One of our contributors, Skye, has given up Internet time in order to apply herself diligently to the praying of many Rosaries for the intentions of this latest, and defiantly "greatest" of all the SSPX's Rosary Crusades.
I must admit, I have been some what lax in this regard, but the issues at stake here are much more important.
Watch this video, it will surely inspire you to offer all your free time to this noble Crusade!
http://www.gloria.tv/?media=28126
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Television: The Greatest Tool of the Freemasons
Television: The Freemason’s Greatest Achievement
By Skye Dolphin
Every guilty American knows that the more television he watches out of laziness or boredom, the more unhealthy he becomes. His brain begins to dull as his body begins to soften strangely, growing in size and blubber. However, how many viewers of television know the darker, more subtle effect of television: the complete corruption of the soul caused by spiritual apathy? The enemies of the Catholic Church, especially the Freemasons, have used the television to project messages of relaxed morality and anti-Catholicism.
Father Peter R. Scott of the SSPX clarifies why television viewing is dangerous:
It is equally obvious, and every traditional Catholic will admit it, that the regular watching of television for children is an occasion of sin, and this not just because of the obvious sins of impurity, but especially of materialism, concupiscence of the eyes, the loss of the Faith and the perversion of the mind by the parading of the false ideals of subjectivism and liberalism continually before the eyes of the young.
Many children have grown up on television. The television has replaced quality family time. When the child is unpleased with something in his environment, he cries, trying to gain the attention of his mother or father. In times before television, either the parents would scold him for his angry temper or would comfort him or maybe even play a game with him. However, in these most modern times, the parents will simply do the easy thing: they will set the child before the television screen, which instantly captures his attention and renders him senseless for as long as he is captivated by the bright, flashing images before him. The parents are satisfied; no work had to be done. The child is satisfied; whatever was bothering him before is completely forgotten.
2
As Father Scott has written, it is an occasion of sin to expose one’s self to the evil messages of the television. And to deliberately expose one’s self to an occasion of sin is actually a sin. So every time one watches the television, he is sinning. And if the occasion of sin is mortal, the viewing itself becomes a mortal sin. But the viewing of television is not only sinful because of the perverted ideals, the materialism, the liberalism and the subtle anti-Catholic messages; it is sinful because it is an addiction to laziness; it is no more than a poisonous drug, the opiate of the masses. The more one watches television, the more one begins to crave it more. When someone is watching television, he is watching millions of tiny, tiny images that a constantly flashing, so that his brain must put the images together to form one, unified image. In order to do this, the brain enters a state called the “alpha” state, in which the left side becomes completely inactive, in a zombie-like mode of consciousness. The left side of the brain is the logical, well-tempered, mathematical portion. Needless to say, television is probably the cause of today’s children’s inability to solve math problems without a calculator.
Because one needs not use his logical side of the brain while viewing television, he becomes incredibly relaxed and open to everything he hears and sees on the screen. He needs not do anything, he becomes no more than a beast, filling his belly, filling his mind with nothing but dust. He becomes completely passive, doing nothing but laying down, completely enthralled by what he is watching. In this state, any group (the government, the Freemasons, the Neo-Nazis) can inject into the world’s consciousness anything it wants to.
3
Watching the television dulls the mind and also opens the mind to sinful refuse such as immodesty and sexual abuses. The more and more one exposes himself to such negative views on Catholic morality, the more he begins to question his own morals and the more he becomes used to the evil morals of the world. He watches millions of women wearing tight jeans and low cut shirts and eventually begins to think this sinful style of dress is acceptable and commonplace. Women begin to think this way as well. They think that they must follow the trends of the modern era so that they will not “stick out” in a crowd or be the subject of someone’s ridicule. Soon enough, television has brainwashed every woman to wear immodest clothing because--it is simply the social rule.
Sex is also exploited on television. It seems that one cannot possibly watch a single sitcom these days without hearing a dirty reference to a sinful sexual relationship. “Typical teen fare contains heavy doses of sexual content, ranging from touching, kissing, jokes, and innuendo to conversations about sexual activity and portrayals of intercourse. Sex is often presented as a casual activity without risk or consequences. Conventional wisdom holds that the messages young viewers absorb from television promote sexual activity in this group” (Collins).
Marriage is also attacked fiercely. The role of the woman, as portrayed on most modern television shows, is that of either a single “mom,” the “boss” of the house or just a hard-working (outside of the house) wife. These women are considered heroes, no matter how morally relaxed they are. According to Saint Paul, a woman is not supposed to be a single “mom” or the head of the household, rather, she is to be meek and gentle, in submission to her husband at all times. “In like manner also let wives be subject to their
4
husbands: that if any believe not the word, they may be won without the word, by the conversation of the wives. Considering your chaste conversation with fear.”
Therefore, television should be eschewed by all Catholics. It is clearly an evil device that the Freemasons have manipulated to spread their evil values. Let us be the Church Militant, fighting ever valiantly against the evils of the world, including the most evil infection of modern times: the flashing box of sin!
