What if its against my conscience to be Catholic?

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There is a new thread in the Apologetics forum regarding scripture references supporting Catholic doctrine. The thread is entitled Catholic Quick Reference.
 
JoyToBeCatholic said:
but we can’t walk around just accepthing things b/c someone says they are true, now can we?
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you must trust some one
how do you know that the sun is a hydrogen fireball?
you accept the authority of the scientists, strangers to you.
How do you know that your car just need a solenoid, not the whole starter?
You trust/believe the mechanic.
You believed in their authority in their fields.
Why can’t you accept the authority of the Church?
After all, she is the church that Christ established.

May the Holy Spirit illuminates you
Tak
 
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JoyToBeCatholic:
but we can’t walk around just accepthing things b/c someone says they are true, now can we?
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This begs the question of whether or not what is said is true.

It also begs the question of whether or not we should trust anyone at all and, if so, then whom?

To trust no one but one’s self calls one’s humanness into question. Humans do not have fur to keep them warm in the winter. They do not have sharp teeth and claws to bring down prey. Their survival therefore depends on a division of labour and therefore an interdependence.

To trust everyone indiscriminately is as counterproductive as trusting no one. After all, there may be those among us who trust no one and do not respect the rules governing interdependence. To trust someone who does not trust us is illogical.

It comes down to choosing whom to trust. Christians trust Jesus. Jesus asks us to trust the Church He established on Earth. Why? Well because He asks us to, but also because the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church.

Moreover, it is reasonable to trust the Church. And God has given us the gift of reason. For wisdom in using that reason, we have only to ask God. For example we have only to pray the Prayer of Solomon.

Actually it gets more personal than this. Each person has his or her trust barriers and, if those trust barriers are blocking a productive happy life, then those trust barriers must be subjected to scrutiny. It serves no good cause to cast blame on others when it is our own ability to trust even those who are worth of trust which is in question.

Moreover, choosing whom to trust must be not only logical but reasonable. What is irrational after all has a logic of its own but is completely unreasonable. There are rules for discerning what is reasonable and what is not.

However way you cut it, self-sufficiency, by its very nature cannot lead to truth. Hence we have the appeal to authority and the appeal to reason which have lasted – at least in the Catholic Church – for two millenia. It can be easily shown that these two ‘methods’ have been around for a much longer time.
 
Thanks for the link on that other thread. I will check it soon…
lak611 said:
What in particular did you believe was erroneous on the Scripture Catholic website?
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Well, it’s been a while, but it had something to do with the Greek in John 6. Actually, I asked a question here about it some time ago…

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=128258

I don’t specifically remember the other errors, but if you look at the part on the eucharist I’ll bet you can easily pick some out for yourself. If I remember correctly some were not so much errors as they were just not really supporting the argument very well. You’d have to try to look at it as if you were someone who didn’t believe in the real presence already.
 
scylla said:
That is interesting…Which Bible by the way?
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I don’t have it handy right now, but I think it said New American something… Standard, perhaps? It was a Catholic bible which I got at my Confirmation. I was fully Catholic at the time all this started, and that was the only Bible I had aside from a really special one with pretty pictures from the Vatican in it that no one dares to open because it’s so nice, so it sits on a shelf and collects dust and every now and then we put a special paper or bonds and such in it for safe keeping :rolleyes: . Since then I’ve gotten the Ignatius bible and the King James (those are the ones I am currently using to study with, as well as the Douay-Rheims [sp?] online)
Now if you don’t see it there, does it mean it isn’t there? If I don’t see God is He there?
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Well, I think they were written so we could see…
I don’t feel peace in the Catholic Church in the sense that I am a sinner and I constantly need to be reconciled. Yet I have the peace of it being 100% true and perfect. I have searched for the last couple years and have never found one problem with the Catholic Church. It is perfect which I cannot say for any other faith tradition I have found.

Ask me anything of the Catholic Church, and I will be happy to show you how it is perfect in every single doctrine and belief, of course you will find crummy Priests, Bishops not doing what they should. Celibacy for example.
This is hard because it is hard to imitate Jesus. Some Priests and even some Bishops will complain because they are wishy washy.
This doesn’t invalidate Catholicism but just shows how people are crummy.
Yet the truth still stands in every single aspect of Catholicism.

