Rosary Praying Catholics removed from Brussels Cathedral by Police during "Reformation Celebration"

  • Thread starter Thread starter R_H_Benson
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Your analogy is designed to view the “celebration” positively and that skews it in the direction you are promoting.
Analogy? I gave no analogy. I was attempting to show why the idea that “they have the right to pray the Rosary in the their own Church” is absurd, giving two examples. There is no such right to co-opt the Cathedral for one’s use. It is a made up entitlement. Yet six people seemed to like that. I do not get why. There is no right. They exercised no right. They protested. This has nothing to do with prayer or saying the Rosary and that claim is intellectual dishonesty.
 
Last edited:
The celebration itself was a kind of co-opting of the cathedral. It wasn’t a “wedding” celebration as you claim in your analogy. (Yes, it was an analogy since you likened the ecumenical celebration to a wedding.)

I wouldn’t suppose celebrations of reformations happen with much frequency in cathedrals.

The relationship of the protestors to the celebrating parties is more like that of children of divorce than that of a spurned lover. I won’t call your comparison “intellectually dishonest,” but it is a gross misrepresentation.
 
Last edited:
The celebration itself was a kind of co-opting of the cathedral.
Do you know the meaning of the word “cathedral”? It is derived from the “cathedra” or chair of the bishop. A bishop can no more co-opt his own chair than the Pope can co-opt the Vatican, the President can co-opt the Oval Office, or you can co-opt your own house you own.

If what he did was wrong, that is up to the Holy Father alone to address, with the faithful allowed to pray for him, or to contact the Nuncio, if they do not believe they are getting the proper response from bishop himself.
 
Last edited:
The fact is this was completely nonsensical on the part of the Brussels archbishop. As was the decision of the Vatican to issue a postage stamp to commemorate the Protestant Revolt. What was it Paul VI said about the smoke of Satan?
 
“The Rosary” as you so scornfully and mockingly refer to…
I did not. I repudiate and denounce this accusation with the greatest of fervor. However, it is a prayer and a sacramental. It is not a Sacrament and it is darn sure not a protest sign. I have several rosaries and still it irks me to see them worn as a sign of gang affiliation. One can respect a thing and still not like to see its abuse or even exaggerated elevation. It is a tool of prayer, not a tool of showing your backside.

These young ones could have done the same thing, but low enough not to disturb the service, and the protest would have been more powerful.
 
Last edited:
I did not. I repudiate and denounce this accusation with the greatest of fervor.
Perhaps, but your fervor to defend the Protestant heretic’s “right” to preach about the wonders of the “Reformation” in a Catholic Cathedral seems to burn much brighter than your fervor for the Holy Rosary of Our Blesssed Lady.
 
I do love how the real heart of all of this alleged positive rapprochement with Protestants is really about Catholics becoming more like Protestants. It’s always a one-way street. Luther is being rehabilitated in some circles of the Catholic hierarchy…and shamefully so…with the basic narrative being, oh those mean Catholics of the time, Luther was such a visionary. Nonsense. He was an agent of Satan in terms of how many souls he led astray.
 
Perhaps, but your fervor to defend the Protestant heretic’s “right” to preach about the wonders of the “Reformation” in a Catholic Cathedral seems to burn much brighter than your fervor for the Holy Rosary of Our Blesssed Lady.
You have no business even attempting to judge me. You haven’t even accurately judged what I have written, much less how I feel. For example, do you know I have not said one word in defense of this meaning or defended in any way the Protestant’s right to preach about the wonder of the reformation in the Catholic Cathedral. I have deliberately avoided opining on that point.

I defend the right of the bishop to act in his capacity. I reject the right to co-opt the facilities under his authority in the name of protest. And I find the greatest irony that the protest of the bishop’s authority is done in the name of defying protestants.
 
Last edited:
Then understand at least what the word means.

http://www.ewtn.com/v/experts/showmessage.asp?number=634895&Pg=&Pgnu=&recnu=
The first Protestants were heretics because they were baptized Catholics. But their children would not be considered heretics because they had no choice in the matter, They quite naturally accepted the faith of their parents. To be a formal heretic you have to know what your faith is and then reject some part of it.
Again, twice people have called them heretics since I posted this. I will not post this more than once a day after this, just enough so that rhetoric may be seen for what it is. I hope it will dawn on some that if one who is cheering on these protesters are factually wrong in such an obvious point, maybe their judgment is not superior to that of the bishop in question.

Besides, all one has to do is look at who is making the accusations and name-calling here.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. "
 
Last edited:
They are heretics. If not formal heretics, they are still material heretics. Heretics.
 
