12/12/2018 Spanning continents and centuries, Our Lady’s message is clear. (Part 3)

Jeanette Flood
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/12/12/spanning-continents-and-centuries-our-ladys-message-is-clear/?
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/flood-jeanette/


Reasons for Hope

Our Lady’s dire predictions are conditional, and she gives reasons to hope.

As Our Lady of America, she has said: “What happens to the world depends upon those who live in it.

There must be much more good than evil prevailing in order to prevent the holocaust that is so near approaching.”

At Kibeho: “Do not forget that God is more powerful than all the evil in the world.”


At San Nicolás:

“Those who stay in the Lord have nothing to fear,” and, “Just as in the Calvary after the crucifixion and death came the resurrection, also the Church will resurge again by the force of love.”


And, of course, at Fatima:

“In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

The messages and results of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s apparitions are also great reasons for hope.

She appeared in a land where human sacrifice had long been and was still surreptitiously being practiced, and she left behind an image not only miraculously produced but rich in both theological truths and cultural significance.

The image recalls Revelation’s “woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”
(Rev 12: 1;

According to the position of the star map on her mantle, the constellation known as the “Boreal Crown” would be above her head), and at the same time has a special meaning for Aztec viewers.

She blocks the sun, which played a critical role in their civilization, but does not extinguish it, for its rays still shine all around her.

She stands on the moon, showing that she is greater than their moon god. Her eyes are looking down, indicating that she is not a god—as their gods were always depicted looking straight ahead.

She wears a black sash indicating she is pregnant, and the cuffs on her sleeves show she is royal.

Though there had been peace for 10 years, the Aztecs were planning a rebellion shortly before the apparition, and many of them viewed Christianity as a foreign religion irrelevant to themselves.

(The cruelty of such Spaniards as the governor, who had been excommunicated by the bishop for it, was counter-evangelical as well.)

But when the Aztecs heard of the miracles and saw the image—the Mother of God appearing as an Aztec to an Aztec—their hearts were changed. Her loving words also made an impact:

I am the ever-virgin, holy Mary, Mother of the true God: the life-giving Creator of all people;

The Lord of what is near and far, of heaven and earth. I deeply desire that a chapel be built to me here where I can show, praise and testify to him forever.

Here I will give people all my love, compassion, help, comfort and salvation.

For I am truly your compassionate Mother: your Mother and Mother to all who dwell in this land …

Here I will hear their cries and listen to their complaints. Here I will console them in their suffering and relieve their pain.

Here I will heal them in their anguish, their affliction and distress.

Nearly nine million converted in only a decade.

These words of Our Lady of Guadalupe are for us too today, in all places and all times, for she also called herself the Mother “to all other nations and peoples who love me and call and entreat me.

I am the Mother of all who seek me and place their trust in me.”

(End Part 3)

12/12/2018 Spanning continents and centuries, Our Lady’s message is clear. (Part 2)

Jeanette Flood
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/12/12/spanning-continents-and-centuries-our-ladys-message-is-clear/?
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/flood-jeanette/


Our Lady of the Rosary at San Nicolás (1983-1990):

The apparitions in San Nicolás, Argentina, began in 1983 to an uneducated housewife and grandmother, Gladys Quiroga de Motta, and are said to continue to this day.[2]

The visions have been accompanied by allegedly miraculous signs, including healings and Gladys’ repeated experiences of the stigmata (verified as scientifically inexplicable by physicians).

In 2016, the local bishop deemed the apparitions from 1983 to 1990 to be “worthy of belief.”

Later messages, since they  are ongoing, are still under investigation.


Common Themes

While these Marian apparitions occurred on four different continents, in some cases several centuries ago, and while they each have unique facets, they share some common themes which are particularly pertinent to our situation today.


Widespread sin

Four centuries ago, Our Lady of Good Success in Quito painted an accurate picture of our day:

“The sacrament of Matrimony…will be thoroughly attacked and profaned,” “iniquitous laws” will be implemented making it “easy for all to live in sin, thus multiplying the birth of illegitimate children.”

And evil groups would find “ways of introducing themselves into the very heart of homes to corrupt the innocence of children.” 

She also predicted, “In those times the atmosphere will be saturated with the spirit of impurity.”


Our Lady of America came shortly before the sexual revolution, stressing purity.

“I desire that my children honor me by the purity of their lives,” she reportedly said, asking them to be her “army of chaste soldiers” and to comfort her by “the love and chasteness of your lives.”

She even said, “I desire, through my children in America, to further the cause of faith and purity among peoples and nations.”

(See “Knights of Columbus on Our Lady of America.”)
https://catholicsouthernfront.wordpress.com/knights-of-columbus-on-our-lady-of-america/


On a broader scale, Our Lady of Kibeho said in 1982:

“The world is in rebellion against God. Many sins are being committed.

There is no love and no peace.

If you do not repent and convert your hearts, you will all fall into an abyss.”


(See The Messages of Kibeho.)
www.miraclehunter.com/marian_apparitions/messages/kibeho_messages.html

Similarly, in San Nicolás in the 1980s, Our Lady is reported to have said,

“The majority of mankind has allowed itself to become contaminated and as a result the world is under a warning.”

(See Newly Approved Vision of San Nicolás.)
https://churchpop.com/2016/05/23/secret-messages-lady-san-nicolas-newly-approved-vision/



Wolves in the Church

More specifically, the Blessed Mother foretold the corruption of some clerics.

At Quito, she predicted: “The devil will work to persecute the ministers of the Lord in every way, working with baneful cunning to destroy the spirit of their vocation and corrupting many.

Those who will thus scandalize the Christian flock will bring upon all priests the hatred of bad Christians and the enemies of the One, Holy, Roman Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

This apparent triumph of Satan will cause enormous suffering to the good pastors of the Church.”



Similarly, Our Lady of Akita prophesied:

“The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops.

The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres…churches and altars sacked;

The Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.”

In a recent article on Our Lady of America, who spoke so much of purity, Father Stanley Smolenski wondered,

“Is our present dilemma due to a lack of proper attention and response to this message given about 60 years ago?”