You wont find peace until you rest in Christ. I have found peace in the Catholic Church but I am always uncomfortable as sin keeps getting to me. The sins of others and my sins.

You might find comfort but that is different. Comfort can be found in New Age Groups, Buddism, Protestantism, even the touchy feely Catholicism that some Priests promote.
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I’m not talking about that kind of peace/comfort. I’m talking about my conscience bothering me which is a different kind of unrest. It’s doubt, really. It’s not dealing with hardship and the lack of peace that comes from that. Believe me, I don’t have that kind of peace or comfort as a Mennonite either! Quite the contrary.
I would be happy to be on a farm with the Amish, it would be very comfortable, yet I wouldn’t be picking up my cross and following Jesus.
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Amish and Mennonites believe in living the crucified life. They are quite familiar with the cross.
I would be going to hell because of my desire.
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Yes, just following one’s heart/desire is the wrong motive. I’m trying to follow what I believe is God’s will, not a desire. It would be much easier for me to remain Catholic, go to church down the street, WITH my husband even (and ALL my children, whereas, my oldest son refuses to go the the Mennonite church and my husband won’t let me take him b/c of it), my family would stop asking me so many questions, people won’t gawk at my funny headcovering… It is much more comfortable to remain Catholic. Believe me.
Feel free to PM me with any objection the the Catholic Church and I will be happy to show how it all leads to Jesus and is perfect. Not because of the people, but because of Jesus.
We can talk about why the Sacrifice of Jesus translates into the only perfect worship.
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Thanks so much. I’m debating whether or not to get into specific teachings I object to. I know it’s going to be time-consuming as this already has been. I also feel like I’ve heard or read so much about these things (no, I don’t know it all…). And it’s not that I totally disagree with the teachings and practices, but that if I were going to go solely with the Bible I would see them as wrong. But as a Catholic I shouldn’t go solely with the Bible anyway, or my understanding of it.
 
JoyToBeCatholic said:
Lol - yes, that certainly is true! (no pun intended), but we can’t walk around just accepthing things b/c someone says they are true, now can we?
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If it’s Christ who said it, we can 🙂 He gave us the Church and said the gates of Hell will not prevail. That’s good enough for me.
—KCT
 
2BAC0905 said:
I have been back and forth with Catholicism and I feel at best that Christianity is flawed and corrupt on the whole. Its like untangling a ball of yarn.

I think we storm-battered soldiers should go on silent retreat and listen to the moon, the stars, the wind. Let all the voices be silent in AWE of the universe. Shed tears and TASTE everything around you. Bring no cameras or notepad. Just sit with GodNESS all around you. Stop trying to get certified canonical approval for that fresh GodSENSE that lies deep within you reguardless of the Bible, the Sutras, the Holy Q’ran, the Tamuld, etc. Just BE and by BEing you BECOME what you truly are in the 1st place.
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I do that from time to time; just turn off theology-mode and get contemplative. I go through phases of intense studying and then phases of none at all. There’s no other way. But just “being me” brings out the worst in me :o . Without God I am nothing, and although I find inspiration in nature, etc., my main inspiration comes from the Scriptures and the grace of God. Not that I’m saintly when I focus on God, but I am truly wreched and definately hellbound without Him. I know I’m not going to get certified canonical approval, but I believe one or the other is true and I cannot fully rest until I have a certain measure of faith in where I’m going. I definately believe God wants me to worship with His people - not just with the critters in the forest (although it’s a nice way to worship outside of formal worship:thumbsup: )

Peace
 
my two cents -
you said that you belived that any man should be able to pick up the bible and gain salvation. That would be true enough, if the Bible was more than it actually is. If it contained ALL the teachings of Jesus and the apostles, than it would be all we needed. However, the Bible is only a small selection of writings, chosen by the Catholic Church, and put together under one cover to be an accessible guide to religous everywhere. It was never meant to be the sole rule of faith, but to supplement the teachings of the church. The overwhelmingly convincing facts that tell me that Catholicism is the true, original church is that: The RCC put the Bible, and that for many years before the bible was created, Jesus’ teachings were passed down by word of mouth. The Bible was only created later as a tool to more widely distribute His word.