By Skye Dolphin
Every guilty American knows that the more television he watches out of laziness or boredom, the more unhealthy he becomes. His brain begins to dull as his body begins to soften strangely, growing in size and blubber. However, how many viewers of television know the darker, more subtle effect of television: the complete corruption of the soul caused by spiritual apathy? The enemies of the Catholic Church, especially the Freemasons, have used the television to project messages of relaxed morality and anti-Catholicism.
Father Peter R. Scott of the SSPX clarifies why television viewing is dangerous:
It is equally obvious, and every traditional Catholic will admit it, that the regular watching of television for children is an occasion of sin, and this not just because of the obvious sins of impurity, but especially of materialism, concupiscence of the eyes, the loss of the Faith and the perversion of the mind by the parading of the false ideals of subjectivism and liberalism continually before the eyes of the young.
Many children have grown up on television. The television has replaced quality family time. When the child is unpleased with something in his environment, he cries, trying to gain the attention of his mother or father. In times before television, either the parents would scold him for his angry temper or would comfort him or maybe even play a game with him. However, in these most modern times, the parents will simply do the easy thing: they will set the child before the television screen, which instantly captures his attention and renders him senseless for as long as he is captivated by the bright, flashing images before him. The parents are satisfied; no work had to be done. The child is satisfied; whatever was bothering him before is completely forgotten.
2
As Father Scott has written, it is an occasion of sin to expose one’s self to the evil messages of the television. And to deliberately expose one’s self to an occasion of sin is actually a sin. So every time one watches the television, he is sinning. And if the occasion of sin is mortal, the viewing itself becomes a mortal sin. But the viewing of television is not only sinful because of the perverted ideals, the materialism, the liberalism and the subtle anti-Catholic messages; it is sinful because it is an addiction to laziness; it is no more than a poisonous drug, the opiate of the masses. The more one watches television, the more one begins to crave it more. When someone is watching television, he is watching millions of tiny, tiny images that a constantly flashing, so that his brain must put the images together to form one, unified image. In order to do this, the brain enters a state called the “alpha” state, in which the left side becomes completely inactive, in a zombie-like mode of consciousness. The left side of the brain is the logical, well-tempered, mathematical portion. Needless to say, television is probably the cause of today’s children’s inability to solve math problems without a calculator.
Because one needs not use his logical side of the brain while viewing television, he becomes incredibly relaxed and open to everything he hears and sees on the screen. He needs not do anything, he becomes no more than a beast, filling his belly, filling his mind with nothing but dust. He becomes completely passive, doing nothing but laying down, completely enthralled by what he is watching. In this state, any group (the government, the Freemasons, the Neo-Nazis) can inject into the world’s consciousness anything it wants to.
3
Watching the television dulls the mind and also opens the mind to sinful refuse such as immodesty and sexual abuses. The more and more one exposes himself to such negative views on Catholic morality, the more he begins to question his own morals and the more he becomes used to the evil morals of the world. He watches millions of women wearing tight jeans and low cut shirts and eventually begins to think this sinful style of dress is acceptable and commonplace. Women begin to think this way as well. They think that they must follow the trends of the modern era so that they will not “stick out” in a crowd or be the subject of someone’s ridicule. Soon enough, television has brainwashed every woman to wear immodest clothing because--it is simply the social rule.
Sex is also exploited on television. It seems that one cannot possibly watch a single sitcom these days without hearing a dirty reference to a sinful sexual relationship. “Typical teen fare contains heavy doses of sexual content, ranging from touching, kissing, jokes, and innuendo to conversations about sexual activity and portrayals of intercourse. Sex is often presented as a casual activity without risk or consequences. Conventional wisdom holds that the messages young viewers absorb from television promote sexual activity in this group” (Collins).
Marriage is also attacked fiercely. The role of the woman, as portrayed on most modern television shows, is that of either a single “mom,” the “boss” of the house or just a hard-working (outside of the house) wife. These women are considered heroes, no matter how morally relaxed they are. According to Saint Paul, a woman is not supposed to be a single “mom” or the head of the household, rather, she is to be meek and gentle, in submission to her husband at all times. “In like manner also let wives be subject to their
4
husbands: that if any believe not the word, they may be won without the word, by the conversation of the wives. Considering your chaste conversation with fear.”
Therefore, television should be eschewed by all Catholics. It is clearly an evil device that the Freemasons have manipulated to spread their evil values. Let us be the Church Militant, fighting ever valiantly against the evils of the world, including the most evil infection of modern times: the flashing box of sin!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Luther, Exposing the Myth
LUTHER-AS HE WAS
(Death Mask by Lucas Fortnagel – Leipzig, University Library)*
“Among you there will be lying teachers who will bring in destructive sects . . . And many will follow their wanton conduct, and because of them the way of truth will be maligned.” - II Peter 2:1-2
By Fr. Raymond Taouk
Luther speaks for himself;
With the New Movie on Luther having recently come out I think it would be good to get a real insight to the true Character of Luther and expose “legend” of “Luther Reformer”. Luther is undoubtedly the father of the Protestant rebellion and spiritual father of the Modern Apostasy from God. The object of this article on Martin Luther is not to give his history, which is easily researched, but rather to give direct quotes from a man called a “great religious reformer” and to whom many non-Catholics trace back real origin of their respective churches.
