Catholics. Catholicism. Wtf? -- LiveWire Teen Forums

Well this was a little amusing to read.

oh wait you forgot the best part... theyre not allowed to read their own holy word.. lol why do i need some OLD fart to tell me what "God" has allready had written down for man to interperet(sp)? i can read just as well as the next person if not better

This works if you're living in the twelfth century. The modern Catholic is allowed and even encouraged to read the Scripture. I visited a Catholic mass several years ago where the priest said from the pulpit (and I paraphrase) 'The new Bible study group is starting this coming Sunday. Come and join so when your Protestants quote from scripture, you know where it is.' Your accusation is undoubtedly one born out of prejudice since it obviously has no basis in fact.

Now for the OP:

They confess to a priest in a box...I'm alittle confused about the confessing thing because there's not supposed to be a go between with you and God... but whatever.

They confess to a priest because the Bible tells people to confess to other Christians. For example James 2:16:

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.

Confession to a priest doesn't replace confession to God, it supplements it. As a Christian, you should be confessing to some other Christian anyway. Catholics fulfill this command of Scripture by confessing to a priest in confidentiality. It's actually a really good system in my opinion, since most Christians ignore this command anyway.

They pray to Mary and Joseph and zillions of other people.

They don't pray to them. They pray through them. They are asking the saints to pray for them. It's like when you ask your friends or family to pray for you. They are just expanding the base of support. They'd look at you and say, why would you only ask your living family to pray for you?

Why saints you might ask. They'd go back to the passage I just quoted from James, the rest of which says that the prayer of a righteous man has great effect. What proof is there that the dead can petition God? They'd turn to Revelation 6:9-10.

I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?"

In fact, scripturally, the only people depicted as being in heaven, able to speak to God before the judgment are the martyrs (in the Catholic view, this includes most saints).

They have statues.

Catholic statuary is a carry-over from the Middle Ages when literacy was basically non-existent. They were meant to tell the Bible stories in a language that people could understand. Catholics don't worship statues. They never pray to them, sing to them, etc. Many bow before the cross, but they will argue that they are bowing before God and not that image. Personally, I don't like this practice or even the practice of making images (I'm very Islamic in that sense), but that's how they would talk about it.

Jesus is the only child to them, supposedly. Mary's a virgin.

The Mary cult is one of the hardest things for me to swallow about Catholicism. I haven't done the study on this issue, but a lot of the veneration of Mary appears to spring out of Christological issues and the views of sex in late antiquity. It's complicated, but basically because the early church developed a low view of sex and because the character of Mary was so closely tied to the character of Jesus they had to find a way for Mary to have always been a virgin. Now, the Mary cult has evolved to the point that Mary herself was immaculately conceived and bodily assumed into heaven.

They cross themselves.

Crossing oneself is just a continual reminder of the cross. The origin of the practice is unknown, but it dates back to at least the mid-second century. If you want to attack a tradition, this one will be hard to overturn. It has 18 centuries of practice behind it. It existed before the New Testament had been universally canonized.

I'm not a Catholic, but I get annoyed when people call Catholics strange or odd. People need to realize that there form of Christianity is brand spankin' new in the grand scheme of things and there group is still in the noticeable minority compared to Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Catholics are the largest Christian group in America and the largest Christian group in the world. They're not right about everything. They're wrong about a lot. But one thing they have is a rich history of complex theology to explain their practice. If you have a problem with something they are doing, you better have more than that it seems strange to you because your practice is the historical and numerical anomaly, not theirs.

-------
"It is the wrong question to ask, and therefore, as one might expect, has
no right answer." - Hans von Campenhausen

This is the philosophy of my life.

573 users online 186991 members 731 active today Advertise Here