He encouraged the laity to pray that any obstacle to its full approval be removed and to ask our bishops to consider fulfilling her request to install her statue in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.[4]


Dire warnings

All these private revelations also give dire predictions for our times, due to widespread sinfulness and lack of faith, and urge prayer and reform.

Our Lady of Quito concluded her depiction of prevailing impurity in our times with:

“There shall be scarcely any virgin souls in the world.…Without virginity, fire from heaven will be needed to purify these lands.”

Our Lady of America warned of “a great havoc of war and incredible suffering” coming upon all nations, if people don’t reform their lives.

She gave a very broad hint what form punishment might take:

“If my warnings are taken seriously and enough of my children strive constantly and faithfully to renew and reform themselves in their inward and outward lives, then there will be no nuclear war.”

Our Lady of Akita gave a very similar warning on Oct. 13, 1973:

“If men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity.“
It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful.

The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead.

The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son.”

Alarming too are the words of Our Lady of Kibeho:

“Repent, repent, repent! Convert while there is still time.”

And: “The time remaining is short and you are absent-minded. You are distracted by the goods of this world which are passing….

Don’t lose Heaven for the world.” Lest we think she was addressing only Rwanda about the then-coming genocide, she explained, “If I am turning to the parish of Kibeho, it does not mean that I am concerned only for Kibeho or for the Diocese of Butare or for Rwanda, or for the whole of Africa.

I am concerned with and turning to the whole world.”

Our Lady’s warnings at San Nicolás are consistent with those above: “God’s warning is over the world.…

Two-thirds of the world is lost, and the other part must pray and make reparation for the Lord to take pity.…

The earth is in great danger.”

And “At these moments all humanity is hanging by a thread.

If the thread breaks, many will be those who do not reach salvation.

That is why I call you to reflection.

Hurry because time is running out…!”

Jesus is said to have told Gladys at San Nicolás, “If this generation will not listen to my mother, it will perish.

I ask everyone to listen to her. Man’s conversion is necessary.”


What Mary asks us to do

A golden thread running through all these Marian apparitions is her request for her children to pray, especially to pray the Rosary.

As at Fatima, she begs us to pray for the conversion of sinners.

She also asks that we pray for clergy and for the family.


At Quito, Mary said: “Pray constantly, implore tirelessly, … beseeching the Eucharistic Heart of my most holy Son to take pity on His ministers and to end as soon as possible these unhappy times.”

And at San Nicolás,“
https://www.sign.org/articles/marys-stern-warning-chastisements-approved

The weapon that has the greatest influence on evil is to say the Rosary.”

To fight the evil in the world, she said that there should be special devotion to the Holy Rosary and perpetual novenas, “never interrupted.”

Other common themes are the need to reform our lives, fast, and perform acts of penance.

Finally, she encourages us to have faith and to trust in God no matter what and focus on what really matters, the salvation of souls.


(End Part 2)

12/12/2018 Spanning continents and centuries, Our Lady’s message is clear. (Part 1)

Jeanette Flood
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/12/12/spanning-continents-and-centuries-our-ladys-message-is-clear/?
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/flood-jeanette/


At various times and places, the Blessed Mother has communicated to her children on Earth the need for repentance and trust in God’s mercy.

In the last several days, the Church has celebrated both the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (December 8) and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (December 12).

This makes it particularly fitting to consider the times God has sent the Queen of Heaven to Earth to warn, guide, and help us.

True, not every alleged Marian apparition is authentic; in fact, most are not.

The Catholic Church upholds stringent norms in investigating of such matters, and only a small percentage of the hundreds of claimed Marian apparition gain Church approval.

(See my 2017 Fatima centenary article in Catholic World Report.)
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/10/06/fatima-spectacular-signs-for-a-skeptical-age/


There are varying degrees of Church approval of apparations; they are:

Partial: allowance for the devotion (e.g., prayers, medals, Masses at the site) after determining that the purported messages are not contrary to the faith;
Full: usually when the local bishop officially declares the apparition “worthy of belief”; and
Extraordinary: the Holy See is not usually involved, but rarely, various forms of Vatican recognition are also given.


However, the faithful are not obliged to believe fully- or even Vatican-approved apparitions, since they are “private revelations,” rather than Church doctrines—the latter being based on the public revelation of Jesus Christ passed on by the Apostles.

While approved visits from the Mother of God differ from each other, they also have certain commonalities, particularly the fact that they always directs mankind to God:

Mary implores us to honor the Father and imitate her Son by relying on the Holy Spirit.


Appearances particularly relevant to our day

There are several private Marian revelations with partial or full ecclesiastical approval that speak amazingly to our times.

First a brief chronological overview of these apparitions and their credibility, with links to more information.
Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531)

One of the most powerful and convincing of all Marian apparitions is that of Our Lady of Guadalupe, when the Blessed Mother appeared to Juan Diego, one of the few Aztec Catholic converts in newly conquered Mexico.

She requested a chapel to be built; to convince the bishop that the apparition was authentic, she asked Juan Diego to cut roses that were miraculously growing at the site, in a season and place where they never grew.

She arranged the gathered roses in his tilma—an Aztec-style cloak with swaths of cloth front and back. When he unfurled the tilma to display the roses, a bigger miracle was revealed—the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared on the tilma.

Though a tilma, being made of cactus fibers, usually lasted about 20 years before crumbling, Juan Diego’s tilma is still extant today, though it has been almost perpetually on display, often in the presence of lit candles, for 500 years.

Scientists cannot explain the origin of the image—which consists of no-known pigments, has no sketch underneath or any brushstrokes. Moreover, more recent technology has revealed curved reflections of figures (thought to be Juan Diego and the bishop) in the Lady’s eyes, exactly as they would appear in real human eyes beholding other people.

The arrangement of stars on her cloak matches the pattern of stars of that date in that place, seen from above (see MiracleHunter’s timeline of Guadalupe).
www.miraclehunter.com/marian_apparitions/approved_apparitions/guadalupe/index.html

The apparition has received multiple forms of Vatican and papal recognition, one of only 15 Marian apparitions to receive any Vatican acknowledgment.
www.miraclehunter.com/marian_apparitions/approved_apparitions/vatican.html


The Church celebrates the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12.

