For me, my main concern and suspicion of all 40,000 protestant denominations is the dislike and even in some circumstances hatred of the Blessed Virgin.
Needless to say, all that is Catholic is fully scriptural, which of course you can confirm by opening your Bible at Revelations 12 and reading about the Mother and her offspring, and by checking out the Prophets and the Psalms that speak of the Blessed Virgin as the Queen of Heaven, as free of all sin, as the perpetual virgin, etc.
As for the Holy Rosary, indeed it is not define in the Canon of Sacred Scripture, but is a heavenly gift from the hands of Our Lady. And since the rule of thumb is to know the tree from the fruits and that if something is of human origin it fails but if it is of divine origin it will stand strong, ask yourself why a private revelation to a friar in the 13th Century diffused shortly to the whole Universal Church and has brought many souls to conversion and great devotion to Christ, and is known - in fact, well-known - to rebuke the fallen angels, though this visible spiritual warfare goes unnoticed in the modern age, while it was not so in the past centuries. After all, the Rosary begins with our Profession of Faith, continues with the Lord’s Prayer and the Glory be to the Holy Trinity, and continues with a meditation on the life of Christ (the “mysteries”, such as the Incarnation, the Agony in the Garden, the Ascension, etc.) paced with ten prayers of the Angelic Salutation or Ave Maria, a prayer based on what God told Our Lady through the Archangel and on the praise that the Holy Spirit inspired her cousin Elizabeth, mother of the Forerunner John, the greatest of all prophets.
If I were you, I would try to maintain the humble behavior inspired by the reading of the great spiritual masterpiece De Imitatione Christi, by all the while reading the books on the figure of Mary in Holy Scripture, and especially the writings of the same Thomas Kempis on Our Lady, collected in the book “The Imitation of Mary”.
Remember, it is not up to you to define worship. It is up to the teaching authority, to the apostolic authority. And the apostolic authority (which in matters of faith and morals comes from Christ, as we learn from Mt 13:11, Lk 10:16, Jn 16:12-15) defines worship (ugh…the English language…) as
latria when reserved to God alone, and in an infinitely lower magnitude as
dulia when directed to God through the saints (you know, that which in our most ancient Profession of Faith we call the
Communion of Saints) of which Our Lady is the greatest member since from Her the Son took flesh…and this is of course fully scriptural, for it is written: “laudate Dominum in sanctis eius”, “praise the Lord in His holy ones”.
I will be fully honest with you: the Holy Spirit will always move the Christian heart towards the unity of the Church, which is one, holy, universal, and apostolic, and is governed by the successor of s. Peter and the bishops in communion with him. What prevents you from joining the fullness of communion with the Church of Christ is not those issues, but your pride.
Understand that the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation has its roots in 20 centuries of continuous, consistent, unquestioned apostolic tradition that is fully and solely based on Scripture. Not one of the Church Fathers, Church Doctors, saints, theologians, and bishops of Holy Church has ever raised his voice to question it. They all agree, and explain from Scripture, about what this Sacrament is and does. In fact, they also agree in condemning as incredibly dangerous the errors that negate this Sacrament. s. Augustine of Hippo, for instance, clearly admonishes: “
Let us not listen to those who deny that the Church of God has power to forgive all sins”. So does s. Ambrose, who rebuked the error of the Novatianists as follows: “
they professed to show reverence for the Lord by reserving to Him alone the power of forgiving sins. Greater wrong could not be done than what they do in seeking to rescind His commands and fling back the office He bestowed.The Church obeys Him in both respects, by binding sin and by loosing it”. Are we to believe that s. Augustine and s. Ambrose (along with all other Church Fathers, Church Doctors, bishops, priests, martyrs and saints) were not true, orthodox disciples of Christ doing His will? Or are we rather to believe that the novelties of small groups such as the Novatianists back then or some denominations today are gravely erroneous?
Negation of infant baptism is ludicrous inasmuch as it is taught in the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a book that was taken into consideration to enter the Canon of Sacred Scripture (though later it was not included), and - to mention one - Church Father Origen (184-245 AD) speaks of infant baptism in his works known today as “Homilies on Leviticus”, “Commentary on Romans”, and “Homily on Luke”, as follows:
Baptism according to the practice of the Church is given even to infants …] The Church had a tradition from the Apostles, to give baptism even to infants …] Infants are baptised for the remission of sins …] that is the reason why infants too are baptised".
Are we to assume that the holy Apostles and Church Fathers were mistaken in baptizing infants, or are we to assume that the novelty of not baptizing infants is an error?
:doh2: