Apparitions of Mary at Medjugorje

Did you even bother to watch the video??? Never-mind, I already know the answer!!!

 

So, when I was a Baptist, who put my faith and trust in Jesus Christ shed blood on the cross, confessed with my mouth that He was Lord and that He rose from the dead, I had given my heart to the 'right' Christ, but now that I have been a Catholic for many years, I worship a 'false Christ'? I was told years back when I announced on this board that I was no longer Baptist and that I was entering the Catholic Church that if I was REALLY a Christian, I would never do so. Do you think I am Hell bound if I remain a Catholic? Sounds like you probably think so.

 

Well except the whole prophecy thing

 

Do you place the video on the same level as God's word?

 

Your salvation is between you and God. Your theological grasp of scripture is weak and thus you struggle to discern. Scripture determines truth. Apparitions do not determine truth.

 

You don't know anything about my 'grasp of scripture'. Catholics are not required to believe in any of the apparitions of Mary and that is not why I asked about whether Yeshua1 bothered to watch before chiming in.

BTW, I will post a segment of my journey into the Catholic Church for your benefit and those who haven't read it before. Your assumption of my weak theological background is a false one. You just make such a statement because I used to be Baptist and discovered the truth of the Catholic faith.

 

For your benefit, Particular:

I was brought up in a Baptist family, came to Christ (repented of my sins and trusted Christ as my Savior and Lord) at the age of eleven and was taught that if something is Catholic it has to be wrong.

Liturgy is definately part of Catholic worship and so it was to be rejected as ritualistic and repetitive praying. As an evangelical I thought the symbolism and ritual of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheran or any high church as devoid of meaning, empty, rote, and mindless. Of course there have been cases or even tendencies at times for people to lose track of the meanings of their religious practices, and to do them without thinking about why they do them– but Baptists do this too– sometimes even with their prayers, devotions, church-going, etc. To say that all symbolic ritual in the Catholic church is rote and thoughtless ritualism is as uncharitable as someone saying that evangelicalism is legalistic unthoughtful literalism which practices bibliolatry with no concern for making a concrete difference in this world. But I digress!

I began a bible study in my church of the book of Hebrews and I saw just how important liturgy was for the covenant and that became increasingly evident to me as I studied the book of Hebrews. Also I found that overwhelming historical evidence exists proving it was important to the Early Church. I came to believe that liturgy represents the way God fathered his covenant people and He renewed that on a regular basis. It became evident to me as to what the relationship of the Old Testament was to the New and how the New Testament Church became a fulfillment and not an abandonment of the Old. These ideas were confirmed by the writings of the Early Church Fathers. Reading the ECF's, I began to believe that the Catholic Church might most accurately reflect the intentions of the Early Church Fathers and found other evangelicals seeking a church whose roots run deeper than the Reformation. However, I had always believed that people only leave the Catholic Church for 'True Christianity' and not the other way around. But, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s 2007 Religious Landscape Survey, roughly 8 percent of Catholics were raised in other churches as evangelicals. This compares with 9 percent of evangelical Christians who were raised Catholic. Not much difference.

As I continued to study I became aware that the one only place where Jesus used the word 'covenant' was when He instituted 'The Lord's Supper'. Yet, we only observed communion four times a year.
I began to study the Gospel of John and became aware that the Gospel was chock full of sacramental imagery. I was raised to believe that liturgy and sacraments were to be rejected and certainly not to be studied. These things I was programed not to be open to. But going through Hebrews I noticed the writer made me see that liturgy and sacraments were an essential part of God's family life. Then in John six, I came to realize that Jesus could not have been talking metaphorically when He taught us to eat His flesh and drink His blood. The Jews in His audience would not have been outraged and scandalized by a mere symbol. Besides, if the Jews had merely misunderstood Jesus to be speaking literally and He meant His words to be taken figuratively, why would he not simply clarify them? But He never did! Nor did any other Christian for over a thousand years!

All this and the fact that my Aunt, a Baptist missionary, had announced to her family that she was becoming a Catholic and this started me looking deeper into a Church I had long considered heretical and even the Great Whore of Babylon (I had read David Hunt's book). Then I began to read some of the writings of the recent popes. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been highly regarded in the evangelical community. Their writings are very focused on the person of Jesus Christ and very attentive to scripture. That was certainly important to us evangelicals.

