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Monday, March 10, 2008

Roman Catholics Come Home

I do not know how many people have seen these commercials from the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). I do not know if they are showing them all across the country or not. However, I must say the ones I have seen are excellent. They are real to life. They do not discuss any of the extemporaneous items and beliefs of the RCC. They discuss our problem as humans and how Jesus is the only one who can fix it. How basic and grand. I wish evangelicals had thought of this first. They are wonderful commercials that I am sure will resonate with many people, regardless of whether they have ever had any affiliation with the RCC. I hope that this is a sign of a change in direction for the RCC and that they are going to go back to the Gospel that created the Church and leaving the many man-made "rituals" created by the RCC magisterium.

posted by Refmergant @ 9:10 AM   2 comments

2 Comments:

At 4:36 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam--For the Greater Glory of God!

Catholics DO believe Jesus Christ is the only one we can fix our problems. He has left us wonderful channels of grace through His Church--the sacraments--to draw us closer to Him. I too have seen these advertisements and think they are excellent. I hope they resonate with Catholics who have left the Church and with inquiring non-Catholics. Actually, I venture to guess that the people who put out these videos lean more toward the side of wanting the Church to go back to her traditions and beliefs as opposed to the modernizing "reforms" and liberalization following the Second Vatican Council. After all, they're inviting people home to the Catholic Church; not to a protestantized Church. And the clip of the Mass shown in the video is a very traditional Mass, facing "ad orientem" ("to the East", that is, facing the altar and not turned towards the people) with incense, tabernacle, smells & bells, etc...the works!

Why and how do you see a disconnect between the Catholicism advertised proclaiming the Gospel and Christ as the solution to the world's problems and that which you perceive to be "man-made rituals" and the Church's Magisterium (teaching authority)?

Thanks & God bless.

 
At 11:32 PM, Blogger Joel Haubenreich said...

First, ‘…I find it very difficult to take some of the Protestant propositions even seriously. What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are condemned by the Bible? It indicates a humble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the sense. The ordinary sensible skeptic or pagan is standing in the street (in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand the spectator saying, "This is all hocus-pocus"; I can even understand him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying, "Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh." But in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned? Why should t not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed? To say to the priests, "Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense," is sensible. To say, "Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest," is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that of the man in the street.’ (G. K. Chesterton, Catholic Church and Conversion)

Second, a note on the historicity of the Church is in order. The Gospel did not, in fact, create the Church. Our Blessed Lord created the Church, which in turn preached the Gospel by which all men would be saved. There are then the Gospels, those inspired books in our New Testament, written by men in the Church, to guide the ever-growing body of disciples. The Church was living, breathing, growing, fulfilling the Great Commission, before she ever had a Bible. Her scriptures were those of the Jews, and contemporary guidance came from sundry letters from sundry men. Some of these were worthy, some not. It would be centuries before the canon of Scripture would be established, throwing out not only wicked books of heresy, but also some with great merit (such as, from what I have been led to understand, the Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas). The Church, in her authority derived not from the pages of Sacred Writ, but from the Son of God, established this canon by way of fallible men. Sacred Scripture is a part of the Tradition of the Church.

This will have to do for now. Here’s a helpful chart (I pasted the link with a line break, so make sure you copy & paste both bits into your url field):
http://www.scborromeo.org/
truth/figure1.pdf

Pax et bonum!

 

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