How do I respond to these statements by a protestant?

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"As for praying to Mary, I have two things. First of all is the first commandment. (Exodus 20:4-5) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God…
Second is the fact that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the light. No man comes to the Father but by ME.” There is not one single reference in scripture to praying to the dead(Mary is dead) but hundreds against it. Necromancy is satanic. Period.
As for the Papacy, there is Scripture in I believe 1st/snd Samuel about God providing priests and prophets, but man demanding a single leader. This is precisely how the RCC split off from the Orthodox Christians, by demanding a Pope versus the “counsel” as the apostles instructed. If you are honestly interested in more on what Scripture says in regards to RCC teachings on papacy, I would encourage you to check out this page. gotquestions.org/pope-papacy.html

What does the Bible say about the pope / papacy?
www.gotquestions.org
What does the Bible say about the pope / papacy? Does the Bible teach that there is to be one bishop in authority over the entire church?

Remember that the RCC re-wrote the first commandment(along with other Scripture) in order to protect itself from being labeled an idolater. They never expected that the common man would one day have access to the original Hebrew translations."
 
I am/was a devout a protestant currently converting. And despite everything that I heard there is 1 specific thing that lead me to register on this site and start talking to people here.

This is the church, this is the church that Jesus Messiah lord of lords founded. And I don’t think any protestant can come up with a reasonable response as it is quite clear Jesus did not found the Lutheran church…Martin Luther did.
 
for one thing, gotquestions.org isn’t a Catholic website and so has no authority or ethical reason to know what the Catholic Church teaches.

secondly, the above poster is correct in that Christ founded the Catholic Church.

thirdly, the papacy started with St. Paul, in which Jesus said, “You are the rock on which I will find my church” or something along those lines. Please look to articles 874, 880-882 in the CC for more information.

as for the issue on Mary, please look to article 970, 971, 975,968, 969 in the CC also.

God Bless
 
Here is my preferred overview of Marian Dogmas:
scripturecatholic.com/blessed_virgin_mary.html
It’s pretty compact so it may give you more ideas of what to look for at the least even if it’s not all quite clear. A lot of the Old Testament prophecies can be more thoroughly explained by this six lesson free course: salvationhistory.com/studies/courses/online/holy_queen_the_mother_of_god_in_the_word_of_god

As for the Papacy, I would say that they should look at history. If they trust St. Jerome to compile the Bible, why not trust him on the Papacy… or any of the other early Church fathers and Bishops:

Ignatius of Antioch [50-117 AD] Epistle to the Romans
“Ignatius . . . to the church also which holds the presidency, in the location of the country of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of blessing, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and, because you hold the presidency in love, named after Christ and named after the Father” (Letter to the Romans 1:1 [A.D. 110]).
“You [the church at Rome] have envied no one, but others you have taught. I desire only that what you have enjoined in your instructions may remain in force” (ibid., 3:1).

Irenaeus of Lyons [120-180 AD] Adversus Haereses (Book III, Chapter 3)
“But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the succession of all the churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, that church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles. With that church, because of its superior origin, all the churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world, and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition” (Against Heresies 3:3:2 [A.D. 189]).

Cyprian of Carthage [200-270 AD] Epistle 44
“Cyprian to [Pope] Cornelius, his brother. Greeting. . . . We decided to send and are sending a letter to you from all throughout the province [where I am] so that all our colleagues might give their decided approval and support to you and to your communion, that is, to both the unity and the charity of the Catholic Church” (Letters 48:1, 3 [A.D. 253]).

Jerome, St [347-420 AD] To Pammachius Against John of Jerusalem
“I follow no leader but Christ and join in communion with none but your blessedness [Pope Damasus I], that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that this is the rock on which the Church has been built. Whoever eats the Lamb outside this house is profane. Anyone who is not in the ark of Noah will perish when the flood prevails” (Letters 15:2 [A.D. 396]).

Constantinople II (553) [ECUMENICAL]
“*f some bishop be deposed by the judgment of the bishops sitting in the neighborhood, and if he declare that he will seek further redress, another should not be appointed to his see until the bishop of Rome can be acquainted with the case and render a judgment” (canon 4).