Peace, and I’ll be praying for you.
 
jemfinch said:
First, determine whether those are genuinely inconsistencies, or whether they’re just differences, ways in which the Church developed. The analogy that Paul used, that the Church is the Body of Christ, is particularly apt: bodies grow, even Christ’s, and develop on their way from infant to child to adolescent to adult.
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But God doesn’t change. Why isn’t the church as we see it in Scripture not a good enough model for the church today? And if Scripture is ‘canon’, how can the church decide some of it is no longer applical today? If Scripture was just made into a book of good historical value, the church could have compiled it and labeled it as such, but it went so far as to make it the rule of measure. How is it okay to keep changing over time???
Even Christ “grew in favor with God and men,” to use the term that St. Luke used to summarize eighteen years of Jesus’ time on earth.
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But did He change (other than physically)? Can this also mean that God and men’s favor in Jesus grew with time?
What you won’t find in Scripture properly interpreted, however, is inconsistencies with the Church of today. That’s another major point in defense of the Catholic Church: it has genuine doctrinal consistency with itself throughout history.
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I think the church sometimes finds a way around contradicting itself. Annulment is one of them.
But most of the heresies that Baptists would accuse Catholics of subscribing to (for instance, infant baptism or baptism by methods other than immersion) the Church does not even have record of an argument that infant baptisms were invalid prior to the Reformation. These are things so historical, so deeply ingrained within the Church that even those in the early Church who said that baptism should be delayed into adulthood (since it washed away all sins, and could only be performed once) never argued that infant baptism was invalid.
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Perhaps they quietly left? Perhaps not all objectors were as noisy as the reformers were
 
jemfinch said:
How can the Church be trusted in its canon if it can’t be trusted to preserve the apostolic teachings by which it determined the canon?
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Jesus said the Holy Spirit would bring all things to their (Apostles) remembrance. If the Scriptures are inspired by God, and if the Apostles had all things in their remembrance, and if the H.S. guided them to write these things, I cannot possibly believe that He only had them write some of their teachings. The fact that there are many different interpretations is no different than the fact that there are cafeteria Catholics. In some cases, the differences in denominations are so small, its like looking at the differences in religious orders; its just a matter of differing charisms.
If you can trust those present at the councils of Hippo, Carthage, and Rome to pronounce the canon, why can’t you trust them in their doctrines on infant baptism, or baptism by methods other than immersion?
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B/c I trust the canonization process of Scripture based on God’s promise to preserve His Word. I know you trust the Church (as you’ve interpreted it) that God preserves is the Catholic church. I trust that God is preserving His church too, but I don’t think it is solely the CC. (sola churchola ----:rotfl: sorry, I couldn’t resist!)
Why do you believe that? What about the world changed such that those gifts were necessary in the early Church, but not in this later Church that had no need for gifts?
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I don’t know what changed or that change inthe world was what caused it to cease. But obviously they have ceased or there would still be people raising the dead.
God will not have His Church, whom He has commanded His followers to obey, teach falsehood in matters of faith and morals.
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Assuming the church means a specific body (like the CC). The pillar and bulkwark of truth may be those called out (ecclesia, I think) who live according to God’s Word. There is so much in the Bible God tells us about obeying His Word; so much about how perfect God’s Word is… The difference is that the CC believes there is more to God’s Word that just the Bible. But again, if the HS inspired the Apostles, who had all things in remembrance… (see above).
 
tptram and ani,

Please see my last post. See my point about the H.S. and all things brought to the Apostles’ remembrance etc.? I think it addresses what you’re saying. I’m giving it more thought though. It may be circular reasoning :hmmm:
 
I know I didn’t respond to each individual post, but I think my answers to them have been given in response to others’ posts.

Thanks so much.

And thanks also for prayers. They are very much needed.
 
JoyToBeCatholic said:
But God doesn’t change.
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Of course He doesn’t.
Why isn’t the church as we see it in Scripture not a good enough model for the church today?
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I didn’t say that it wasn’t “good enough.” I said that it wasn’t full grown. We should expect that the Church, like Christ Himself, will grow. If the Church looks different today than it looked in the first century, that is to be expected, because 2,000 years of growth will do that to a person 🙂 Note that the Holy Spirit was given to the Apostles for the Church to lead us into all the truth: leading is a process, not a one-time event that took place in the first century and is not to be continued. Note also that Christ gave us the apostles, the prophets, the teachers, the evangelists, and the pastors for building up the Body of Christ, until we attain to the fulness of the measure of the stature of Christ: that is, they were given to us, the Church, to help us grow, because the Church is a living body that God intends to grow as such.
And if Scripture is ‘canon’, how can the church decide some of it is no longer applical today?
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I’m not sure what you mean when you say that some of it isn’t applicable today. Of course, the Church affirms the truth of all the doctrines taught by the Bible. There’s no doctrine taught in the Bible about which the Church says, “That’s what we used to believe, but we were wrong: now we don’t believe that.” I challenge you or any Protestant to provide one such example.

