Constantine started the Catholic Church? oh really?

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havana1

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As a recent ‘revert,’ I still encounter a LOT of fundamentalists (mostly Calvary and Vineyard types) who believe that Constantine founded the church. No mention of Jesus founding the church to them. They believe that Constantine founded the church, and that Catholics are pagan. That’s what they believe.

I appreciate the good apologetics books and CD’s I read and listen to…I like Tim Staples, I like Dave Armstrong’s books…

Why, however, is there so little attention paid to “the Constantine lie” when so many Protestants believe it? We provide the Catholic answers, and they say, “Ah, I see,” but at the back of their minds, they still think Catholics are pagans and that Constantine (not Jesus) founded the Catholic church.

Finding Constantine-oriented apologetics is like finding a needle in a haystack… a really, really big haystack. For those who want to be the Next Big Apologist (on the web or elsewhere), my suggestion: Please, please, PLEASE, don’t forget to provide the Catholic answer to: “Yes, but Constantine started your church…!” The more this anti-Catholic canard goes unacknowledged and unanswered, the more potential converts will feel they can undermine the Catholic answers that they’re given. Just a thought, thanks.
 
He founded our Church like Abraham Lincoln founded African Americans
 
Well, when you refuse to love the truth, you need a lie to believe in. So I say, give them Constantine! 😛 But the truth is there for all who seek to find. As Cardinal Newman said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” But if you want to arm yourself, Scripture Catholic has volumes of quotes from the Bible itself, and from the early Church, much of it pre-Constantine, showing that the Church has always taught the same things. God bless.
 
Constantine started the Catholic Church?

What a corrupt and perverse sort of logic. I suppose then that we should infer that through the “totally depraved” intellect of the descendants of pagan-men too corrupted by sin to do anything good & through some fortuitous magic (serendipity?) or new Gnostic secret knowledge the reformers conjured up the perfect blue print for reforming the Church that Constantine started??? 🤷 Just brilliant, where do these towering geniuses get this sort of Babel? 😉

(Edited)

We should feel sorry for these, pray for them, and do our best to keep them comfortable and calm. But owing to its contagious nature all Catholics coming into close contact with these poor souls should use safe handling procedures. Use appropriate prophylactics to avoid being personally infected and to safeguard against accidentally spreading their errors to infect other innocent souls. 😃

James
 
Among the many reasons that Protestants believe such hooey is that they have been taught to distrust anything that the Catholic Church teaches, be it doctrine or history. Even when you try to show them secular historians from the time, they reject it as being manufactured by the Catholic Church. These accusations have been answered time after time, here and elsewhere. The problem is even when real documentary proof is to be had, the Protestants who publish and preach these lies, continue to do so, and tell their people, the Church is the Whore of Revalation and you can’t trust it.

I was questioned about my reasons for converting to the Catholic Faith by one of these Protestant types here. I included information about how my family escaped Europe during WWII because a Catholic Prelate had given my family forged documents stating we were Christians, as at the time the quotas in the US rejected Jewish Immigration. He took it and ran, telling me if the Church falsefied papers to save our lives then how can I accept that the Catholic Church did not falsify documents regarding dogma. Irrational, yes, but when one is prejudiced against the Catholic Church, the paranois is so strong that no amount of logic, historical proof or any other argument aside from God’s Grace, and our Lady’s intercession will really work.
 
Filioque said:
Among the many reasons that Protestants believe such hooey is that they have been taught to distrust anything that the Catholic Church teaches, be it doctrine or history. Even when you try to show them secular historians from the time, they reject it as being manufactured by the Catholic Church. These accusations have been answered time after time, here and elsewhere. The problem is even when real documentary proof is to be had, the Protestants who publish and preach these lies, continue to do so, and tell their people, the Church is the Whore of Revalation and you can’t trust it.

I was questioned about my reasons for converting to the Catholic Faith by one of these Protestant types here. I included information about how my family escaped Europe during WWII because a Catholic Prelate had given my family forged documents stating we were Christians, as at the time the quotas in the US rejected Jewish Immigration. He took it and ran, telling me if the Church falsefied papers to save our lives then how can I accept that the Catholic Church did not falsify documents regarding dogma. Irrational, yes, but when one is prejudiced against the Catholic Church, the paranois is so strong that no amount of logic, historical proof or any other argument aside from God’s Grace, and our Lady’s intercession will really work.
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Well Put! these foolish people need to denigrate anything that isn’t “Them” especially all those that were in Error for days, decades, or centuries according to them. They intentionally are forced to misquote & misapply the Bible in order to support their deluded positions. All that we can do is (as you pointed out so well) pray for them. Thanks again
 
havana1 said:
As a recent ‘revert,’ I still encounter a LOT of fundamentalists (mostly Calvary and Vineyard types) who believe that Constantine founded the church. No mention of Jesus founding the church to them. They believe that Constantine founded the church, and that Catholics are pagan. That’s what they believe.

