. He was a man accepted and celebrated as the greatest Jesuit theologian in the last one hundred years. He spent a lifetime of effort to change Catholic belief. Rahner chose the long-accepted immemorial formulas of belief as his targets. His cry was “I will not serve.” He refused point-blank to defend either Catholic teaching on contraception or the Pope. It was the same for virtually all the other dogmas and rules of the Catholic church. He was untiring in his biting and sarcastic criticism of the papacy and Roman authority.
In regard to the dogmas about papal infallibility and those about Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption; would a Catholic theologian be free to say that those dogmas are not necessary, that they are basically superfluous? Ans: “Dogmas have very differing degrees of importance. Of course, my faith in Jesus Christ means much more to me than the teaching of the First Vatican Council about infallibility of the pope. The first is very important to me, the other is secondary, which is not to say it does not bind. I am not ready to say that any of these dogmas is simply so mistaken as to be thrown on the rubbish heap of history. But under circumstances which would have to be spelled out in detail, I would readily admit that such explicit, official, papal definitions about them could have been omitted.”
And why has no other theologian of note besides Rahner and Hans Kung said that? Ans: “Perhaps because no one has sufficiently thought it through. Before these dogmas were defined, there was discussion not only whether they were objectively correct but also whether it was opportune to define them. I am not bound by the decision regarding their opportuneness. If Pius XII had asked my opinion in 1950, I would have advised him against defining the dogma of the Assumption.
What are the consequences for a lay person, when a dogma is low on the hierarchy of truths? Ans: “The fact that a particular statement is a dogma of the Catholic Church does not require every Catholic Christian to take a position regarding it in any particular way. If Catholics come to me and say they cannot understand this or that or make any sense of it, I advise them not to reject it completely out of hand, for there are things in the world and in the realm of truth that are inaccessible to one personally. If you want to believe the basic truth of Christianity, you have the right not to worry about secondary matters in the hierarchy of truths and just let them be.
Rahner, in his book “Unity of the churches. An Actual Possibility.”(1984) made sweeping and outrageously anti-Roman proposals. To achieve Christian unity, he said, it was necessary to drop all insistence as well as on all other doctrines about the pope and Roman Catholicism that had been defined since the fourth century. What the Church had defined as basic and obligatory was optional.
Rahner, along with many of his Jesuit brothers wished to see the papacy and the hierarchy dismantled. So single-minded was his devotion to the anti-papal and anti-Catholic point of view that he became its incarnation, as one might say.
Sometime in the twentieth century the Society(Jesuits) changed from its original purpose as guardian of the papacy to that of self-appointed saviors of the poor. In doing so the Society(Rahner among them) became quite radical and antagonistic towards the papacy. The papacy insisted on its supreme authority over them. On October 5, 1981, Pope John Paul by papal fiat intervened in the highest affairs of the Society by removing Pedro Arrupe and Vincent O’Keefe, and replaced Arrupe with Piet-Hans-Kolvenbach. As it turned out, Kolvenbach was just as radical and antagonistic towards the papacy, as Arrupe. Kolvenbach resigned his position in 2013.
The Society is not alone in the war against the papacy. Many exist championing the idea that a new church, the “people of God,” should replace the old hierarchic Roman Catholic Church.
Rahner on the Intercession of Saints. “Whether and in what sense ‘saints’ intercede for us, has not yet been answered. The first thing I would say, according to Catholic teaching on sainthood and on the communion of saints or the cult of saints, they are not to be considered as a “board of appeals” or as a special intervention process, where they would be involved in running messages to the throne of God, messages that otherwise would not arrive there. I would say that the language concerning the intercession of the saints means nothing else than that their lives, accepted now by God where we all belong together in the community of God loves, are meaningful to me—and not just as secular lives, but as lives related to God. I don’t stand alone before God, although I am absolutely individual before God and God’s grace, but I belong to others. Each person is meaningful for another. Praying to someone to intercede for me thus means nothing else than saying in prayer that the other is significant for me, in a way known finally only by God and only when I stand before God.”
Richard Peter McBrien (1936 – 2015) was the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame He was ordained as a Catholic priest for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford in 1962 and the author of several books and articles discussing Catholicism. He is most well-known for his authorship of Catholicism. He also served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America from 1974–1975. In 1976 he was the awarded the John Courtney Murray Award for outstanding and distinguished accomplishments in theology. He published 25 books and was the general editor of the Encyclopedia of Catholicism. He also served as an on-air commentator on Catholic events for CBS in addition to his regular contribution as a commentator on several major television networks. He was also a consultant for ABC News.
Fr. Charles E.Curran said of McBrien at his death: “No Catholic theologian in the United States has made a greater contribution to the reception of the Second Vatican Council. Fr. McBrien addressed head-on the controversial issues that arose in the life of the Church while many others often put their heads in the sand. Dick wrote and spoke often to Catholics seeking an understanding of their faith. ” Like McBrien, Fr. Curran was also a sort of dissident on matters Catholic. He maintains in his 1986 Faithful Dissent that Catholics who may dissent nevertheless accept the teaching authority of the Pope, bishops and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Curran has taken a full tenured professorship at Southern Methodist University and has published personal accounts about his experience with the Roman Catholic Church and his viewpoint on the actions of Roman Catholic Church authorities.
McBrien wrote: “You have to wonder how many Catholics there are who have never read the Bible or even pay attention to the readings at Mass.” and, “A large percentage of the Catholic laity seem to believe Jesus must have been preoccupied with instituting loyalty to the pope, censoring dissident theologians, condemning most expressions of human sexuality, blessing military preparedness and encouraging the accumulation of personal and corporate wealth. Jesus must have spent a good deal of time developing various devotions to his mother; and when he wasn’t concentrating on Mary , he was probably urging his militant followers to be brutally rough on anyone who failed to toe the line. In his spare time , he insisted that priests wear Roman collars, that nuns wear veils and that children be forced to memorize lists of holy days of obligation, precepts of the church, and, of course, the ten Commandments. This version of Catholicism bears no resemblance to the New Testament, nor to the rich selection of readings we are given at Mass.”
McBrien proposes that Catholics should “explore, understand, and exercise their faith in freedom without prejudice to our abiding responsibility to reconcile our understanding, our judgments and our decisions with the theological criteria embodied in the Bible, the writings of the great Fathers and doctors of the church, the official teachings of the ecumenical councils and the popes, the liturgy, and the sensus fidelium(“consensus of the faithful”) maintained through the centuries, everywhere and at every time.” “The faithful, in the last analysis, are they who discern the master’s voice, and the voice of the master is the one that the faithful are able to recognize. The discernment, therefore, goes in both directions. If we have identified the Word of God, it serves as a criterion for recognizing God’s people, and if we know who God’s people are, we have a clue for ascertaining the Word of God. The faithful discern the Word of God, but on a deeper level they are discerned by it. “The Word of God is living and active . . discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”(Hebrews 4).
McBrien on the Crisis in the Church: He is in no doubt about the reality of the crisis following Vatican II and cites numerous evidences of such a crisis: “Attendance at mass and vocation to the priesthood and religious life are in sharp decline, divorce and remarriage are way up, theological dissent is rampant; there is widespread confusion and doubt about the church’s official teaching; there is agitation for the ordination of women and resistance to priestly celibacy; ecumenism challenges Roman Catholic identity and distinctiveness; young people seem alienated from the church; science, technology, and materialism have for many people replaced spiritual explanations and motivations; and Christians are divided in the struggle for justice between rich and poor; oppressed and oppressor.”
He ponders the crisis and identifies three basic causes. The first is Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae. The second is what he calls “the acculturation of the immigrants.” As Roman Catholics became better educated and more successful, they began to think for themselves. Also on matters religious. The third explanation is what he calls the loss of the supernatural. This may represent simply another direction that acculturation can take. He states that in the span of a generation the absolute authority of the church regarding truth, law, and rules of life, has suddenly vanished . . The collapse of this authority has not occurred because of certain church doctrines, papal decrees, bishop’s rulings and so on were at last found to be in error, or obviously “wrong” or “old fashioned” in relation to the mind, but is due to the loss of a sense of the supernatural. People feel free to reject teachings not because they are wrong but because they no longer believe that the church speaks with the authority of God.
Then on the subject of celibacy and the laity, McBrien cites surveys that show many young men with a genuine aptitude for pastoral ministry are discouraged today from pursuing it primarily because of lifelong obligatory celibacy and because of the manner in which authority is too often exercised in the church. Such potential candidates tend to be creative and intellectually discriminating at a time when the hierarchy prefers loyalty, obedience, and conformity.
That situation won’t change unless and until there is a different cast of church leaders – men who are open to change, who acknowledge that celibacy has nothing essential to do with the priesthood, and who exercise authority, like Jesus, in the manner of servants rather than of royal officials.
McBrien holds that in recent decades many Catholics have begun to draw a sharper line between the church and its faith. The numbers of Catholics who still consider themselves Catholic in faith but not ecclesiastically or institutionally continues to grow. It all comes out in the wash at the parish level. It is the parish level that the church is most vividly the church. It is at the parish level that the ordinary faithful relate themselves to the church and to the faith that it proclaims. The laity does think it is their business how and why their bishops got selected. And it does make a difference to them what criteria are used for recruiting and training candidates for the priesthood.
In the January 8, 1998 issue of the diocesan paper,”Superior Catholic Herald,” McBrien’s column pointed out that the hierarchy in Rome is getting paranoid about the possibility that, in the minds of lay people, the line between ordained and non-ordained will be erased, and that they will come to look upon the various ministries they have been performing since Vatican II as a normal part of their service to the church.
Some might be tempted to regard the recent Vatican instruction on lay ministers as an example of ecclesiastical overkill. What concern could possibly require the attention of so many Vatican dicasteries?
Simply put, it is fear that the extraordinary growth in ministries since Vatican II will somehow diminish the status of the ordained priest and further depress the level of vocations to the priesthood.
The document’s spirit and tone are unmistakably defensive with regard to the pastoral prerogatives of priests and wary of encroachments of lay persons on territory formerly reserved exclusively to the ordained. Karl Lehmann, bishop of Maine, deplored the “atmosphere of distrust” the document created toward the laity. Johann Weber, bishop of Graz-Sechau, challenged the document’s assumption that many initiatives are on an emergency basis only (with the idea that, once the clergy shortage is corrected, the laity will have to recede from these ministerial roles).
McBrien asks, “Does the Vatican really want to turn back the clock?” He says, Vatican II replaced the medieval view of the church as a pyramid, with the pope at the top and the laity at the bottom. It captured the spirit of all the baptized, the council declared, the laity must also share in its mission and ministries, in a manner consistent with their gifts. They do not simply participate in the ministry of the hierarchy and at their sufferance; by baptism and through the power of the Holy Spirit the laity share directly in the mission and ministries of the church.
McBrien says, “Are we now to assume that none of this really makes any difference? Are the ministries of the church to be consigned once again almost exclusively to the hierarchy and the clergy?”
Andrew M. Greeley (1928 –2013) was an American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist. He sold more than 20 million books, and gave most of his money to charity. After studying at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago, Greeley received an AB degree from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago in 1950, a Bachelor of Sacred Theology (STB) in 1952, and a Licentiate of Sacred Theology (STL) in 1954, when he was ordained for the Archdiocese of Chicago. In 1962 he earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago, adding it to earlier degrees in theology. He died May 30, 2013 at the age of 85. The priesthood was what, in Father Greeley’s eyes, held his life together.“I always wanted to be a priest,” he once wrote. “My core identity is priest. I will always be a priest.” He defended parochial schools, priestly celibacy, ethnic loyalties, and the vivid imagery of traditional Catholic piety. He did not have a parish, but he had a mailbox — and later an e-mail address. The faithful gathered there in huge numbers, thanking him for new insights into God and their church, adding their own tales of return and reconciliation. He was an advocate of women’s advancement in the church which earned him a large following of feminist defenders.
In May of 1996 Greely commissioned a Gallup poll of American Catholics. The poll found that 78% said the next pope should let lay people have more voice in the church by serving as papal advisors. 69% said the pope should permit priests to marry. 65% also said the next pontiff should support the ordination of women. The survey results also come at a time of turmoil over the acceptable limits of dissent within the church. Greely himself has been a persistent critic.
He identified the controversy surrounding “Humanae Vitae,” the 1968 papal encyclical reasserting the church’s condemnation of contraception, as a turning point for the church — a time when attendance at Mass dropped precipitously and Catholics began to question church authority on an ever-growing list of topics. He had great respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics. He once described Catholic bishops as “morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt.” If the church wanted “to salvage American Catholicism,” he wrote, it would be well advised to retire “a considerable number of mitered birdbrains.” He had been an early and vehement advocate for victims of abusive priests at least since 1989, when he began writing articles in Chicago newspapers demanding that the church take action against pedophile priests. His outrage and proposals for reform were eventually recognized by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, among others, as prescient.
What is it about the calling to become a priest that is so special? Ans. “The priesthood is a sacred role. A priest is someone who stands between God and humankind, directing humans to God and trying to reveal God to humans.
Greely painted a bleak picture of the priesthood when he wrote, “The good of the Church is ill-served when psychopaths, sociopaths, crooks, alcoholics and incompetents are routinely appointed to the American dioceses. They can’t cope. They can’t cope with the pedophile crisis, with the loss of credibility, with the decline of vocations and in contributions, with women’s demands for equal treatment. But I’m hard put to think of anything they’re doing right. What has happened is we have tried to make priests more than human and in the process have created an image of somebody less than human.
“There surely have been gay priests, gay bishops, gay popes and gay saints, but one would not want the whole priesthood to be gay because it would mark it off rather strikingly from the rest of humankind. As long as one or two or even five percent of the priesthood are gay, I have no problem with it, particularly if they don’t flaunt affectual orientation in the face of the laity. Once the proportion of priests becomes higher than that, then the priesthood gets marked as a gay profession in people’s minds and it will lose its attraction for heterosexual young men.
“The Vatican has established an ever-greater distance between itself and the laity, which is very serious and dangerous. The leadership of the Church has lost its nerve. For the past 30 years the Vatican, bishops and priests have done everything they can to drive the laity out of the Church – but they won’t go.”
“I wouldn’t call Pope John Paul the worst pope, but I think he is a tragic pope because he is a man of enormous talent who has been unable to understand the Western world. His pilgrimages are ceremonial; they capture people’s imagination but the people are not listening to him. He’s a man of extraordinary gifts – a poet, a playwright, a singer, a university professor, a skier, a swimmer, -- but he grew up in a country under siege and he views the Church as under siege in the world, which it isn’t.”
Greely, what if you were the pope? Ans. “It’s a serious question. The first thing I would do is to set up channels of communication so I’d know what’s in the mind of the laity and parish priests. There is no means of upward communication. The Vatican doesn’t ask because it knows all the answers. The bishops don’t ask anyone either. I would try to listen. That seems to be the abiding failure of Church leaders and maybe of all leaders. They don’t listen. Church leaders think they have the monopoly on the Holy Spirit, that God speaks only to them and not to ordinary folk. That’s just crazy. Another problem I would work on is the equation of religion with sexual morality, to the exclusion of all else.”
What about women priests? “It’s terribly unjust. The argument is because they have never been priests. And because people don’t want to share power. If you make women priests, you are going to have to change the way you do business. The ordination of women would break up the male clerical monopoly and notably change its culture and orientation.”
What about celibacy? “The celibate witness is important because it points to a world beyond this one, and it means there are some men in this world who can care about women very strongly without jumping into bed with them. “
“For much of Catholic history celibacy was only a rule in theory. It is said, a third of the population of Iceland are descendants of the last Catholic archbishop(laughs). Celibacy as a norm really only became typical after the Council of Trent.”
“Celibacy is certainly too high for some people. But in past ages it would have been more typical for archbishops to have concubines than not, so the notion that this is something new or startling I find odd. You hear everywhere that if the priesthood wasn’t celibate there wouldn’t be all this sexual abuse of children. It’s by no means a Catholic monopoly. Moreover, most pedophiles are married men. I think there has been an assault on celibacy that’s just not fair.”
“I don’t know how much those images are affecting the laity, but I will say this: if Catholic lay folk have been totally trusting of a priest’s emotional and sexual maturity in the past, that is a bad mistake and they are not going to do it again. On the other hand, being more careful, if they size up the priest as somebody they can trust, the relationship will be the same. In fact, women tend to trust a celibate priest far more than they would any other man. Other men may themselves uneasy about intimacy, in the psychological sense between their women and priests, but the tension is a benign and positive tension.”
“I have no feelings about these issues. Celibacy ought to continue, and we ought to ordain women. I’m the only one I know who holds both positions. I also have a third one: People should be able to leave the priesthood after a limited term of service. But I can’t get anybody to take the idea seriously. Until the end of the 19th century you were a priest for about ten years and then you died. Now you’re a priest for 50 years – even if you’re burned out at age 40, you can’t stand teenagers, you don’t like the work, and you want to start a family. So volunteer for ten years, then go forth with dignity and gratitude.”