Now, there are certain matters of practice recorded in the Bible, for instance, the decisions of the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, or the directions Paul gave the Corinthians regarding headgear and a woman’s place in the Church that are matters of practice that no longer are necessary to be enforced in today’s Church. These aren’t matters of doctrine or of the faith, but matters of practice and prudence, which are fully within the Church’s right to modify. Remember, the Church still has the power Christ granted the Apostles, to bind and to loose, as well as the keys given to Peter.
If Scripture was just made into a book of good historical value, the church could have compiled it and labeled it as such, but it went so far as to make it the rule of measure.
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What do you mean by “the rule of measure”? That sounds to me like Protestant terminology, implicitly accepting the claim of some proponents of Sola Scriptura that Scripture has an authority greater than Tradition or the Magisterium.
But did He change (other than physically)?
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The Bible says that Christ not only “grew in stature” but also that He grew “in favor with God and men.” Christ’s growth was not merely physical.
Can this also mean that God and men’s favor in Jesus grew with time?
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Yes, I think that’s precisely what it means.
I think the church sometimes finds a way around contradicting itself.
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I would expect that it always should. How else could it be the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15) if it contradicted itself?
Annulment is one of them.
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Annulment is necessary because of the Church’s adherence to Christ’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. Sometimes people think they’re married, but actually aren’t. The Church must investigate such cases and rule as to whether they are, in fact married. Do you have some other suggestion? 🙂

To Be Continued…
 
Perhaps they quietly left? Perhaps not all objectors were as noisy as the reformers were
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One would think that those people defending the faith they received from the Apostles would cry out all the more loudly than those coming 1,000 years who claim that the true faith was lost.

If the anabaptist distinctives were not worthy even to warrant a defense by those who believed them strongly enough to leave the Church, are they likely to be the true gospel, for which many martyrs throughout history have given their lives?

And again, we’re back to “special pleading”: an arbitrary guess as to why history simply has no evidence for the supposed anabaptist dissent in the early centuries of the Church. The Donatists did not dissent quietly. The Montanists did not dissent quietly. The Arians certainly did not dissent quietly. Why would the anabaptists have dissented quietly?
Jesus said the Holy Spirit would bring all things to their (Apostles) remembrance. If the Scriptures are inspired by God, and if the Apostles had all things in their remembrance, and if the H.S. guided them to write these things, I cannot possibly believe that He only had them write some of their teachings.
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Christ’s promise was to all the Apostles, but only four Apostles actually wrote anything down! Christ’s promise was not that the Apostles would write it all down, but that He would bring it to their memory. Be careful of reading Protestant presumptions into the text. Even Paul emphasized that both his written teachings and his verbal teachings commanded obedience: “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.” (2 Thessalonians 2:15)
The fact that there are many different interpretations is no different than the fact that there are cafeteria Catholics.
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Both have approximately the same evil source: disobedience to our rightful leaders, in contradiction to Scripture.
I trust the canonization process of Scripture based on God’s promise to preserve His Word.
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But again, I have to challenge the logical consistency of the belief that the canonization process can be trusted, but not the faith of the men whom God used in this process. How can a baptist, for instance, claim to trust the canon declared by Carthage, Hippo, and Rome while denying the very faith by which the men in those councils measured literary works for their inclusion in the canon? These men believed in the Real Presence, they believed in infant baptism, they believed in baptism by methods other than immersion, and this was the apostolic faith that they used to determine the canon: how can you trust their canon while denying the faith by which it was determined?
I don’t know what changed or that change inthe world was what caused it to cease. But obviously they have ceased or there would still be people raising the dead.
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Read up. We still see miracles in Church today.
Assuming the church means a specific body (like the CC).
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It does, in the Bible. Otherwise how would you interpret Matthew 18? All throughout Scripture we see reference to a visible Church. I just finished reading St. Francis de Sales’ sermon on the visibility of the Church, and I could provide example after example in the Bible where the Church is visible, if you like.
The pillar and bulkwark of truth may be those called out (ecclesia, I think) who live according to God’s Word.
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An invisible body of believers cannot be the pillar and bulwark of the truth: first, and most importantly, because they are invisible, they cannot serve as a pillar for men to look to see the truth.
There is so much in the Bible God tells us about obeying His Word; so much about how perfect God’s Word is… The difference is that the CC believes there is more to God’s Word that just the Bible.
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You’re doggone right it does. The Word of God is Jesus Christ Himself, “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature,” and any attempt to reduce God’s Word to mere letters on paper always has and always will fail. And let’s not forget what John tells us at the end of his gospel: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
But again, if the HS inspired the Apostles, who had all things in remembrance… (see above).
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And again, the promise is that they would remember, not that they would record in writing. Paul doesn’t tell Timothy to hand on his writings, or to write down what he taught, but he says, “what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