Our Lady of Good Success, Quito, Ecuador (1594-1634):


Mary appeared under this title to an Ecuadoran nun, Mother Mariana, granting numerous miracles and giving many predictions for Ecuador and the world, not only for Mother Mariana’s day but even for later centuries.

Many have already been fulfilled.

The bishop at the time gave his approval and established a feast in honor of Our Lady of Good Success.

When Mother Mariana’s tomb was opened, three centuries after her death, her body and habit were incorrupt.
Our Lady of America (1956-1957):


The apparitions of Our Lady of America have received partial approval. Sister Mary Ephrem (later Mildred Mary Neuzil) reported to her spiritual director, then-Monsignor Paul Francis Leibold, that Mary appeared to her under this title with messages and warnings for the US.

After carefully reviewing Leibold’s letters and actions, Cardinal Raymond Burke determined they clearly demonstrate Leibold’s belief in these events as authentic and that he promoted and approved the devotion to Our Lady of America.

The messages were not found to be contrary to the Catholic faith and were given Leibold’s imprimatur in booklets published in 1960 and 1971.

Leibold became archbishop of Cincinnati, but it was not under his jurisdiction to approve the messages and apparitions.

They are currently under investigation. Thomas Paprocki, bishop of Springfield, Illinois, is the procurator-advocate for the bishops of the dioceses related to the reported apparitions and messages of Our Lady of America;

He himself seems open and favorable to them; he led a public prayer to Our Lady of America in 2017 and encourages others to ask for her intercession.
https://www.ourladyofamerica.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Catholic-Time-Cover-story-on-OLOA-to-end-abortion.pdf


Our Lady of Akita (1973):

The apparitions of Our Lady of Akita, in Japan, were approved by the local ordinary, Bishop Ito, in 1984 (although there have been some misleading statements and resulting confusion on this topic; see note below for details).[1]
miraclehunter.com/marian_apparitions/statements/akita_statement_01.html

The visionary, Sister Agnes Sasagawa, experienced a bleeding wound in her right hand, and a statue of Mary at the convent was discovered to have the same wound, also bleeding.

Later the statue was seen to sweat, and to cry 101 times (witnessed also by the bishop).

The blood, tears, and sweat were tested by a non-Christian scientist and determined to be human.

Sister Agnes was eventually healed of her incurable deafness, as she said Mary prophesied; a woman with a brain tumor was also healed after praying to Our Lady of Akita.

There has been a misunderstanding of the Vatican’s role in this case.

Early on, Bishop Ito consulted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which initially did not deem the apparitions to be supernatural;

Bishop Ito realized, however, that they did not have all the facts, and so he personally presented them.

He also ran his pastoral letter on the subject by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who said it was acceptable to propagate.

Some misunderstood and called this Vatican approval, so the CDF was obliged to state that it has never made any declarations (either way) on the authenticity of the Akita apparitions.

Ito left the dossier on the events at Akita with the Vatican, which has thus far neither formally approved nor disapproved the apparitions at Akita.

But no Vatican approval is necessary, because it is up to the local bishop. (The Vatican could weigh in someday, but otherwise the approval stands.)

While the Bishops’ Conference of Japan has been dismissive of the Akita apparitions, it is not in the jurisdiction of an episcopal conference to weigh in on the authenticity of an apparition, unless requested or permitted to do so by the local bishop (See Vatican norms on apparitions.)
www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19780225_norme-apparizioni_en.html


In addition, Bishop Sato, the successor of Bishop Ito, issued a statement (reproduced in this article, scroll to the end), saying that he would neither encourage nor forbid devotion to Our Lady of Akita and affirming Bishop Ito’s authorization to be “still valid.”
https://www.spiritdaily.org/Cool_to_Akita.htm


Our Lady of Kibeho, Rwanda (1981-1989):

In the 1980s, several young people claimed to have seen and heard either Mary or Jesus.

The first three visionaries, Alphonsine, Nathalie, and Marie Claire, all described prophetic visions of the horrific genocide in Rwanda that would occur in 1994;

Marie Claire would be one of its victims.

From early on, there were healings, conversions, and solar phenomena reminiscent of Fatima during the Kibeho apparitions.


The Marian apparitions and messages received by these first three visionaries were recognized as authentic by the local bishop in 2001.

(End Part 1)

12/14/2018 Why I came to believe that Mary was conceived without sin. (Part 2)

Dr. Leroy Huizenga
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/12/14/why-i-came-to-believe-that-mary-was-conceived-without-sin/?
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/huizenga-leroy/

Thinking of Mary in a deeply biblical way

When I was considering becoming Catholic, then, I was in a good position to think about Catholic claims about Mary in a deep biblical way.

Jesus fulfills multifold figures from the Old Testament (Isaac, Moses, Israel itself, et alios), the Church is a new Israel, Paul likely understood himself as the suffering servant.

Might not the New Testament writers have similar drew on the Old Testament in presenting Mary?

Further, might not the logic of the story of salvation history require a certain understanding of Mary’s role therein?

In teaching Introduction to the New Testament in my first full-time teaching gig, I of course had to address the Gospel of Luke.

And so I dug deep into the first couple of chapters, in which Mary figures prominently.

What did I find there?

In the first chapter, we encounter the aged priest Zechariah and his barren wife Elizabeth.

Immediately our thoughts should turn to the original Holy Family, aged Abraham and barren Sarah, who eventually received the gift of Isaac.

Moreover, Abraham was effectively a priest, like the other patriarchs.

Often overlooked, Genesis is concerned with cult, as the patriarchs offer ritual sacrifice at significant moments.

And the Archangel Gabriel tells Zechariah, “your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.”

It’s the same pattern used in God’s announcement to Abraham in Genesis 17:19: “Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac.”

But Zechariah does not believe Gabriel’s words, asking a doubt-filled question: “How shall I know this?

For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.”
(Luke 1:18).

