ND Church I’ve Been Considering

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Hope1960

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Well, I took that class at the Non Denominational church I’d been considering. The lead pastor, whom I’d describe as a showman, had a lot of rude comments about the Catholic Church, all the while trying to make it sound like he wasn’t against the Church.

He was saying that there’s “very few things the CC got right;” “none (or maybe some) of the stuff the CC teaches is in the Bible, they just made it up out of thin air;” “Catholics lied since the 1300’s and its in writings”…among other things. He said that you can ask priests things, (challenge him) to find stuff the Church teaches in the Bible and it’s just not in there.

I’ve learned a LOT here, much of what’s is in direct opposition to what this pastor said. How do we know our teachings, traditions etc. are correct?
 
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I’ll take an unusual approach.
Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to a Catholic.
Our Lady of Lourdes appeared to a Catholic. Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal appeared to a Catholic.
What’s good enough for The Blessed Virgin Mary is good enough for me.
 
Start with the Bible. If you trust the Bible, you trust that Jesus was a real person who went around doing things. He claimed he was God. If he wasn’t, then he was crazy, which the evidence doesn’t suggest in the slightest, or else he was evil, which also isn’t borne out by the evidence. So he had to be God, since a good man wouldn’t walk around saying the things he did knowing that he wasn’t God.

We know of his works, among them was that he founded a Church. He put Peter and the Apostles in charge of it. And that Church decided what belonged in scripture, and faithfully preserved the teaching of Jesus. They handed on the authority they were given by Jesus to others who followed after them. Jesus promised the Church would not fail, and that the Holy Spirit would guide it. The evidence of that guidance is overwhelming. The Church’s teachings are all logically consistent within themselves and do not contradict. They follow perfectly from what we can figure out about God and the nature of the world, even purely by reason.

If there is one God, who is truth itself, there can only be one truth, and that one truth is given to the Church to keep sacred. If you believe the Bible has authority, you trust in the authority of the Church who put the Bible together. That non-denominational church depends upon Catholic teaching for its teaching, though they’d never admit that.

A quick and oversimplified view, but there you go. I’d say stay away from these people and work on deepening your understanding of the teaching of the Church and her history.

-Fr ACEGC
 
Blacknblue said:
What’s good enough for The Blessed Virgin Mary is good enough for me.
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I doubt Marian apparitions are going to be convincing to a Protestant who thinks most Catholic traditions are just made up. They’d almost certainly respond, “yeah, those are just legends/fabrications.”

If someone believes in Marian apparitions, they’re probably Catholic already.
 
Thanks so much Father! I think he even said something about how the CC tried to keep Catholics from reading the Bible.
 
Nah, illiteracy did. Widespread literacy is actually a relatively recent phenomenon in history. People who weren’t of more educated classes couldn’t read well enough to study scripture. So the Church devised other ways of teaching. That’s why preaching is so important, as well as sacred art and music.

It’s also worth noting that monks and hermits would often memorize scripture.
 
Matthew 16:18

”And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Jesus specifically said that the Papacy will never be overrun by sin and thus the Truth will always stay with it. This ND church is claiming that the Church has lost the Truth and that we don’t read the Bible right and that there is very little about the Church that is right… well Jesus said the Truth will always remain with the Church. That’s a good enough answer for me 🙂
 
What is your opinion of all this? That is the only opinion that counts in all this. Yours.
We can all have doubts about our faith. That’s ok. St Thomas the Apostle had doubts.
Do you feel the ND people are correct in what they said? Or in part? Do you feel they have truth.

To echo that famous quote ‘what is truth?’

I will also add , you took a class to learn about a Church, and the fruits of this class were so little, because it was focussed on tearing down another Christian Faith.
Jesus did not teach this way.
 
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I will add
In Egypt Our Lady in Zeitoun, Cairo, appeared to thousands, of all denomination and belief, and also to non believers. Many souls were converted back to God.
 
Hope1960 said:
The lead pastor, whom I’d describe as a showman, had a lot of rude comments about the Catholic Church…
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Were these rude comments unsolicited? How did this topic (Catholic Church) come about?
 
LateranBasilica said:
What is your opinion of all this? That is the only opinion that counts in all this. Yours.
We can all have doubts about our faith. That’s ok. St Thomas the Apostle had doubts.
Do you feel the ND people are correct in what they said? Or in part? Do you feel they have truth.

To echo that famous quote ‘what is truth?’
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Well, at the time I found him somewhat convincing but now, not so much. And my husband, who heard him speak for their Christmas Eve, Eve service disapproves of this church and pastor and I really respect my husbands opinion.
 
At the end of the day, Hope, your struggle with faith, and the direction you head, is from your heart, your soul. We are all Pilgrims on that journey home to God.
Listen to everything, and as Jesus said, discern and reject what you decide is falsehood.
This is the process you are undertaking, exploring different denominations. 🙂
 
To me, it’s like a conspiracy theory. Most of them don’t hold much truth because they depend on one critical point that’s horribly flawed - that an enormously large group of loosely associated people willingly keep a secret and keep it well. The saying goes the only time two people can keep a secret is when one is dead.

If the Catholic Church was a fraction of what the anti-Catholics purport, do you really think the secrets would be so well kept that billions of people over nearly 2000 years would completely go along and not spill the beans?

So for me, it’s simply illogical. Besides, everything under careful and unbiased scrutiny points back to the Church.
 
In retrospect, maybe I should’ve stood up and walked out. There were several of us there with Catholic backgrounds.
This is the same snotty guy I tried talking with a long time ago and he seemed to be kind of jerky then, too.
 
Hope1960 said:
In retrospect, maybe I should’ve stood up and walked out. There were several of us there with Catholic backgrounds.
This is the same snotty guy I tried talking with a long time ago and he seemed to be kind of jerky then, too.
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I am having a very difficult time understanding what it is that you feel you are lacking and what it is that you are looking for.
 
Wannano said:
I am having a very difficult time understanding what it is that you feel you are lacking and what it is that you are looking for.
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I’ve explained that enough in previous threads. You can look it up.
 
Q
“Wesrock said:
So does this ND preacher strive to emulate the pre-1,300s Catholic Church?
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I was questioning him in my mind during this class. He also mispronounced or stumbled over the word Transubstantiation. LOL. I thought that if he really knew his stuff, that wouldn’t be a difficult word for him.
 
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