Mary Ann Collins (A Former Catholic Nun)

I have personally read many sites (of the Scott Hahn type) that start out: Protestants believe: (yada yada yada), but this is false. The true answer is found in the Catholic Church which teaches (yada, yada yada). There are plenty of them out there. This is no different then the site that John has been referring to.
The biggest difference is that the Catholics spew out false doctrine, whereas Collins tells the truth about the Catholic Church, and the Catholics hate it. Therefore they mount a hate crusade against her.
DHK

 

I tried to go to freemdomfrombaptists.org through the link above, but keep getting an error page (saying it can't be found). Does this site exist?

 

I think that's Mike's point.

 

No it hasn't, they are still the largest religious organization in the world.

 

No it hasn't, they are still the largest religious organization in the world.

</font>[/QUOTE]The next time you want to twist someone's words or meaning, don't use mine.


LaRae

 

No, I made it up. I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to www.freedomfromcatholicism.org. Or www.exposingsatanism.org. Or any of hundreds of sites with less-interesting names that write things like "The Roman Catholic Church is a false religion spawned from hell, damning the
untold souls of billions to a Godless eternity in the fires of hell." I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to Jack Chick or Lorraine Boettner or Dave Hunt or James White. I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to Bob Jones University.

Sorry to mislead...

 

Where's the Catholic site that writes things like this against other Christians: "The Roman Catholic Church is a false religion spawned from hell, damning the untold souls of billions to a Godless eternity in the fires of hell."

Or this: "The Roman Catholic Church is built on control, manipulation, violence, terror, lies and fraud."

You know I could easily find a hundred or more cases of anti-Catholicism as bad or worse than this.

When you say "This is no different" you are being extremely naive or extremely disengenuous.

 

Today at RCIA we welcomed one new addition to our catechumenate (those seeking Baptist, Confirmation, and first Eucharist). She is a beautiful young lady who is a Regular Baptist (as well as her entire family immediate and extended) and was even betrothed to a young man who is pursuing studies to become a Baptist pastor while they were both students at a Fundamentalist university (the name evades my memory). She moved to Steubenville last week to attend Franciscan and become a Catholic.

We also welcomed a new addition to our candidates for full communion (those seeking Confirmation and first Eucharist): a new addition to our household who just arrived from a four day trip from Washington State this morning at 1 AM. He's a smart cookie from a Calvary chapel background who is the best friend of one of my other roommates who is also a candidate for full communion (and moved up here from Bob Jones University this past semester). He brought with him a beautiful hand-carved whale bone standing crucifix that he placed upon our living room fireplace mantle.. Wow!

 

OK fellow Catholics here on the board, I guess we're beat! Please let's be careful not to injure one another as we all stampede out the door, shedding our rosaries and little bobble-head BVM statues behind us!

 

Hi John,

If you wish to evangelize the Catholics on this web board, then I encourage you to engage in an intellectual and cordial dialogue with these Catholics, including myself.

As a Catholic, I have found extreme freedom and joy in embracing the fullness of what my Lord Jesus Christ has to offer me in His Church, in His Sacraments, through His Grace, and through His Bishops. It is a great and profound joy to embrace and love the Bride of Jesus Christ, which is unified (one), santified (holy), universal (catholic), and ancient (apostolic) and conforming myself to the Bridegroom, the Lord Jesus through the many gifts he has given to his Bride.

I would, in effect, be rejecting and spurning the countless riches my Lord died upon Calvary to give me me if I were to embrace your sect, would I not?

Do you embrace the Queen Mother of the Davidic King (Mary)? Can you offer me the substantial presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist? Do you have 2,000 years of saints upon which I can emulate my life and read the writings of in my walk with Christ? Do you have an authority that can solve disputes over Biblical interpretation that can trace itself back to Jesus Christ himself throughout history? (an Apostolic Magisterium)?

 

Carson, while you are all wrapped up in your church and all its rites and such, which actually chain you to them, 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.

No, we do not emulate saints. Why, with Jesus living through us, would we do anything but show HIS character?

No, we do not play at church rituals. We live in Christ instead.