And so he is struck dumb because he did not believe Gabriel’s words until baby John is born.

(Protip: When an archangel speaks, believe him.)

So we have a typology between Zechariah’s family and Abraham’s family.

But it becomes a triple typology, a verbal triptych empaneling salvation history: Gabriel next goes to the Virgin Mary.

He greets her, and declares that she will bear the Messiah, the Son of the Most High.

Like Zechariah, she asks a question: “How can this be, since I have no husband?”
(Luke 1:34).

But unlike Zechariah, she is not punished.

Rather, the Archangel Gabriel answers her, explaining to her that she’ll give birth as a Virgin, conceiving by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And she responds with her famous fiat: “Behold,

I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
(Luke 1:38).

And of course she will bear Jesus, the new Isaac, to whom John pointed.

All this proves nothing.

But it suggests everything.

Why, I asked myself, is Zechariah punished, but Mary not?

They each asked a question.

The deference the Archangel Gabriel shows Mary is incredible.

Without entering into philological and linguistic debates about the Greek word kecharitōmenē­—at least “highly favored by God” or (as Catholics believe) “full of grace”—the asymmetry between Zechariah and Mary in the tight triple typology of Luke 1 intrigued me.

It proves nothing, but suggests everything. Protestants in principle only want to believe that which Scripture expressly asserts with perfect clarity.

Since nowhere does Scripture say Mary was conceived without sin, they find the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception unbiblical.

But Catholics read differently. For Scripture does not only assert; it also implies and suggests.

Catholics ask what the biblical stories—indeed, the overarching biblical story of salvation history—permits, encourages, requires.

For us, reading the Bible is a matter of logic, of theo-logic.

That Mary’s question receives an encouraging response instead of punishment is suggestive.

It fits, then, with theology, and offers us a model for how theology and Scripture support each other.

It’s an assumption of Luke’s Gospel and indeed the whole New Testament that Jesus is sinless.

Theologically, that implies—requires—that Mary must be sinless, for Jesus must take sinless flesh from his mother.

If he were to take sinful flesh on, he wouldn’t be sinless—unless we want to be Gnostic or docetist (two heresies that go hand in hand), and suggest Jesus’ soul was sinless but body sinful.

Apart from the problem that the Bible throughout bears witness that God cannot dwell in the direct presence of sin, this would mean there was no real Chalcedonian union of the two natures, human and divine in Christ. 

We might end up as some sort of Nestorians to boot, with the natures divided.


Theologically necessary, and theologically possible

So Mary needs to be sinless.

How is this possible?

By the Immaculate Conception.

The later merits of Christ are applied to Mary proleptically.

To the Protestant that sounds like theological gymnastics born of desperation.

But it’s theologically necessary, and theologically possible.

God is outside of time.

And if one insists on biblical backing, the warrant is there in the example of Abraham.

How, we might ask, was Abraham justified by faith (Genesis 15:6, a verse St. Paul draws on twice, in both Romans and Galatians, so foundational for Protestants), over two thousand years before Christ suffered and died for sins?

Abraham must have been justified proleptically, and if God could do it for him, God can do it for Mary.

Why not?

If theology demands Mary be sinless and Scripture shows that God can make people righteous well before Christ, then we can say that the story of Mary in Luke 1 fits with Mary’s sinlessness.

The Immaculate Conception explains why Mary isn’t chastised but answered.

(Of course, she asks her question, I think, because she’s taken a vow of perpetual virginity in accord with Numbers 30, and so wasn’t planning on having children, but that’s a discussion for a different day.)

Scripture is of a piece; theology is of a piece; reality is of a piece; all superintended by God.


Some modern Protestant theologians have asserted that Christ took on sinful human nature (thinking of Thomas Torrance), and before them Protestant scholarship largely in Germany in the nineteenth century gave traditional Christian beliefs—from the divinity of Christ to the Immaculate Conception and most everything in between—the acid bath of higher criticism.

Some found Mary so distasteful they suggested Luke didn’t write Luke 1–2; a later proto-Catholic wrote them and appended them to the beginning of Luke.

But earlier Protestants maintained many historic Marian teachings.

Ulrich Zwingli wrote, “I esteem immensely the Mother of God, the ever chaste, immaculate Virgin Mary” (quoted in G. Philips et al., De Mariologia et Oecumenismo, Rome, Pontificia academia Mariana internationalis, 1962, p. 456).

For his part, Martin Luther thundered, “She is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin…

God’s grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil…

God is with her, meaning that all she did or left undone is divine and the action of God in her.

Moreover, God protected her from all that might be hurtful to her.”
(Luther’s Works, ed. Lehmann; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968).

The original Protestants knew what later Protestants, in their attempt to be biblical, have forgotten: that Mariology is a reflex of Christology, that beliefs about Jesus require believing certain things about Mary.

As Jesus takes his flesh from Mary, Mother and Son are a package deal.


And so sinless Mary was in a position to undo what Eve did.
She cooperated with God, having that perfect Edenic free will that Eve surrendered in sin.

(End Part 2)

12/14/2018 Why I came to believe that Mary was conceived without sin. (Part 1)

Dr. Leroy Huizenga
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/12/14/why-i-came-to-believe-that-mary-was-conceived-without-sin/?
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/huizenga-leroy/


Most Catholic-Protestant debates surrounding Mary and beliefs such as the Immaculate Conception take place on a surface level, when the real issues concern bedrock: how we read the Bible and how Scripture informs theology.

Most Catholic-Protestant debates surrounding Mary and beliefs such as the Immaculate Conception take place on a surface level, when the real issues concern bedrock: how we read the Bible and how Scripture informs theology.

This past Saturday’s Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception occasioned no little debate on social media as certain Catholics and Protestants who are co-laborers in many cultural and political endeavors­—publications, pro-life work, and the like—went after each other hammer and tongs in theological agonies, as various champions entered the virtual arena for the contest.

Passionate but never ad hominem (at least in my feeds), ornery but not mean, the combatants sparred, parrying and thrusting, throwing out this argument, that Bible verse, this quotation, that rejoinder.