“For if they have doctrines opposed to ours, it is not fitting to be mixed up with them for this cause alone… what do you say? ‘There faith is the same; these men are orthodox?’ why, then, are they not with us?”
- St. John Chrysostom

Do not converse with heretics even for the sake of defending the faith, for fear lest their words instil their poison in your mind.
-Bl. Isaia

I will not pray with you, nor shall you pray with me; neither will I say “Amen” to your prayers, nor shall you to mine!
-St. Margaret Clitherow

I refuse to pray with you, but I desire all Catholics to pray for me, and I mean Catholics of the Catholic Roman Church.
-Ven. George Haydock

To know whom to avoid is a great means of saving our souls. […] Thus, the Church forbids the faithful to communicate with those unbelievers who have forsaken the faith by corrupting it, such as heretics, or by renouncing it, such as apostates.
-St. Thomas Aquinas

“He is no Christian who is not in Christ’s Church.”
- St. Cyrpian

“How does a Catholic sin against faith? A Catholic sins against Faith by Apostasy, heresy, indifferentism and by taking part in non-Catholic worship.”
(Catechism of the Council of Trent, Catechism of Pope St. Pius X and The Baltimore Catechism).

Origin expressly states “If you eat the words of God in the Church, and also eat them in the synagogue of the Jews, you transgress the commandment which says: In one house shall it be eaten”

"These men are Protestants; they are heretics. Have nothing to do with them.! -
St. Anthony Alary Claret, The Modern Apostles.

I will live and die in the true Roman Catholic faith, which I and all antiquity have always professed; and I will by no means go to Protestant churches.
-Ven. Edmund Genings

It is not lawful to go to the Protestant church.
-St. John Rigby

Sorry for the giant use of quotes, but I had to use them to illustrate my point.

It is a great scandal for protestant services to be held in a Catholic Church. Ecumenism is useless unless there is any chance they may repent and convert, which I’m guessing they aren’t willing to change…so I would go with useless.

And to have the protestant preacher give a homily? What is going on?
 
Whether we approve of a celebration of the Reformation or not , we need to ask ourselves if we are
acting in accordance with the will of God. In John Ch.17 on the night before his Crucifixion Jesus prayed to His Father - " That they may all be one, as You, Father and I are one "
If God’s will is for all believers to be one, we need to get behind that purpose and support the healing process. I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I’ve experienced love and fellowship from my Protestant brothers and sisters. I’ve also experienced rudeness and bigotry.
In the end we will all be judged on Love
 
For one, you weaponized the verses, just as you accuse the Catholics in the Brussels Cathedral of doing with the Rosary.

More so, in your hasty desire to lambaste the Catholic who were praying the Rosary, you brought out Matthew 6:5-6, one of the most misunderstood verses in Scripture, to apparently make the point that public prayer is hypocritical, failing to take into account what kind of implications that faulty interpretation would have on on the entire public life of the Church.

Then later, as you were condescendingly accusing another poster of logical fallacies, you weaponized the words of Christ Himself to make it sound like we must have blind obedience to bishops, even if they are telling us to stand idly by while the House of God is profaned by a sacrilegious “ecumenical” service.
 
public prayer is hypocritical,
Public prayer for show..

You use words like “lambaste”, “condescendingly” and “weaponized.” You judge the hearts of others too easily and too readily.

I have never suggested blind obedience. That is also untrue.
 
“Ecumenical” prayer is at the service of the Christian mission and its credibility. It must thus be especially present in the life of the Church and in every activity aimed at fostering Christian unity. It is as if we constantly need to go back and meet in the Upper Room of Holy Thursday, even though our presence together in that place will not be perfect until the obstacles to full ecclesial communion are overcome and all Christians can gather together in the common celebration of the Eucharist.
My visits have almost always included an ecumenical meeting and common prayer with our brothers and sisters who seek unity in Christ and in his Church. With profound emotion I remember praying together with the Primate of the Anglican Communion at Canterbury Cathedral (29 May 1982); in that magnificent edifice, I saw “an eloquent witness both to our long years of common inheritance and to the sad years of division that followed”.
St. John Paul - Ut Unum Sint.

I am not saying if this ecumenical service was a good idea or not, but it is not out of the blue.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/john-paul-iis-ecumenical-passion
 
Last edited:
It is a great scandal for protestant services to be held in a Catholic Church. Ecumenism is useless unless there is any chance they may repent and convert, which I’m guessing they aren’t willing to change…so I would go with useless.
“By showing that the quest for unity is grounded in the unalterable will of Christ for his Church, the present pope (John Paul II) makes it clear that ecumenism does not depend on prospects of visible success but that it is to be pursued in all times and places, even in the face of indifference and hostility” - Cardinal Avery Dulles (The Splendor of Faith: The Theological Vision of Pope John Paul II, 157).
 
Last edited:
You use words like “lambaste”, “condescendingly” and “weaponized.”
I have never suggested blind obedience.
I chose my words to most accurately refect the tone of your posts. You indeed advocated for blind obedience by posting the Scripture verse which says “So you must be careful to do everything they tell you” , prefacing it by implying that any who does not do this 1.) is worldly, and 2.) is violating the teachings of Christ, and then implying that the Catholics who were praying the Rosary must be ignorant of Scripture.
You judge the hearts of others too easily and too readily.
I’m just holding you accountable for your posts.
 
That’s great and all…but the definition of ecumenism is “a relations with other Christian groups in order to persuade these to return to a unity that they themselves had broken.”

My question is, was the “celebration” of the tragic revolt a means of converting protestants? What is the purpose then? Interfaith?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top