For more than 25 years, Greely worked on really a kind of opus theory, that is, that religion is story. “Religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits. And I began to think that, well, maybe this is the way religion really gets passed on today. That religion is story before it's anything else. And after it's everything else. A major book on this is called The Catholic Imagination. Or there's also one called Religion is Poetry. And that's the thesis, that if we can get at people's stories, stories they tell about what their life means, then we'll know what their religion is. Because practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.”
What is the religious tradition that we come from? “The Catholic Church's basic insight into reality is that it's sacramental. That God is everywhere. And God discloses Himself, Herself in the moonlight, and the frozen lake in the wintertime. And the touch of a friendly hand in reconciliation in human love. We have never been afraid of contaminating God by putting right down into midst of the human tradition, human experience. Our Protestant brothers tend to try to keep God away from these things because they think we'll make Him into an idol. There's something to be said for either position, but the Catholic position is that God is everywhere.
Why do you love women so much? “Because they're neat. I'm not afraid of 'em. I like them, I admire them," but you can't deal with them as an equal. But at least I don't feel too inferior to them. They don't threaten me. Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.
Being a long time student of the Papacy and of the politics of the Papacy. He was asked if he contemplated any change with respect to that authoritarian sexual view from Rome after the current pope passes on? “Well, I think the question isn't about what Rome says. Now it's a question of what goes on in the parishes. And I think that authoritarian view has vanished in most parishes, both among the lower clergy and among the laity. I don't know what the next Pope is going to be like. I do know this, the Catholic laity all over the world have made up their minds. We have data from 37 countries that the laity have made up their minds the Church is not going to interfere in their sex lives. That may be wrong, but that's the way it is.”
What is the essence of being an American Catholic? What makes a Catholic distinctive?” I think it’s the stories. If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it’s very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic. They like the stories — Christmas, Easter, May crowning, the souls in purgatory, the saints, the angels, the mother of Jesus. These are enormously powerful religious images. Some people might think they’ve become clichés through the century, and maybe for some they have. But for most Catholic lay folks, the images and the stories are what hold us in the Church despite, sometimes, our leadership.
Define the essence of American Catholicism. “I’d say that Catholicism in the United States has the distinct advantage of being in a pluralistic society, where your religion contributes something to your identity. So you tend to define yourself as a Catholic. I’m Irish, Catholic, a Democrat from the West Side of Chicago, and that’s pretty much my identity. But for most Americans, that relation is part of their identity, so you come to them and say, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” when [they] move into a neighborhood, and they’ll say Protestant or Catholic or Jew. It’s the preprogrammed response. I don’t know how I would explain it to people who live in a country where everybody’s one religion, but I would try to say that religion is a part of who we are and what we are. It gives us something to belong to and something to believe in in our lives.”
What is the religious core of Catholicism? What is the kernel and what is the husk? “The kernel is the belief that God is love and, in Catholicism, God’s love is present in the world. It is in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in our families, in our friends, in our neighborhood, and forgiveness in the touch of a friendly hand, in a rediscovered love God is there. God lurks everywhere. That’s the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level — that God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there’s God.”
What do you mean by the term “communal Catholic? :Well, I meant people who have decided they’re going to be Catholics on their own terms. They are Catholic, they’re strongly Catholic, they like being Catholic; but they’re not going to let Church leadership dictate the terms of belonging. Immediately after the Second Vatican Council, [there was] the euphoria and the effervescence of the council, the contagion [from] the council fathers to the people and to the lower clergy, and in a remarkably short period of time, they changed the Church. By 1975, all this had happened: birth control wasn’t wrong, premarital sex wasn’t wrong, priests leaving the priesthood wasn’t wrong, nuns leaving the religious life wasn’t wrong. You didn’t really have to go to mass every Sunday. You didn’t have to go to confession before receiving communion every time. All of these things, which they never really understood and they didn’t like, were just swept away. Now, a whole generation later, despite all the efforts of the present pope, they [the Church fathers] have not been able to restore the acceptance of those teachings. And I don’t see how they ever will. It may be good, [it] may be bad, but the sociologists say this is what’s happened. The idea of communal means they’re part of the Catholic community, but they’re not necessarily obedient to the teaching Church. If you’re a Catholic in Italy when you’re born, it’s unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.
What is the Catholic imagination? “The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that. It sees God present in His creatures, in all of the creatures, and especially in those creatures that love us and that we love.
The most serious problems facing the American Catholic Church? “Women. And the woman problem is also a man problem, because men have stronger feelings about the rights of women in the Church than women do. Not much stronger, but some. The Church just has not been able to cope with the demands for fairness and equality from women, so they’re very angry. For a long time, the bishops could console themselves — and I think some still do — that these are just radical feminists. But the radical feminists include their sisters and their nieces and their mothers and all the women in their lives. They just don’t like the way the Church treats them. And this includes lots of parish priests. They are just awfully sloppy in their respect and sensitivity toward women.
The next thing is the quality of preaching and worship. Thirty years ago, before the Vatican Council, Catholics didn’t know what liturgy was. Now they know what it is, and they want it [to be] good. They want good preaching and good liturgy. The parishes that provide those things flourish. But so many priests, for one reason or another, don’t do it.
Should Christians be evangelizing, trying to convert others to Christianity? “I think the only kind of acceptable evangelization is the evangelization of good example. The kinds of lives we live, the joy, the patience, the charitableness of our lives is the way we influence other people. The early apostles said, “See how these Christians love one another.” My colleague Rodney Stark at the University of Washington has done research on the spread of Christianity. He has empirically validated that finding. People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good — Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice.
Do Americans believe that there is truth in all religions? And, if so, does this violate the idea that the only way to salvation is through Christ? “Well, I think Catholic Americans had better believe there’s truth in all religions, because the Second Vatican Council said that. We don’t believe that we have a monopoly on truth. We believe what we have is true, but it’s not the whole truth. And we can learn a lot from the other religions if we listen to them respectfully. We don’t give up our heritage; we expand it. There’s the great story about Saint Augustine of Canterbury. He [went] to England when the Anglo-Saxons had taken over, and he liked them; they seemed to be good people. He wondered whether it was all right to adapt their customs to Christianity. And Gregory the Great, who was pope then [in] 600, wrote him a letter saying, “Well, of course. As long as these are good and true and beautiful, and there’s nothing unnatural about them, then of course they can be adapted for Christianity.” That’s been our policy ever since. Sometimes we’ve violated it, but that’s the official policy. We can learn from everybody. Catholicism means, “Here comes everyone.”
How can a Catholic reconcile that with Christ’s saying, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me”? “I don’t think Jesus was an exclusivist. He said, and we believe, that He is the unique representation of God in the world. But that doesn’t mean this is the only way God can work: “Now, God, you’ve got to work here and no place else.” Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn’t like it.
Are Americans tolerant of other religions, or merely indifferent to them? “Oh, I think they’re at least tolerant. It’s the viewpoint that everybody has the right to make their own religious choice, and we’re not going to challenge that right. I think we find some of the other religions interesting — not all of them, but some of them are interesting. We’re more than tolerant. I don’t think it’s indifference.
Are Americans’ religious beliefs are softening? Are people less wedded to creed and doctrine? And if you believe that, why is it happening? “ I know that’s the conventional wisdom, and some of my sociological colleagues have been writing about [it]. I don’t believe it. I think that the core doctrines of Christianity — the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death — these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century. I don’t think American religion is falling apart. Quite the contrary. I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion. They’re offending people, and they’re responsible for some of the departure of younger Protestants from denominations. The Catholics we lose — it’s almost always over divorce and remarriage, of which problem we have made a real mess.”
What is turning people off to the Catholic Church? “Most people who are born Catholic are still Catholic, unless they’ve had a divorce and remarriage problem. I think the Church is just ham-handed in dealing with those people. They leave the Church because of something that’s happened to them in the process of getting a divorce and being remarried.
Could it be the whole gamut of sexual issues? “There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn’t changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s. The increase comes from people who’ve had marriage problems. [Catholic University sociologist] Dean Hoge and his colleagues have done work on young Catholics, and they find that very few young Catholics don’t think of themselves as Catholic anymore. They want to stay even if they don’t go to church much.
What is the major impact of Hispanics on the Catholic Church? I think they are a great grace for the Catholic Church in this country, because their religion has so much festivity and celebration in it. We European Catholics tend to be somewhat grim and dour and straight-laced. We shouldn’t have been, but we are. We can learn from the Latinos that Catholicism is a religion of festivity and celebration.”
How are Hispanic Catholics different ? “ They have a very strong sense of family and local community. Now, of course, so do the Italians and the Irish. But I think it’s stronger. One Hispanic woman… was telling me about her religion, and all she was talking about were the parties, the festivals. And I asked, “But what does all this mean?” She would tell me about another party or festival. I finally said, “No, no. What’s the theology?” “Oh,” she said. “Well, I think we believe that God is part of our family. And when we have celebrations, God comes and celebrates with us.” I like that. I think we should have more of it.
Why do so many Catholics in this country disagree with fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church, especially those having to do with sex, gender, reproduction. And yet, they remain loyal to the Catholic Church; they would never join another church. Why? “ Because once a Catholic, always a Catholic. If you’re a Catholic and are filled with Catholic images and stories in childhood, you don’t want give them up. You like being a Catholic. And how fundamental are these teachings? What’s more important? Life after death or birth control? What is more important? God’s forgiving love or premarital sex? The sexual ethic is important, but it’s not the only thing in Catholicism. I’m afraid sometimes our leaders — and the media, too — have made it sound as if the only unique thing about Catholicism is sexual teaching. The lay people know better.”
Why have people stopped going to confession? Why do they think it’s not necessary? “ I think one of the conclusions that many Catholics drew from the Second Vatican Council is there’re just a lot fewer mortal sins than there used to be. So we don’t really have to confess them, and we can make a good act of contrition, as we used to say, and receive communion, and it’s fine. Part of it is just the decision that confession before communion isn’t necessary. This is a conclusion that the laity have reached. And the lower clergy have not disabused them of that notion, because they think the same thing. People still go to confession and the penitential services at Easter and Christmas. They’re very, very popular. But we realize now that we really don’t have to run to confession every Saturday afternoon if we want to receive communion on Sunday.”
What is the benefit of confession? “I can think of two benefits, and both have to do with reconciliation. One is you’ve been away for a long time, or you’ve done some terrible sins, and you want to do penance for them. You want to get them straightened out. You want to acknowledge that you were a sinner or a wanderer and eliminate that dimension from your life. For those kinds of people, the old kind of confession — maybe not in a box — is very, very helpful. It relieves a lot of stress and guilt and gives you a sense of beginning all over. For most of us, confession is a chance to be reconciled with the local community. Those priests who support the absolution services — that’s why they’re so popular, because people want to be reconciled with the community.”
Confession to a Priest. A most obvious example of works stems from the idea of weekly compulsory oral confession to a priest. They require that the penitent must name all the deliberate sins that he has committed and not previously confessed, so that the emphasis is on the list of misdeeds. Deliberately omitting to mention a deliberate sin invalidates the confession. If you honestly forget to mention one, then the confession is still valid, but you must mention that sin the next time you go to confession. In theory, this means that anyone intending to make a good confession, and honestly trying to remember all his past sins, has no cause for worry about forgetting something. In practice, many sincere and troubled penitents were frantic with worry over the possibility that they had forgotten something. He accordingly told the penitent to acknowledge that he was a sinner, in need of God's grace, and then to name the sins that he was principally aware of. It is still understood, of course, that omitting a sin because you do not repent of it and have no intention of stopping it means that you do not really wish God to be the Lord of your life, and that you have simply added a fraudulent confession to your other sins. After confessing, the penitent is instructed to work off his sins by saying repetitious prayers, the number of which correspond to the number and severity of sins confessed. Now you are “good to go” until the following week.
Writing of the papacy's desire to suppress information and ban the Bible, Roman Catholic priest and Historian John Dalberg Acton stated: “The [Roman Catholic] Council instituted the index of prohibited books, which is the fourth article in the machinery of resistance.... A congregation was appointed to examine new publications, to issue decrees against them as required, and to make out catalogues from time to time of works so condemned. Besides this, censures were also pronounced by the Pope himself, the Inquisition, the Master of the Sacred Palace, and the Secretary of the Index, separately. In this way an attempt was made to control what people read, committing to oblivion the works of Protestant scholars, and of such men as Machiavelli, and correcting offensive texts, especially historians. Several such corrected editions were published at the time, and many things were reprinted with large omissions.” (Lectures on Modern History, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, London: Macmillan, 1906).
Acton is much quoted for his statement concerning Papal infallibility, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Both Acton and his priest mentor Joseph von Döllinger opposed moves to promulgate the doctrine of Papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council. They both were associated with the Old Catholic Church, although neither became full-fledged communicants.
The term Old Catholic Church originated with groups which separated from the Roman Catholic Church over certain doctrines, primarily concerned with papal authority. The formation of the Old Catholic communion of Germans, Austrians and Swiss began in 1870 at a public meeting held in Nuremberg under the leadership of Joseph von Döllinger, following the First Vatican Council. The term "Old Catholic" was first used in 1853 to describe the members of the See of Utrecht who did not recognize any infallible papal authority. Later Catholics who disagreed with the doctrine of Papal Infallibility as made official by the First Vatican Council (1870) had no bishop and so joined with Utrecht to form the Union of Utrecht.
I’m presenting a brief sketch the inner history of Roman opposition to the infallibility dogma in different countries and several centuries, until and after the Decree of 18th July 1870. Here we see the process by which a very considerable section of Bishops, priests, and laity in the Roman Church were constrained to pass from one belief to its opposite.
Roman Catholicism's formal separation from Old Catholicism occurred over the issue of Papal authority. This separation occurred in The Netherlands in 1724, creating the first Old Catholic Church. The churches of Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland created the Union of Utrecht after Vatican I (1871) over the Dogma of Papal Infallibility. By the early 1900s, the movement included England, Canada, Croatia, France, Denmark, Italy, America, the Philippines, China, and Hungary. The American affiliate of the Union of Utrecht until recently was the Polish National Catholic Church which ceased to belong to the Union in opposition to the ordination of women by other member churches.
Malachi Brendan Martin (1921-1999), An Irish Catholic priest and writer on the Catholic Church with outstanding credentials. Bestselling author, eminent theologian, correspondent, confidant to bishops and cardinals, Vatican insider, former theological professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. In America Martin served as religious editor for National Review from 1972 to 1978, when he was succeeded by Michael Novak. He served as a guest commentator for CNN during the live coverage of the pastoral visit of John Paul II to the United States October 4–8, 1995. He was interviewed twice by William F. Buckley, Jr. for Firing Line on PBS. He was an editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica. He continued to offer Mass privately each day in the Tridentine Mass form, and vigorously exercised his priestly ministry all the way up until his death.
Martin was born in Ballylongford, County Kerry, Ireland to a middle-class family in which the children were raised speaking Irish at the dinner table. Catholic belief and practice were central; his three brothers, including Francis Xavier Martin, also became priests, two of them academics.
He was summoned to Rome to work at the Holy See as a private secretary of Cardinal Bea SJ from 1958 until 1964. This brought him into contact with Pope John XXIII. Martin's years in Rome coincided with the beginning of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), all of whose sessions he attended, and which was to transform the Catholic Church in a way that the initially liberal Martin began to find distressing. He became friends with Monsignor George Gilmary Higgins and a fellow Jesuit priest, Father John Courtney Murray.
In Rome, he became a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where he taught Aramaic, paleography, Hebrew and Sacred Scripture. He also taught theology, part-time, at Loyola University Chicago's John Felice Rome Center. During this period, his living quarters were in the Vatican, outside the papal quarters of John XXIII. He worked for the Orthodox Churches and Ancient Oriental Churches Division of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity under Cardinal Bea, as a translator. Thus, Martin became well acquainted with prominent Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Abraham Heschel. In 1961 and 1962. Martin accompanied Pope Paul VI on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in January 1964. Disillusioned by reforms, he resigned his position at the Pontifical Institute in June 1964, and asked to be released from certain of his Jesuit vows. He moved to New York City, where he later became an American citizen.
Because of Martin’s extensive background and access to much of the Vatican’s innermost workings, enabled him to established a record of accuracy that it has been called “uncanny” as he probed like an unrelenting searchlight behind the shrouds of secrecy that so far cloak the activities of the globally powerful RCC. He was the premier investigator and unraveler of the clandestine politics and unlikely alliances of popes, cardinals, bishops and priests – men who wield as much power as any worldly leader as they guide nearly a billion people in faith, and broker the destinies of countries and continents.
Of the riches of the RCC Martin says, “Three hundred billion dollars. Gold deposits that exceed those of many industrial nations. Real estate holdings larger than the total area of many countries. These are but some of the riches of the RCC. Yet millions are starving daily.”
“When Matthew ,Mark, Luke, and John spread the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ, they never could have envisioned that the institution entrusted with perpetuation of the Christian ideals of love and charity and contempt for material things would become one of the richest single entities in the world.”
“Nor, in their wildest imaginings, could those apostles have foreseen the source of much of these riches. Some exist because of the desire of the wealthy for luxury; still more, throughout history came to the church through war, terrorism ,and the destruction of human liberty.”
“Instead of helping the Third World’s starving, disease-ridden masses –over 250 million of whom are Catholics – the church, like any capitalist, seeks to increase its profit-making.”
“Since World War II, and most especially since the 1960’s, there has been a movement to divest the church of its holdings so that no cleric would have power over the management if its assets. The International Trust Fund, managed by lay people has been proposed. It would be publicly audited and have a system of checks and balances guaranteed to ensure its proper function. But such a program doesn’t have a chance in hell.”
“The Vatican has been linked in the public mind with a mind-boggling string of scandals and calamities more often found in sensational novels: big bank failures, gross embezzlements involving up to a billion dollars; protracted public trials; assassinations and attempted assassinations of police, judiciary and clerical officials; eerily symbolic suicides; defenestations; counterfeiting of corporate securities; parliamentary investigations without any conclusions; government inquiry boards without any issue; ruination of local economies and of small investors; International money intrigue involving Eurodollars and fiduciary accounts in trans-continental tax havens; the activities of organized crime; and armaments traffic in favor of certain strong-man regimes in the Third World.”
“Throughout, the name of the Catholic Church has been linked rightly or wrongly with impressive sums of money.”
“By implication, the three popes who have reigned during those years – Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II (if not their immediate predecessors), John XXIII and Pius XII, together with their colleagues and associates in the Catholic Church throughout the world – have all been linked with these lurid scandals.”
The Experience of a lifetime
In the previous pages I have presented views of the RCC from the experience of its own insiders.(priests of the church). When one gives careful thought to the pronouncements given by those priests, it becomes clear what we have here is an apostate church under the influence of Satan.
In the following pages I will present my viewpoint of the RCC as a layperson, derived from a lifetime of experience. What I present here is an account of the RCC as I personally witnessed it over a period of eight decades(a lifetime by most standards). Are my viewpoints and opinions without bias? Hardly! However, what is written here is a truthful record as I lived it. One may take issue on some points, but none of what I have to say can be rejected out of hand without distorting what is a first-person source. I may be accused of embellishment at times, but never a liar.
My becoming a member of the Catholic Church cannot be considered a “conversion,” but more an acquiescence. After attending the prescribed RCIA program I simply “joined” my wife in the Church. I was confirmed during the service of Easter Vigil in 1995. On the surface there was nothing ethereal or inspirational about it, yet I firmly believe this was all done under the prayerful guidance of the Holy Spirit. It was all part of my continuing personal effort to obey the command of Jesus to be “born again.” Joining a community of believers is essential to the command to be born again. I could have just as easily joined the Baptists, or rejoined the Lutherans,--but I joined the Catholic Church mainly to placate my wife Bette, “a cradle-Catholic,” and to demonstrate “action” and “decision” on returning to a Christian community. Apostate or not at its head, the Roman Catholic Church, like the old Corinthians, is still a Christian community.
I admit, that it is a great disgrace if a child of God chooses to live among apostates; much more, if the sacred Body of Christ is prostituted to them. But though the Catholic Church fails in her duty, it does not therefore follow that every private individual is to decide the question of separation for himself. It is one thing to shun the society of the wicked, and another to renounce the communion of a church through hatred of them.
Those who think it sacrilege to partake of the Lord’s bread and wine with the apostate are in this more rigid than the Apostle Paul. I see the Catholic Mass as a perversion of Scripture, but it does embrace the Gospel of Paul when it recognizes the death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ. For when Paul exhorts us to pure and holy communion, he does not require that we should examine others, or that everyone should examine the whole Church, but that we should only examine ourself (1 Cor. 11:28,29). If it were unlawful to communicate with the unworthy, Paul would certainly have ordered us to take heed that there were no individuals in the whole body by whose impurity might be defiled, but now he only shows that it does no harm for us to participate though some who are unworthy are present among his saints.
Even though in the administration of Word and sacraments, where defects may creep in, it should not cause to alienate us from its communion. We are not on account of every minute difference to let this prevent us from participating. Jesus found the Pharisees apostate in much of what they did, but He continued to participate every Sabbath in the synagogue. And we note that the Apostle Paul did not abandon the Corinthians, the whole of which had become tainted. He greeted them as brothers.
Scandal in the Church is no occasion for avoiding it. All denominations contain a mixture of good and bad. Jesus in one of his parables compares the Church to a net in which all kinds of fishes are taken, but not separated until they are brought to shore. If the Lord declares that the Church will labor under the defect of being burdened with those who pervert it until the day of judgment, it is in vain to look for a Church altogether free from blemish(Matthew 13).
When I started this work I had not yet made a decision to join the Catholic Church. It was only after much soul searching and changes brought about by Vatican II that I found I could join without compromising my true beliefs, although I doubt that anyone would conclude that I was a “Roman Catholic.”
These few pages are a summary of my life experience now speaking as a recognized member of the Roman Catholic Church. From personal experience and research I recognize that my life experience is typical of tens of thousands of American Roman Catholics. On the basis of such knowledge it is within my prerogative to carry out an assessment of Catholicism.
All through grade and high school I learned a great deal about the Catholic Church from very close friends(both boys and girls), several of whom I was closely associated with for more than twelve years. We were forever comparing notes about our respective religious experience. I learned from them exactly how they participated in this one Catholic church in our hometown. A few of the boys were altar boys for several years. One of them entered the priesthood. They all attended catechism, but as to specific knowledge concerning church doctrine, we were all about on the same level(virtually nil). Most of our knowledge on church matters came from our parents. The one thing that stood out for me was their “going to a priest for confession,” every Saturday morning. They all said it was a matter of rote, requiring saying several Hail Marys and Our Fathers as penance. They were taught from childhood that confession was the only safe way to escape mortal sin. My wife Bette told me that as a child, “we were never certain of our ‘perfection’ until we had received the forgiveness of the priest. We were taught that there was no place else to go.” They were well indoctrinated in the concept of “works.” There were hundreds of formula to follow, mostly with prayers that would shorten one’s time in Purgatory. None of them said they ever saw a Bible in their home.
After college I married Bette, a Roman Catholic Girl. Over the years Bette and I talked about her childhood. Through the guidance of her mother, Bette was raised in a strict Catholic family tradition. For example, she remembers on the day of her first communion she drank some water while brushing her teeth. When her mother found out what she had done, Bette said she almost had a fit. It wasn’t settled until her mother called her priest brother and he told her it was O.K. to go to communion. A priest always had the last word.
Bette said all she really knew about being a catholic she got from her mother. She said if she wanted to know anything about religion she would ask her mother who was very well versed in things catholic, and if her mother didn’t know she would call her priest brother. Other than that she didn’t have a clue. They didn’t own a Bible, and whatever her mother said was law.
Her Mother graduated from Catholic grade and high schools, and Bette’s mother’s brother was an ordained Catholic Priest. Of course we interacted with both of them regularly until they passed away.
Bette’s priest uncle had a pretty, old-maid housekeeper, named Agness—they were both about the same age. I viewed Agness as the epitome of servitude and devotion to her church and to her calling. As far as we could tell she had no long-range goals. She lived at the priest house and she travelled with him wherever he went. She doted on him, and they were never apart until he died. I met them many times while they spent their annual summer vacations together at the parent farm. All of Bette’s family had a wink and a smile of approval when they talked about that couple.
Bette also had a first cousin her age who became a Maryknoll priest. He was very close to Bette’s family, and we knew him well. He was sent to Korea, and after a few years he left the priesthood to marry a Korean woman. After returning to America they had a son. Years later they separated but never divorced.
After our marriage I did not attend any church at that time. Our three children attended the local parochial school. After our children grew up only our oldest daughter remained in the Catholic faith, but divorced. Our youngest daughter married twice. She first married a Catholic man and the marriage was annuled. She then remarried to another Catholic man who graduated from a Catholic university, but they left the church when they said they were forced to sign a paper saying they would have children and raise them Catholic, which neither of them would sign. They attend no church. Our son married a Methodist woman. Neither of them attend church on a regular basis. Their two children were raised Methodist, but neither attended church.
Bette and I retired to a small town in northern Wisconsin, and I began a serious study of theology. Then I attended the prescribed RCIA course leading to church membership(see the Prologue). After that I joined Bette at Sunday Mass on a regular basis. Bette was very active in all aspects of church work. She became a lector in the church reading the gospels at Mass every four to five weeks, and assisted at communion. Bette and I were asked to join a small Christian community consisting of about a dozen church members, most of whom were educated professionals, teachers, and the like, but all were “cradle Catholics.” We met monthly on Sunday evenings in private homes on a round robin basis. We carried out serious discussions on a wide variety of church topics, then closed the meeting with a social hour. We belonged to that group for about 20 years. They still carry on without Bette and me.
During those 20 years with that small Christian Community I learned a great deal about serious, intelligent, died-in-the-wool cradle catholics, They bared their souls on all manner of topics pertaining to the catholic faith, and the local catholic community. None of it went by me as they talked freely about things they would never bring up outside that group, and I asked a lot of questions. It was interesting, because they were all aware of my previous Protestant background, and they knew of my interest in theology. Because of this, they held me up as some sort of guru when we dealt with the more difficult subjects. There is a tad of irony here, because I learned more from the group, than they learned from me. I was sort of a “mouse in the corner.”
So, what did I learn? None were sure of their salvation. I found this weighs heavily on every catholic I have come in contact with. Bette has come to terms with this problem(almost). She wants to believe what I believe on this question, but she had been so indoctrinated that when walked through the Scripture that says otherwise, she is still “on the fence.” She herself knows that if you can’t change your mind about anything you may forever be locked in a lie, but coming to terms with a lie is sometimes near impossible. Satan knows this, and he is the master of the lie.
Why are catholics taught they can never be sure of their salvation? Since the Bible teaches there is no need for the priest, the Catholic Church could not permit that. In Catholic theology you are not permitted to have assurance. There is always the element of uncertainty. Assurance is never on the agenda because the presence of free-will and good works as Catholic teaching rules it out. The laity was made totally dependent on the priesthood for salvation. In our small Christian community, the subject of God's "priests" and God's "laity" surfaced time and time again. Although the New Testament says nothing about the subject as it is usually thought of, just a little over one hundred years after the last apostle died, the bishops of the church in each community began exerting unscriptural power. The result: after continuing to assume power not rightfully theirs, the church leaders eventually placed themselves above the laity. During this period the laity became more and more dependent upon the clergy for access to God's favor. And as time went on the hierarchy invented more and more ways to separate the priest from the laity, until finally, the laity believed they could not possibly achieve salvation except through a priest and the church. One more success for Satan.
This absolute power of priests goes directly to the concept of “Catholic guilt” which has become a cliché, a joke, but it is real. The average Catholic learns from his youth the agony of guilt. For my wife Bette it has raised its ugly head for years. I witnessed evidence of that in almost all of the members of our Christian Community group. For many who experienced Catholic childhood religious indoctrination, Catholic guilt is a pernicious and inescapable burden with serious lifelong repercussions. Bette says “I cannot rid myself of it, it was a dark aspect of my childhood: that we are unworthy, that we cannot do anything right, that we do not deserve to be happy, that we will always be sinners who will end up in Purgatory. Where is Heaven for those of us who grew up with this indoctrination; it is hard to keep one’s faith.” Catholic childhood religious indoctrination is never seen for what it is: for its emotional and
psychological abuse. We had to remove our son from parochial school because he couldn’t cope. After he left he was just fine and became a good student; a successful adult and family man.
In Summary
The bottom line is that the Roman Catholic Church became the outlet for the god of this world. Satan is so ingrained and established that even the key players(the church hierarchy)are unapologetic. They are either unaware or downright ignorant of their complicity. The laity are innocent bystanders totally and forever locked in. Only God will judge them. Only God has a plan greater than Satan, and we know “Thy Will be Done.”
If anyone would like to comment or correspond, my email: georgedfoss@gmail.com
The early Roman church, now known as the Roman Catholic Church(RCC), is presently the largest Christian church, with a claimed membership of 1.2 billion worldwide. Since the 4th centuryAD it is one of the oldest religious institutions in the world and has played a prominent role in the history of Western civilization. The Catholic Church teaches that it is the one true church founded by Jesus Christ, that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles, and that the Pope is the successor to Saint Peter. The Church maintains that the doctrine on faith and morals that it presents as definitive is infallible.
Catholics teach that the church, as an external, visible society consisting of those who profess to be followers of Christ(thus Christians) united in communion of the same sacraments and subjection to lawful pastors, and especially to the Pope of Rome, is divinely appointed to be the infallible teacher of men in all things pertaining to faith and practice. They claim this office by the divine revelation of the truth in the written and unwritten Word of God, and by the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit transmitted to the bishops as official successors of the Apostles, or, to the Pope as successor of Peter in his supremacy over the whole Church, and as vicar of Christ on earth.
There is something simple and grand in this theory. It is wonderfully adapted to the tastes and wants of men. It relieves them of personal responsibility. Everything is decided for them. Their salvation is secured by merely submitting to be saved by an infallible, sin-pardoning, and grace-imparting church. The RCC teaches that Christ left on earth a visible representative of Himself(the Pope) clothed with His authority to teach and govern, and an order of men(priests) dispersed throughout the world endowed with the gifts of the original Apostles, -- men everywhere accessible, to whom we would resort in all times of difficulty and doubt, and whose decisions could be safely received as the decisions of Christ Himself.
In these opening paragraphs I have presented a brief overview of the Roman Catholic Church as it is now understood by most observers. This appendix was added to provide evidence for the claim that the Roman Catholic Church(now apostate as an institution) is the single most important aspect of Satan’s effort to thwart the plan of God.
Satan and the Roman Church
The gigantic system of the Christian faith known as Roman Catholicism is a perfect monument to the effort of Satan to seat himself upon the earthly throne to rule according to his will. Where better to carry on his own plan—the plan to achieve the power of God? Scripture tells us very clearly the plan of Satan. We may ask, if Satan is so wily , so intelligent, so powerful, why doesn’t he know what the Scripture says about him? The answer is, he is blinded by God whenever God chooses. God does the same with all unbelievers; only believers are privy to the Will of God.
What, and how God achieves what He does is incomprehensible to us. We do know that Satan is at the center of what we call the paradox of God’s sovereignty versus our free will. To make a choice there has to be at least two positions on which to choose. Satan represents the choice for evil. God represents the choice for good. Man, in his deficient wisdom has, for centuries considered this paradox, but we must rely on our faith to trust God in His infinite wisdom. All that God has revealed to believing man is now contained in the Bible—so I defer to the Bible for my answers.
According to Scripture, Satan once endeavored to form a compromise with Jesus Christ. He came to the Son of God in the wilderness, and showing Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, offered to give all into His hands if He would acknowledge the supremacy of the prince of darkness. Was the world Satan’s to make such a bargain? Yes, Satan remains the god of the world until God the Father fulfills His own plan at the end-time. So Christ, the Son of God rebuked Satan, and forced him to depart(citing Holy Scriptures). But Satan meets with success in presenting the same temptations to man. To secure worldly gains and honors, the Church was led by Satan to seek favor and support of the great men of the earth. Satan also knew that the Holy Scriptures would enable believing men to discern his deceptions and withstand his power. It was by the written Word that even the Savior of the world resisted the temptations of Satan. At every assault, Christ presented the shield of eternal truth, saying “it is written.” To every suggestion of Satan, Christ opposed with the wisdom and power of the Word. In order for Satan to maintain his sway over men, he must keep men in ignorance of the Scriptures. His plan to solve this problem was to infiltrate the Church.
How Satan Infiltrated the Roman Church
There is evidence of Satan’s presence in the early Church from its inception following the death of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul makes note of that. We believe Satan was the force behind the widespread division and acrimony that existed throughout the early Christian churches. But in spite of this, God’s intervention assured the True Christian Church(the Body of Christ) would continue to survive and thrive to the end of the age (Matthew 16:18--"and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it"). Even the Satan- inspired persecutions against the True Christian Church did not slow its growth.
With the Apostle Paul as the principle founder of the early churches, he felt strongly about heretical teaching and teachers. They were to be treated accordingly. Some were delivered to Satan (1 Tim. 1: 20). Others were to be rebuked (Titus 1: 13) and to be taught, so that they could escape from the snare of Satan, after having been caught by him (2 Tim. 2:23.). During the first three centuries Satan attacked the Christian Church from without as well as within. But to his chagrin, Satan found that the more the Church was persecuted and attacked, the more it grew and prospered. The blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. The martyrs died, but others were saved and took their places. Christianity not only spread but it thrived and prospered. The Church of Jesus Christ could not be exterminated. It survived each and every persecution against it. The Church could not be defeated. It came out of every persecution victorious and strong. The Church we are speaking of here is “My Church”, the Body of Christ.
