If you do not believe in the dogmas of the Church because you do not know them, if you instead believe something contrary to them, you are a material heretic. If you do not believe in the dogmas of the Church after you have been instructed in them, you are a formal heretic.
This offends God greatly.
I am not saying this out of any desire for negativity, but because these is serious matter. **It is essential to believe the dogmas of the Church, as proposed by the Church, to be a Catholic. ** This is serious. People need to understand how important these truths are to God and the soul. They are so important than one’s eternal salvation is at stake, and not only one’s own.
People who are journeying, investigating, on the way but not yet Catholic, it is one thing – but for people who propose that they are Catholic, it is quite another.
To be a Catholic is to submit to revealed truth, both understood and not understood, because it is revealed by God, whether it be transubstantiation, grace, or Adam and Eve.
I strongly urge picking up both Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, and Denzinger’s Sources of Catholic Dogma. Then you can start from dogma, and have a solid foundation for thought on these matters.
The types of people who would speculate without doing this, and without also going to tradition – people who are minimalists. . . Do not please God, far from it. It is a sign of hubris that people with such lack of sanctity and basic knowledge of the Faith would attempt to forge ahead theologically rather than learning what God has taught us through Revelation and the saints.
This incredible imprudence in regards to Revelation is hard to comprehend considering the gravity and sacred nature of the deposit of the Faith.
From what I have seen written here, there is among some a desire to prefer to refer to as authorities people who have no sanctity, who are against the Church, who found illusionary sciences and people who do not respect tradition. Referring to doctors, saints, Councils, etc. there seems to be an allergic reaction against. This is a sign of the spirit of the world at work, of being lost in error.
An example of Carl Jung:
"Following this break with Freud, he came close to a mental breakdown. He deliberately allowed his irrational side to function freely and he kept detailed notes of his strange experiences, dreams and visions. Certainly many strange events were reported around this time. His house felt haunted, his daughters claimed to have seen ghosts and he himself saw a crowd of spirits bursting into the house. As they disappeared, he went into a three day state of automatic writing leading to the production of his work entitled The seven sermons.
Jung was visited by a spirit guide who he named Philemon, a “pagan who brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.” Although he may have suggested that the spirit guide was a figment of his imagination, in truth, as far as he was concerned it was a real being, “an old man with the horns of a bull. I was walking up and down the garden with him and to me he was what the Indians call a Guru.” He also became acquainted with another spirit guide named Ka. “Ka’s expression had something demonic about it - one might almost say Mephistopholean.” This is a highly pertinent observation as Jung, like Freud, was fascinated by the Faust-Mephistopheles legend about the doctor who sold his soul to the devil in order to obtain secret knowledge. Jung had by now obtained a whole series of messages from his spirit guides which were to determine the nature of his beliefs. The Jungian expert Doctor Anthony Storr concluded: “Jung thought of these spirit guides as existing in an imperishable world and manifesting themselves from time to time through the psyche of an individual.” "
Now anyone who knows anything about the demonic obviously can see the source of and foundation of Carl Jung’s work and how little value it has towards understanding the world because of its total separation from true science at its foundation.