Of course, if they are Sola Scriptura…

Matthew Chapter 16
15: He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16: Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 17: And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. 18: And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. 19: I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Hope that helps in your studies… it’s a lot of material to go over haha sorry 😛

God Bless*
 
thirdly, the papacy started with St. Paul, in which Jesus said, “You are the rock on which I will find my church”
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:confused:
I think that was just a lapse of the mind but you mean Peter yeah? haha 😉
 
I read the link. When they say that scripture does not support this belief or that, they are intrepreting scripture. Peter says that man cannot interpret scripture. Well who can? Jesus gave the keys to the kingdom to only one man. Peter. Jesus built His Church on this Rock. The only institution that can intrepret scripture correctly, is The Church that gave us the Holy Scriptures. In The Church´s Magisteriem, you find the truth in the scriptures. When any Protestant starts pulling out Bible scripture to support his or her own views, I listen closely to see if the scripture quoted is really support for his or her view. Normally it´s just what they think the scripture means. As far as Mary is concerned, We simply do not come under the old law. We come under our faith in Jesus. Jesus loved His Mother, He talked to Her, He immaculately created Her. I don´t think it offends Him for us to talk to Her, while kneeling at a statue of Her. She´s not dead. She´s the Holy Queen of Heaven.God bless.👍👍👍
 
I will later get in to Mary, It is just that is a very ample issue. But regarding the Pope:
God is the only one who has authority over all creation and even though destiny does not exist, since free will exists, there is a pre-destiny, which is part of the path that God sets for every person or angel God created, it is your will that determines the choosing of the path, but in the end there is no leaf that falls from a single tree without God’s blessing. Stating this we can look at salivations history and look that God and only God has renamed certain people so that their new names mean what their path is. We have the examples of Sarah, Abraham, Israel, and in the NT we have the example of Simon who was renamed to Peter which means Rock, not little rock or small stone etc, but Rock. So Peter fulfills the meaning of the name Rock as does Abraham who is a Father of multitudes or Israel who fought with God. God does not rename randomly but with a clear purpose. Also historically there is a lot of supporting documentation on the authority of the Pope, which is also acknowledged (not like us Catholic, but still) ny the Orthodox Church which considers the Pope ‘First among equals’. If this is not enough look into Acts and the interaction with St. Paul and Peter with the gentile dilemma or how Peter precedes assembly. This is clear that the authority of the Pope was acknowledged and it is stupid to think that is only valid with the first generation of bishops, since Christ has not yet returned and continuity of the Church is a must and set on by Christ himself who will be with us till his return.
Thanks
Santiago
 
This is from Scott Hahn concerning Our Blessed Mother, transcribed from an audio.

“The last verse in Revelation 11 is 11:19 and states, “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, and peals of thunder, an earthquake, and a violent hailstorm.” This brings us to Revelation 12 and John sees the divine temple in the heavenly Jerusalem and the real Ark of the New Covenant. And that’s what he describes, he doesn’t just say, oh I see the Ark and let’s just forget about that and we’ll shift over to this woman. If he’s seeing the Ark, he’s describing the Ark and his description of the Ark is of the woman who bears the male child in verse 5, “She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod.” Now who is this? Some say it’s the OT synagogue daughter, Zion, others say it’s the Church. I’d say both are right but in addition to those truths, there’s a higher truth that ties them together and that is, this woman is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Why? Because in this vision, there are 4 characters. There’s the woman, there’s the male child who is to rule the nations, there’s also Satan in the form of a dragon with 7 heads and 10 horns and there’s Michael the Archangel. Now we know the male child is Jesus, an individual person, but it’s also a symbol of the whole Davidic dynasty, because it quotes Psalm 2, verse 9, which is applicable to every Davidic king, most especially to Jesus. So it refers to Jesus but it also is a symbol of this corporate reality, the Davidic kingdom. Likewise, Satan, the great dragon, certainly refers to an individual personage, the fallen angel himself. But he has 7 heads and 10 horns which symbolize the earthly empires that he uses to make war against God’s people. Likewise, Michael the Archangel, who makes war against this dragon but he doesn’t do it alone, he does it with all the angelic hosts, all of the armies of heaven, of which he is their head representative. So you have representative heads here, Jesus, the representative head of the Davidic dynasty, Satan, the representative head of the fallen angels, Michael, the representative head of the angels who make war against evil. And so Mary is the representative head of the Church. The Church is called to be a virgin bride of Christ and yet Mother Church, a fruitful mother. How can the Church be both? Only one person was endowed by God to be both, Mary is the virgin bride and a fruitful mother. In Mary, the Holy Spirit has created the Ark type and source of the Church. This is how Vatican II describes Mary and this is why more than half a dozen Popes said Mary is the woman described in John’s vision of Revelation 12. We wouldn’t be a family without a mother!”
 