No, we do not have 2000 years of your saints to look at, rather we focus on the eternal Christ.

No, we do not embrace any 'mother', but rather, as the Bride, we embrace the Bridegroom Himself.

There is quite a difference.

 

St. John,

Keep up the good work for the Lord. It's difficult to believe that some Christians turn apostate and go to a Catholic College/seminary where they are going to promise them the misery of going to and through Purgatory when this life is over. Can you imagine giving up our hope of immediately being in the Presence of our Savior, Jesus. [II Cor. 5:8 & Philippians 1:23] The Apostle Paul knew that at death he was going directly to Heaven; but the Magisterium tells Catholics and 'would be Catholics' that God speaking through Paul was and is a liar. Apparently, the Magisterium is God and Almighty God is merely their errand boy.

My great-grand father was a French Catholic but, thank the Lord, my grandfather found Jesus at First Baptist Church in Schenectady, New York or I would be a member of this deluded system of man-made religion. [Colossians 2:8] I might have gone to Hell had it not been for the Holy Spirit working in the heart and life of my grandfather who is now with the Lord. My grandfather was disgusted and angry at times that the Catholic Church had made him think that he was saved and ready for Heaven, by simply receiving the Eucharist without personally receiving Christ into his heart by faith in Jesus Christ.

Catholicism is clearly pinpointed in Scripture as those who 'forbid to marry' and those 'who abstain from meats.' God speaking through Paul says,

'Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their consciences seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, with God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.' [I Timothy 4:1-3]

Keep looking up Jesus is coming soon.

I have noticed that Catholics who get saved in the evangelical sense of the word, often turn to and join the Assembly of God Church (or types like it) and I think it is because the music in the Mass is so depressing, while the music in Protestant Churches is more uplifting. I believe that some Protestant Churches are more open to and really believe in the Presence and power of the Holy Spirit in Divine worship.

 

No, I made it up. I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to www.freedomfromcatholicism.org. Or www.exposingsatanism.org. Or any of hundreds of sites with less-interesting names that write things like "The Roman Catholic Church is a false religion spawned from hell, damning the
untold souls of billions to a Godless eternity in the fires of hell." I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to Jack Chick or Lorraine Boettner or Dave Hunt or James White. I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to Bob Jones University.

Sorry to mislead... </font>[/QUOTE]Sure you do. It's called the Vatican.

 

No, I made it up. I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to www.freedomfromcatholicism.org. Or www.exposingsatanism.org. Or any of hundreds of sites with less-interesting names that write things like "The Roman Catholic Church is a false religion spawned from hell, damning the
untold souls of billions to a Godless eternity in the fires of hell." I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to Jack Chick or Lorraine Boettner or Dave Hunt or James White. I don't know of any Catholic equivalent to Bob Jones University.

Sorry to mislead... </font>[/QUOTE]Sure you do. It's called the Vatican. </font>[/QUOTE]10-4 Good Buddy...

 

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.

 

And I love being a Christian, Carson. I don't belong to any sect. I am a Christian, belonging to Christ, who is much older than any church.

 

Hi Helen,

You wrote, "And I love being a Christian, Carson. I don't belong to any sect. I am a Christian, belonging to Christ, who is much older than any church."

"The Gospel creates, not a bunch of individual Christians, but a community. If you take the old route of putting justification, in its traditional meaning, at the centre of your theology, you will always be in danger of sustaining some sort of individualism. This wasn't so much of a problem in Augustine's, or even in Luther's, day, when society was so much more bound together than it is now. But both in Enlightenment modernism and in contemporary post-modernism, individualism has been all the rage, with its current symbols of the personal stereo and the privatization of everything. Tragically, some would-be presentations of 'the gospel' have actually bought into this, by implying that one is justified or saved first and foremost as an individual. Paul's gospel could never do that; nor could its corollary, the doctrine of justification. Of course every single human being is summoned, in his or her uniqueness, to respond personally to the gospel. Nobody in their right mind would deny that. But there is no such thing as an 'individual' Christian. Paul's gospel created a community; his doctrine of justification sustained it. Ours must do no less."

N.T. Wright, the Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, in What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1997), 158.