The dogma of the Immaculate Conception

One serious evangelical Protestant called out a relatively popular modern image of Eve and Mary, with Eve downcast in red holding an apple, and Mary in blue and white comforting her, holding Eve’s hand on her swollen belly, pregnant with the hope of redemption, the Christ child.

(The image was created by Sr. Grace Remington of Our Lady of the Mississipi Abbey, whose sisters belong to the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, following the Rule of St. Benedict.)

In a tweet, he called it “heretical theology (i.e., Mary as co-redemptrix),” and followed up with a later tweet claiming “I’d have no objection to interpreting the image that way if the straightforward meaning (Mary crushes the serpent) wasn’t an entrenched heresy.

Because it is, I just think it’s better to avoid confusion than hope all viewers read into it an orthodox meaning.”

Co-Redemptrix is not an official Catholic title for Mary, though many pious Catholics would like to see that move made. In my recollection, John Paul II once broached it with his prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, who dissuaded him from pursuing the matter.

Being that as it may, for many the root issue is the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the teaching that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without sin through the retroactive merits of Christ.



The Church found the doctrine necessary, I think, for two fundamental reasons.

First, Christ needs sinless human flesh, for he cannot be a sinner, and second, he must take his flesh from his mother really and truly if he is to be fully human. Indeed, the Eve-Mary typology iconographed in the image assumes Mary’s sinlessness, for she has to be in the prelapsarian (i.e., pre-fall) position of Eve to be able to undo what Eve did.

She obeys freely, where Eve disobeyed, in parallel to Christ’s obedience undoing Adam’s disobedience.
(see Romans 5:12–19 and 1 Corinthians 15:21–22, 45–49).

And so that we may have the precise and mature claims before us, the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
(§§ 490-93) teaches:



To become the mother of the Savior, Mary “was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a role.”

The angel Gabriel at the moment of the annunciation salutes her as “full of grace.”

In fact, in order for Mary to be able to give the free assent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be wholly borne by God’s grace.

Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, “full of grace” through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception.

That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:

“The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”

The “splendor of an entirely unique holiness” by which Mary is “enriched from the first instant of her conception” comes wholly from Christ: she is “redeemed, in a more exalted fashion, by reason of the merits of her Son.”

The Father blessed Mary more than any other created person “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” and chose her “in Christ before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless before him in love.”

The Fathers of the Eastern tradition call the Mother of God “the All-Holy” (Panagia) and celebrate her as “free from any stain of sin, as though fashioned by the Holy Spirit and formed as a new creature.”

By the grace of God Mary remained free of every personal sin her whole life long.

The teaching summarized:
1. Mary was sinless from conception on
2. through the forthcoming merits of Christ so that
3. she could “give free assent” to her calling and
4. provide Christ with a sinless human nature.


How the New Testament fulfills the Old

I don’t want to rehearse the history of the development of the dogma, the controversies surrounding it, or the typical apologetic maneuvers each side makes.

Rather, I want to engage a little bit in how I came to believe in the Immaculate Conception on my way to becoming Catholic.

In doing so, I hope to contribute a bit to the discussion at a different level, as I often find people talking past each other.

Most debates surrounding Mary (and indeed most Catholic-Protestant debates) happen on a surface level, when the real issues concern bedrock: how we read the Bible and how Scripture informs theology, in particular.

I was always fascinated with the Old Testament, even from childhood, but like most Christians today, had little idea what to do with it.
In Sunday School I loved the Old Testament stories, but cannot remember what was said, if anything, about how they related the Jesus Christ in the Gospels.



I got an RSV Bible as a Lutheran second-grader, and I remember a picture of an Old Testament priest before the altar in the book; What does that have to do with anything?

I asked myself.

I started finally grasping how the Old and New Testaments related while yet a Protestant at Princeton Theology Seminary, taking a class with the late, great Don Juel on the Old Testament in the New.

Therein I learned how the New Testament writers drew on everything from single words to grand narratives in the Old Testament in shaping their own stories and making their own claims about Jesus and the Church.



In short, I began to learn about typology, how the New Testament fulfills the Old, and with that came an understanding of the continuity between the Testaments, and with that an understanding of salvation history.

The same God superintends the story of the world form creation to end, and acts in the same ways in every age.

I was so fascinated with the question of the relationship between the Testaments that I pursued doctoral work to study that very question, working with Dr. Richard Hays at Duke University. Dr. Hays had written a famous work.

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, in which he demonstrated that St. Paul remained deeply concerned for Israel and her Scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament), over and against Germanic Protestant scholarship that painted Paul as a proto-Lutheran happy to leave Moses’ corpse on the far side of the Jordan.



My own work under Dr. Hays concerned how the Gospel of Matthew employed the figure of Isaac to present Jesus as the final, decisive sacrifice. In writing that dissertation, I came to see ever more strongly that the New Testament writers were doing what the Church Fathers and medievals were doing.

They all were interpreting the Old Testament figuratively, and indeed the New Testament writers were really doing what later would be called the fourfold sense.

They were using not only the literal sense but engaging in typology (what Aquinas would call allegoria) between the Testaments, as well as the moral (tropological) sense and anagogical sense (which concerns the soul’s progress towards heaven).


(End Part 1)

11/30/2018 Saint Paul, the Apocalypse, and the mystery of evil. (Part 2)

Conor Sweeney
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/11/30/saint-paul-the-apocalypse-and-the-mystery-of-evil/
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/sweeney-conor/

Satan­—the personification of evil, antichrist, whom Scripture calls “a liar,
and the father of lies”.
(John 8:44)


“Get behind me, Satan.”

But one need look no further for vivid corroboration of this “shadow side” than chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel.

In verse 18 we have Christ’s words to Peter that have inspired the dogmas of the indefectibility and infallibility of the Church: “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

And yet, just 4 verses later we see Christ turn savagely on Peter, telling him “Get behind me, Satan.

You are an obstacle [literally, skandalon] to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (v. 23).


My point is not, I wish to make clear, to deny the indefectibility and infallibility of the Church. Nor should we become fixated on the largely unanswerable question of the extent to which this pope or that pope is literally a figure of the “lawless one” or not.