101405 said:
"As for praying to Mary, I have two things. First of all is the first commandment. (Exodus 20:4-5) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God…
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This is a command not to worship anyone other than God. You can tell because God actually commanded the creation of various statues at various times. The most relevant example is probably the snake on a stick that we see on ambulances today - definitely a graven image that God specifically ordered. It was destroyed when people began to worship it but not before, which shows that statues themselves are not inherently bad for religious purposes. See the Catholic Answers tract here for more.
Second is the fact that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the light. No man comes to the Father but by ME.” There is not one single reference in scripture to praying to the dead(Mary is dead) but hundreds against it.
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False. Of course, a certain reformer tossed out the books with the most references, but if you take the whole bible this is clearly not true, and even if you restrict to the parts that protestants accept today it’s not really true, references are just more oblique. The example that comes to mind is when the Israelites threw a body into the tomb of Elisha and the person came back to life after hitting a bone. More directly linked to relics (which protestants also tend to not like), but the two are related.

Also, praying to saints is not trying to circumvent Jesus, sense we ask the saints to pray for us to God, and they go through Jesus. We pray for each other on earth, and ask each other to do so, and there’s no reason why we should stop praying for our relatives when we move closer to God in heaven, not any reason we should stop asking people to pray for us because they are closer to God. This makes zero sense. If I can ask someone I see once a week a church to pray for my family and have that not be useless, then I can’t think that it’d be useless to ask Christ’s mother or some other saint to do so.
As for the Papacy, there is Scripture in I believe 1st/snd Samuel about God providing priests and prophets, but man demanding a single leader. This is precisely how the RCC split off from the Orthodox Christians, by demanding a Pope versus the “counsel” as the apostles instructed.
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“You are Rock, and upon this Rock I build my Church.” Nuff said.
Remember that the RCC re-wrote the first commandment(along with other Scripture) in order to protect itself from being labeled an idolater. They never expected that the common man would one day have access to the original Hebrew translations."
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This is silly:
  1. Eastern Catholics tend to use the same numbering as the Protestants, with no arguments from the Latin, so if the Catholic Church is trying to hide something it’s doing a bad job. But even ignoring that:
  2. The text was not changed at all. A full version of the Latin Catholic ten commandments has the graven images listed as part of the first commandment.
  3. Latin Catholics tend to include the graven image thing as part of the first commandment because all of that is clearly talking about the same thing. This accusation is along the same lines as trying to accuse protestants of dropping the commandment to not covet “thy neighbor’s wife” because (often) the protestant version of the 10 commandments combines not coveting neighbor’s goods and wife into one because both are related to coveting.
  4. The bible tells us there are ten commandments, and it gives us the text from which the 10 come, but it does not tell us which text goes to which commandment. Have your friend open the bible and see if there is anywhere in there a bullet point listing of commandments that was not product of later human modification. Verse numbers don’t count, and in any case there are 16 verses spanning the 10 commandments and (so far as I know) Catholics and protestants use exactly the same text for both orderings. We do the best we can to divide this up into 10 commandments, and we don’t change the text that is used, but in both our case and in his case the numbering is an semi-artificial thing that we added later as an aid for us. But, and again to emphasize, the textual content is the same, only the lines dividing it into chunks differ.
See fisheaters.com/10commandments.html.
  1. THE ONLY REASON why we even have the original texts of scripture, for the most part, is because the RCC preserved them. Had Catholics wanted to “hide their idolatry” they could have just, while painstakingly hand copying every single bible that existed before the printing press, changed a few words and destroyed earlier copies - perhaps claiming that any thing contrary was the writings of heretics. If there really was some sort of conspiracy to hide this sort of thing, that would have been easy. This might be harder for old testament stuff than new, but a direct reference to the “real 10 commandments” added in somewhere in the new testament would have made this fairly easy to do. But this didn’t happen, because the text against graven images is still there.
If we had really tried to edit scripture to agree with us, then he wouldn’t know because there would be no conflicting copies. (But in fact there are no conflicting copies because we use the same text.)
 
