Roman Catholics not Christian??

[Mary]

Could people please explain, or refer me to a thread that does, what the basis is for those who claim Roman Catholics are not Christian? It just doesn’t make sense to me… Especially as Christian is made up of the word Christ- our Saviour. If we believe Christ is our Saviour, our Reedemer, our Lord, how could we not be Christians?

Thanks!

 

[GrzeszDeL]

Mary:

Could people please explain, or refer me to a thread that does, what the basis is for those who claim Roman Catholics are not Christian? It just doesn’t make sense to me… Especially as Christian is made up of the word Christ- our Saviour. If we believe Christ is our Saviour, our Reedemer, our Lord, how could we not be Christians?

If all you want is a link that explains the logic (or illogic) of the claim that Catholics are not Christians, you can find one here. Mind you, of course, the basis for these claims are all either erroneous or trivial in my opinion, but this should at least explain to you the mindset behind the claim.

Meanwhile, for the record, I deny that Christ is my “saviour.” I believe that He is my “savior.”

 

[Matt16_18]

saviour - one who saves from any form or degree of evil. In its highest sense the word indicates the relation sustained by our Lord to his redeemed ones, he is their Saviour. The great message of the gospel is about salvation and the Saviour. It is the “gospel of salvation.” Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ secures to the
sinner a personal interest in the work of redemption. Salvation is redemption made effectual to the individual by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Source: Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary

Dictionary.com

 

[La_Chiara]

Mary–The “Christians” who make the claim that Catholics are not Christian are ignorant. How does one deal with an ignorant person? I find that such people want to judge and are not interested in having a dialogue.

But see the following thread for one person’s reply to the question “have you been saved?”

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=12188

These are people who make up their own definition of what constitutes a “Christian” (ie, that “the Lord Jesus Christ is your personal Savior”) and then go around applying it to others. They are almost always fundamentalist Protestants and usually American. You don’t get this stuff in Europe. But then it is also a uniquely American phenomenon to have the bazillion Protestant denominations and non-denominational Protestant churches. I think that phenomenon is related to all the Protestant groups that came to the US in search of religious freedom. History books would have you believe that they were escaping persecution from the Catholic Church, but the persecution was at least as much and probably worse from the other Protestant churches in Europe (especially Anglican, Calvinists, and Lutheran).

 

[GoodME]

I find the source of this teaching is usually an unlightened minister who imagines how much the coffers of his tiny church would swell if he could just convert those “unGodly” Catholics.

This opinion is the mark of the uninformed and should be ignored, and the credibility of any other utterings of the source of this “factoid” should be immediately questioned.

 

[Contarini]

There are two different rationales for saying that Catholics are “not Christians.” On the one hand, you have the very conservative Protestants (extreme fundamentalists, ultra-conservative Calvinists, etc.) who would say that the doctrines of Catholicism are so completely contrary to the Gospel that they amount to a different religion. These people would vary on when this began to be the case. Many fundamentalists might cite Constantine. Modern conservative Calvinists are more likely to speak of Trent as the point where “Rome anathematized the Gospel.” Or there could be a number of points in between. All these different views account for a tiny minority of modern Protestants, though until late in the 19th century they were probably the majority.

The other, much larger, group who might make such a statement consists of evangelicals, who would usually say something like “many Catholics are not Christians, but some are.” The likelihood of a Catholic being a “Christian” would vary depending on how fundamentalist a given evangelical is. This view is based on the notion that Christianity is not at its core a “religion”–i.e., a set of beliefs and practices–but rather a “personal relationship with Jesus,” which you enter by an act of the will in which you put your trust in Jesus for salvation. At its most moderate, this is not an anti-Catholic view at all–many evangelicals would say that there are members of all churches who have not put their trust in Jesus. However, evangelicals tend to think that the Catholic Church does a rather bad job of teaching people to have a personal relationship with Jesus, so they are more likely to suspect a Catholic of “not being a real Christian,” though members of certain mainline churches such as the Episcopal Church don’t fare much better. The more conservative/fundamentalist an evangelical is, the greater this suspicion of Catholics will be, and the closer it will come to a dogmatic declaration that “Catholics are not Christians.”

In Christ,

Edwin