Art Sippo gives a history and Scripture lesson to a misinformed Protestant on a variety of issues. Art's comments are in blue.
It is sad to see that your mind is made up and that you have no use for the facts. I am sorry to say that in my experience people such as yourself tend to leave the Church usually over some serious moral failing that they refuse to relinquish. I have no idea who you are but you protest too much about things you obviously know nothing about. Your "biblical" reading is amateurish. You know nothing about Church history. You have believed every lie told to you by your new masters. It is obvious you don't want to hear the truth and will do anything to avoid it. I surmise there is another ulterior motive. I am saddened. I will pray for you. I am disappointed with the poor quality of your response. I will demolish only certain bits of it. Most of it has already been demolished previously.
St Paul never taught "justification by faith alone without the need for good works." He clearly taught that no one who continues to practice vice will be saved no matter what he believes. This false prot doctrine is exactly what the devil uses to seduce souls into accepting cheap grace and then prompts them to blaspheme the one true Catholic Church which God established.
Your theories about what made the Reformers reject the false Gospel of Catholicism sounds nice if I were an unsaved sociologist. However, they don't stand the test. The Reformers themselves gave us the reason for their rejection and it had nothing to do with social, nationalistic, or any other naturalistic reason you may wish to ascribe to them any more than the reasons that the Roman pagans rejected pageantry to embrace the Gospel of my Lord Jesus Christ were naturalistic.
You have obviously never read anything about the reformation period. You also haven't read much about Luther. All of the matters that I mentioned in my analysis have been admitted over and over again even by prot historians. Luther himself appealed shamelessly to the German people to rebel against "forgeign" influences and tweaked every bourgeoisie value he could. The same is true of the Swiss, the Scandinavians, and the English. There is absolutely nothing biblical about the deformed church order. If you have a knowledgeable person in reformation history they will acknowledge that everything I mentioned is reasonable. Forget your prot minsters. They make their living by telling lies on such matters and will not tell you the truth.
I would recommend some books for you if you want to know the real truth of the reformation":
"The Blind Devotion of the People" by R. Whiting
"The European Reformation" by Euan Cameron.
"Against the Protestant Gnostics" by Philip Lee.
"The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamon Duffy.
"Luther: the Man and the Image" by Herbert David Rix.
"The English Reformation" by William Cobbett.
You do not wish to deal with the passages that say that Jesus is a Door, a Rock, or that describe God with wings, because it knocks your teaching about transubstantiation.
Okay, hot shot. Let's see what the Bible REALLY says in those passages:
John 10:7 So Jesus again said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not heed them. 9 I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
This is where Jesus is referring to himself as the "door" or "sheepgate" leading to the pasture where the sheep are kept overnight. You see, the shepherd would lead the sheep into a walled enclosure to protect them from predators and then sleep at the only access hole so that his body would literally be a "gate." No predator could get to the sheep except through him. This passage has no relevance to your argument. Jesus WAS literally referring to himself as a door in his role as the Good Shepherd.
Jesus never refers to himself as a rock. He also never refers to himself as having wings. Once again, you have to know the Bible before you make claims about what it says!
He does say:
John 15:1 "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine dresser. 2 Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3 You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.
This section is CLEARLY an analogy. There is no indication that Jesus is literally identifying himself with any particular vine.
He uses several other "I am" statements in Scripture. Only one of them refers to himself as bread:
John 6:32 Jesus then said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world." 34 They said to him, "Lord, give us this bread always." 35 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst...
John 6:47 Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 53 So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; 54 he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 56 He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever."
This material from John 6 is OBVIOUSLY referring to the Eucharist and is making it clear that Jesus is literally giving his flesh to be eaten and his blood to drink. He is very careful not to be figurative. Even when disciples are leaving because he is speaking literally, he does not correct them. Unlike other places where he lets the parables stand among the unbelieving, and then explains it to the disciples, he lets it stand even for the disciples without an '"interpretation" or watering down of the obvious literal sense.
Now let us take a look at what Jesus says at the Last Supper:
"This is my body" (Matt 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19, 1 Cor 11:24)
Whoa! In the other statements you wanted to quote, Jesus NEVER pointed to a door or a vine and said "This is my body." The grammatical structure is altogether different. here Jesus is indicating THIS loaf and saying that "This particular piece of bread is my body." Based on the extended treatment in St John's gospel, he meant what he said at the Last Supper to be taken LITERALLY. There is NO parallel between the words at the Last Supper and the "door" and "vine" statements. Your examples are simply irrelevant to the matter under discussion.
You're right about apostasy within Protestantism.