I appreciate the good apologetics books and CD’s I read and listen to…I like Tim Staples, I like Dave Armstrong’s books…

Why, however, is there so little attention paid to “the Constantine lie” when so many Protestants believe it? We provide the Catholic answers, and they say, “Ah, I see,” but at the back of their minds, they still think Catholics are pagans and that Constantine (not Jesus) founded the Catholic church.

Finding Constantine-oriented apologetics is like finding a needle in a haystack… a really, really big haystack. For those who want to be the Next Big Apologist (on the web or elsewhere), my suggestion: Please, please, PLEASE, don’t forget to provide the Catholic answer to: “Yes, but Constantine started your church…!” The more this anti-Catholic canard goes unacknowledged and unanswered, the more potential converts will feel they can undermine the Catholic answers that they’re given. Just a thought, thanks.
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Christians R Us
By Jack Taylor
catholic.com/thisrock/1995/9505fea3.asp

Christian History
catholic.com/library/Fundamentalist_or_Catholic.asp
 
One guy answered me once when confronted with this lie: “well, all history is written by liars”
Not a whole lot one can accomplish with that kind of logic.
 
Many times when Protestant and other non-Catholic Christians are discussing Church history, it is their proposition that the Catholic Church cannot be the true Church that Christ founded. They claim that the Catholic Church, as an institution, developed at some later date. One of the big difficulties with this theory is that no one can quite agree on when the Catholic Church was established. Some Protestants who hold the first seven Ecumenical Councils to be valid argue that it was after that time (this leads to more problems, such as Protestant rejection of many of the Catholic doctrines expounded by those councils). Perhaps the most popular claim is that the Catholic Church was an invention of Constantine, and developed during his reign after the legalization of Christianity.
Dr. Carroll, author the Baptist church history entitled “The Trail of Blood,” makes the claim that Constantine called a council in 313 AD and this council first formed the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This theory breaks down, though, when one begins to read the history books and discovers that no Church council was held in 313, the year that Constantine issued the Edict of Milan.
But the main problem with all of these theories is that, if they were true, one would expect to be able to find all of the doctrines that are specifically “Catholic” coming about only after the “invention” of the Catholic Church. Whatever year one proposes as the beginning of Catholicism, one should expect to see none of these Catholic doctrines before it. Even a cursory reading of the Church Fathers from the first, second, and third centuries shows that this is not the case.
 
JustaServant said:
One guy answered me once when confronted with this lie: “well, all history is written by liars”
Not a whole lot one can accomplish with that kind of logic.
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Gee…does that apply also to the Protestants who claim that Constantine founded the Catholic Church?

Aren’t those historians liars, too, by his definition?

Sheesh.
 
The word: Catholic comes from the Latin words Cata Holic. Cata is the root of the word: “Category” which has a very similar definition, and the word: “Holic” I THINK is the, or a root of the word: “Whole”, and basically means the same thing. “Holic” is where the rumor that Catholic means: “Universal” comes from, which in modern comprehension, isn’t far from the truth. The word: “Catholic” is a merging of the two. Sort of like how we merged the words: “What’s up” in to: “Wassup”.

The word: “Catholic” was made by the early apostles around 100 years after the year of our Lord (Ano Domini, or AD) for rather obvious reasons. Originally, it was how they described themselves in short words, but eventually became a title. In other words, it and the belief system didn’t come together. The belief system came first, and the name came later, and later was over 200 years BEFORE Constantine began Rome’s conversion to Christianity.

If you want to go after Constantine I, you are at a lost cause. Constantine converted to Christianity and installed the already existing religion in to Romes establishment. On top of that, Constantine I himself foretold very bizarre future events that actually came true (some 1100 years later), so it may even be possible to establish him as a prophet under the old testament law.

The real issue here is what happened later. I am talking about the events that caused the church to split in to two (Catholic and Orthodox. On top of many things that more or less corrupted the establishment, the break up could, in some ways, be compared to the break up of the republican party in to the Republicans, Libertarians and Constitutionalists. To make matters worse, these cultural and philosophical shifts took place over very long periods of time, with plenty of different things happening. There was a time when the Catholics and Orthodox were in outright war with each other, yet today they are buddy buddy.