Of course there were the questions about supposed 'Mary worship' (Catholics place Mary and the saints above Christ and Catholics bow to idols, don't they?) and I was taught in my Baptist church that Catholics believe Purgatory is place where people are given a 'Second Chance' at salvation. Of course, I knew that was un-biblical. And wasn't Catholicism a 'works-rigteousness' based religion? The list went on and on so I began to read and see for myself what the Catholics had to say to my objections to their 'un-biblical' doctrines. My first book was 'Born Fundamentalist, Born-Again Catholic' by David Currie. This answered most of the nagging questions I had had as to whether or not the Catholic Church was biblical or not. I then read 'Crossing The Tiber: Evangelicals Discover The Ancient Faith' by Steve Ray, a former Baptist. Then came books by other evangelical converts such as Scott Hahn and books by Karl Keating.

There are many other reasons why I and other former evangelicals convert to Catholicism. One reason is: Certainty
To have certainty and knowledge of truth leads many evangelicals to look elsewhere beyond all the doctrinal differences and “choose-your-own-church syndrome” within evangelical churches. I had the desire for certain knowledge, this is something I could not find within evangelical churches. If I were to ask ten evangelicals what their churches teach about marriage and divorce, how many different answers might I get?

Another reason for conversion is that I wanted to be connected to the ENTIRE history of the Christian Church and not just from the Reformation forward. I do not buy into Baptist successionism as their is a lack of historical evidence for it. Baptists trying to connect themselves to various groups that split from Catholicism prior to the Reformation falls short. Their beliefs and practices were closer to Catholicism than present day Baptists. The Waldenses are an example.

Also, I have issue with the "interpretive diversity” that occurs in evangelicalism, I prefer to accept the authority of the Catholic Church instead of trying to sort through the numerous interpretations of evangelical pastors and theologians. The authority that is found in the Catholic Church’s Magisterium has been consistant for two thousand years. The non-ending threads on the BB pitting Christian against Christian over doctrine many times resulting in either board members directly or indirectly questioning each others salvation and the myriad of denominations created because of such squabbling is evidence enough of the dangers of 'interpretive diversity' or 'individual interpretation' of scripture.

 

As long as you are not ascribing any part of your salvation to the sacraments, or hail Marys, or water baptism, or anything added

 

Scriptures do not assign to her ANYTHING that the Church of Rome does, correct?

 

There is only one faith, Walter. It is the faith that God gifts to those whom he graciously saves and makes alive with Christ. (Ephesians 2:5-9)
You have chosen a works based, legalistic walk with God. I see God's grace oozing from every letter in scripture.

 

First, there is nothing wrong with liturgy...as long as it is grounded in scripture and not in church traditions that have no scriptural basis. Indulgences and praying to saints are not biblical.
Indeed, the early church had liturgies and creeds (see 1 Corinthians 15). They did this because the vast majority of people were illiterate, but they had great memorzation skills.
Second, if you want to own the Roman Catholic Church then you own the 1500 years of abuse, genocide and sexual misconduct the church has been parading to the world as a form of Christianity. You don't get to pick and choose what you find virtuous, while sweeping the grave evils of the Roman Catholic Church under the rug. Own it all and call on your leadership to grovel in the dust in repentance. Call on them to be like Zacheus and pay back two fold for the damages they have caused to millions of people. Be honest about your church and pray for its repentance. If you cannot do so, then admit you play the hypocrite who wants to whitewash the outside while leaving the inside darker than coal.

 

It's already been done, by Pope John Paul II in the 1980's (for the Church's sins against other Christians). Apologies have also been made for the sexual sins caused by Catholic clergymen and millions of dollars paid out in compensation. Now when are you going to accept that reality once and for all and stop using those sins as a cudgel against the Catholic Church and move on?

