Hi Helen,
When you write statements such as "we who are born again in Christ have the freedom to simply allow Him to live through us, having a direct relationship with Him and direct access to God because of Him," I wonder if you'll ever see Catholicism for what it is instead of this pseudo-Catholicism that you have constructed in your mind.
I affirm your statement above with complete sincerity, and the freedom I live with a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus, with direct access to God through him, is the source of my joy. In fact, I am about to step out the door to join fourteen other young men to adore Jesus in the Holy Eucharist in awe and adoration in a small chapel set in the woods on campus. We are a band of men who desire an intimate relationship with Jesus, and we encourage one another in the Christian race as brothers in the Lord Jesus.
You wrote, "No, we do not emulate saints."
Then you are not a Bible Christian and you are not living out the exhortation of Sacred Scripture.
"For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me" (1 Cor 4:15).
"Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Cor 11:1).
"And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness in realizing the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (Heb 6:11f).
No, we do not have 2000 years of your saints to look at, rather we focus on the eternal Christ.
How can you if your sect is barely one or two or even ten decades old, when the Catholic Church is written of and witnessed to in the pages of the New Testament?
"No, we do not embrace any 'mother', but rather, as the Bride, we embrace the Bridegroom Himself."
Why the stance of mutual exclusivity that ignores what Paul has to say of the Church, the Heavenly Jerusalem, in his epistle to the Galatians?
"But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother" (Galatians 4:26).
You see, Helen, you aren't the Bible Christian that you make yourself out to be. If you want to follow the Bible and be faithful to God's Word, that means embracing all that Scripture exhorts us to and encourages us to walk in, not just what your sect embraces (such as the acceptance of divorce and remarriage, which makes such individuals out to be adulterers violating the Word of God for the sake of human tradition, embracing the sect that itches one's ears or rather, sexual impulse), and no other Church than the Catholic Church can fit the Biblical pattern because no other Church gathers around Peter's office of Prime Minister upon which Christ continues to build his ecclesia this very day.
Can I say that I love being Catholic?
I love being Catholic!
The Lord is good.