Regarding Mary: A good argument is that we must follow Christ’s example and the Weddings of Canaa is a good example of how our Lord submitted to Mary’s authority and with he issuing her as our mother in the Crucifixion with St. John, it means that we also need to acknowledge Mary’s authority as our mother. If Jesus did this then we must at least try to do the same. Doing the contrary is an insult to God himself who did what his mother told him to do even though he stated it wasn’t time. Who are we to do the contrary? Taking Mary as our mother and authority means submitance to another human being which needs humility. If a protestant tells you that Christ before his passing, only wanted someone to take care of Mary that is taking everything out of context, Jeus last words are and have to be very meanningfull, those were his last words before resurrection and as such must be taken in to context, Jesus did not tell anything to Mary Magdalene, absolutely nothing to John except here is your mother and the same to Mary. Taking lightly this words of Jesus is to take all of the Gospels lightly.

There are hundreds of other arguments of the importance of Mary in salvation, many results of Logic or theology and many other of histortic writings. I suggest reading some of Louis Maria de Monfot works which take care of a lot of the theology arguments.
Thanks
Santiago
 
We are not to make graven images to WORSHIP. Keep reading in Exodus and you will see that God commanded Moses to build images of angels. God also had Moses make a snake on a pole for people to look on to be cured of venomous snake bites.

Mary is not dead, she is alive and in Heaven. [bibledrb]Mark 12:27[/bibledrb]
 
Catholic Answers has wonderful apologetic tracts that go into fine detail concerning each of those things mentioned above. I highly recommend checking those tracts out and get familiiar with them because they can truly help equip you.

As for my own top of the head remarks without being at my PC to copy and paste links and resources, I would usually reply to the praying to the saints by bringing up intercessory prayer, which most Protestants believe in, which means that we can and should ask our brethren to pray with us and for us. And since those in Heaven are our brethren too, then we can ask them to pray for us. Asking for them to pray for us is nothing like conjurring up demons and spirits like Scripture teaches against doing, because that is Satanic. But to ask our brothers and sisters in Heaven to pray for is not Satanic.
 
Do Protestants believe in what happened at Fatima?

Didn’t Mary, the mother of our Lord invite us to pray the Rosary, which is prayer through her to God? Or am I wrong?
 
ajecphotos said:
Do Protestants believe in what happened at Fatima?

Didn’t Mary, the mother of our Lord invite us to pray the Rosary, which is prayer through her to God? Or am I wrong?
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In that same context remember what she told juan Diego in Mexico. I am the mother of the only god. Once again she’s showing us that she’s not a god, but that she’s here as our mother to help us go to him
 
ajecphotos said:
Do Protestants believe in what happened at Fatima?

Didn’t Mary, the mother of our Lord invite us to pray the Rosary, which is prayer through her to God? Or am I wrong?
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Actually no they do not believe what happened in Fatima. Most Protestants actually hate the notion of Hyperdulia. They treat Mary as just a causality, not acknowledging her will and why she was chosen from all the women in existence and who are to exist. It is sad because Mary is so wonderful, I couldn’t imagine myself being a Catholic without loving Mary and rendering her well deserved veneration above all saints and angels. She is this perfect human born without sin who gave herself to God, like no other human has and once again she gave her self to us. So loving protective and humble and also very special in Gods Salvation plan. She is the one that the devil fears the most and the one that is our principal advocate.
Thanks
Santiago
 
I wandered through a few NCC (Non-Catholic Christian) churches on my way home. Some things struck me back when I was in RCIA.

To the uneducated eye, it looks like we “worship” statues. When I first saw someone kneeling in front of a statue of Our Lady, praying, I was pretty shocked. So I asked questions. I couldn’t see inside the person’s head, to know that rather than worshiping, she was humbly asking Mary (knowing full well that statue wasn’t her) to “pray for me to the Lord, our God.”

And to a cradle Catholic, it might seem that, with their bare churches, NCCs don’t give God any honor, and that by using crosses instead of crucifixes, they ignore His Passion. I know that’s not so, either.

So, as the old saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover! 😃
 
Tx3bro said:
I am/was a devout a protestant currently converting. And despite everything that I heard there is 1 specific thing that lead me to register on this site and start talking to people here.

This is the church, this is the church that Jesus Messiah lord of lords founded. And I don’t think any protestant can come up with a reasonable response as it is quite clear Jesus did not found the Lutheran church…Martin Luther did.
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How old is your church?:

ewtn.com/faith/teachings/churb4.htm
 
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