 

Lip service is meaningless. It's like a drug addict who is remorseful for being caught, but keeps on doing drugs.
Let's talk reparations and financial payouts in combination with authentic repentance. Right now we still see cover up and lack of transparency. You all have to own it.
I have zero tolerance for Christian leaders and organizations who try to minimize the fallout by spinning the narrative to make them look as good as possible. That problem goes far beyond the Roman Catholic Church and embraces much of Protestantism as well.
I would rather the church be relegated to house fellowship and poverty, yet live in holiness, than to own the greatest shrines in the world and be spiritually bankrupt.

 

This was not just lip service, but an authentic and true repentance which included reparations. It is clear by your response that you will never accept what has actually occurred. Your hatred of the Catholic Church overrides any sense of Christian decency on your part and this reality is especially troubling because you are not even a part of any of the aggrieved parties.

 

I live in Ashford, Kent, England. About 100 yards from my house runs the river Stour. The follower of Wickcliffe, John Brown was burnt at the stake on the banks of this river, having first had his feet burnt to the bones and forced to walk to the place where he was burnt,

I used to live in Faversham from where a young man called Andrew Hewet came. He was aprentice to the king's taylor and was found to be a gospeler, He was burn't at Billingsgate, London, together with John Frith, one of the most learned men of his day.

If you are a Catholic you stand together with those who perpetuated this and millions of other murders.

Remember. Rome's motto is Semper Edem. Ever the Same. As one Dominican said, "Rome Never changes, as she was, so she is, so shall she ever be." As evil a murderer as ever.

 

"The more the faith of Christ spread and the Name of the Savior of the world was glorified on earth, and together with Him also She Who was vouchsafed to be the Mother of the God-man, the more did the hatred of the enemies of Christ increase towards Her. Mary was the Mother of Jesus. She manifested a hitherto unheard-of example of purity and righteousness, and furthermore, now departed from this life, She was a mighty support for Christians, even though invisible to bodily eyes. Therefore all who hated Jesus Christ and did not believe in Him, who did not understand his teaching, or to be more precise, did not wish to understand as the Church understood, who wished to replace the preaching of Christ with their own human reasoning all of these transferred their hatred for Christ, for the Gospel and the Church, to the Most Pure Virgin Mary. They wished to belittle the Mother, so as thereby to destroy faith also in Her Son, to create a false picture of Her among men in order to have the opportunity to rebuild the whole Christian teaching on a different foundation. In the womb of Mary, God and man were joined. She was the One Who served as it were as the ladder for the Son of God, Who descended from heaven. To strike a blow at Her veneration means to strike Christianity at the root, to destroy it in its very foundation." - St. John of Shanghai (Orthodox saint)

 

There is twofold problems.
1) You are correct. 1500 years of brutal repression on a global scale is not forgotten with a simple "I'm sorry" from the pope, especially when evil is still continuing.
2) The heretical teachings, still being promoted by this pope, cannot be overlooked. After 500 years the Roman Catholic Church is still desperately in need of Reformation.

 

Someone drank the kool-aid of the state run church.

 

I am always suspicious of people who attack Mary. The reason being is we know that Satan hates Mary. She embodies the promises of redemption in her person and for this reason she is hated. She is the type, figure and image of the Church and in her is the fullness of redemption. She reveals what it means to be redeemed. Thus, anyone who seeks to denigrate her or diminish her role in salvation history, is acting in the spirit of anti-Christ.

 

This is where you are projecting a false attack on Mary.
No one is attacking Mary. We are telling you, you are exalting Mary to a higher position than God, himself, lifts her. If it isn't worship of Mary, it is extremely close.
The Roman Catholic Church has been guilty of co-opting animism into the church. Animism is the largest and oldest belief system in the world. It is from Animism that we get the mysticism of apparitions. It is from Animism that we get incense and prayers to the ancestors (saints) who intercede on the behalf of the living. It is from Anism that we get the idea of spirit energy being received by the eating of flesh and drinking of blood of a fallen warrior. The church at Rome, seeking to consolidate power, co-opted the Animism of the tribal groups it conquered by force and coercion. Much of the so-called traditions of the Roman Catholic Church are not biblical, but are animistic traditions they merged into the church for purposes of gaining power and control.
So...no Christisn bashes Mary. Many Christians bash the paganization of Mary by your church.