Wow, the very next post. It seems that being anti-Catholic is part of being Mormon. So it does seem the rejection of the cross is a rejection of Christianity.
Wow. I have seldom seen a better example of slippery slope, fallacious reasoning and broad generalities.
Not to mention begging a whole bunch of questions.
As to the question that brought this on: the position on one side of this issue seems to be that the Catholic church during the middle ages (early, middle and late) was this universally wonderful institution that never stepped wrong, held all knowledge in trust for the ages, diseminated it as soon as physically and divinely possible, and is thus soley responsible for all the forward thinking philosophy and scientific advancement made by all men who ever heard the word “Catholic.”
Those who hold this view resent the mildest observation that, well…no. That’s not quite how it was. If you can’t look at the history of your own faith with your eyes wide open to human and political frailties, and understand that God had to work with very human, imperfect people—flaws and all–who SCREWED UP, then your faith is lacking, sir.
C’mon. Are you going to tell me that the church’s treatment of Wycliff (whose opinions rather closely matched those of St. Francis in terms of what he thought of the clergy’s tendency to get very rich) was a good and righteous thing? That digging the man up after his death, burning his corpse and throwing his ashes into the river was the act of a system that had its head on straight?
Yeah, Wycliff disagreed with the church big time, and he went off the rails doctrinally. However, the church didn’t worry about that nearly as much as it worried about the fact that he could read, write, (boy, did he write), translate the bible into the vernacular and generally embarrass the church by insisting that it return to the early days of being poor.
Then if course there was Tyndale, who asked permission to translate the bible into English, and was refused permission. Never mind his ultimate fate, which was to be tried and convicted of heresy, strangled and having his body burned. Here we have two men, good Catholics (at least at first!) both, who wanted to give the most basic of knowledge to the common man; the scriptures.
Both were refused permission, excommunicated, bodies burned, their books confiscated and burned…I’m sorry, but this is not the fruit of an organization that is eager to spread knowledge and advance thought.
THAT organization, the one that was being presented to me as perfect and a shining example of scientific and philosophically advanced thought, would have, as soon as possible, seen to it that the scriptures were translated into the vernacular by those whose theological opinions matched their own, under the aegis of the church.
But no…because the men whose opinions marched with the church had no intention of translating the scriptures into the vernacular, or sharing that knowledge, so it was left to the ‘heretic.’
