Lord Jesus, let
Your prayer of unity for Christians
become a reality, in Your way.
We have absolute confidence
that you can bring your people together,
we give you absolute permission to move.
Amen
I have been at the pc all day. Don't know why I sometimes do this to myself because it is very tiring. I forgot I had pledged to fast from my pc every Thursay!
Below is the result of my labours! Who will read it? Will anyone read it? Will anyone who does read it leave a comment?
Over the years, I have been given an understanding that it
is part of my vocation - which is primarily that of being a wife and mother - to
defend the Church, founded by Christ, against the misunderstandings and
downright lies, of non-Catholics of every other belief and none. By doing this, I am talking about Christ
because I am telling the doubters they will find the full truth about Him
within the Catholic Church which faithfully preserved the copies of the Old
Testament that Jesus and the Apostles used; faithfully preserved the new
writings coming out in the first century by the Apostles,; eventually put all
the books of the Bible together in the format we have it today; and was
super-vigilant to protect new editions of it once the printing press made it
easier to disseminate. This wonderful
institution founded by Our Lord Himself which preaches Christ at every Mass and
in every other possible way has been under demonic attack for two thousand
years, and will always be under attack, but Christ promised it His eternal
protection.
By defending the
Church, I invite others to look into it, to read correct versions of our Bible,
(there are error-filled versions around so one has to know the difference); to
learn about all the Sacraments Jesus gave us, the full knowledge of which was
handed down by the apostles via the Church Fathers; to learn about all the
Sacraments Jesus gave us, the full knowledge of which was handed down by the
apostles via the Church Fathers; to study what are really our doctrines - not
what non-Roman Catholics say are our doctrines; to encourage them to read
interesting books and articles about the Faith; to read about converts to the
Faith, especially the world famous ones; to understand why we venerate Saints,
and so on and so forth. As a point in question: non-Roman Catholic Christians insist we are idolaters who worship Mary and other Saints - because they are parroting what they have been taught through the literature of their own institutions that broke away from the Mother Church of Christianity in the 16th Century. Catholic devotion to the Saints is NOT and NEVER, NEVER has been preached as essential for salvation. NO ROMAN CATHOLIC IS OBLIGED TO VENERATE MARY OR ANY OTHER SAINT. The majority of us do so because we want to. These devotions are inspirational and they keep us close to God. But there are Catholics who are not interested in these devotions.
Protestants today make Marian devotion an issue by using it
as one of many excuses to not actually look at what the Church teaches is
necessary for salvation. Now, on that we
can debate. Interestingly, Luther never
refuted Our Lady’s standing though he refuted the Church’s authority to make it
an article of faith that she was assumed.
Luther’s assumption was that he knew better than the Church, who under
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit had preserved this truth which it received about
Mary’s assumption via the Church Fathers.
Nowhere has the Church taught that venerating Saints, saying
the Rosary, and loving Mary as our spiritual mother is essential to
salvation. I am sorry there are people
who cannot accept this. I always invite
them to please read the Catechism with a trust-worthy Bible in the other
hand. (That means a Bible with the same
books in it that all Christians used up till the time of the so-called
Reformation.)
I personally do have a devotion to the Saints, especially to
Mary. In the Jewish tradition, by the
way, the King’s mother had an equal social standing to the King and ruled in
his stead when he was away. My devotions
consolidate my belief in and my love for Jesus whom I have loved since I was
about five years old. They increase my
desire for the Sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist. I only began to pray the Rosary when I was 46
years old and it was when I began to do this that my desire to read and
understand better the Scriptures developed.
I pretty quickly learned that reading the Scriptures on my own was a
waste of time. I needed an authoritative
teacher, and that had to be the one that preserved and put the Bible together.
A key Protestant misconception about Catholicism came into
the world via a Muslim vizier called Ibn Khazem in Cordoba in the 11th
Century: this is the conviction that the Catholic Church changed the true
teaching of Jesus and the Apostles at the Council of Nicea. Today, Muslims say that Jesus was an Islamist
prophet and His disciples were proto-Muslims.
Before Ibn Khazem, Muslims accepted the historic validity of the Bible
as a holy book of a specific group of people, Christians. They did not accept Christian interpretation
of Christ’s divinity and human nature, but they did not deny the validity of
their books. Centuries afterwards,
Protestants said we added on teachings that were not there before.
What the Council actually did after a fair debate was to
affirm the CORRECT teachings of Christ’s divinity and His human nature, against
the new heresy of a Catholic bishop, Arius, which was gaining ground in the 4th
Century. People like Arius were losing
the Faith! He was dragging the weak and
ignorant after him! Of course the Church
had to do something about that! In fact,
Arianism submerged and destroyed the Church in many areas for years but Christ
was in charge, He had made His promise about protecting the Church and He kept
it. That particular “deluge” served to
strengthen the Church and to clarify the meaning of particular Scriptural
references so that Arius and all future Ariuses were confounded. All such “spiritual deluges” that occur over
the centuries, caused by the weak human beings who are part of the Body of
Christ, eventually strengthen the Church.
Posted later on the same day: I have
been thinking about authority. The big problem within the non-Catholic
Christian community towards Catholicism is a dislike of authority so profound
that it will not even accept that God Himself could have chosen to set up an
authoritative institution here on earth! Despite Matthew 16:18-19 and other
verses.
I am in favour of dialogue, i.e:
ecumenism, because it is important that the Truth is made available to all who
are talking to each other. That does not mean the Catholic Church must deny her
God-given Sacraments, for example, but should be allowed explain to others why
she knows them to be such. Nor does she need to apologise for promoting
veneration of Mary and the Saints since her historical documents show that the
very first Christians had these devotions.