Protestantism IS apostasy. The amorality among many Protestants concerning divorce & remarriage has been present from the beginning of the 16th reformation to this very day despite the very words of Jesus against it. Luther and his cronies in fact wrote a treatise supporting polygamy so that one of their "righteous" Protestant princes - Phillip of Hesse - could marry another wife. The other problems crept in piecemeal afterwards but are still an essential part of mainline and fundamentalist Protestantism. These are not modern corruptions. They are moral errors that are constitutive to the Protestant religion.
That should not surprise you as an equal liberalization has taken hold of your Church.
That is a lie. The official teaching of the Catholic Church come from the Magisterium and have never been unorthodox. The liberal elements in Catholicism are renegades and their opinions mean NOTHING. If we follow the Pope and the Councils, there is NO liberal error. This Pope in particular is a true "Rock" in matters of doctrine. Please do not point at heretics and confuse them with true Catholics.
One last word on the subject...if things keep going the way they are going, there soon won't be a Catholic Church because there won't be any priests.
There are plenty of priests in the Third world. The number of ordinations is increasing every year. No worries, mate. We are here to stay.
Besides, you don't know your own Protestant statistics very well, I am afraid. ALL Christian denominations have a shortage of local Church ministers. Oh, the seminaries are full, but parish work is so demanding that most ministers can't hack it for more than a few years and then they start looking for a teaching job or some easier way of making a living. The sheep are tough on their shepherds. Go ahead. Check it out. We are ALL having problems.
As far as authority is concerned, Jesus has given HIS Church, according to Galatians 1:8, any Gospel not in accordance with what was already given, is anathema.
The Gospel preached in the Catholic Church is the same as that of Jesus. We have preserved it through the centuries. Our doctrine agrees with the historical records for all intervening ages. Protestant doctrine is a pure innovation based upon 16th Century social and philosophical presuppositions and it was NEVER taught in the Christian Church until then. When St Paul condemned the teaching of "another gospel" he was prophetically speaking of Luther and Calvin.
For confirmation of this, please read :
"Iustita Dei" (volumes 1&2) by Alister McGrath especially the summary at the end of volume 1.
And the introduction to Peter Toon's book "Justification and Sanctification" Both of these Protestant authors confirm this.
Unlike the Catholic Church, we just don't have the right to torture anyone or burn them at the stake. Any Reformer who has done that or might do it is in danger of hellfire himself.
How ignorant you are! What about the people killed by Luther's anti-Catholic mobs in Germany? The priests beaten for refusing to use his "German Mass" or to marry? The nuns kidnapped from their convents and raped to destroy their virginity? What about poor Servetus who was burnt at the stake by Calvin? He was a heretic by Catholic standards, but Calvin had no authority to kill him and was a hypocrite for doing so. There were thousands of others in Switzerland who were beaten, robbed, killed and driven away from their lands for no other reason than that they refused to be "reformed."
What about the Catholic martyrs of England? Aside from St Thomas More, St John Fisher, St Margaret Clitherow, St Edmund Campion and the rest of the 89 who have been canonized, there were thousands of them in the Western Rebellion against Cramner's Book of Common Prayer. The Protestantss have denied this until recently but now there is no doubt about it. Read Fr Phillip Caraman's recent book on it. Did you know that Henry VIII murdered Cardinal Pole's mother in the tower of London for no crime other than being his mother? He held the poor woman ransom trying to make Pole return to England so that he could be tortured and executed. When the Pope refused to send Pole back to certain death, good Henry killed Pole's mother in revenge.
What about the thousands killed during Cromwell's genocidal rampage in Ireland? Or the MILLIONS killed by the British policies there during the Potato Famine? Those who would renounce the Catholic faith were fed.
What about the Know Nothings and the KKK in this country? Do you know how many Catholics were killed or maimed by these bigots over the last 200 years? Protestants have been every bit as intolerant, violent and murderous as anyone. Again if you knew SOMETHING about history, you would not talk in such a naive way.
As far as interpretation....we have our God given reason, and are guided by the Holy Spirit who's task is to guide us into all truth.
You have you own personal opinions and nothing more. You have no method of discernment for distinguishing true from false opinions. Look at the pandemonium that is Protestantism today. Infant baptism? Believer baptism? Dunking, pouring, sprinkling, or just "say the magic word"? Total depravity? The extra calvinisiticum? The communication of attributes? I have studied the cesspool that is Protestant theology and there is no way to adjudicate differences and so "protestantism" is a collection of logically contradictory 'faiths' that only agree that they oppose the Catholic Church. I am sorry that your bigotry has blinded your reason, but I suspect a serious moral fault lies at the bottom of all of this.
Art Sippo
The Catholic Legate