Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Where lies the heresy?It is in believing that we should really be deathly concerned about the real people, or existent flesh-and-flood, who are the men, women and children who huddle in the cold and dark each time they abandon their cardboard shanties by the estero to the floods, and not the unreal and nonexistent Great Unborn who are the phantasmagorical beings that should be there but aren’t because
One problem does not erase the other. Contraception is not about nonexistent unborn, it is an entirely different and very practical issue. The encyclical letter
Humanae Vitae written in 1968 is a helpful reading, and the most powerful thing is that we can clearly see today many or all of the things that the Holy Father predicted back then through the light of the Holy Spirit.
without the fear of spawning mouths you cannot feed
There is confusion between sexual pleasure - which is not bad or sinful, but very good - and lust (the seek of such pleasure as an end). The end of a sexual relation between a man and a woman is - from a purely physical point of view - to bring forth a new human being. To stop that from happening is a
choice. If we cannot feed new mouths, then we abstain from sexual relations or we learn about how our bodies work naturally, which we call “natural family planning”.
how the Church has often stood before learning, with its opposition in the Middle Ages
That’s original, never heard that one before.
to the teaching that the earth revolved around the sun
Most of the scientific world thought pretty much the same way, and it’s not the Church’s fault if it really looks like the sun comes up and goes down.
(persecuting Galileo to discourage the belief)
Of course, anyone with a bit of knowledge knows that Galileo was not persecuted for this reason.
man evolved from lower species and not from Adam and Eve (persecuting Darwin to discourage the belief).
In “On the Origin of Species” Darwin did not address the question of human evolution. The first debates about the nature of human evolution arose between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen. Huxley argued for human evolution from apes by illustrating many of the similarities and differences between humans and apes, and did so particularly in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. However, many of Darwin’s early supporters (such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell) did not agree that the origin of the mental capacities and the moral sensibilities of humans could be explained by natural selection.
“The Descent of Man” was not the first work of its kind, more like a response to various debates of Darwin’s time. It is often erroneously assumed that the book was controversial because it was the first to outline the idea of human evolution and common descent. Coming out so late into that particular debate, while it was clearly Darwin’s intent to weigh in on this question, his goal was to approach it in a new way (sexual selection).
Alfred Russel Wallace, the “co-discoverer” of evolution by natural selection, believed that the human mind was too complex to have evolved gradually. Darwin opposed this view in “The Descent of Man”, trying to show that human features such as moral reasoning, sympathy for others can be seen in kind in other animal species.
As for the Catholic Church persecuting Darwin, I never heard that one before (this time I’m not joking). As far as I know, the Church of England had mixed responses, some of them considering such thoughts heretic, others interpreting natural selection as an instrument of God’s design. I also found that “the Catholic Church delayed official pronouncements on Darwin’s Origin of Species for many decades and Origin of Species was never placed on the Index of Forbidden Books”. Pope Pius XII, in Humani Generis (1950), wrote: “
The Church does not forbid that … research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.” Pope John Paul II said in 1996: “
In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points… Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis.”.
both the centrality of the sun in relation to the planets and evolution are now staple in Catholic universities.
What?
The irony is that “catholic” means “of broad and liberal scope.”
Last time I checked, it comes from the Greek word “
katholikos”, which means “universal”.
This is about the Church saying divorce is a sin, women priests are an abomination, contraception is corruption, you don’t believe that, get out of Catholic schools, get out of the Church, get out of our sight.
The first half is correct, the second half is absurd.
It’s a throwback to the days
Lots of mindless attacks on the Church that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the article. Absolutely no relationship whatsoever between those things and the original topic - just throwing stones at the Church.
when Martin Luther, seeing the corruption and ignorance and despotism of the Church, led a monumental protest against it to get Christians to know Christ’s teachings directly,
Yeah, well, I don’t recall it being quite that way…anyways we saw the consequences in the shape of thousands of Christian communities, each of them with their own teachings and doctrines, while the Catholic Church remains not only united and strong, but still the largest Christian community (1.2 billion, I recall).
Anyways hope some of this helps. Remember the Lord’s words and that the gates of Hades will never prevail over the Church.