Now enter the Roman church and the plan of Satan. Christianity had been seen as a threat to the Roman Empire as Christians refused to worship the pagan Roman gods or the Emperor. This resulted in the persecution of the early Christians, many of whom were killed and thus became martyrs to the Christian religion. The pagan Roman government observing the presence of the Christian Church began to realize the Christians were surviving all their persecutions. In the year 311 A.D. Galerius (along with his co-emperors, Constantius and Licinius) signed the Edict of Toleration into law which granted toleration to all religions throughout the Roman empire, including Christianity. Galerius was not a fan of the Christians, nor was he a friend. He was a foe of the Christians but he was smart enough to realize that the past persecutions under the Romans had not accomplished anything. The more the believers suffered the more they multiplied. Somewhat later when Constantine came to power, he did them one better. “If you can’t beat them-join them,”
Constantine then gave the Roman Church freedom and power they never dreamed possible. Since all of this activity was initiated in the city of Rome which was the center of world power at the time, it was logical for Satan to concentrate his efforts on the local Roman Church with his long range plan.
Was Satan really behind this move? We have no direct evidence to prove that, but when you sum up the apostasy that took place in the Roman Church in the centuries following Constantine, everything supports our thesis.
Satan created an apostate Roman church through its hierarchy, and the laity became innocent, docile, indoctrinated victims. Absolute power and a total distortion of the biblical message by the church hierarchy was used to keep the laity in bondage. Once in place, the system was easily and permanently perpetuated. It isn’t something that happened overnight. It took time to mature. Satan is not hurried.
The exact mechanism by which Satan achieved this apostate hierarchy is not clear, but there are some clues to follow that may provide some insight to this idea. I would suggest Satan separated out a cadre of Roman church leaders who were operating outside the gospel of grace, those with a weak or non-existent value system, as opposed to men with strong virtuous values which includes wisdom, self-control, justice, transcendence, kindness, and courage. He knew those weak men when faced with challenging decisions, who did not have an internalized value system that includes these values, would respond to his plan. Satan knew all this perfectly well, and after he picked and chose enough bad apples, he was in a position to spoil the whole bushel. It was primarily in that situation in which those Roman church leaders who did not have an internalized value system caused them to turn to mental gymnastics and sinful mind games instituted by Satan.
Of course there is more to it than that. This was a grandiose scheme based on Satan’s knowledge of human nature. The hierarchy Satan formed acted as a peer group. Within this closed system the priest’s anonymity can be induced by acting in an anonymity-conferring environment that adds to the power of being in control. Institutional forces and peer pressure can lead otherwise sincere priests to disregard the potential harm of their actions on the other priests. You don't need a motive, all you really need is a situation that facilitates moving across that line of good and evil. So is it a few bad apples that spoil a barrel? We would like to believe that we could never be a bad apple, we're the good ones in the barrel. But as Satan found with Adam and Eve, men are subject to sinful influence, regardless of their best intentions to resist.
Complicity with the system itself controls the individual's behavior. These men slipped mindlessly into their accepted role. Peer pressure is influence on a peer group, the idea of “going along,” encourages others to change their attitudes, values, or behaviors to conform . A peer group of men have similar interests, age, background, or social status. The members of this group are likely to influence and reinforce each other’s beliefs and behavior.. Peer groups develop their own hierarchies and distinct patterns of behavior, "love of the same,” is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. Sort of a birds of a feather flock together syndrome . We tend to associate with others who think in similar ways, regardless of differences in status. Thus the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Tradition and the Bible
The concept of tradition was made to order for Satan and the Catholic hierarchy. It was the perfect means of defending the indefensible. Tradition was the perfect way to neutralize the Bible as the final proof of God’s Word. With Tradition no proof for any action need be cited, all one needs to do is claim divine institution(ius divinum), against which there can be no argument. Only Satan could have conceived and carried out such a ruse.
The Roman Catholic concept of Tradition mimics exactly that of the Pharisaic use of tradition practiced by Israel in the centuries preceding the Incarnation. It was a perfect model to follow. The Pharisees were an educated elite who controlled and dominated the religious lives of the Jewish people. They considered themselves to be the only ones that could interpret scripture correctly. To disagree with these spiritual leaders was to risk severe penalties of censure, ostracism, imprisonment, torture and even death. The torture and crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate example of the hatred the Pharisees had for the Truth which was at odds with their doctrines. It was the oral tradition that was necessary for the "correct" interpretation of the law. By the words of Jesus in Matthew 15:6 such oral traditions did nothing for the law but only against it as He said, "You have made the commandment of God void because of your tradition." It was the oral tradition of the law that enabled the Pharisees to want Jesus killed and yet believe they were not in violation of the commandment, "Thou shall not kill." To the Pharisees, as long as they did not commit murder by their own hands, they were absolved of all blood guiltiness. So, they invalidated God's command, "Thou shall not kill" by their oral tradition.
This same disparity between the Catholic hierarchy and the laity is maintained today exactly as it was 2,000 years ago by the Pharisees. Specifically, it is the disparity between the Christian "layperson" and the doctors of theology, priests, and all those who have been trained and ordained by Catholic institutions. Through the official certification of such "priests "the distance between the hierarchy and the laity is maintained. It is exactly the same relation the Pharisees had with their Jewish congregations. The election of God often has little to do with the calling and training of such modern Pharisees which are the leadership of today's apostate church.
In the early Church the word was used in this widest sense. Appeal was made to “the traditions,” i.e., the instructions which the churches had received. It was only certain churches at first which had any of the written instructions of the Apostles. And it was not until the end of the first century that the writings of the evangelists and Apostles had been collected. The fathers spoke of them as containing the traditions, i.e., the instructions derived from Christ and His Apostles. They called the Gospels “the evangelical traditions,” and the Epistles “the apostolic traditions.’ In that age of the Church the distinction between the written and the unwritten Word had not yet been clearly made.
Now the "traditions" of the apostles was what? They were the same tradition they learned from both the scriptures and the Lord Jesus Christ ! Are the ways of God outlined in the Old Testament? Were they not adhered to, and even expounded upon, by Jesus in the New Testament? Yes, of course they were.
We know that the Apostles taught these precepts both verbally and written, and then expounding upon it. The scripture is what gave credence to the speaker. The spoken words had to be in accord with the scripture or the person was not to be listened to. We see that Paul taught these precepts verbally and by written letters of faith (epistle). We also take note that both forms of transmission carried the same data! “But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth: 14 Whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions (paradosis i.e. law or ordinance)which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” (2Thessalonians 2:13).
There weren't scriptural rules and then also different rules transmitted orally. These were the same precepts taught by either method to some individuals - and both to others. One did not supersede or contradict the other. One did not contain information that the other didn't. Paul wrote that they should obey the 'paradosis' whether you heard it, or read it, or heard it read. God's word is true whether spoken or written.
But as controversies arose, and disputants on both sides of all questions appealed to “tradition,” ie., to what they had been taught; and when it was found that these traditions differed, one church saying their teachers had always taught them one thing, and another that theirs had taught them the opposite, it was felt that there should be some common and authoritative standard. Such a standard was necessary to eliminate the confusion and introduction or error as a result of the vagaries of tradition. Hence the wisest and the best of the fathers would argue for the authority of a common consciousness and a common faith, or common sense of the Church which could only be found in the divinely inspired written Word. The written Scriptures as God’s final Word eliminates any attempt to circumvent the truth.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the Bible and Sacred Tradition (that is, things believed to have been taught by Jesus and the apostles that were not recorded in the Bible but were transmitted through the church) are considered a rule for all believers for judging faith and practice.
For non-Catholic Christians, Romans 12:6 “Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith;” is viewed as the biblical reference for the term "analogy of the faith" . The Bible alone is considered the word of God and the only infallible standard for judging faith and practice, therefore, for non-Catholic Christians, the analogy of the faith is equivalent to the analogy of scripture – that is, opinions are tested for their consistency with scripture, and scripture is interpreted by the Holy Spirit speaking in scripture, i.e., sola scriptura.
But once the concept of two equal sources of revelation was incorporated into the Catholic Church as dogma in 1546, the hierarchy did everything in its power to utilize Tradition to reduce Scripture to a secondary role as the source of final proof.
The Catholic Church and the various Protestant churches attempt to lure each other into a strange circular argument regarding the doctrinal debate over "Tradition vs Sola Scriptura" (the bible alone). The Catholics will not regard scripture because they are pushing so hard on the point of traditions that they attempt to prove traditions by traditions, or extra biblical writings, rather than with scripture. Protestants won't consider the oral transmission of God's word because they push the written text only. The circle is a dizzying spiral that leads to nowhere fast. The Catholic apologists cleverly sets Protestants arguing against all traditions rather than just the inventions of men; and more specifically, the inventions of the Catholic Church. The argument is really against traditions of men that are not supported by the written word of God.
Then there is Satan’s well-known use of the lie. If we’ve been lied to long enough, we tend to reject any evidence that we have been used. We’re no longer interested in finding the truth. The lie has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give Satan that kind of power over you, you almost never get it back. That is what happened to the top echelon of the Roman Church hierarchy. Satan cleverly caused a general erosion of morality and a haughty sense of entitlement and a hubristic willingness which knew no bounds; when thrown together in secret sessions, they formulated so much mischief some of which was approved outright, some of which took years of in-house debate; none of which in truth has been rescinded. The result was a program of Satan-directed innovations in church doctrine, liturgy, and ritual, that were deliberately made to order for an innocent, docile, laity, while at the same time retaining the autonomy of the hierarchy.
The advancing centuries witnessed a constant increase of error in the doctrines put forth by the hierarchy. Even before the establishment of the papacy, the teachings of the secular philosophers had received attention and exerted influence in the Church. Many who professed conversion still clung to the tenets of their secular philosophy, and not only continued its study themselves, but urged it upon others as a means of extending their influence among non-Christians.
The Roman church was divided into two absolutely inseparable parts—the hierarchical priesthood and the laity. The hierarchy became an alien structure which was built up within the church and superimposed on it. The laity had been led into spiritual bondage to a professional priestly caste, a hierarchical order, which dispossessed the church of organs and functions that belonged to it, resulting in absolute independence and autonomy. The effect of this usurpation was to degrade the church into an irresponsible multitude of docile subjects and followers, instead of the corporate body of the faithful which is directly responsible only to Christ its living head.
The preceding thesis on how Satan infiltrated the Roman church rests on what I would call “The proof of the pudding.” That is, the historical record which provides all the evidence one needs to expose and verify Satan’s plan that is still ongoing to this very day. The scope of this Treatise has its limits, so I defer to the comprehensive histories of Christianity that are readily available to anyone seeking additional confirmation. For now, I will examine only enough snippets of history pertaining to the scandals of the RCC to support my thesis regarding the plan of Satan.
While Jesus himself discouraged those who wanted to treat him as a supernatural being and chose to be known as nothing more than a poor carpenter's son, the popes and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church have gone out of their way assuming titles and honors that would patently offend Jesus, Perhaps the most egregious of these is the title of "Vicar of Christ". ( The word "vicar" means "stand-in" or "substitute", just like the word "vice-" does in titles like "vice-president".) When the famous British Lord Acton wrote to the Catholic Bishop Creighton, in 1887:"All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." he was only expressing a theory. But, as we will show in the pages which follow, it becomes evident how accurate that theory is when applied to the RCC; and how tragic the consequences when so-called "men of God" turn their backs on the teaching of Jesus and strive to dominate, rather than love and serve mankind.
Here are a few of the proclamations made by arrogant men posing as "men of God" :
Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) :
"The pope cannot make a mistake."
Pope Paschal II: (1099-1118)
"Whoever does not agree with the Apostolic See
is without doubt a heretic."
Pope Innocent IV (1243-54):
described himself as
"the bodily presence of Christ."
( presumably by a kind of
transubstantiation at his election)
Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) :
"Every human being must do
as the pope tells him."
Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903):
"We hold upon this earth
the place of God Almighty."
( Encyclical Letter, June 20, 1
Here is what Jesus himself said, (according to Matthew 23:1-14) : Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.
But you are not to be called 'Rabbi', for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your 'father' on earth, for you have one Father – the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'instructors', for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. "
How can anyone who claims to take Jesus Christ seriously hear or read the words above and not be troubled by the behavior of today's "princes of the church"? Does it really matter that we now call our houses of worship "churches", instead of "synagogues", and "reserved pews in the synagogue" have been superseded by ornate cathedral thrones, and the pompous garments worn by today's hierarchy differ in superficial ways from those of the high priests of Jesus' day ?
How can anyone read Jesus' demands that his disciples shun titles of honor, and never suspect that, if Jesus considered the titles "Father" and "Teacher" objectionable, he would hardly approve of "Monsignor" (which is French for "My Lord"), "Your Excellency", "Your Eminence", "Your Holiness", "The Holy Father", "Supreme Pontiff", and perhaps most presumptuous of all, "Vicar of ( i.e. stand-in for ) Christ", the equivalent of "Vice-Messiah" !
The following is a list of some Roman Catholic scandals and innovations, and the dates of their adoption. As you can see, items on this list began just prior to Nicea, and continue to this very day. Once the church hierarchy rose to absolute power they were solely responsible for everything that appears on this list in one way or another.
List of innovations by the RCC hierarchy
- Prayers for the dead; about 300
- Making the sign of the cross; 300
- Wax candles; about 320
- Veneration of angels and dead saints, and use of images; 375
- Holy Chrism, 2nd Ecumenical Council;381
- The Mass as a daily priestly celebration; 394
- Beginning of the exaltation of Mary, the term "Mother of God" first applied to her by the Council of Ephesus; 431
- Priests began to dress differently from laymen; 500
- Extreme Unction; 526
- The doctrine of Purgatory, established by Gregory I; 593
- Latin Language, used in prayer and worship, imposed by Gregory I; 600
- Prayers directed to Mary, dead saints and angels; about 600
- Title of pope, or universal bishop, given to Boniface III by emperor Phocas; 610
- Kissing the pope s foot, began with pope Constantine; 709
- Temporal power of the popes, conferred by Pepin, king of France; 750
- Worship of the cross, images and relics, authorized in; 786
- The Donation of Constantine forgery,, about 800
- Holy water, mixed with a pinch of salt and blessed by a priest; 850
- Worship of St. Joseph; 890
- College of Cardinals established; 927
- Baptism of bells, instituted by pope John XIV; 965
- Canonization of dead saints, first by pope John XV; 995
- Fasting of Fridays and during lent; 998
- The Mass, developed gradually as a sacrifice, attendance made obligatory in the 11th century
- Celibacy of the priesthood, decreed by pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand); 1079
- The Rosary, mechanical praying with beads, invented by Peter the Hermit; 1090
- The Inquisition, instituted by the Council of Verona; 1184
- Sale of Indulgences; 1190
- Transubstantiation, proclaimed by pope Innocent III; 1215
- Auricular Confession of sins to a priest instead of to God, instituted by pope Innocent III, in Lateran Council; 1215
- Adoration of the wafer (Host), decreed by pope Honorius III; 1220
- Bible forbidden to laymen, placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Council of Valencia; 1229
- The Scapular, invented by Simon Stock, an English monk; 1287
- Cup forbidden to the people at communion by Council of Constance; 1414
- Purgatory proclaimed as a dogma by the Council of Florence; 1438
- The doctrine of Seven Sacraments affirmed; 1439
- The Ave Maria (part of the last half was completed 50 years later and approved by pope Sixtus V at the end of the 16th century); 1508
- Jesuit order founded by Loyola; 1534
- Tradition declared of equal authority with the Bible by the Council of Trent; 1545
- Apocryphal books added to the Bible by the Council of Trent; 1546
- Creed of pope Pius IV imposed as the official creed; 1560
- The Galileo Affair 1630
- Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, proclaimed by pope Pius IX; 1854
- Syllabus of Errors, proclaimed by pope Pius IX, and ratified by the Vatican Council; condemned freedom of religion, conscience, speech, press, and scientific discoveries which are disapproved by the Roman Church; asserted the pope s temporal authority over all civil rulers; 1864
- Infallibility of the pope in matters of faith and morals, proclaimed by the Vatican Council; 1870
- Public Schools condemned by Pope Pius XI; 1930
- Assumption of the Virgin Mary (bodily ascension into heaven shortly after her death), proclaimed by Pope Pius XII; 1950
- The Jesuits and the Opus Dei organization.
- Cover-ups of sex scandals in the priesthood after Vatican II to 2015.
- Banking scandal and the hierarchy of Rome.
In recent years(i.e.2014) because of a shortage of priests, many new innovations have taken place. In the Catholic Church there are any number of ways to accommodate the laity by bending a few previously “written in stone” rules. Since Vatican II one goes to confession infrequently or not at all. A new ritual called “communal penance” has been introduced. It is no longer a sin to eat meat on Fridays. The priest now faces the congregation over the altar and speaks in English. Laypeople are admonished to “search the Scriptures,” but cannot interpret. Nuns no longer wear traditional habits. Marriages are easier to have annulled. There are new innovations related to abortion. Purgatory and indulgences have been downplayed but have never been rescinded. The sacrament of extreme unction, and the cult of Mary have been downplayed. Novenas are almost unheard of. Parents wonder what they did wrong if their son wants to enter the priesthood. Father O’Malley says there is really no difference between Christians and Muslims. And the bishop seems embarrassed when you try to kiss his ring. The idea of the “communal Catholic” has gained a certain currency. One need not be a liturgical Catholic, a doctrinal Catholic, nor an ethical Catholic who tries to keep the rules; it is now sufficient to identify with the community that calls itself Catholic.
