Questions from a former Catholic thinking about returning

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I have the Mystical City of God too and enjoy reading it. However, that and other writings of the Saints (e.g. St. Alphonsus, who I love) were written before the dogmatic definition of the Assumption in 1950.

Obviously, there are no iPhones or cell phones in heaven. 😀
 
Margaret_Ann said:
I have the Mystical City of God too and enjoy reading it. However, that and other writings of the Saints (e.g. St. Alphonsus, who I love) were written before the dogmatic definition of the Assumption in 1950
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And yet Mary of Agreda pinned the date of the Assumption correctly! 😄
 
MarysLurker said:
At the time of the fall of man, God has to be 100% sure that the plan of salvation will go through: that Mary will say yes. Otherwise Christ doesn’t ransom us, and all of us are gonna go to hell. Now who doesn’t want it to be 100%? The devil.
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I prefer what other Catholics say. That the IC was not necesary but was fitting.

The fact is there were multitudes of “yeses” paving the way for the Incarnation. None of these pivotal, obedient yes’s required IC. There were graces inherent with each covenant .

For Mary to be obedient to the angel did not require a pre fallen spirit. Abraham was obedient without one. Noah was, Rahab was, Moses was, David was also.
 
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This may have been posted before but if not this is a very good video on Mary and Scripture…


Also when you read Scripture have you ever noticed this before…

https://www.agapebiblestudy.com/charts/Virgin Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant.htm

And finally…let’s say someone is walking along a path and falls in a hole. Someone else comes along and pulls them out…they save them. Now let’s say another person is walking along the path and someone comes along and guides them around the hole so that they don’t fall into it. That person was saved also.
 
Baltimore Catechism has it best…
Q. 269. Why was the Blessed Virgin preserved from original sin?

A. The Blessed Virgin was preserved from original sin because it would not be consistent with the dignity of the Son of God to have His Mother, even for an instant, in the power of the devil and an enemy of God.
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There have been many good answers given here. As one who was away from the Church for so years, and then later an RCIA sponsor, I recommend that you attend RCIA at your local parish. Perhaps you will find some answers that you feel comfortable with. God bless you on your journey.
 
Loud-living-dogma said:
OP: when was the last time you confessed your sins to another person, like it says to in the Bible?
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I do this frequently. To my husband, to my children, to my pastor, to my friends.
It’s one of the reasons I mentioned that fellowship is so important to me, because I rely on that accountability and encouragement in my daily life. My problem isn’t that I don’t take scripture seriously, or pick and choose which I want to follow, but that, as it stands, I’m not 100% convinced that what I see in Scripture is consistent with what the Catholic Church teaches. I’m further along after reading many of these answers and articles that have been shared, but I do have one extra question that popped up. (And to reiterate, I’m not doing this in a spirit of argument or contention, I’m genuinely trying to arrive at a knowledge of the truth and, for me, that involved unraveling everything going on in my brain and sorting it out and having my questions answered.)

So my next question is this -
I get the understanding from many here that what it really boils down to is that if the church is the true Church and if she holds the authority she claims to, then the rest of the answers are more of a secondary thing (not regarding their importance, but they’re not foundational - we can all agree that the truth of Mary’s very being is important but simply believing in the IC isn’t going to make me a Catholic if I don’t hold to the authority of the church, if that makes sense).
So if it all more or less rests on whether or not the Church has the authority she claims, then how am I to apply Paul’s words to the Galatians when he says, “But even if I or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than the one you have received, let him be condemned.”
This isn’t me saying that the Catholic Church preaches a false gospel - she and I both agree in the Apostles Creed - but it does set a precedent for refusing to believe what a high authority says.
I hope that makes sense. I haven’t had my coffee yet and I’m still mentally sorting through it.

Thanks to everyone so far for their answers.
 
marybobo said:
There have been many good answers given here. As one who was away from the Church for so years, and then later an RCIA sponsor, I recommend that you attend RCIA at your local parish. Perhaps you will find some answers that you feel comfortable with. God bless you on your journey.
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How I would love for something like that, but I did RCIA at our local Parish as a 13 year old and even at that time I knew that what they were teaching was being taught by people who had no idea what they were talking about. I had many conversations with my Dad on the topics there and he would affirm that the things we were told were not Catholic doctrine (as he had studied it for nearly a decade before enrolling in RCIA).
 
Unique_name said:
So if it all more or less rests on whether or not the Church has the authority she claims, then how am I to apply Paul’s words to the Galatians when he says, “But even if I or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than the one you have received, let him be condemned.”
This isn’t me saying that the Catholic Church preaches a false gospel - she and I both agree in the Apostles Creed - but it does set a precedent for refusing to believe what a high authority says.
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That’s the question of whose Gospel is original: the question of the 1500 year gap between Calvary and the Protestant Reformation. Also, the Book of Acts does state that a “high authority” existed from the beginning: a council of the Apostles (Acts 15). The Catholic Church’s ecumenical councils like Vatican II are just a continuation of that.
 
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As I mentioned, I’m not debating the gospel. The gospel is that Christ, fully God and fully man, was born of a virgin and died to save us from the punishment and power of our sins and reconcile us to God. I believe we are in agreement there.

My question is that even if Paul himself or an angel from heaven could fall and be condemned, why not the Catholic Church?
 
Unique_name said:
My question is that even if Paul himself or an angel from heaven could fall and be condemned, why not the Catholic Church?
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Because until the Eastern Schism (1005 AD), Nicene Christianity was the Catholic Church. After the Schism, you also had the Eastern Orthodox who kept everything except the Papacy. Only in the 1500s AD do you have Protestantism in any form.

God would NOT let the whole Church go apostate. 1 Tim 2:3-4, John 17
 
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You’re right in that the pivotal question is the authority of the Church. All else stems from this question. That was a crucial moment in my conversion to Catholicism. I wasn’t sure about Marian dogma, about the Real Presence, about Celibacy for a long time. But once I understood that Jesus Christ established His Church upon Peter, and He promised it would never fall - I had no recourse but to submit to the Magisterium.
 
AlmaRedemptorisMater said:
But once I understood that Jesus Christ established His Church upon Peter, and He promised it would never fall
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Okay so what is the answer to the common Protestant argument that it was Peter’s confession (not Peter himself) - “You are the Christ” - that Jesus built his church on?
 
As I was a Protestant until this past Easter, that esentially was my position. Yet I could never get it out of my head that for that to be the case, then Jesus’s ministry would have been a spectacular failure. Then it would mean that the early Church misunderstood what Christ was talking about for centuries until Luther came along.

Building the Church on an action (the profession of faith) necessarily takes Christ out of the picture. It is strictly a human response to God’s call. And it fails all the time because we are human, and that is our nature.

Building the Church on a role (the authority of the Church) allows humanity and Heaven to work together. One can be a fallen human yet still function in a role that has never faltered.

Founding the Church on man’s fallen nature is akin to building a house on sand. But establishing a role for humanity to play in the salvation of souls means Christ can provide the sanctity that humans lack for it to function.
 
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