The important point, rather is to be attentive to the more general character of Paul’s cryptic insistence that a “hell” of a lot of deception, manipulation, and corruption (evil!) will operate in some way even inside the assurance of indefectibility and infallibility.

It’s at this level that we must attend to Christ’s description of Peter—the first pope—as a stumbling block, and yes, even as “Satan.”

Here we face an “enigma,” a “hard saying” (and Christ has a few of these) not amenable to easy answers or control by merely juridical and rationalist categories.

According to both Christ and St. Paul, then, there must be real acknowledgment that no pope, simply by virtue of being pope, is thereby immune from becoming an instrument of evil.

And it’s also to affirm that somehow the office of the pope will be used by Satan as the instrument of evil par excellence. Every pope must therefore face this test and trial.

It’s not surprising that we should prefer to accent the reassuring message of verse 18: what institution wants to be up-front about an evil inside itself corrupting and perverting its operations and destroying its credibility?

But indefectibility and infallibility in principle mean little, particularly for the “little ones” (cf. Matt 18:6) if the gatekeepers of the Church in any historical here and now are in the grip of heresy, apostasy, and false witness, especially at the level of praxis—it’s small, no, delusional consolation to appeal to theoretical doctrinal coherence and integrity while at the level of practices everything else is in pieces.

My point, said with great caution, is that downplaying the mysterium iniquitatis capable of being actively propagated even by the Church’s highest office may well represent a crucial historical blind spot as regards treatment of Christ’s promise to Peter.


Modernity, the illegitimate progeny

There’s one more piece of the puzzle, particularly important for our own historical epoch: the way in which the mysterium iniquitatis at the heart of the Church comes to be mirrored in the world.

Extending his reflection on the mysterium iniquitatis, Illich advanced the radical thesis that the modes and institutions of modernity were not post-Christian as much as they were perversely Christian—parodic perversions of faith bled of the vital sap of the New Testament, perhaps the beginning of the definitive (apocalyptic) “betrayal of Christian faith.”

In other words, think of modernity as the illegitimate progeny of the Church’s own worst mode of itself­­­, an extension of ecclesial perversion into the heart of the world. It’s a weird idea: the worst things in the world come from the Church. We’d prefer it to be the other way round.

This might be a bitter pill to swallow: for we’d be crazy not to regard some developments of modernity as salutary, i.e. universal rights, modern medicine, technology, democracy, etc., all undeniably of Christian inspiration and which have in remarkable ways raised standards of living, stamping out immense suffering.

And yet, note how each of these “salutary” gifts of modernity can be employed, with moralizing imperatives that brook little dissent, for evils capable of destroying the person, communities, cultures, if not the world itself: e.g. a “right” to abortion—embryo experimentation and sex reassignment surgery—the atomic bomb—the “dictatorship of relativism.”

Here’s the point: but is not this profound ambiguity precisely what we should expect from antichrist?
Weave evil with good so it becomes well-nigh impossible to distinguish and extricate the two.

Trap souls and bodies in what John Paul II called “structures of sin,” where material cooperation with evil becomes almost impossible to avoid, where simple social and cultural acts become freighted with a nihilism that works like a cancer on those who perform them.

Illich was struck by the fact that “apocalyptic modernity’s” greatest stroke is to consummate a trend that had already been long gestating in the worst tendencies of institutional Christianity: to overcome the gratuity, radicality, freedom, intimacy, and foolishness of Christian love with stifling procedural, bureaucratic, corporate, and professional modes; and as a final flourish, we might add, to then convince the Church to ape these modes of its own perversion and thus unwittingly cooperate in its own destruction (surely, this is evil’s greatest stroke).

The transformation can be subtle enough not to notice. But then, one day, you wake up and the deepest New Testament modes of existential, Gospel faith—including the mysterium iniquitatis—appear as incomprehensible, fundamentalist nonsense, an embarrassment to “respectable” ecclesial discourse in Catholic institutions
.
All of this is why Illich concluded ominously that “I believe this to be, paradoxically, the most obviously Christian era which might be quite close to the end of the world.”


Watch and pray

Thus ends a rather bleak, and by no means complete, reflection; but one, I think, with great explanatory power.

Note that none of it precludes the truth that “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” (Rom 5:20).

Christ has already triumphed over the lawless one.
But this victory cannot to be an excuse for lethargy and blindness to the very real evil that this victory has unleashed.

If the mysterium iniquitatis should not be the occasion for cheap attacks on the Church as divine institution per se, neither should we deny the profound ambiguity that Christ’s second words to Peter represent.

The mysterium iniquitatis must be permitted as a goad forcing recognition that the central mode evil takes on is the corruption of the best for the worst, as the Gospel itself warns.

What always remains for us is to pray: “watch and pray that you will not fall into temptation” (Matt 26:41).

And know that Christ always abides with us in this fight against evil:

(End Part 2)

11/30/2018 Saint Paul, the Apocalypse, and the mystery of evil. (Part 1)

Conor Sweeney https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/11/30/saint-paul-the-apocalypse-and-the-mystery-of-evil/ https://www.catholicworldreport.com/author/sweeney-conor/

Satan­—the personification of evil, antichrist, whom Scripture calls “a liar,
and the father of lies”. (John 8:44)

Relentlessly pursues the best so that the worst might be that much more effective a lie.

One of the most enigmatic tropes in the New Testament can be found in St. Paul’s comments to the Thessalonians (2 Thess 2)

About the “mysterium iniquitatis”: the mystery of “lawlessness” or “evil” he tells us is “already at work.”
https://aleteia.org/2018/09/02/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-evil-is-a-mystery-and-why-is-there-something-hopeful-about-it/
This is a pervasive and apocalyptic evil able to inhabit and control human hearts, worldly powers, and worst of all, the earthly reality of Christ’s own mystical body, the Church.

Apocalypse and antichrist

At this point in these trying days for the Church, I’m inclined to think that we must reflect more urgently on this provoking Pauline perspective.

This is, of course, by no means an easy or safe task. Disturbing, delusional, or fanatical possibilities await at every turn.