Has the Catholic Church really changed? No, not really. The Catholic Church shows no sign of relinquishing her claim to infallibility. The papacy that Protestants are now ready to honor is the same that ruled the world in the days of the Reformation. It is not without reason that the claim has been put forth that Catholicism differs less widely from Protestantism than in former times. There has been change; but the change is not in the papacy. Catholicism indeed resembles much of the Protestantism that now exists; because Protestantism itself has so greatly degenerated since the days of the Reformers.
The question can still be asked, has the claim of Divine Institution by the Roman Church been relinquished? The answer is no! This claim was affirmed in the nineteenth century with greater positiveness than ever before. As Rome asserts that the church “never erred, nor will it, according to the Scriptures, ever err,” how can she renounce the principles which governed her course in the past ages?
The hierarchy cleverly hide themselves from their misdeeds behind specious arguments such that if pressed by the temporal power, they have affirmed and maintained that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them, but, on the contrary, that the spiritual power is above the temporal. Then if it is proposed to admonish them with the Scripture, they objected that no one may interpret the Scripture but the Pope. And lastly, if they are threatened with a council, they pretend that no one may call a council but the Pope.
ROME BEFORE THE REFORMATION
In Europe during the Middle Ages the only recognized religion was Christianity, in the form of the Roman Catholic religion. The lives of the Medieval people of the Middle Ages was dominated by the church. From birth to death, whether you were a peasant, a serf, a noble a lord or a King - life was dominated by the church. Various religious institutions became both important, rich and powerful. The lives of many Medieval people were dedicated to the Catholic church and religion. From 590 to 1517, the RCC dominated the western world. The Roman Catholic Church controlled religion, philosophy, morals, politics, art and education. This was the dark ages for true Christianity. The RCC was theologically sick and its theology led to atrocious corruptions. It was spiritually exhausted, enfeebled and almost lifeless. Rome had seriously departed from the teaching of the Bible and was engrossed in real heresy. Many of the clergy had come to their offices through political maneuvering and simony. Simony was the sinful practice of giving or obtaining an appointment to a church office for money. This was a common practice in the Middle Ages, even in the obtaining of the office of pope. They no longer had to learn and teach the Scriptures, for the church told them what to do. Even the superior clergymen were sunk in great ignorance in spiritual matters. They had secular learning, but knew very little of the Bible.
Some Specifics
1. The Donation of Constantine was probably the most famous forgery in World history. It was a document supposedly written by emperor Constantine (285-337 A.D.) granting the Catholic Church ownership of vast territories within the western Roman Empire. The document stated that he made this generous gift out of gratitude to Pope Sylvester I who had converted him to Christianity and had cured him of leprosy. It has never been proved who faked the Donation, but it was written ca. 750 to c.800 in Latin. It is believed to have been written to aid Papal attempts to challenge Byzantium’s spiritual and secular interests in Italy, probably being created in the mid eighth century at the behest of Pope Stephen II, in order to aid his negotiations with Pepin the Short. The idea was that the Pope approved the transfer of the great central European crown from the Merovingian dynasty to the Carolingians, and in return Pepin would not just give the Papacy the rights to Italian lands, but would actually ‘restore’ what had been given long before by Constantine. It appears that the rumor of a Donation or something similar had been traveling round the relevant parts of Europe since the sixth century, and that whoever created it was producing something people expected to exist. It was during the reign of Leo IX in the mid eleventh century that the Donation was quoted as bona fide evidence, and from then on it became a common weapon in the struggle between the RCC and secular rulers to carve up power. Its legitimacy was rarely questioned at that time.The Donation was proved entirely fake beyond a doubt by Lorenzo Valla in 1440, as even the RCC eventually acknowledged. Forgery be damned, the RCC made full use of the forgery for hundreds of years to promote its own purposes and ill-gotten gains.
It is important because this document is what the Roman Catholic Church used in order to establish its authority for centuries. When it was proved a forgery, the Roman Catholic Church – with power already firmly established – stopped referring to that document but did not admit it was a fake for another hundred years. They did the same thing with Galileo—not admitting their error for hundreds of years.
2. The Inquisition—Totalitarianism RCC Style
The Medieval Inquisition was the most common name for the Inquisition that was created by the Catholic Church. After the Roman Catholic Church emerged following the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., it immediately achieved expansive influence at all levels of the imperial government. As The True Church of Christ(The Body of Christ) separated themselves from the Church of Rome, which they saw as apostate, they represented a formidable potential threat to the official new imperial religion. As in the early days of the infant Church, persecution in varying degrees of severity was instituted not by emperors but by popes over the centuries following.
By the 11th century, in their zeal to establish their power, the Roman popes began utilizing a new tool -- the Crusades. At first, the Crusades had as their object the conquering of Jerusalem and the "Holy Land". Along the crusaders' paths, thousands of innocent civilians (especially Jews) were raped, robbed, and slaughtered. In time, however, the crusade concept was altered to crush all non-Catholic dissidents within Europe itself. In other words, armies were raised with the intent of massacring whole communities of non-Catholic Christians.
Pope Innocent III believed that those non-Catholic dissidents were worse than infidels for they threatened his absolute power. So the pope sponsored four "crusades" to exterminate the opposition. He called upon Louis VII to do his killing for him, and he also enjoined Raymond VI to assist him.
The Cistercian order of Catholic monks were then commissioned to preach all over France, Flanders, and Germany for the purpose of raising an army sufficient to kill all dissidents. All who volunteered to take part in these mass murders were promised that they would receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life.
In July of 1209 A.D. an army of orthodox Catholics attacked Beziers and murdered 60,000 unarmed civilians, killing men, women, and children. The whole city was sacked, and when someone complained that Catholics were being killed as well as "heretics", the papal legates told them to go on killing and not to worry about it for "the Lord knows His own." At Minerve, 14,000 Christians were put to death in the flames, and ears, noses, and lips of the "heretics" were cut off by the "faithful." This is but one example from the long and sordid history of Catholic atrocities committed against their perceived enemies. Much worse treatment of dissidents was forthcoming during that stage of bloody Catholic history known as the Inquisition.
The Inquisition was purely and uniquely a Catholic institution; it was founded for the express purpose of exterminating every human being in Europe who differed from Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. It spread out from France, Milan, Geneva, Aragon, and Sardinia to Poland (14th century) and then to Bohemia and Rome (1543). It was not abolished in Spain until 1820.
"Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first 3 centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required by an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.”--William Durant(noted historian).
3. RCC Cover-ups
The Tip of the Iceberg was Pedophilia
The widespread problem of sex abuse within the Catholic church has existed for centuries, but its ability to cover up its transgressions has finally come to an end. Actually it was the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid 15th century that was the eventual death-knell for Catholicism’s grip on its internal sordid activities and world thought. The other side of the coin was that besides disseminating the truth, censorship reared its ugly head. From 590 to 1517AD, the Roman Church dominated religious thought in the western world. The Roman Catholic Church controlled religion, philosophy, morals, politics, art and education. This was the dark age for true Christianity. The vital doctrines of Biblical Christianity had almost disappeared, and with the neglect of true doctrine came the passing of life and light that constitutes the worship of the One True God as declared in Christ.
Pope Paul IV ordered the first Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. The Index was issued again 20 times by different popes. The last Index of Prohibited Books was issued as recently as 1948, and then finally abolished in 1966. These lists of books banned for their heretical or ideologically dangerous content, were issued by the Roman Catholic Church. The Holy Bible especially was on their list of restricted reading. Zealous guardians carried out the Sacred Inquisition, banning and burning books and sometimes also the authors. The most famous of authors that the Catholic Church banned is undoubtedly Galileo (1633), and the most famous victims of the Inquisition’s trials must be Joan of Arc (1431) and Thomas More (1535).
Finally, in 1776 with America showing the way by means of freedom of the press, and an educated public world-wide, the RCC lost its greatest weapon for deceit. Since Vatican II numerous cases of sex abuse have surfaced following a series of allegations, investigations, trials, and convictions of child sexual abuse crimes committed by Catholic priests, nuns, and members of Roman Catholic orders against boys and girls, some as young as 3 years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. There is no way to put accurate numbers on the problem because of the secretive methods employed by the Church hierarchy. The accusations began to receive wide publicity in the late 1980s; many span several decades, and were brought forward years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who did not report sex abuse allegations to the legal authorities, moving sexually abusive priests to other parishes where abuse sometimes continued. There is hardly a single parish in America that hasn’t been affected.
In the year 2000, Pope John Paul made a mock apology for atrocities that occurred over the centuries, pretending that it was only certain members of the Catholic church who were responsible for committing the gruesome acts of torture and murder, when in fact it was the official policy of the papacy that was responsible. Furthermore, the "Pope" made no apology for, nor did he even mention, the nearly three quarters of a million innocent non-Catholic Christian Serbians slaughtered by Roman Catholics in Croatia, Yugoslavia, during World War II.
Catholic apologies of 1998 and 2000 are quite pathetic: Apologies are made on behalf of some unidentified "sons and daughters" of the church, but not on behalf of the church itself. The apologies are vaguely worded so that it is sometimes difficult to identify which past atrocity is being referred to -- whether it be genocide against the Cathars, burning "Witches" and other heretics at the stake, castrating boy singers so that they would preserve their soprano voice into adulthood, etc. It does not include any mention of present behavior that is sinful or deficient. It does not describe any plan to prevent the recurrence in the future of past crimes against humanity
Recently(6 May, 2014) the UN Rapporteur on Torture questioned the Vatican on clerical sexual abuse, and for “crimes against humanity” because of the widespread scheme, orchestrated by the church hierarchy, to facilitate and cover up the mass rape and sexual abuse of children. Many argued that the very term “crime against humanity” was over the top, fueled by anti-Catholicism or secularism, and effectively undermined itself by its extreme language.
At that time, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child accused the Vatican of fostering a climate of impunity with regard to child sexual abuse. In a two-hour hearing in Geneva, CAT launched a barrage of questions to the Vatican delegation, asking about past policy decisions, the juridical distinction between the Holy See and Vatican City, and information on specific cases.
The Vatican, said the Church has been "doing its own house cleaning" for 10 years. It says it is determined to protect children and that measures put in place have led to a decline in cases of sexual abuse of children by priests.
George Tugushi, a committee member from Georgia, said a recently formed international commission advising Pope Francis on how to deal with sexual abuse, was a very positive step but not enough. "The commission may need help to ensure all cases are reported properly and begin to change the climate of impunity, but it cannot be considered in our opinion as a substitute for a functioning investigation system," he told the Vatican delegation.
Another committee member, Satyabhoosun Gupt Domah of Mauritius, asked if the Holy See was taking steps to eliminate the "chemistry that creates the conditions" for sexual abuse of children by priests.
The Holy See's position is its adherence to the UN Convention against Torture applies only to the territory of Vatican City. The head of the Vatican's delegation, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, said the Holy See's powers did not extend beyond the Vatican, but added the church was taking action to address past wrongs. Archbishop Tomasi said while the Holy See can be a moral force, the "agent of justice" for crimes committed by Catholics was the local state where the crime was committed. "It should be stressed, particularly in light of much confusion, that the Holy See has no jurisdiction ... over every member of the Catholic Church," he said in opening remarks.
Barbara Blaine of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) accused the Vatican of ducking responsibility. "They are splitting hairs when they should be embracing the victims and stopping the sexual violence," she said. The committee's chief rapporteur, Felice Gaer of the United States, told the Vatican delegation that its position "seems to reflect an intention for a significant portion of the actions and omissions of Holy See officials be excluded from consideration by this committee, and this troubles us".
Ms Gaer and Mr Tugushi presented dozens of questions to the delegation, asking them to respond to reports presented to the committee by non-government organisations. "We have received numerous allegations of intimidation of witnesses and shifting of finances to avoid payment (of compensation)," Ms Gaer said.
Archbishop Tomasi told news agency Reuters that the reduction in the number of cases of abuse showed that "effective" action taken by the Church was working. "I think that in this kind of situation there will never be enough done. The damage has been done, reparation has to continue," he said.
Church groups defend "strong" reforms and protocols .The Church in the United States had invested $US2.5 billion in compensation for the victims. Archbishop Tomasi said "most of the abuser priests that we know of have been defrocked".Church groups defended the Catholic Church's efforts to stem abuse and criticised committee members who said the Church's opposition to abortion had harmed women. "Attacking the Church's moral and religious beliefs violates the religious liberty of the Church, a human right which the United Nations affirms," said Ashley McGuire of Catholic Voices. "Over the last decade, the Church has put into place reforms and protocols so strong that they are now being modelled by other institutions, like public schools," she said.
This past February, a UN committee on the Rights of the Child accused the Vatican of systematically turning a blind eye to decades of abuse and attempting to cover up sex crimes. The Vatican called the report unfair and ideologically slanted, but this is no more than the cry of a desperate church.
But what can possibly describe the following unless it is a crime against humanity? In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and live in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.
More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.
A mass grave for eight hundred children, buried with no dignity, no humanity, no trace of decency. And the mass grave may well have been facilitated by rampant, disgusting and callous neglect:
According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. “If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”
Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.” According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”
“Let us call this what it is: a concentration camp with willful disregard for the survival of its innocent captives, a death camp for a group of people deemed inferior because of the circumstances of their birth. When we talk of mass graves of this kind, we usually refer to Srebrenica or the crimes of Pol Pot. But this was erected in the name of Jesus, and these despicable acts were justified by his alleged teaching.”
“It seems to me that we have to move past the church’s current doctrines on sex if we are to fully seek justice for the victims of this pathology and if we are to ensure that never again is a phrase that actually means something. It is not enough to ask for a change in governance (and even that has been hard); what this evil signifies is the need to root out this pernicious obsession with sexual sin. This pathology – perpetuated by Benedict and the sex-phobic theocons – perpetuates the mindset that led to this barbarism. The nuns – and yes, this was abuse practiced by women as well as men –they did not for a moment internalize Jesus’ emphatic insistence on the holiness of children as those most likely to enter the kingdom of Heaven. No, these precious images of God were consigned, after years of abuse and neglect, to unmarked early graves in a septic tank.”
“That is not a sign of a church gone astray. It’s a sign of a church given over to evil. A church that leaves young children to die of malnutrition and then dumps hundreds of them into a mass grave is not a church. It’s an evil institution that robs the word “church” of any meaning, and twists the Gospels into their direct opposite. We failed these children in their short lifetimes. Never, ever forget them if we are to have a chance at restoring a Christianity worthy of Jesus.”
In June, 2016 Archbishop Christian Lepine, issued a decree to Catholic priests in Montreal to “ensure the safety and integrity of the people to whom we bring the Gospel message and offer our pastoral care”. But, it added, it was also “to preserve the integrity, security and good reputation of God’s people”.
The New policy, which includes church workers and volunteers, is intended as ‘safety net’ against allegations of sex abuse, but critics say move is ‘too little, too late’ Catholic priests in Montreal will be banned from being alone with children to provide a “safety net” against allegations of abuse.
According to the decree, the move was in an accompanying letter, Lepine said: “Recent events brought to light the horrific reality of abuse of minors and vulnerable people by members of the church. These intolerable situations have shocked and shaken the Universal Church as well as the entire population.”
Pope Francis and his predecessors had issued clear instructions that every Catholic diocese must take necessary measures to prevent the abuse of children and vulnerable adults, the letter said.
Implementation of the policy is to begin with a pilot project involving a dozen parishes from September, and will subsequently be rolled out across the diocese.
The policy would cover anyone “in the orbit of the church” to create a “safety net”, Canon Francois Sarrazin told the Canadian Press.“Imagine if you are alone in a room and a child accuses you of hitting them, how will you react?” Sarrazin said. “Whether it’s true or not, you need a witness. Not being in the room alone with someone who is vulnerable is simply being prudent.”
But Carlo Tarini, representing survivors of abuse by priests, said the move was “too little, too late”, and the church was trying to protect itself from legal action.
In February, 2016, the church agreed a $30m settlement after around 150 people claimed they had been abused by the Clerics of St Viateur, who ran a school for deaf children in Montreal between 1940 and 1982.
The policy was dismissed as “window dressing” by David Clohessy of the US-based Snap (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests).“The single most effective step would be to publicly disclose and discipline every cleric who committed or concealed child sex crimes. That immediately protects children,” he said.“We’ve literally seen hundreds of policies, procedures, protocols and pledges like this that sound good on paper but are virtually never enforced. So we are extremely sceptical.”
The new policy is thought to be unprecedented in the Catholic church, although the Anglican church in Australia has had similar guidelines in place since 2004, said Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Abuse victims in many countries have been demanding such a policy, in the case of Canada at least since 2007,” he said.
The new measures “provide safeguards for vulnerable children against the assaults of pedophile priests or other church workers. Given the volume of cases across time and place, it’s quite shocking that such measure[s] haven’t been adopted in all dioceses across the globe, if for no other reason than for the church to preclude future lawsuits which have cost it billions of dollars in Canada and the US alone.
