I felt speechless

[MarkA16]

When I watched a video about Mother Mary, I felt speechless. It showed statues of her, clips of people really devoting themselves to her.
Here’s the video: youtube.com/watch?v=2xLYKLcN2dM
I started feeling weird at 4:00. The constant “We do not worship Mary, we do not” by the priest. Then later shows people walking on their knees for some reason. Large numbers of people honoring Mary. Isn’t this taking it too far? Why do people walk on knees? I truly hope that those people worship Jesus too. Is it bad to devote yourself praying rosaries and doing these things? How about Jesus for a change. Am I missing something?

I’m Catholic. I know she is the one true church, and I’m still learning.

 

[Ghosty]

Well, the “historical” stuff is all just conjecture and mistaken history. Every culture has honored motherhood in some way; it’s a very human thing to do. We all have mothers, motherhood is a sign of our life, ect. That every single other culture in history also honored motherhood, but in the form goddess worship, is not a issue. It’s like complaining that pagans had sacrifices, so the Sacrifice of the Mass is just a pagan influence

As for the waving and kneeling, people waiving is nothing special. I don’t know the tradition of the white hankies, but it looks like a simple veneration to me. The walking while kneeling has no context, so I can’t say anything about it one way or another; I can’t even find references to it online. What I would point out is that walking on the knees is NOT a typical Catholic posture of Divine worship anyway, so there’s no reason to suspect that it has anything to do with that. More likely it’s a penitential action attached to some Feast or Shrine. It’s certainly not indicative of any kind of worship behavior by Catholics, though

Peace and God bless!

 

[carol_marie]

So I watched the whole thing - and mind you, I’m already thinking oh brother, I hope this isn’t over the top because as a convert, the topic of Mary can still make me a bit nervous… but I have to say, that was a bunch of propaganda. The producers of that video OBVIOUSLY have something against Catholics - (hence the quote from Kings at the end.) Fr. Coropi said we do not & should not worship Mary. And I don’t think we do. At least I haven’t seen any evidence of Mary Worship since becomming Catholic. As a Catholic yourself, have you? I do think we honor her as the Mother of God - but that’s it. I don’t know what those people were doing with their hankies - or why they were walking on their knees - but all devotion to Mary is because of Jesus. I do believe that. And big deal that Mary is similar to some pagan goddess. How easily they connected those dots… pagan mom w/ baby… Mary w/ baby… BINGO - we have a match. Yeah right… like there haven’t been billions of Moms w/ babies thoughout history. Those sort of jabs are similar to the ones about the communion host being similar to some pagan symbol. Bunch of hooey.

 

[LilyM]

Well, the “historical” stuff is all just conjecture and mistaken history. Every culture has honored motherhood in some way; it’s a very human thing to do. We all have mothers, motherhood is a sign of our life, ect. That every single other culture in history also honored motherhood, but in the form goddess worship, is not a issue. It’s like complaining that pagans had sacrifices, so the Sacrifice of the Mass is just a pagan influence

As for the waving and kneeling, people waiving is nothing special. I don’t know the tradition of the white hankies, but it looks like a simple veneration to me. The walking while kneeling has no context, so I can’t say anything about it one way or another; I can’t even find references to it online. What I would point out is that walking on the knees is NOT a typical Catholic posture of Divine worship anyway, so there’s no reason to suspect that it has anything to do with that. More likely it’s a penitential action attached to some Feast or Shrine. It’s certainly not indicative of any kind of worship behavior by Catholics, though

Peace and God bless!

This is simply lumping all the extremes of anything anyone has ever done for Mary all together to make it look bad. The one other example of going on your knees that I’ve heard of as a Catholic devotion is climbing on the knees of the Scala Santa in Rome - which is certainly nothing to do with Mary that I’m aware of.

And the Pope went to Fatima to thank Mary - big deal, you honestly think he and all of us didn’t thank God and Christ first and foremost that his life was preserved?

You think statues of Christ are never paraded around anywhere in the same way as the statue of Mary? Not to mention that a lot of places have Eucharistic Processions where the Blessed Sacrament is carried around just as solemnly and huge crowds similarly pay respect to it. You’ve obviously never been to Europe if you think what they showed was anything special!!!

Heck, people NAIL THEMSELVES TO CROSSES (temporarily) in some parts of the world in HIS honour every Easter. How is any amount of prayers to Mary bigger than doing something like that?

As a Catholic I hope you’ve been taught that our SUPREME act of worship is … the Mass. Who are the prayers of the Mass directed to? Not Mary. Does every church even have an image of Mary? I’ve seen a fair few that don’t. Do they all have images of Christ? Certainly - it’s canon law that every church HAS to have a crucifix with his image on it!

More than that - they all have a TABERNACLE - where JESUS HIMSELF is residing! And we worship and adore that Eucharist in a way unheard of in any Marian devotion. Where in the world are there any shrines of Mary that are kept open 24/7 so that people can adore HER? And yet every decent sized city has Perpetual Adoration churches and chapels open 24/7 so that we can visit our Blessed Saviour in the Eucharist any time.

 

[havemercy]

What a horrible video. We need to take CAF to youtube. Youtube ministries.

 

[Jeanette_L]

My family got a copy of this video when I was ready to convert last Easter. They tried to convince me that this is what I was getting myself into!

When this kind of propoganda is out there, and people are desperately wanting to believe the worst, they will cling to this stuff. And it does what it intends to do, it firmly cements them in their anti-Catholic mindset.