In the first eleven centuries, there
were only Christians. Europe was called Christendom and Christians believed all
the doctrines of the Catholic Church. All accepted all the Sacraments. All had
devotions of one tradition or another to Mary and the Saints. The Arian heresy
of the 4th Century was the first serious shredder of Christ's Body. In the 11th
Century the Schism between eastern Christians and western Christians added to
Its Wounds. Incidentally, the problems of those eastern Christians were not
connected to veneration of Mary and other Saints, or to infant baptism, or to
changes in Scripture, but to the disagreement about the place of the Holy
Spirit within the unity of the Godhead as expressed in the Creed - in other
words a disagreement about the UNDERSTANDING of specific texts about the Holy
Spirit - which became a handy excuse to break away when the geo-political
conflicts became overwhelming.
Here is a partial list of some of
the movements that broke away either from Catholic Chritianity or from one
another, and if you read about them from informed sources you will see how
their reasons conflict one with the other: Arians, Monophisites, Nestorians,
Cathars, Greek and Russian Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglo-Catholics,
Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Free Church, Pentecostals, Unitarians,
Christian Scientists, Christadelphians and so on and so on. Someone did a
computer count of the Christian churches outside the Catholic Church which have
split off from one another and there are apparently more than thirty thousand
and counting. How can every individual pastor be correct in his interpretation
of the Scriptures?
I had a message
from X today, 26th Sept 2013, saying I talk only about the
Church and not about Jesus.
This was my response:
Yes, X, I do talk about
the Church a lot. It is necessary
because I am always being confronted with hostility towards “The Church”. But when my personal contact is listening to
me on the street, I start by talking to him about Jesus, and Jesus’ love for
him. I give him prayer cards to
encourage the start of a prayer life so that he will be drawn to Jesus. I encourage him to buy or borrow a Bible and
to read it, and I give him links to websites to help him understand and think
about what he is reading.
P.S: I know Protestants
who are very sincere Christians within the narrow confines of their
beliefs, but the movement whose followers came to be called Protestants
was an evil heresy which scourged the Body of Christ and divided it, much
as the earlier heresy of Arius had done in the 4th Century. Within a
couple of years of the start of Luther breaking away from the Church,
there were several different groups who disagreed with him as well as
with the Church, and today, there are thousands of "churches"
that have differences of opinion one with the other. The Body of Christ
of which Jesus is the Head is the Catholic Church because Christ's Body
cannot be divided. To think otherwise is to deny Christ's power to
protect it and to deny his prayer, "Father, may they be one."
The response of X to me:
Do you not realize that you are
hostile towards those you call protestants? Do you not realize that you
are always attacking non-Catholics? Many of the things you say about
"protestants" is complete nonsense and comes from pure
ignorance. The more you go on the more I realize how wrong it all is. You
have made me see that. But you know, I am fully confident that the Lord
will one day vindicate those you are always attacking, and that you are
in for a big shock. So I will leave it there, I should have done that
long ago as another wiser person did. May your eyes be opened to see the
truth and may you love and not hate those whom God loves and who belong
to Him and who are His children. The Bible tells us to love the brethren,
you do not.
My reply to X:
Dear X, if you want to tell me that I am
writing "nonsense" you have to specify which sentence or paragraph is
nonsense so that I am given the chance to respond otherwise you are wasting
your time as well as my own. I may be saying things about your belief system
which annoy you but I am not attacking you as an individual. You may be annoyed
with the arguments I raise against your arguments, but in debates that is
permitted. As far as loving one’s brethren goes, your own language does not
suggest love of me or of Catholics generally. Quite the opposite! Please do
“walk away”, and be at peace.
In fairness, though, please remember that on my own FB, and on the FB pages of my real-life RC friends, I am free to post websites and messages that support our beliefs and to defend the Catholic Church against the postings of anyone writes against it. I do not go into your FB to deliberately offend you; I cannot even remember the last time I went onto your Timeline. And you are not obliged to read anything that comes onto your pages with my name on it. If you are tempted, hit the button on the top right of the posting which will delete it. Out of sight, out of mind J. But I will always stand up to anything you write against the True Faith if it comes into my FB via a friend’s FB. God bless you.
In fairness, though, please remember that on my own FB, and on the FB pages of my real-life RC friends, I am free to post websites and messages that support our beliefs and to defend the Catholic Church against the postings of anyone writes against it. I do not go into your FB to deliberately offend you; I cannot even remember the last time I went onto your Timeline. And you are not obliged to read anything that comes onto your pages with my name on it. If you are tempted, hit the button on the top right of the posting which will delete it. Out of sight, out of mind J. But I will always stand up to anything you write against the True Faith if it comes into my FB via a friend’s FB. God bless you.
This was not posted though I was sorely tempted. It is painful to hear the words,
"idolators", "child abusers", "down-treaders of the
poor", and similar insults said to one in encounter after encounter with
the Evangelicals and Pentecostals I meet.
The abuse starts from these particular Christians the moment I tell
them, "Hello. I am a Catholic and I
would like to share my Faith with you."
I never return the rudeness but I try to show them their understanding
of us is wrong. However, they rarely
listen even for a few moments and have a way of talking fast that does not
permit one to interrupt in response to a statement. Time after time, I have to smile and say God
bless you and walk away. I have had gargoyle
faces pulled when I mention my Faith, I have heard the expression
"Ugh! Don't talk to
her/them!" That is hostility.
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