“Despite its tardiness, the new policy in Montreal should be universally adopted, above all for the protection of children at Catholic churches and organizations.”
Globally, the Catholic church has paid tens of millions of dollars in compensation and costs relating to child sex abuse. An investigation by the National Catholic Reporter last year concluded that the US church alone had incurred costs of nearly $400 m.
In the year 2014, the Vatican said that 848 priests had been defrocked and more than 2,500 had been sanctioned. But the church has also been accused of systematically covering up crimes committed by priests.
Contemporary Catholic Opinion
As seen through the eyes of Prominent Catholic Priests.
For most of this country's 60 million Catholics, Vatican pronouncements are no laughing matter. Whatever comes out of the Vatican is accepted as the law of the Church. Because of its “death grip” on its laity through absolute power, there is no means to question or rebut. In fact, for the most part, the laity has no will to question. So who speaks for the laity? It is one thing for non-catholics to question the RCC, but within the Catholic Church there is no such thing as second-guessing the hierarchy. The hierarchy with its untold power and resources easily dispenses with all criticism by means of censure, ostracism, character assassination, and the threat of excommunication. The few Clergy who openly question the church have been silenced or even cut off from church membership.
What is it about some noted priests who have spoken out that deserve our attention? It is important to understand all were first, foremost, and forever Catholic priests with impeccable credentials. Most were “cradle catholics” trained into the priesthood and made privy to everything the church has to offer. They speak with the mind of a”dyed-in-the-wool” Catholic in total support of their church. Whatever viewpoints they expounded were sincere efforts on their parts for the betterment of the church. All were speaking for themselves, but in effect they serve as defacto spokesmen for the majority of the laity.
All in all, these priests referenced here present a vivid truthful snapshot of the status and current scandalous activities of the RCC, and call for reforms of a giant magnitude. We can never know the mind of the controlling hierarchy, but here we have a chance to see what is in the mind of credible intellectual Catholic men speaking and writing outside the usual censorship of the RCC . These men are baring their innermost thoughts. When one is confronted with overwhelming evidence of scandal in the RCC throughout its history, it lends credence to the presence of Satan and his plan to thwart God.
Uncensored Views of Noted Priests
Avery Dulles,S.J.(1918-2008).
Dulles was a noted American Jesuit theologian. and cardinal of the Catholic Church. He is considered by many scholars and fellow theologians as one of the premier theologians of the Roman Catholic Church.
Dulles served on the faculty of Woodstock College from 1960 to 1974, of The Catholic University of America from 1974 to 1988, and as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University from 1988 to 2008. He was an internationally known author and lecturer.
From his book “A Church to Believe In.” by Fr. Avery Dulles, S.J.(1982). “priestly and religious vocation have notably declined. A high percentage of ‘under forty’ Catholics no longer regard themselves as members of the Church. Many Catholics who enter marriages drift away from their former religion. Among Catholics who perservere, a large number reject the official teaching of the church on issues such as divorce, contraception, and, to some extent, abortion. Dogmas such as papal infallibility are widely misunderstood and disbelieved. Even among orthodox Catholics, increasing numbers are in canonically irregular situations, such as remarriage after divorce. With the decline of the Catholic school system, and with the increasing influence of mass media communications, the church finds it increasingly difficult to transmit its doctrine and values to younger members.”
Dulles observes, in an earlier day, when people were accustomed to being ruled by alien powers in every sphere of life, the institutionalism of the church caused little difficulty. People took for granted that they could have little control over their own lives and that someone would tell them what to believe and do. In a paternalistic society, a paternalistic church was felt to be appropriate. In some respects it even offered relief from the tyranny of other institutions. But today, especially in America, people take a critical view of all institutions. It seems almost impossible to look upon a huge bureaucracy as a loving mother, yet this, it seems, is precisely what the church is asking them to do. To large numbers of people, and to others not so young, the laws and dogmas of the church seem designed to control and crush rather than to nourish and satisfy the needs of the spirit. Dulles feels that until this fundamental difficulty is alleviated, all new techniques to shore up the institutional church will accomplish little.
Joseph L Bernadin
Joseph Louis Bernardin (1928 – 1996) was an American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983.
In August, 1996, Bernadin, of Chicago, in conjunction with 25 U.S. Catholic leaders compiled a 3,000-word statement titled, “Called to Be Catholic; Church in a time of Peril.” According to Bernadin the Catholic Church in America is in a time of peril. His statement painted a depressing portrait of Catholic life in the U.S.—a demoralized clergy, decaying institutional life, drooping attendance at Mass and declining financial contributions.
Some of the strongest criticism of Bernadin’s project arose from the age-old hierarchical anxiety that the exploration of differences could compromise the truth of Catholic doctrine or serve to legitimize dissent. Bernadin countered by saying, “The goal of dialogue is not negotiation or compromise but understanding.” He also pointed out that not all dissent is illegitimate. In conjunction with an essay by Archbishop Weakland, Berrnadin agreed that in spite of a movement for more respect for sex in Catholic theology, there was a gradual erosion of church rule on mandatory celibacy.
Bernadin ‘s comments are a good example of the crisis and turmoil taking place in the RCC involving laypeople, priests, theologians, bishops, and even “princes” of the church.
Karl Rahner,S.J.(1904-1984). Rahner was a noted Catholic theologian/teacher—a key figure at Vatican II. He entered the Jesuits in 1922. He was a man accepted and celebrated as the greatest Jesuit theologian in the last one hundred years. He spent a lifetime of effort to change Catholic belief. Rahner chose the long-accepted immemorial formulas of belief as his targets. His cry was “I will not serve.” He refused point-blank to defend either Catholic teaching on contraception or the Pope. It was the same for virtually all the other dogmas and rules of the Catholic church. He was untiring in his biting and sarcastic criticism of the papacy and Roman authority.
In regard to the dogmas about papal infallibility and those about Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption; would a Catholic theologian be free to say that those dogmas are not necessary, that they are basically superfluous? Ans: “Dogmas have very differing degrees of importance. Of course, my faith in Jesus Christ means much more to me than the teaching of the First Vatican Council about infallibility of the pope. The first is very important to me, the other is secondary, which is not to say it does not bind. I am not ready to say that any of these dogmas is simply so mistaken as to be thrown on the rubbish heap of history. But under circumstances which would have to be spelled out in detail, I would readily admit that such explicit, official, papal definitions about them could have been omitted.”
And why has no other theologian of note besides Rahner and Hans Kung said that? Ans: “Perhaps because no one has sufficiently thought it through. Before these dogmas were defined, there was discussion not only whether they were objectively correct but also whether it was opportune to define them. I am not bound by the decision regarding their opportuneness. If Pius XII had asked my opinion in 1950, I would have advised him against defining the dogma of the Assumption.
What are the consequences for a lay person, when a dogma is low on the hierarchy of truths? Ans: “The fact that a particular statement is a dogma of the Catholic Church does not require every Catholic Christian to take a position regarding it in any particular way. If Catholics come to me and say they cannot understand this or that or make any sense of it, I advise them not to reject it completely out of hand, for there are things in the world and in the realm of truth that are inaccessible to one personally. If you want to believe the basic truth of Christianity, you have the right not to worry about secondary matters in the hierarchy of truths and just let them be.
Rahner, in his book “Unity of the churches. An Actual Possibility.”(1984) made sweeping and outrageously anti-Roman proposals. To achieve Christian unity, he said, it was necessary to drop all insistence as well as on all other doctrines about the pope and Roman Catholicism that had been defined since the fourth century. What the Church had defined as basic and obligatory was optional.
Rahner, along with many of his Jesuit brothers wished to see the papacy and the hierarchy dismantled. So single-minded was his devotion to the anti-papal and anti-Catholic point of view that he became its incarnation, as one might say.
Sometime in the twentieth century the Society(Jesuits) changed from its original purpose as guardian of the papacy to that of self-appointed saviors of the poor. In doing so the Society(Rahner among them) became quite radical and antagonistic towards the papacy. The papacy insisted on its supreme authority over them. On October 5, 1981, Pope John Paul by papal fiat intervened in the highest affairs of the Society by removing Pedro Arrupe and Vincent O’Keefe, and replaced Arrupe with Piet-Hans-Kolvenbach. As it turned out, Kolvenbach was just as radical and antagonistic towards the papacy, as Arrupe. Kolvenbach resigned his position in 2013.
The Society is not alone in the war against the papacy. Many exist championing the idea that a new church, the “people of God,” should replace the old hierarchic Roman Catholic Church.
Rahner on the Intercession of Saints. “Whether and in what sense ‘saints’ intercede for us, has not yet been answered. The first thing I would say, according to Catholic teaching on sainthood and on the communion of saints or the cult of saints, they are not to be considered as a “board of appeals” or as a special intervention process, where they would be involved in running messages to the throne of God, messages that otherwise would not arrive there. I would say that the language concerning the intercession of the saints means nothing else than that their lives, accepted now by God where we all belong together in the community of God loves, are meaningful to me—and not just as secular lives, but as lives related to God. I don’t stand alone before God, although I am absolutely individual before God and God’s grace, but I belong to others. Each person is meaningful for another. Praying to someone to intercede for me thus means nothing else than saying in prayer that the other is significant for me, in a way known finally only by God and only when I stand before God.”
Richard Peter McBrien (1936 – 2015) was the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame He was ordained as a Catholic priest for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford in 1962 and the author of several books and articles discussing Catholicism. He is most well-known for his authorship of Catholicism. He also served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America from 1974–1975. In 1976 he was the awarded the John Courtney Murray Award for outstanding and distinguished accomplishments in theology. He published 25 books and was the general editor of the Encyclopedia of Catholicism. He also served as an on-air commentator on Catholic events for CBS in addition to his regular contribution as a commentator on several major television networks. He was also a consultant for ABC News.
Fr. Charles E.Curran said of McBrien at his death: “No Catholic theologian in the United States has made a greater contribution to the reception of the Second Vatican Council. Fr. McBrien addressed head-on the controversial issues that arose in the life of the Church while many others often put their heads in the sand. Dick wrote and spoke often to Catholics seeking an understanding of their faith. ” Like McBrien, Fr. Curran was also a sort of dissident on matters Catholic. He maintains in his 1986 Faithful Dissent that Catholics who may dissent nevertheless accept the teaching authority of the Pope, bishops and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Curran has taken a full tenured professorship at Southern Methodist University and has published personal accounts about his experience with the Roman Catholic Church and his viewpoint on the actions of Roman Catholic Church authorities.
McBrien wrote: “You have to wonder how many Catholics there are who have never read the Bible or even pay attention to the readings at Mass.” and, “A large percentage of the Catholic laity seem to believe Jesus must have been preoccupied with instituting loyalty to the pope, censoring dissident theologians, condemning most expressions of human sexuality, blessing military preparedness and encouraging the accumulation of personal and corporate wealth. Jesus must have spent a good deal of time developing various devotions to his mother; and when he wasn’t concentrating on Mary , he was probably urging his militant followers to be brutally rough on anyone who failed to toe the line. In his spare time , he insisted that priests wear Roman collars, that nuns wear veils and that children be forced to memorize lists of holy days of obligation, precepts of the church, and, of course, the ten Commandments. This version of Catholicism bears no resemblance to the New Testament, nor to the rich selection of readings we are given at Mass.”
McBrien proposes that Catholics should “explore, understand, and exercise their faith in freedom without prejudice to our abiding responsibility to reconcile our understanding, our judgments and our decisions with the theological criteria embodied in the Bible, the writings of the great Fathers and doctors of the church, the official teachings of the ecumenical councils and the popes, the liturgy, and the sensus fidelium(“consensus of the faithful”) maintained through the centuries, everywhere and at every time.” “The faithful, in the last analysis, are they who discern the master’s voice, and the voice of the master is the one that the faithful are able to recognize. The discernment, therefore, goes in both directions. If we have identified the Word of God, it serves as a criterion for recognizing God’s people, and if we know who God’s people are, we have a clue for ascertaining the Word of God. The faithful discern the Word of God, but on a deeper level they are discerned by it. “The Word of God is living and active . . discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”(Hebrews 4).
McBrien on the Crisis in the Church: He is in no doubt about the reality of the crisis following Vatican II and cites numerous evidences of such a crisis: “Attendance at mass and vocation to the priesthood and religious life are in sharp decline, divorce and remarriage are way up, theological dissent is rampant; there is widespread confusion and doubt about the church’s official teaching; there is agitation for the ordination of women and resistance to priestly celibacy; ecumenism challenges Roman Catholic identity and distinctiveness; young people seem alienated from the church; science, technology, and materialism have for many people replaced spiritual explanations and motivations; and Christians are divided in the struggle for justice between rich and poor; oppressed and oppressor.”
He ponders the crisis and identifies three basic causes. The first is Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae. The second is what he calls “the acculturation of the immigrants.” As Roman Catholics became better educated and more successful, they began to think for themselves. Also on matters religious. The third explanation is what he calls the loss of the supernatural. This may represent simply another direction that acculturation can take. He states that in the span of a generation the absolute authority of the church regarding truth, law, and rules of life, has suddenly vanished . . The collapse of this authority has not occurred because of certain church doctrines, papal decrees, bishop’s rulings and so on were at last found to be in error, or obviously “wrong” or “old fashioned” in relation to the mind, but is due to the loss of a sense of the supernatural. People feel free to reject teachings not because they are wrong but because they no longer believe that the church speaks with the authority of God.
Then on the subject of celibacy and the laity, McBrien cites surveys that show many young men with a genuine aptitude for pastoral ministry are discouraged today from pursuing it primarily because of lifelong obligatory celibacy and because of the manner in which authority is too often exercised in the church. Such potential candidates tend to be creative and intellectually discriminating at a time when the hierarchy prefers loyalty, obedience, and conformity.
That situation won’t change unless and until there is a different cast of church leaders – men who are open to change, who acknowledge that celibacy has nothing essential to do with the priesthood, and who exercise authority, like Jesus, in the manner of servants rather than of royal officials.
McBrien holds that in recent decades many Catholics have begun to draw a sharper line between the church and its faith. The numbers of Catholics who still consider themselves Catholic in faith but not ecclesiastically or institutionally continues to grow. It all comes out in the wash at the parish level. It is the parish level that the church is most vividly the church. It is at the parish level that the ordinary faithful relate themselves to the church and to the faith that it proclaims. The laity does think it is their business how and why their bishops got selected. And it does make a difference to them what criteria are used for recruiting and training candidates for the priesthood.
In the January 8, 1998 issue of the diocesan paper,”Superior Catholic Herald,” McBrien’s column pointed out that the hierarchy in Rome is getting paranoid about the possibility that, in the minds of lay people, the line between ordained and non-ordained will be erased, and that they will come to look upon the various ministries they have been performing since Vatican II as a normal part of their service to the church.
Some might be tempted to regard the recent Vatican instruction on lay ministers as an example of ecclesiastical overkill. What concern could possibly require the attention of so many Vatican dicasteries?
Simply put, it is fear that the extraordinary growth in ministries since Vatican II will somehow diminish the status of the ordained priest and further depress the level of vocations to the priesthood.
The document’s spirit and tone are unmistakably defensive with regard to the pastoral prerogatives of priests and wary of encroachments of lay persons on territory formerly reserved exclusively to the ordained. Karl Lehmann, bishop of Maine, deplored the “atmosphere of distrust” the document created toward the laity. Johann Weber, bishop of Graz-Sechau, challenged the document’s assumption that many initiatives are on an emergency basis only (with the idea that, once the clergy shortage is corrected, the laity will have to recede from these ministerial roles).
McBrien asks, “Does the Vatican really want to turn back the clock?” He says, Vatican II replaced the medieval view of the church as a pyramid, with the pope at the top and the laity at the bottom. It captured the spirit of all the baptized, the council declared, the laity must also share in its mission and ministries, in a manner consistent with their gifts. They do not simply participate in the ministry of the hierarchy and at their sufferance; by baptism and through the power of the Holy Spirit the laity share directly in the mission and ministries of the church.
McBrien says, “Are we now to assume that none of this really makes any difference? Are the ministries of the church to be consigned once again almost exclusively to the hierarchy and the clergy?”
Andrew M. Greeley (1928 –2013) was an American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist. He sold more than 20 million books, and gave most of his money to charity. After studying at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago, Greeley received an AB degree from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago in 1950, a Bachelor of Sacred Theology (STB) in 1952, and a Licentiate of Sacred Theology (STL) in 1954, when he was ordained for the Archdiocese of Chicago. In 1962 he earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago, adding it to earlier degrees in theology. He died May 30, 2013 at the age of 85. The priesthood was what, in Father Greeley’s eyes, held his life together.“I always wanted to be a priest,” he once wrote. “My core identity is priest. I will always be a priest.” He defended parochial schools, priestly celibacy, ethnic loyalties, and the vivid imagery of traditional Catholic piety. He did not have a parish, but he had a mailbox — and later an e-mail address. The faithful gathered there in huge numbers, thanking him for new insights into God and their church, adding their own tales of return and reconciliation. He was an advocate of women’s advancement in the church which earned him a large following of feminist defenders.