The mysterium iniquitatis is therefore perhaps one of the more embarrassing New Testament themes, certainly for what passes as “civilized” (read: bourgeois) Catholic discourse today, which eagerly grasps at every opportunity to “spiritualize” away as much of it as possible.

One can quite confidently expect accusing cries of “fundamentalist!” to ring in the ears of those who today take up this theme with any degree of seriousness.

And yet this teaching, along with the perspectives of apocalypse and antichrist that are part and parcel of it, is by no means peripheral to the New Testament as a whole:

St. Peter and St. John pull no punches either. Properly understood, the mysterium iniquitatis furnishes an essential dramatic and eschatological dimension to Christian anthropology that we, heirs and citizens of the “flattest,” most dramatically and eschatologically arid eras of history (i.e. secular modernity), are won’t to forget.

Here’s how St. Paul presents the teaching to the Thessalonians. He speaks, cryptically, about a “lawless one” (or, as one freer translation puts it, a “real dog of Satan”) (v. 3) who will “seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (v. 4).

This, he assures his listeners, has not yet come to pass; but “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” (v. 7).

In more reassuring (but no less apocalyptic) vein he goes on to speak of the ultimate triumph over the lawless one, whom Jesus “will kill with the breath of his mouth and render powerless by the manifestation of his coming” (v. 8).

What’s most disturbing about this passage, of course, is how we’re told to look for an evil that will incubate in the heart of God’s own dwelling place—his “temple”—and even, as Paul tells the Ephesians, in the “heavenly places.” (Eph 6:12).

In other words, the worst evil is not outside the gates; it’s not even at the gates. Rather, the worst evil is always already inside the gates, at the very heart of the existential reality of faith, in us, in the Church.

Here we encounter the paradox that no person and certainly not the institutional machinery of the Church (“Surely not I, Lord?” (Matt 26:22)

Usually want to really confront.

But what is confronted brutally and honestly by St. Paul is this unthinkable possibility: that the worst evils might be most at home and, indeed, find the most scope for their manifestation and legitimation in that which is most sacred.

Yet this should not be surprising if we consider what evil is in its essence.

If evil is a “privation of the good,” this means that it cannot work on its own; it requires a host.

In order to manifest itself evil must take a good thing and corrupt and desecrate it from within, transforming by parasitisation the icon into the idol.

“Vice mimics virtue,” says St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Here’s the scary part: the more perfect the good, the more scope for evil to mimic and subvert.

Thus, in order to effect the most perfect corruption and desecration of everything good and pure, Satan­—the personification of evil, antichrist, whom Scripture calls “a liar, and the father of lies”

(John 8:44)—relentlessly pursues the best so that the worst might be that much more effective a lie. It’s nicely expressed in the ancient Latin idiom: corruptio optima quae est pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.

The assault on “the temple”

The genuinely disturbing implication of St. Paul’s teaching is therefore that we should expect—and not deceive ourselves—to find the most horrible possibilities in our own hearts, our own hands, and our own community.

St. Paul’s reference to the temple, God’s dwelling place, is crucial in this regard. In a broad sense, “temple” represents those sacred and holy places where God’s presence is manifest (e.g. the Jerusalem temple).

The holiest of these is Christ himself, the Son, the “temple” par excellence (cf. John 1:14), who pours himself out for his bride (cf. Eph 5).

The Church, who in turn becomes the Sacrament of Salvation for all mankind, generating the children of God, sanctifying and purifying them for perfect union with the Father.

We ourselves, bearers of the divine image, adopted into the eternal mystery as sons in the Son and bride of Christ, are in the entirety of our bodily selves sacramental temples of the Holy Spirit. (cf. 1 Cor 3:16-17; 1 Cor 6:19).

This means, then, that what evil will attack and corrupt most virulently is precisely the mystery of baptismal adoption, eucharistic presence, Holy Orders, and sacramental marriage—the central ecclesial, sacramental, and liturgical modes of God’s “temple,” the highest realities of truth, worship, and love.

It explains a lot, I think.

This is the deep paradox of the Incarnation: even as the gift of the Son offers the possibility for the best, it also adds to the scope of the worst.

It makes a more perfect, more demonic rejection of Christ possible. This is why David Bentley Hart argues—so effectively—that nihilism could only become possible after Christ; you could not have Nietzsche, with his frighteningly polished embrace of anti-value, without the Incarnation.

But St. Paul recognizes that the Incarnation does not just sharpen the existing conflict between good and evil, but in fact starts its final countdown.

This is what the apocalyptic mode of antichrist­ is all about. And if this plays out in the summons to each adopted child of God to fight antichrist in the dramatic arc of their own lives, to “put on the armor of God” against the “devil’s schemes” (Eph 6:11) and the “spiritual forces of evil” (Eph 6:13), it also sets the fate of the world itself on its final trajectory.

“Apocalypse,” both in the sense of unveiling and ultimate catastrophe, thus perfectly expresses the new dramatic trajectory that the Incarnation has set us on. Salvation and redemption are the beginning of the end.

The truth of Christ is simultaneously the activation of the greatest evil, one that will cause the catastrophic end of the age: and it will happen—is always happening—from and at the very heart of the Church, God’s dwelling place (if this sounds, well, apocalyptic, consult the Catechism’s treatment of the theme, cf. especially CCC 675; Catholics should believe in this stuff too).

It’s in this context that we must not shrink from the extent to which evil can and will operate in the innermost recesses of God’s temple, the Church.

Evil’s power extends, not just to corruption of individual hearts and minds, but in some sense to the institutional dimension of the Church itself. This accords, I think, with what St. Paul is trying to say in 2 Thessalonians (although how far it’s to be taken is the difficult point; both anti-Catholic bigotry and Catholic “progressivism” see an ideological wedge here).

It was the contention of enigmatic Croatian-Austrian intellectual Ivan Illich, a radical critic of modern institutions, that serious awareness that the best can become the worst, that the Church itself as an entire institution could easily adopt modes more typical of the “whore of Babylon” (Rev 17:1–18) was very early on in the history of Christianity effectively sublimated.