Of course, these discrepancies were often between individual philosophers and leaders rather then the underlining establishment of the whole.

For instance, in 1452, the bishops and church leaders of both the Catholics and Orthodox hated each others guts and while physical hostility between them was almost nonexistent, they had some pretty bold things to say about one another.

In 1456, following the miraculous victory at Nandorfehervar (one of the most important battles in history and a great read) by a Christian coalition in a last stand effort to halt the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Europe, the CATHOLIC commanders of the coalition: Janos Hunyadi and Giovanni of Capistran (San Juan Capistrano) began organizing military forces to liberate Constantinople and restore the liberty of the Orthodox Christians. The only reason the city is still called: “Istanbul” is because both Janos Hunyad and Giovanni of Capistran died shortly after their victory at Nandorfehervar while still preparing to march on Constantinople. Janos Hunyadi himself also worked together with the Orthodox Christians throughout this time and even placed a very famous Orthadox Christian (Vlad the Impaler) in power, though obviously never got to see Vlad’s true dark side before he died.

Anyway, that’s just one example of the many complicated things that were going on between Catholics and Orthodox over the years.

Part of the real confusion is that apostasy and sainthood marched in the same parade for a long time (read about St. Francis of Acici for one example) and it can be tricky to understand what went where, how reliable are current understandings of early teachings and of course, an even bigger one, how much of the original teachings were contaminated and subject to confusion before the original apostles died.

In the end, the only thing I have been able to find conclusive to hold Catholicism above all the other faiths is that they have been around for a very long time and have deep roots and a better understanding of things then the protestants. If I were to take up a Christian religion, I would take up both Catholic AND Orthodoxy together. The Catholic and Orthodox clergy might not like it, but who cares?
 
Some of you may have already read, Fr. Barbour’s article, "Ancient Baptists and other myths…

envoymagazine.com/backissues/2.4/coverstory.html

Fr. Barbour grew up in a Protestant (Episcopalian) home, his father being a minister in that church. After his father retired he converted to the Catholic Church, like his son, and was ordained, living the last year or so of his life as a Catholic priest.
 
LBSDBS said:
The word: Catholic comes from the Latin words Cata Holic. Cata is the root of the word: “Category” which has a very similar definition, and the word: “Holic” I THINK is the, or a root of the word: “Whole”, and basically means the same thing. “Holic” is where the rumor that Catholic means: “Universal” comes from, which in modern comprehension, isn’t far from the truth. The word: “Catholic” is a merging of the two. Sort of like how we merged the words: “What’s up” in to: “Wassup”.
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“Catholic Church” in the Bible

Many people argue that the Catholic Church is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ beginning with Peter and the Apostles. One argument often made is that the phrase “Catholic Church” does not appear within the pages of Scripture.

Aside from the fact that this argument is weak since the words “trinity” and “Bible” are not contained in Holy Writ either, is it really true that the Catholic Church is not named in the Bible? Well, take a look at the following verse from the Acts of the Apostles, and decide for yourself:

Acts 9:31 (Greek)
ἡ μεν ουν **εκκλησια καθ****᾽ **ὁλης της ιουδαιας και γαλιλαιας και σαμαρειας ειχεν ειρηνην οικοδομουμενη και πορευομενη τω φοβω του κυριου, και τη παρακλησει του ἁγιου πνευματος επληθυνοντο.

Act 9:31 (Transliteration)
aye men oon ekklaysiaye kath olays tays ioodayeas kaye galilayeas kaye samarayas aycon ayraynayn oikodomoomenaye kaye poryoomenaye tow fobow too kurioo kaye tay paraklaysay too agioo pnyoomatos eplaythunonto (russ.org/gtb/luke.html#a9)

Acts 9:31
So the Church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was built up; and walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it was multiplied.

From this text, we can see the Greek word “kath olays” which is rendered “Catholic” in modern English and the word “ekklaysiaye” which becomes “ecclesia” in English and is commonly translated as “church”.

**εκκλησια καθ****᾽ **ὁλης = ekklaysiaye kath olays = “the church throughout all” = Catholic Church.
 
Randy_Carson said:
“Catholic Church” in the Bible

Many people argue that the Catholic Church is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ beginning with Peter and the Apostles. One argument often made is that the phrase “Catholic Church” does not appear within the pages of Scripture.