I tried to reason with them about the context of what they were seeing and how it was being misrepresented on film, but to no avail. People will believe what they want to believe.

I agree that we do need something that directly counters this particular video, because it’s used a lot more than I think any of us understand. It’s all over the place. My family got it online from Chick Publications! They reach more people than we can even imagine with this garbage.

 

[Eden]

Well, if anyone is up for it, I believe you can leave a video response to this on YouTube countering the propaganda.

 

[Atreyu]

When I watched a video about Mother Mary, I felt speechless. It showed statues of her, clips of people really devoting themselves to her.
Here’s the video: youtube.com/watch?v=2xLYKLcN2dM
I started feeling weird at 4:00. The constant “We do not worship Mary, we do not” by the priest. Then later shows people walking on their knees for some reason. Large numbers of people honoring Mary. Isn’t this taking it too far? Why do people walk on knees? I truly hope that those people worship Jesus too. Is it bad to devote yourself praying rosaries and doing these things? How about Jesus for a change. Am I missing something?

I’m Catholic. I know she is the one true church, and I’m still learning.

The video was deceptive. Others have mentioned some things in the video, but I want to focus on the message that said:
To venerate means to worship!
This is true. Yet it is also not true. The problem is, the word “worship” itself has changed meaning over time. When speaking of “veneration”, “worship”, and “adoration”, the Catholic Church likes to use the words “dulia” and “latria”. “Latria” is rendered in English as “adoration”, and this is the highest form of worship or reverence and is reserved for God alone. It is sacrificial in nature. Note how the word “adoration” is placed above the word “worship”. Over time, these two words seem to have actually swapped meanings somewhat! And so “dulia” is originally rendered in English as “worship”, which means to venerate or to honour. Personally, I try to avoid using the word “worship” with respect to “dulia”, because of this confusion. And so I usually say that “latria” is worship/adoration, and “dulia” is veneration/honour.

Even though “worship” these days tends to have the same meaning to “adoration”, there are still remnants of its former meaning. In Australia (I’m not sure what the case is in America), a magistrate is referred to as “your worship”, in a similar way to a judge who is “your honour” and a prince/princess is “your highness”. And so it is fair to say that anyone who goes to a magistrate court worships the magistrate! So long as we have the correct understanding of what this word means in this situation, then there is no problem. We honour the magistrate as we would honour a judge by calling him “your honour”. The same goes for Mary. We honour Mary only.

By the way, just to give you the complete story, there is a third word, called “hyperdulia”. This is the veneration that Catholics give to Mary only, as she is the archetype of the Church and the archetype of the Christian. She is the greatest of the saints, and she is our mother. Read the gospel of John. In particular, look at the beginning of John 2 - the Wedding at Cana. Jesus grants Mary her request even though it isn’t yet his time! Now look at the passion scene, John 19. The “disciple Jesus loves” is John, representing all Christians. Here, Jesus tells this disciple that Mary is his mother. Catholics take this to mean Jesus is talking to all Christians - that Mary is the mother of all Christians. Also, Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant. If you want to read more about that, then ask someone here and they should be able to point you in the direction of some good sources.

Now, hyperdulia is of the same species as dulia, it is of completely different species to latria. In other words, if there was a scale of 1 - 10, dulia could be anywhere from 1 - 9, and hyperdulia would be 10. Latria would need a completely different scale (I suppose I could say that it was infinity on a scale of 1 - 10). For starters, even hyperdulia isn’t sacrificial in nature. Also, you’ll never see any orthodox Christian thanking Mary for their existence or for Creation!

 

[Verita]

I truly hope that those people worship Jesus too. Is it bad to devote yourself praying rosaries and doing these things? How about Jesus for a change. Am I missing something?

Actually, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. It seems to me the ones who do venerate Mary so much are probably more likely to be the same ones that worship Jesus even more. That’s the great thing about Catholics. It’s not either or. Their perfectly capable of multitasking their devotion.

 

[seremina]

I watched it and made comments. Honestly, have people forgotten that we should honour our parents? God and Mary are no exception, as our Spiritual Parents.

I think the hankies are a British tradition. When you respect someone that’s on parade, you wave your hanky since it would be rude to use your bare hands.

The walking on knees is a penance. It is usually accompanied with penitential prayers. I’m not surprised people don’t recognise this penance; you don’t see it as much after Vatican II came. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Vatican II–I’m merely giving a timeframe. However, you see it more often in Mexico. They respect Mary to the point that the rosary is MUCH longer than we’re accustomed to seeing. You can see that here as a cute comparison… ixeh.net/faith/Treasure/pb-menu.html

I personally feel the video is too Jack Chick-ish to be ignored. I agree with one poster. We here at CAF -need- to do apologetics for those that watch these videos.

 

[Mijoy2]

It’s not worthy of a second thought. It’s idiotic and best left ignored.

 

[Jeanette_L]

It’s not worthy of a second thought. It’s idiotic and best left ignored.

I understand your sentiment because they are annoying and it’s hard to believe anyone with half a brain can take them seriously. But there are those of us who can’t ignore it because it has impacted our lives in extremely painful ways. The loss of an entire family due to this kind of propaganda is not trivial, and the loss of countless people stolen from the Church cannot be ignored either.

The people who make these videos are fueled by hatred and take their mission of robbing the Church of it’s members very serious and have dealt the Church real blows because of their craftiness and determination.