Jeremy
 
jemfinch said:
." I said that it wasn’t full grown. We should expect that the Church, like Christ Himself, will grow.
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That would imply that the Apostles were led into all truth, and the H.S. inspired them to write, but for some reason wasn’t able to inspire them to write everything that was necessary. This is absurd to me. If God inspired the writings, they have to be sufficient or there was no point to having inspired them to write in the first place. I’d wager a guess God foresaw that people would insist on following the Scriptures alone and wouldn’t have made it impossible for us to do so in security (human fallibility aside, b/c one can just as easily disobey the church)
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that some of it isn’t applicable today. Of course, the Church affirms the truth of all the doctrines taught by the Bible. There’s no doctrine taught in the Bible about which the Church says, “That’s what we used to believe, but we were wrong: now we don’t believe that.” I challenge you or any Protestant to provide one such example.
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It does, in essence, say this by being silent on the issue of headcovering for instance. I know the church does not forbid it, but it doesn’t require it anymore either. It is a specific prescription given by Paul, given to the church under the inspiration of God. Paul begins the chapter **praising them for imitating him and for keeping the ordinances as he delivers them to them. He goes on, at length about the order of creation and submission and coverings for women. The reason this is no longer a requirement is b/c the church has decided that the practice was cultural. Perhaps it was, but since the H.S. inspired Paul to write this, it passed from an unnecessary cultural practice into a necessary, God-ordained one. I’m sorry, but I if the church can rightly decide it’s no longer pertinent to today, then IMO it can throw out anything else in Scripture too.
Remember, the Church still has the power Christ granted the Apostles, to bind and to loose, as well as the keys given to Peter.
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But, as I said, I don’t know if I believe these things were passed on in succession forever. I see Jesus giving that power to the Apostles. I also see Him giving them power to do things that Catholic clergy today can not do (like raise the dead, etc.). If that stopped, likely the infallibility did to (and rests solely in the writings of the Apostles).
What do you mean by “the rule of measure”? That sounds to me like Protestant terminology,
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Actually, that is what “canon” is. One of the tests of the authenticity of a miracle (according to Catholic teaching) is that it must be weighed against Scripture. It cannot reveal any new revelations. It can’t contradict anything in it. It must be tested against Scripture. That is b/c Scripture is the “rule of measure”/“canon” we are supposed to use to determine the authenticity of something (church teaching, miracles, apparitions, etc.)

I said: I think the church sometimes finds a way around contradicting itself…
I would expect that it always should. How else could it be the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15) if it contradicted itself?
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But finding its way around contradicting itself can sometimes look like it is trying to make an excuse for allowing something wrong.
Annulment is necessary because of the Church’s adherence to Christ’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. Sometimes people think they’re married, but actually aren’t.
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This is what I mean. How can the church say such a thing? And certainly, the church cannot judge such a thing in the first place! It looks like it wanted to find a way around allowing people to divorce, and the church gets a hefty sum in return for its service. The church cannot admit its errors and this is a prime example. You can apply this logic to the “indelible mark of the priesthood” and corrupt priests too, but the Catholic simply cannot do so b/c of the implications of such a pronouncement. The idea of a priesthood that cannot be revoked by the church in matters of disobedience and blatant, heinous corruption. If you say He was never a priest in the first place, you are opening a huge can of worms. Either marriage is forever and the priesthood is too, or either can be said to have never happened.
 
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