Aside from the fact that this argument is weak since the words “trinity” and “Bible” are not contained in Holy Writ either, is it really true that the Catholic Church is not named in the Bible? Well, take a look at the following verse from the Acts of the Apostles, and decide for yourself:

Acts 9:31 (Greek)
ἡ μεν ουν εκκλησια καθ****᾽ ὁλης της ιουδαιας και γαλιλαιας και σαμαρειας ειχεν ειρηνην οικοδομουμενη και πορευομενη τω φοβω του κυριου, και τη παρακλησει του ἁγιου πνευματος επληθυνοντο.

Act 9:31 (Transliteration)
aye men oon ekklaysiaye kath olays tays ioodayeas kaye galilayeas kaye samarayas aycon ayraynayn oikodomoomenaye kaye poryoomenaye tow fobow too kurioo kaye tay paraklaysay too agioo pnyoomatos eplaythunonto (russ.org/gtb/luke.html#a9)

Acts 9:31
So the Church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was built up; and walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it was multiplied.

From this text, we can see the Greek word “kath olays” which is rendered “Catholic” in modern English and the word “ekklaysiaye” which becomes “ecclesia” in English and is commonly translated as “church”.

**εκκλησια καθ****᾽ **ὁλης = ekklaysiaye kath olays = “the church throughout all” = Catholic Church.
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Catholic as a single word developed over time. Like I said, it’s sort of like us merging: “What’s up” in to: “wassup”

In that sense, Catholic, as a single word, is not in the bible because it didn’t exist back then. Likewise, “Wassup” is not found in early 20th century writings because the word merging didn’t happen until later.

Of course, I am only fueling your argument. The historical facts are that the word: “Catholic” is a comprising of some of the very words you bring to the table in order to serve as a single word with that meaning. In tums of what the words mean, yes, Catholic is in the bible, in the form of multiple words. Likewise, you’ll find the two words: “What’s up” in 1970s and 1980s literature with the same meaning as the single word: “Wassup”

Seeing how much you seam to understand, I am doubtful that I told you anything you didn’t already know. In fact, maybe I should be picking YOUR brain about this stuff.
 
LBSDBS said:
Seeing how much you seam to understand, I am doubtful that I told you anything you didn’t already know. In fact, maybe I should be picking YOUR brain about this stuff.
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I “borrowed” that from someone else, and I forgot to make note of the reference in order to give credit to the original author.

So, don’t try to examine MY brain too closely. 😛
 
Either way, you DO appear to understand what you were looking at and that is more then most people are going to be keeping up with. If you are looking that deeply in to this stuff, then you are bound to know something I don’t, and I :)LOVE:) new information.
 
LBSDBS said:
The word: Catholic comes from the Latin words Cata Holic. Cata is the root of the word: “Category” which has a very similar definition, and the word: “Holic” I THINK is the, or a root of the word: “Whole”, and basically means the same thing. “Holic” is where the rumor that Catholic means: “Universal” comes from, which in modern comprehension, isn’t far from the truth. The word: “Catholic” is a merging of the two. Sort of like how we merged the words: “What’s up” in to: “Wassup”.
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Shoot, I’ve been telling people that “Catholic” means “one who is addicted to cats”
 
Luke65 said:
Well, when you refuse to love the truth, you need a lie to believe in. So I say, give them Constantine! 😛 But the truth is there for all who seek to find. As Cardinal Newman said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” But if you want to arm yourself, Scripture Catholic has volumes of quotes from the Bible itself, and from the early Church, much of it pre-Constantine, showing that the Church has always taught the same things. God bless.
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Yes, I know that - I know the truth is there for those to see… but, I’m just perplexed at the apparent absence of Constantine-oriented apologetics. It’s like there’s something embarrassing, something Catholics don’t want Protestants to know, and by rarely mentioning it unless when asked, it kinda sorta sends the message to anti-Catholics that, “Gee, maybe Constantine really did start the Catholic church.” Is there some rule book that dictates what subjects get “Apologetic Priority”?? Bible only, faith alone, Mary, the Eucharist… but never Constantine?? It’s like what Fr. Corapi said about someone told him he never has anything new to say…why don’t more Catholic apologetics interject Constantine-oriented subjects into the mix and throw the anti-Catholics a curveball? It’s not like the fundamentalists are going to ask us about it. Therefore, why not ‘pre-emptively’ make it a prominent apologetics “priority” so it doesn’t need to be asked? That’s what I don’t get.
 
Someone (I think it was on this forum) made a good point: If Constantine turned Christianity into a corrupted pagan cult as Protestants claim, then why would Julian the Apostate attack it so viciously a few decades later?
 
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