In May of 1996 Greely commissioned a Gallup poll of American Catholics. The poll found that 78% said the next pope should let lay people have more voice in the church by serving as papal advisors. 69% said the pope should permit priests to marry. 65% also said the next pontiff should support the ordination of women. The survey results also come at a time of turmoil over the acceptable limits of dissent within the church. Greely himself has been a persistent critic.
He identified the controversy surrounding “Humanae Vitae,” the 1968 papal encyclical reasserting the church’s condemnation of contraception, as a turning point for the church — a time when attendance at Mass dropped precipitously and Catholics began to question church authority on an ever-growing list of topics. He had great respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics. He once described Catholic bishops as “morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt.” If the church wanted “to salvage American Catholicism,” he wrote, it would be well advised to retire “a considerable number of mitered birdbrains.” He had been an early and vehement advocate for victims of abusive priests at least since 1989, when he began writing articles in Chicago newspapers demanding that the church take action against pedophile priests. His outrage and proposals for reform were eventually recognized by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, among others, as prescient.
What is it about the calling to become a priest that is so special? Ans. “The priesthood is a sacred role. A priest is someone who stands between God and humankind, directing humans to God and trying to reveal God to humans.
Greely painted a bleak picture of the priesthood when he wrote, “The good of the Church is ill-served when psychopaths, sociopaths, crooks, alcoholics and incompetents are routinely appointed to the American dioceses. They can’t cope. They can’t cope with the pedophile crisis, with the loss of credibility, with the decline of vocations and in contributions, with women’s demands for equal treatment. But I’m hard put to think of anything they’re doing right. What has happened is we have tried to make priests more than human and in the process have created an image of somebody less than human.
“There surely have been gay priests, gay bishops, gay popes and gay saints, but one would not want the whole priesthood to be gay because it would mark it off rather strikingly from the rest of humankind. As long as one or two or even five percent of the priesthood are gay, I have no problem with it, particularly if they don’t flaunt affectual orientation in the face of the laity. Once the proportion of priests becomes higher than that, then the priesthood gets marked as a gay profession in people’s minds and it will lose its attraction for heterosexual young men.
“The Vatican has established an ever-greater distance between itself and the laity, which is very serious and dangerous. The leadership of the Church has lost its nerve. For the past 30 years the Vatican, bishops and priests have done everything they can to drive the laity out of the Church – but they won’t go.”
“I wouldn’t call Pope John Paul the worst pope, but I think he is a tragic pope because he is a man of enormous talent who has been unable to understand the Western world. His pilgrimages are ceremonial; they capture people’s imagination but the people are not listening to him. He’s a man of extraordinary gifts – a poet, a playwright, a singer, a university professor, a skier, a swimmer, -- but he grew up in a country under siege and he views the Church as under siege in the world, which it isn’t.”
Greely, what if you were the pope? Ans. “It’s a serious question. The first thing I would do is to set up channels of communication so I’d know what’s in the mind of the laity and parish priests. There is no means of upward communication. The Vatican doesn’t ask because it knows all the answers. The bishops don’t ask anyone either. I would try to listen. That seems to be the abiding failure of Church leaders and maybe of all leaders. They don’t listen. Church leaders think they have the monopoly on the Holy Spirit, that God speaks only to them and not to ordinary folk. That’s just crazy. Another problem I would work on is the equation of religion with sexual morality, to the exclusion of all else.”
What about women priests? “It’s terribly unjust. The argument is because they have never been priests. And because people don’t want to share power. If you make women priests, you are going to have to change the way you do business. The ordination of women would break up the male clerical monopoly and notably change its culture and orientation.”
What about celibacy? “The celibate witness is important because it points to a world beyond this one, and it means there are some men in this world who can care about women very strongly without jumping into bed with them. “
“For much of Catholic history celibacy was only a rule in theory. It is said, a third of the population of Iceland are descendants of the last Catholic archbishop(laughs). Celibacy as a norm really only became typical after the Council of Trent.”
“Celibacy is certainly too high for some people. But in past ages it would have been more typical for archbishops to have concubines than not, so the notion that this is something new or startling I find odd. You hear everywhere that if the priesthood wasn’t celibate there wouldn’t be all this sexual abuse of children. It’s by no means a Catholic monopoly. Moreover, most pedophiles are married men. I think there has been an assault on celibacy that’s just not fair.”
“I don’t know how much those images are affecting the laity, but I will say this: if Catholic lay folk have been totally trusting of a priest’s emotional and sexual maturity in the past, that is a bad mistake and they are not going to do it again. On the other hand, being more careful, if they size up the priest as somebody they can trust, the relationship will be the same. In fact, women tend to trust a celibate priest far more than they would any other man. Other men may themselves uneasy about intimacy, in the psychological sense between their women and priests, but the tension is a benign and positive tension.”
“I have no feelings about these issues. Celibacy ought to continue, and we ought to ordain women. I’m the only one I know who holds both positions. I also have a third one: People should be able to leave the priesthood after a limited term of service. But I can’t get anybody to take the idea seriously. Until the end of the 19th century you were a priest for about ten years and then you died. Now you’re a priest for 50 years – even if you’re burned out at age 40, you can’t stand teenagers, you don’t like the work, and you want to start a family. So volunteer for ten years, then go forth with dignity and gratitude.”
For more than 25 years, Greely worked on really a kind of opus theory, that is, that religion is story. “Religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits. And I began to think that, well, maybe this is the way religion really gets passed on today. That religion is story before it's anything else. And after it's everything else. A major book on this is called The Catholic Imagination. Or there's also one called Religion is Poetry. And that's the thesis, that if we can get at people's stories, stories they tell about what their life means, then we'll know what their religion is. Because practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.”
What is the religious tradition that we come from? “The Catholic Church's basic insight into reality is that it's sacramental. That God is everywhere. And God discloses Himself, Herself in the moonlight, and the frozen lake in the wintertime. And the touch of a friendly hand in reconciliation in human love. We have never been afraid of contaminating God by putting right down into midst of the human tradition, human experience. Our Protestant brothers tend to try to keep God away from these things because they think we'll make Him into an idol. There's something to be said for either position, but the Catholic position is that God is everywhere.
Why do you love women so much? “Because they're neat. I'm not afraid of 'em. I like them, I admire them," but you can't deal with them as an equal. But at least I don't feel too inferior to them. They don't threaten me. Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.
Being a long time student of the Papacy and of the politics of the Papacy. He was asked if he contemplated any change with respect to that authoritarian sexual view from Rome after the current pope passes on? “Well, I think the question isn't about what Rome says. Now it's a question of what goes on in the parishes. And I think that authoritarian view has vanished in most parishes, both among the lower clergy and among the laity. I don't know what the next Pope is going to be like. I do know this, the Catholic laity all over the world have made up their minds. We have data from 37 countries that the laity have made up their minds the Church is not going to interfere in their sex lives. That may be wrong, but that's the way it is.”
What is the essence of being an American Catholic? What makes a Catholic distinctive?” I think it’s the stories. If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it’s very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic. They like the stories — Christmas, Easter, May crowning, the souls in purgatory, the saints, the angels, the mother of Jesus. These are enormously powerful religious images. Some people might think they’ve become clichés through the century, and maybe for some they have. But for most Catholic lay folks, the images and the stories are what hold us in the Church despite, sometimes, our leadership.
Define the essence of American Catholicism. “I’d say that Catholicism in the United States has the distinct advantage of being in a pluralistic society, where your religion contributes something to your identity. So you tend to define yourself as a Catholic. I’m Irish, Catholic, a Democrat from the West Side of Chicago, and that’s pretty much my identity. But for most Americans, that relation is part of their identity, so you come to them and say, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” when [they] move into a neighborhood, and they’ll say Protestant or Catholic or Jew. It’s the preprogrammed response. I don’t know how I would explain it to people who live in a country where everybody’s one religion, but I would try to say that religion is a part of who we are and what we are. It gives us something to belong to and something to believe in in our lives.”
What is the religious core of Catholicism? What is the kernel and what is the husk? “The kernel is the belief that God is love and, in Catholicism, God’s love is present in the world. It is in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in our families, in our friends, in our neighborhood, and forgiveness in the touch of a friendly hand, in a rediscovered love God is there. God lurks everywhere. That’s the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level — that God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there’s God.”
What do you mean by the term “communal Catholic? :Well, I meant people who have decided they’re going to be Catholics on their own terms. They are Catholic, they’re strongly Catholic, they like being Catholic; but they’re not going to let Church leadership dictate the terms of belonging. Immediately after the Second Vatican Council, [there was] the euphoria and the effervescence of the council, the contagion [from] the council fathers to the people and to the lower clergy, and in a remarkably short period of time, they changed the Church. By 1975, all this had happened: birth control wasn’t wrong, premarital sex wasn’t wrong, priests leaving the priesthood wasn’t wrong, nuns leaving the religious life wasn’t wrong. You didn’t really have to go to mass every Sunday. You didn’t have to go to confession before receiving communion every time. All of these things, which they never really understood and they didn’t like, were just swept away. Now, a whole generation later, despite all the efforts of the present pope, they [the Church fathers] have not been able to restore the acceptance of those teachings. And I don’t see how they ever will. It may be good, [it] may be bad, but the sociologists say this is what’s happened. The idea of communal means they’re part of the Catholic community, but they’re not necessarily obedient to the teaching Church. If you’re a Catholic in Italy when you’re born, it’s unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.
What is the Catholic imagination? “The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that. It sees God present in His creatures, in all of the creatures, and especially in those creatures that love us and that we love.
The most serious problems facing the American Catholic Church? “Women. And the woman problem is also a man problem, because men have stronger feelings about the rights of women in the Church than women do. Not much stronger, but some. The Church just has not been able to cope with the demands for fairness and equality from women, so they’re very angry. For a long time, the bishops could console themselves — and I think some still do — that these are just radical feminists. But the radical feminists include their sisters and their nieces and their mothers and all the women in their lives. They just don’t like the way the Church treats them. And this includes lots of parish priests. They are just awfully sloppy in their respect and sensitivity toward women.
The next thing is the quality of preaching and worship. Thirty years ago, before the Vatican Council, Catholics didn’t know what liturgy was. Now they know what it is, and they want it [to be] good. They want good preaching and good liturgy. The parishes that provide those things flourish. But so many priests, for one reason or another, don’t do it.
Should Christians be evangelizing, trying to convert others to Christianity? “I think the only kind of acceptable evangelization is the evangelization of good example. The kinds of lives we live, the joy, the patience, the charitableness of our lives is the way we influence other people. The early apostles said, “See how these Christians love one another.” My colleague Rodney Stark at the University of Washington has done research on the spread of Christianity. He has empirically validated that finding. People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good — Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice.
Do Americans believe that there is truth in all religions? And, if so, does this violate the idea that the only way to salvation is through Christ? “Well, I think Catholic Americans had better believe there’s truth in all religions, because the Second Vatican Council said that. We don’t believe that we have a monopoly on truth. We believe what we have is true, but it’s not the whole truth. And we can learn a lot from the other religions if we listen to them respectfully. We don’t give up our heritage; we expand it. There’s the great story about Saint Augustine of Canterbury. He [went] to England when the Anglo-Saxons had taken over, and he liked them; they seemed to be good people. He wondered whether it was all right to adapt their customs to Christianity. And Gregory the Great, who was pope then [in] 600, wrote him a letter saying, “Well, of course. As long as these are good and true and beautiful, and there’s nothing unnatural about them, then of course they can be adapted for Christianity.” That’s been our policy ever since. Sometimes we’ve violated it, but that’s the official policy. We can learn from everybody. Catholicism means, “Here comes everyone.”
How can a Catholic reconcile that with Christ’s saying, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me”? “I don’t think Jesus was an exclusivist. He said, and we believe, that He is the unique representation of God in the world. But that doesn’t mean this is the only way God can work: “Now, God, you’ve got to work here and no place else.” Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn’t like it.
Are Americans tolerant of other religions, or merely indifferent to them? “Oh, I think they’re at least tolerant. It’s the viewpoint that everybody has the right to make their own religious choice, and we’re not going to challenge that right. I think we find some of the other religions interesting — not all of them, but some of them are interesting. We’re more than tolerant. I don’t think it’s indifference.
Are Americans’ religious beliefs are softening? Are people less wedded to creed and doctrine? And if you believe that, why is it happening? “ I know that’s the conventional wisdom, and some of my sociological colleagues have been writing about [it]. I don’t believe it. I think that the core doctrines of Christianity — the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death — these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century. I don’t think American religion is falling apart. Quite the contrary. I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion. They’re offending people, and they’re responsible for some of the departure of younger Protestants from denominations. The Catholics we lose — it’s almost always over divorce and remarriage, of which problem we have made a real mess.”
What is turning people off to the Catholic Church? “Most people who are born Catholic are still Catholic, unless they’ve had a divorce and remarriage problem. I think the Church is just ham-handed in dealing with those people. They leave the Church because of something that’s happened to them in the process of getting a divorce and being remarried.
Could it be the whole gamut of sexual issues? “There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn’t changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s. The increase comes from people who’ve had marriage problems. [Catholic University sociologist] Dean Hoge and his colleagues have done work on young Catholics, and they find that very few young Catholics don’t think of themselves as Catholic anymore. They want to stay even if they don’t go to church much.
What is the major impact of Hispanics on the Catholic Church? I think they are a great grace for the Catholic Church in this country, because their religion has so much festivity and celebration in it. We European Catholics tend to be somewhat grim and dour and straight-laced. We shouldn’t have been, but we are. We can learn from the Latinos that Catholicism is a religion of festivity and celebration.”
How are Hispanic Catholics different ? “ They have a very strong sense of family and local community. Now, of course, so do the Italians and the Irish. But I think it’s stronger. One Hispanic woman… was telling me about her religion, and all she was talking about were the parties, the festivals. And I asked, “But what does all this mean?” She would tell me about another party or festival. I finally said, “No, no. What’s the theology?” “Oh,” she said. “Well, I think we believe that God is part of our family. And when we have celebrations, God comes and celebrates with us.” I like that. I think we should have more of it.
Why do so many Catholics in this country disagree with fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church, especially those having to do with sex, gender, reproduction. And yet, they remain loyal to the Catholic Church; they would never join another church. Why? “ Because once a Catholic, always a Catholic. If you’re a Catholic and are filled with Catholic images and stories in childhood, you don’t want give them up. You like being a Catholic. And how fundamental are these teachings? What’s more important? Life after death or birth control? What is more important? God’s forgiving love or premarital sex? The sexual ethic is important, but it’s not the only thing in Catholicism. I’m afraid sometimes our leaders — and the media, too — have made it sound as if the only unique thing about Catholicism is sexual teaching. The lay people know better.”
Why have people stopped going to confession? Why do they think it’s not necessary? “ I think one of the conclusions that many Catholics drew from the Second Vatican Council is there’re just a lot fewer mortal sins than there used to be. So we don’t really have to confess them, and we can make a good act of contrition, as we used to say, and receive communion, and it’s fine. Part of it is just the decision that confession before communion isn’t necessary. This is a conclusion that the laity have reached. And the lower clergy have not disabused them of that notion, because they think the same thing. People still go to confession and the penitential services at Easter and Christmas. They’re very, very popular. But we realize now that we really don’t have to run to confession every Saturday afternoon if we want to receive communion on Sunday.”
What is the benefit of confession? “I can think of two benefits, and both have to do with reconciliation. One is you’ve been away for a long time, or you’ve done some terrible sins, and you want to do penance for them. You want to get them straightened out. You want to acknowledge that you were a sinner or a wanderer and eliminate that dimension from your life. For those kinds of people, the old kind of confession — maybe not in a box — is very, very helpful. It relieves a lot of stress and guilt and gives you a sense of beginning all over. For most of us, confession is a chance to be reconciled with the local community. Those priests who support the absolution services — that’s why they’re so popular, because people want to be reconciled with the community.”
Confession to a Priest. A most obvious example of works stems from the idea of weekly compulsory oral confession to a priest. They require that the penitent must name all the deliberate sins that he has committed and not previously confessed, so that the emphasis is on the list of misdeeds. Deliberately omitting to mention a deliberate sin invalidates the confession. If you honestly forget to mention one, then the confession is still valid, but you must mention that sin the next time you go to confession. In theory, this means that anyone intending to make a good confession, and honestly trying to remember all his past sins, has no cause for worry about forgetting something. In practice, many sincere and troubled penitents were frantic with worry over the possibility that they had forgotten something. He accordingly told the penitent to acknowledge that he was a sinner, in need of God's grace, and then to name the sins that he was principally aware of. It is still understood, of course, that omitting a sin because you do not repent of it and have no intention of stopping it means that you do not really wish God to be the Lord of your life, and that you have simply added a fraudulent confession to your other sins. After confessing, the penitent is instructed to work off his sins by saying repetitious prayers, the number of which correspond to the number and severity of sins confessed. Now you are “good to go” until the following week.
