Why I Am Catholic

[DanielGarneau]

1. I didn't miss your point at all, but apparently you missed mine. You ask perfect strangers on the internet to get personal with you and you don't see anything inappropriate about that.

2. I don't believe your story. The Catholic Church has never forbidden the reading of the Holy Scriptures. In centuries past, the only restriction was requiring an imprimatur from the bishop before making a copy of it, to ensure that errors were not made. But even before the days when a Bible didn't cost more than a house, people had pages of scripture that they would circulate among themselves, Psalms and parts of the gospel, etc. The accusation that the Catholic Church has kept the Bible from being read is one of the most outrageous smears concocted by the haters of the Catholic Church, of whom you are clearly one.

3. The author of the OP pasted this from some site and then abandoned the thread, and the site. I thought he was an old friend but now I'm having my doubts. Don't waste any time trying to engage him, he's not here.

Hello Vale,

I have no hard feelings at all agains Roman Catholics. The direct association you seem to be making between what I expressed and alleged "hatred" against catholicism is a mistake on your part about who I am and how I position myself in this world. Historically, in Quebec, the Roman Catholic clergy felt threatened by the influence on their French speaking flocks from English speaking protestant missionaries. Since the Roman Catholic clergy was not as well prepared to defend their doctrine from the Bible as were the protestant missionaries, they discouraged their flocks from reading the Bible altogether. Charles Chiniquy testified of this in 19th Century Quebec.

When I myself became a Christian, around 1977, I received a nice and respectful letter from the Roman Catholic clergy, telling me I could come back to the Roman Catholic Church whenever I wanted to. But this was post-Vatican II. A lot of things have changed during the period in which I grew up from the 1950's to the 1970's and later on. Right now in Quebec there are young people meeting to discuss the Bible and to share insights from it. But when I first became a Christian, Quebec was completely different with this regard. My own grand-father was really angry at me because I tried to introduce the Bible in our conversations. My grandmother called me a jansenist. When my father heard I had began reading the Bible, he thought I was in danger of becoming crazy, he contacted a canadian military chaplain, who reassured him that he should not be worried. Nobody I knew at any time in my education ever read the Bible at all.

So, believe it or not, everything I just said is the truth, and is not at all based on some attempt to dismeaneor the Roman Catholic church. It were the protestants that helped me to get to the Bible, not the catholic, back in those days. Perhaps you should read a little bit about the history of French Canada versus English Canada, and you will learn that there were some political issues entertwained with religious issues.

 

[Tex]

I am Catholic, as long as "Catholic" means "part of the universal Church". There is one righteous path, and all that are on it are necessarily part of the big 'C' Church.

However, I am not a Romanist. I do not have any allegience to the pope, reject the authority of the magesterium, and have a few objections to the faith and morals proclaimed by the Roman denomination.

You are correct in saying that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. However, the Church is made up of believers and is not constituted in an earthy organization. The Roman denomination is not the big 'C' Church. The Church includes the faithful elect of the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Anglicans, the Romans, the Greeks, the Russians, the Methodists, even technically those faithful to the One True God that are in other religions (although I don't think there are going to be many in other religions who actually have been given faith...). The multiple churches out there differ in certain instances, but it truly is no different than how Corinth differed from Phillpi. The churches out there are simply named because of slight differences. Denomination. The Roman church is also a denomination. I appriciate the laying on of hands continuation, I appreciate the age of the denomination, I even kinda don't mind the structure of the denomination, but regardless, the RCC is a denomination, not the end all be all of the grace of our Lord.