For Illich, explains David Cayley, this has come with a price: “by abandoning this goad to self-criticism and self-awareness, on which it should have centered its faith, the Church disowned its own shadow,” thereby rendering itself “less and less capable of discerning in the image of antichrist its own tendency to substitute power for faith….”

(End Part 1)

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Simpeltons Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . .

same old . . .Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah . . . Blah

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Guess you did't read the article and have a fundamentalist ax to grind.

Your boring jack and childish

Go back to your troll hole . . .

Rose42,Berean Christadelphians beliefs, are corruptions of original biblical Christian teaching. (See the 11 tenants doctrines of Christian Faith below.)


The only patently ridiculous observation is your opinion fundamentalist Berean schismatic sectarian beliefs. Protestants can't agree upon anything Christian . . .

Rose, You didn't even read 9,585 word 18 page document . . .



Any orthodox Christian knows what Father Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. is talking about, Jesus in the Eucharist.

Denying Jesus in the Eucharist on your part, is your own "Free Will".

Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have no life in you.
Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day
John 6;53-54



Father Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. authored a remarkable historically correct, Jesuit Catholic thesis, and with Catholic doctrines understanding on the Eucharist and many insightful factual references are compelling to all Orthodox Catholics.


Rose42, you only have three religious Protestant options after reading the "The Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist . . . History and Evidence."

1. Believe in the Real Presence of the Eucharist; The Body, The Soul and the Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic Sacrament . . . and Become Christian Catholic.

2. Read the document by Father Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. and ("Understand") the Orthodox Catholic principals-practices and beliefs of the Orthodox Catholic Eucharistic Sacrament.

3. Reject Eucharistic Sacrament doctrine, and symbolically believe that the wine-grape-juice and bread is mere symbol and is nothing more.



I cant explain it any simpler than this.

"The problem here is a failure "Communicate." ?
Judge Roy Bean.


Your religious mentality group-think, is a mob-type Protestant fundamentalist biblical simplistically belief on the OPP forum, to a 2,000 thousand year-old Christian Catholic Mystery.

All you are is black and white, with no prayerful spirituality, Orthodox Christianity, which tell, your evangelical fundamentalist, rose colored Protestant glasses background, to hide the Black and white realities of, Jesus Christ's teaching on the Sacramental Eucharist.

We Orthodox Christians, "Believe" in the Real Presence of the Eucharist; The Body, The Soul and the Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic Sacrament.



What is the problem rose42, cant' accept the 2,000 year historical and Catholic Churches Christ-Centered teachings.

Denial is not a river in Egypt Rose42.

Denial is in your Heart, Mind and Your soul.



Heh but you have "Free-Will." So how are those 30,000 Protestant life-rafts, while I'm on the celestial Ocean liner founded by Jesus Christ.

The Berean Christadelphians faith is in denial and has so many rejections, so many common false biblical Christian tenants of Faith, the reality is they are all found in the Holy Bible the Old and the New Testament and also found outside of the Churches Bible oral and written traditions in historical Church documents.

Thats why History and documents are so important in a discussion, and why the "Bible Only." Does not work, It's a scape-Goat cop-out fundamentalist hit-and-run Protestant tactic.

Your man-Made sola Scriptura doctrine does not work, because of evangelical fundamentalist don't allow for other historical Church documents from the past 2,000 years.

The Early Fathers Church writings were perfectly clear what the Apostles taught from Jesus Christ.

Thats because Berean Christadelphians they don't even know, that these documents even existed.


It's the old "Blind-Eye" theory and practicality wearing rose colored Protestant glasses on and not seeing the truth's in the Bible.

Now why wouldn't the "Berean Christadelphians" faith not believe in the 11 Christian doctrines taught by Jesus ? Hmmmmmm, I wonder why ?

1. The "Trinity,"
2. The "Immortality of the soul,"
3. The "Breaking of Bread,"
4. Reject "Creeds,"
5. They do not see other works as inspired by God,
6. That Jesus inherited human nature (with its inclination to sin) from his mother Mary. Self Interpretation.
7. Berean Christadelphians also reject the doctrine of Christ's pre-existence contrary to, John 1:1–18
8. They regard the Bible as inspired by God and, therefore, believe that in its original form, it is error free and errors in later copies are due to errors of transcription or translation.
9. Based on this, Christadelphians teach what they believe as true Bible teaching. Which is Biblical Self-Interpretation of the Bible.
10. They don't recognize the same Baptism, viewing such separations as schismatic.
11. That God is a separate being from his son, Jesus Christ, that the Holy Spirit is the power of God used in creation and for salvation.

I also wonder what (Martin Luther, John Thomas and other Reformationit's ) probably would have written differently

If the "The Didache" document was available to them . . . “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.

From the Early Church Patristic Fathers, 90 AD in late 1st Century a very important manuscript that was found in AD 1887 Constantinople Turkey was available to them ?
https://www.onepoliticalplaza.com/t-148097-1.html


Here is something to consider Rose42

Denial, of all the 11 items above, are the primary central tenet of orthodox Christianity.


It's really humorous and very compelling-sad that you didn't even read this Article Post and make a comments on Father Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. thesis paper.

Because out of the 9,585 words and on 18 pages.

You rose42 couldn't even come up with ("One' argumentation question) to a Jesuit priest and who has a doctorate in Theology.

And that's how and why I know you are deceitful and are disingenuous.


Prove me wrong . . . I'm waiting . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . . Cricket's . . .


That you can't or won't talk about these 11 major Christian tenants of faith and the multiple differences of what the Bible explicitly addressed, and then you turn a ("blind-eye") and run from these major Christian doctrinal facts.

Ohhhhh Pleaseeeee what a crock, you comment for the sake of countering most of all my Catholic article post and your explicit oxymoronic personal statement on the OPP religious forum.

I hate the Catholic Church but I don't personally hate the people in the church, . . . yeah I said, "oxymoronic personal statement opinion."


Rose42, . . . A parting Gift of wisdom and knowledge.

To be Deep in History, is to cease being Protestant.
Cardinal Henry Newman.

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