Writing of the papacy's desire to suppress information and ban the Bible, Roman Catholic priest and Historian John Dalberg Acton stated: “The [Roman Catholic] Council instituted the index of prohibited books, which is the fourth article in the machinery of resistance.... A congregation was appointed to examine new publications, to issue decrees against them as required, and to make out catalogues from time to time of works so condemned. Besides this, censures were also pronounced by the Pope himself, the Inquisition, the Master of the Sacred Palace, and the Secretary of the Index, separately. In this way an attempt was made to control what people read, committing to oblivion the works of Protestant scholars, and of such men as Machiavelli, and correcting offensive texts, especially historians. Several such corrected editions were published at the time, and many things were reprinted with large omissions.” (Lectures on Modern History, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, London: Macmillan, 1906).
Acton is much quoted for his statement concerning Papal infallibility, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Both Acton and his priest mentor Joseph von Döllinger opposed moves to promulgate the doctrine of Papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council. They both were associated with the Old Catholic Church, although neither became full-fledged communicants.
The term Old Catholic Church originated with groups which separated from the Roman Catholic Church over certain doctrines, primarily concerned with papal authority. The formation of the Old Catholic communion of Germans, Austrians and Swiss began in 1870 at a public meeting held in Nuremberg under the leadership of Joseph von Döllinger, following the First Vatican Council. The term "Old Catholic" was first used in 1853 to describe the members of the See of Utrecht who did not recognize any infallible papal authority. Later Catholics who disagreed with the doctrine of Papal Infallibility as made official by the First Vatican Council (1870) had no bishop and so joined with Utrecht to form the Union of Utrecht.
I’m presenting a brief sketch the inner history of Roman opposition to the infallibility dogma in different countries and several centuries, until and after the Decree of 18th July 1870. Here we see the process by which a very considerable section of Bishops, priests, and laity in the Roman Church were constrained to pass from one belief to its opposite.
Roman Catholicism's formal separation from Old Catholicism occurred over the issue of Papal authority. This separation occurred in The Netherlands in 1724, creating the first Old Catholic Church. The churches of Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland created the Union of Utrecht after Vatican I (1871) over the Dogma of Papal Infallibility. By the early 1900s, the movement included England, Canada, Croatia, France, Denmark, Italy, America, the Philippines, China, and Hungary. The American affiliate of the Union of Utrecht until recently was the Polish National Catholic Church which ceased to belong to the Union in opposition to the ordination of women by other member churches.
Malachi Brendan Martin (1921-1999), An Irish Catholic priest and writer on the Catholic Church with outstanding credentials. Bestselling author, eminent theologian, correspondent, confidant to bishops and cardinals, Vatican insider, former theological professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. In America Martin served as religious editor for National Review from 1972 to 1978, when he was succeeded by Michael Novak. He served as a guest commentator for CNN during the live coverage of the pastoral visit of John Paul II to the United States October 4–8, 1995. He was interviewed twice by William F. Buckley, Jr. for Firing Line on PBS. He was an editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica. He continued to offer Mass privately each day in the Tridentine Mass form, and vigorously exercised his priestly ministry all the way up until his death.
Martin was born in Ballylongford, County Kerry, Ireland to a middle-class family in which the children were raised speaking Irish at the dinner table. Catholic belief and practice were central; his three brothers, including Francis Xavier Martin, also became priests, two of them academics.
He was summoned to Rome to work at the Holy See as a private secretary of Cardinal Bea SJ from 1958 until 1964. This brought him into contact with Pope John XXIII. Martin's years in Rome coincided with the beginning of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), all of whose sessions he attended, and which was to transform the Catholic Church in a way that the initially liberal Martin began to find distressing. He became friends with Monsignor George Gilmary Higgins and a fellow Jesuit priest, Father John Courtney Murray.
In Rome, he became a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where he taught Aramaic, paleography, Hebrew and Sacred Scripture. He also taught theology, part-time, at Loyola University Chicago's John Felice Rome Center. During this period, his living quarters were in the Vatican, outside the papal quarters of John XXIII. He worked for the Orthodox Churches and Ancient Oriental Churches Division of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity under Cardinal Bea, as a translator. Thus, Martin became well acquainted with prominent Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Abraham Heschel. In 1961 and 1962. Martin accompanied Pope Paul VI on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in January 1964. Disillusioned by reforms, he resigned his position at the Pontifical Institute in June 1964, and asked to be released from certain of his Jesuit vows. He moved to New York City, where he later became an American citizen.
Because of Martin’s extensive background and access to much of the Vatican’s innermost workings, enabled him to established a record of accuracy that it has been called “uncanny” as he probed like an unrelenting searchlight behind the shrouds of secrecy that so far cloak the activities of the globally powerful RCC. He was the premier investigator and unraveler of the clandestine politics and unlikely alliances of popes, cardinals, bishops and priests – men who wield as much power as any worldly leader as they guide nearly a billion people in faith, and broker the destinies of countries and continents.
Of the riches of the RCC Martin says, “Three hundred billion dollars. Gold deposits that exceed those of many industrial nations. Real estate holdings larger than the total area of many countries. These are but some of the riches of the RCC. Yet millions are starving daily.”
“When Matthew ,Mark, Luke, and John spread the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ, they never could have envisioned that the institution entrusted with perpetuation of the Christian ideals of love and charity and contempt for material things would become one of the richest single entities in the world.”
“Nor, in their wildest imaginings, could those apostles have foreseen the source of much of these riches. Some exist because of the desire of the wealthy for luxury; still more, throughout history came to the church through war, terrorism ,and the destruction of human liberty.”
“Instead of helping the Third World’s starving, disease-ridden masses –over 250 million of whom are Catholics – the church, like any capitalist, seeks to increase its profit-making.”
“Since World War II, and most especially since the 1960’s, there has been a movement to divest the church of its holdings so that no cleric would have power over the management if its assets. The International Trust Fund, managed by lay people has been proposed. It would be publicly audited and have a system of checks and balances guaranteed to ensure its proper function. But such a program doesn’t have a chance in hell.”
“The Vatican has been linked in the public mind with a mind-boggling string of scandals and calamities more often found in sensational novels: big bank failures, gross embezzlements involving up to a billion dollars; protracted public trials; assassinations and attempted assassinations of police, judiciary and clerical officials; eerily symbolic suicides; defenestations; counterfeiting of corporate securities; parliamentary investigations without any conclusions; government inquiry boards without any issue; ruination of local economies and of small investors; International money intrigue involving Eurodollars and fiduciary accounts in trans-continental tax havens; the activities of organized crime; and armaments traffic in favor of certain strong-man regimes in the Third World.”
“Throughout, the name of the Catholic Church has been linked rightly or wrongly with impressive sums of money.”
“By implication, the three popes who have reigned during those years – Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II (if not their immediate predecessors), John XXIII and Pius XII, together with their colleagues and associates in the Catholic Church throughout the world – have all been linked with these lurid scandals.”
The Experience of a lifetime
In the previous pages I have presented views of the RCC from the experience of its own insiders.(priests of the church). When one gives careful thought to the pronouncements given by those priests, it becomes clear what we have here is an apostate church under the influence of Satan.
In the following pages I will present my viewpoint of the RCC as a layperson, derived from a lifetime of experience. What I present here is an account of the RCC as I personally witnessed it over a period of eight decades(a lifetime by most standards). Are my viewpoints and opinions without bias? Hardly! However, what is written here is a truthful record as I lived it. One may take issue on some points, but none of what I have to say can be rejected out of hand without distorting what is a first-person source. I may be accused of embellishment at times, but never a liar.
My becoming a member of the Catholic Church cannot be considered a “conversion,” but more an acquiescence. After attending the prescribed RCIA program I simply “joined” my wife in the Church. I was confirmed during the service of Easter Vigil in 1995. On the surface there was nothing ethereal or inspirational about it, yet I firmly believe this was all done under the prayerful guidance of the Holy Spirit. It was all part of my continuing personal effort to obey the command of Jesus to be “born again.” Joining a community of believers is essential to the command to be born again. I could have just as easily joined the Baptists, or rejoined the Lutherans,--but I joined the Catholic Church mainly to placate my wife Bette, “a cradle-Catholic,” and to demonstrate “action” and “decision” on returning to a Christian community. Apostate or not at its head, the Roman Catholic Church, like the old Corinthians, is still a Christian community.
I admit, that it is a great disgrace if a child of God chooses to live among apostates; much more, if the sacred Body of Christ is prostituted to them. But though the Catholic Church fails in her duty, it does not therefore follow that every private individual is to decide the question of separation for himself. It is one thing to shun the society of the wicked, and another to renounce the communion of a church through hatred of them.
Those who think it sacrilege to partake of the Lord’s bread and wine with the apostate are in this more rigid than the Apostle Paul. I see the Catholic Mass as a perversion of Scripture, but it does embrace the Gospel of Paul when it recognizes the death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ. For when Paul exhorts us to pure and holy communion, he does not require that we should examine others, or that everyone should examine the whole Church, but that we should only examine ourself (1 Cor. 11:28,29). If it were unlawful to communicate with the unworthy, Paul would certainly have ordered us to take heed that there were no individuals in the whole body by whose impurity might be defiled, but now he only shows that it does no harm for us to participate though some who are unworthy are present among his saints.
Even though in the administration of Word and sacraments, where defects may creep in, it should not cause to alienate us from its communion. We are not on account of every minute difference to let this prevent us from participating. Jesus found the Pharisees apostate in much of what they did, but He continued to participate every Sabbath in the synagogue. And we note that the Apostle Paul did not abandon the Corinthians, the whole of which had become tainted. He greeted them as brothers.
Scandal in the Church is no occasion for avoiding it. All denominations contain a mixture of good and bad. Jesus in one of his parables compares the Church to a net in which all kinds of fishes are taken, but not separated until they are brought to shore. If the Lord declares that the Church will labor under the defect of being burdened with those who pervert it until the day of judgment, it is in vain to look for a Church altogether free from blemish(Matthew 13).
When I started this work I had not yet made a decision to join the Catholic Church. It was only after much soul searching and changes brought about by Vatican II that I found I could join without compromising my true beliefs, although I doubt that anyone would conclude that I was a “Roman Catholic.”
These few pages are a summary of my life experience now speaking as a recognized member of the Roman Catholic Church. From personal experience and research I recognize that my life experience is typical of tens of thousands of American Roman Catholics. On the basis of such knowledge it is within my prerogative to carry out an assessment of Catholicism.
All through grade and high school I learned a great deal about the Catholic Church from very close friends(both boys and girls), several of whom I was closely associated with for more than twelve years. We were forever comparing notes about our respective religious experience. I learned from them exactly how they participated in this one Catholic church in our hometown. A few of the boys were altar boys for several years. One of them entered the priesthood. They all attended catechism, but as to specific knowledge concerning church doctrine, we were all about on the same level(virtually nil). Most of our knowledge on church matters came from our parents. The one thing that stood out for me was their “going to a priest for confession,” every Saturday morning. They all said it was a matter of rote, requiring saying several Hail Marys and Our Fathers as penance. They were taught from childhood that confession was the only safe way to escape mortal sin. My wife Bette told me that as a child, “we were never certain of our ‘perfection’ until we had received the forgiveness of the priest. We were taught that there was no place else to go.” They were well indoctrinated in the concept of “works.” There were hundreds of formula to follow, mostly with prayers that would shorten one’s time in Purgatory. None of them said they ever saw a Bible in their home.
After college I married Bette, a Roman Catholic Girl. Over the years Bette and I talked about her childhood. Through the guidance of her mother, Bette was raised in a strict Catholic family tradition. For example, she remembers on the day of her first communion she drank some water while brushing her teeth. When her mother found out what she had done, Bette said she almost had a fit. It wasn’t settled until her mother called her priest brother and he told her it was O.K. to go to communion. A priest always had the last word.
Bette said all she really knew about being a catholic she got from her mother. She said if she wanted to know anything about religion she would ask her mother who was very well versed in things catholic, and if her mother didn’t know she would call her priest brother. Other than that she didn’t have a clue. They didn’t own a Bible, and whatever her mother said was law.
Her Mother graduated from Catholic grade and high schools, and Bette’s mother’s brother was an ordained Catholic Priest. Of course we interacted with both of them regularly until they passed away.
Bette’s priest uncle had a pretty, old-maid housekeeper, named Agness—they were both about the same age. I viewed Agness as the epitome of servitude and devotion to her church and to her calling. As far as we could tell she had no long-range goals. She lived at the priest house and she travelled with him wherever he went. She doted on him, and they were never apart until he died. I met them many times while they spent their annual summer vacations together at the parent farm. All of Bette’s family had a wink and a smile of approval when they talked about that couple.
Bette also had a first cousin her age who became a Maryknoll priest. He was very close to Bette’s family, and we knew him well. He was sent to Korea, and after a few years he left the priesthood to marry a Korean woman. After returning to America they had a son. Years later they separated but never divorced.
After our marriage I did not attend any church at that time. Our three children attended the local parochial school. After our children grew up only our oldest daughter remained in the Catholic faith, but divorced. Our youngest daughter married twice. She first married a Catholic man and the marriage was annuled. She then remarried to another Catholic man who graduated from a Catholic university, but they left the church when they said they were forced to sign a paper saying they would have children and raise them Catholic, which neither of them would sign. They attend no church. Our son married a Methodist woman. Neither of them attend church on a regular basis. Their two children were raised Methodist, but neither attended church.
Bette and I retired to a small town in northern Wisconsin, and I began a serious study of theology. Then I attended the prescribed RCIA course leading to church membership(see the Prologue). After that I joined Bette at Sunday Mass on a regular basis. Bette was very active in all aspects of church work. She became a lector in the church reading the gospels at Mass every four to five weeks, and assisted at communion. Bette and I were asked to join a small Christian community consisting of about a dozen church members, most of whom were educated professionals, teachers, and the like, but all were “cradle Catholics.” We met monthly on Sunday evenings in private homes on a round robin basis. We carried out serious discussions on a wide variety of church topics, then closed the meeting with a social hour. We belonged to that group for about 20 years. They still carry on without Bette and me.
During those 20 years with that small Christian Community I learned a great deal about serious, intelligent, died-in-the-wool cradle catholics, They bared their souls on all manner of topics pertaining to the catholic faith, and the local catholic community. None of it went by me as they talked freely about things they would never bring up outside that group, and I asked a lot of questions. It was interesting, because they were all aware of my previous Protestant background, and they knew of my interest in theology. Because of this, they held me up as some sort of guru when we dealt with the more difficult subjects. There is a tad of irony here, because I learned more from the group, than they learned from me. I was sort of a “mouse in the corner.”
So, what did I learn? None were sure of their salvation. I found this weighs heavily on every catholic I have come in contact with. Bette has come to terms with this problem(almost). She wants to believe what I believe on this question, but she had been so indoctrinated that when walked through the Scripture that says otherwise, she is still “on the fence.” She herself knows that if you can’t change your mind about anything you may forever be locked in a lie, but coming to terms with a lie is sometimes near impossible. Satan knows this, and he is the master of the lie.
Why are catholics taught they can never be sure of their salvation? Since the Bible teaches there is no need for the priest, the Catholic Church could not permit that. In Catholic theology you are not permitted to have assurance. There is always the element of uncertainty. Assurance is never on the agenda because the presence of free-will and good works as Catholic teaching rules it out. The laity was made totally dependent on the priesthood for salvation. In our small Christian community, the subject of God's "priests" and God's "laity" surfaced time and time again. Although the New Testament says nothing about the subject as it is usually thought of, just a little over one hundred years after the last apostle died, the bishops of the church in each community began exerting unscriptural power. The result: after continuing to assume power not rightfully theirs, the church leaders eventually placed themselves above the laity. During this period the laity became more and more dependent upon the clergy for access to God's favor. And as time went on the hierarchy invented more and more ways to separate the priest from the laity, until finally, the laity believed they could not possibly achieve salvation except through a priest and the church. One more success for Satan.
This absolute power of priests goes directly to the concept of “Catholic guilt” which has become a cliché, a joke, but it is real. The average Catholic learns from his youth the agony of guilt. For my wife Bette it has raised its ugly head for years. I witnessed evidence of that in almost all of the members of our Christian Community group. For many who experienced Catholic childhood religious indoctrination, Catholic guilt is a pernicious and inescapable burden with serious lifelong repercussions. Bette says “I cannot rid myself of it, it was a dark aspect of my childhood: that we are unworthy, that we cannot do anything right, that we do not deserve to be happy, that we will always be sinners who will end up in Purgatory. Where is Heaven for those of us who grew up with this indoctrination; it is hard to keep one’s faith.” Catholic childhood religious indoctrination is never seen for what it is: for its emotional and
psychological abuse. We had to remove our son from parochial school because he couldn’t cope. After he left he was just fine and became a good student; a successful adult and family man.
In Summary
The bottom line is that the Roman Catholic Church became the outlet for the god of this world. Satan is so ingrained and established that even the key players(the church hierarchy)are unapologetic. They are either unaware or downright ignorant of their complicity. The laity are innocent bystanders totally and forever locked in. Only God will judge them. Only God has a plan greater than Satan, and we know “Thy Will be Done.”
If anyone would like to comment or correspond, my email: georgedfoss@gmail.com