Refute what? The rantings of lunatics?
I don’t take what the links say at face-value to be honest. But I’ll see if anything bothers me.
What about it?
Not true. They founded their order in the place where Elijah spent time. And they have a spirituality rooted in Elijah. This prophet of the Old Testament is the model for their order. They make no claim that Elijah founded it. They clearly state their order began in the 12th century.
The Carmelites claim none of these things.
Well, first it was Benedict XIII. And, the Caremelites don’t actually know who founded their order, because it was various pilgrims and hermits who came together on Mt Carmel over a period of time. The first hundred years or so are sort of vague and there aren’t any records. So, they take Elijah as their patron. Because they don’t know who “founded” the order in the same way other orders have a specific person at a specific date, they instead have a statue of Elijah.
That’s just silly.
The articles appear to argue that monasticism comes from paganism. However, that is inaccurate. There is monasticism in the Bible, and early Catholic monks and nuns were simply imitating what some of the prophets in the Bible did, especially St. John the Baptist and Elijah.
You don’t have to refute it word by word, just whatever you feel needs to be addressed and whatever you think may seriously scandalise the faithful.
For the first link, I was looking through PDF books on Scribd and came across a book that seemed interesting to me, only realise it was Anti Catholic when I read the name of a chapter on the contents page; the one in the first link.
I don’t like these sites, they have to lie about Carmelites in order to argue against themWell, sometimes you need to be careful in some cases. I’ve seen that they’ve flat-out made stuff up to slander Catholicism!
It seems to be from a reliable website (www.historyworld.net) and it does not have any anti-Christian overtones of any sort that I have seen. It is not all that extensive. [RESOURCE]