Who will doubt that the best judge of Luther’s true character is Luther himself? And so from Luther’s own words we shall see him for what he really was, that is a rebellious apostate, who abandoned the faith and led many into apostasy from God under the guise of “reformation” in order to follow his perverse inclinations.[1] Keeping in mind that none of the following statements of Luther, which I will quote, were ever retracted by him, and so they may still be considered as part of his “religious thought”. This should show the aspect of Martin Luther which Protestants and all alike so conveniently overlooked in these days of false ecumenism and intellectual dishonesty.
With the New Movie on Luther having recently come out I think it would be good to get a real insight to the true Character of Luther and expose “legend” of “Luther Reformer”. Luther is undoubtedly the father of the Protestant rebellion and spiritual father of the Modern Apostasy from God. The object of this article on Martin Luther is not to give his history, which is easily researched, but rather to give direct quotes from a man called a “great religious reformer” and to whom many non-Catholics trace back real origin of their respective churches.
Who will doubt that the best judge of Luther’s true character is Luther himself? And so from Luther’s own words we shall see him for what he really was, that is a rebellious apostate, who abandoned the faith and led many into apostasy from God under the guise of “reformation” in order to follow his perverse inclinations.[1] Keeping in mind that none of the following statements of Luther, which I will quote, were ever retracted by him, and so they may still be considered as part of his “religious thought”. This should show the aspect of Martin Luther which Protestants and all alike so conveniently overlooked in these days of false ecumenism and intellectual dishonesty.
The Commandments
Christ taught: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.”[2]
Luther in speaking of the commandments teaches: "Their only purpose is to show man his impotence to do good and to teach him to despair of himself"[3]
“Thou shalt not covet,’ is a commandment which proves us all to be sinners; since it is not in man’s power not to covet, and the same is the drift of all the commandments, for they are all equally impossible to us.”
"Moses is an executioner, a cruel lictor, a torturer a torturer who tears our flesh out with pincers and makes us suffer martyrdom . . . Whoever, in the name of Christ, terrifies and troubles consciences, is not the messenger of Christ, but of the devil . . . Let us therefore send Moses packing and for ever." [4]
“We must remove the Decalogue out of sight and heart” (De Wette 4, 188).
“If we allow them - the Commandments - any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of all evil, heresies and blasphemies” (Comm. ad Galat, p.310).
What is more is that scripture constantly declares the greatness of the commandments and the importance of keeping them:
Ps. 19 :7 : “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes.”
FREE WILL
Christ taught: “Not every one who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” [6]
Luther teaches: "...with regard to God, and in all that bears on salvation or damnation, (man) has no 'free-will', but is a captive, prisoner and bond slave, either to the will of God, or to the will of Satan."[7]
"...we do everything of necessity and nothing by 'free-will'; for the power of 'free-will' is nil..."[8]
"Man is like a horse. Does God leap into the saddle? The horse is obedient and accommodates itself to every movement of the rider and goes whither he wills it. Does God throw down the reins? Then Satan leaps upon the back of the animal, which bends, goes and submits to the spurs and caprices of its new rider... Therefore, necessity, not free will, is the controlling principle of our conduct. God is the author of what is evil as well as of what is good, and, as He bestows happiness on those who merit it not, so also does He damn others who deserve not their fate." [9]
“His (Judas) will was the work of God; God by His almighty power moved his will as He does all that is in this world.”[10]
On Reason
Christ taught: “ Be therefore, wise as serpents and simple as doves”[11]
“You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?”[12]
Luther teaches: “No good work happens as the result of one’s own wisdom; but everything must happen in a stupor . . . Reason must be left behind for it is the enemy of faith.” [13]
“Reason is the devils handmaid and does nothing but blaspheme and dishonor all that God says or does.” [14]
“Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.”[15]
“One should learn Philosophy only as one learns witchcraft, that is to destroy it; as one finds out about errors, in order to refute them”[16]
On Sin
Christ taught: “He that commits sin is of the devil: for the devil sinned from the beginning. For this purpose, the Son of God appeared that He might destroy the works of the devil.” - 1 John 3:8
Luther teaches: “A person that is baptized cannot, thou he would, lose his salvation by any sins however grievous, unless he refuses to believe. For no sins can damn him but unbelief alone.”[17]
Luther teaches: “A person that is baptized cannot, thou he would, lose his salvation by any sins however grievous, unless he refuses to believe. For no sins can damn him but unbelief alone.”[17]
"Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides... No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day."[18]
"Do not ask anything of your conscience; and if it speaks, do not listen to it; if it insists, stifle it, amuse yourself; if necessary, commit some good big sin, in order to drive it away. Conscience is the voice of Satan, and it is necessary always to do just the contrary of what Satan wishes." [19]
Faith and Good works
Christ taught: “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.”[20]
Christ taught (in the words of St. James) “What shall it profit, my brethren, if a he has faith, but has not works? Shall faith be able to save him? So faith also, if it have not works is dead in itself.”[21]
Luther teaches: “For we account a man to be justified by faith alone, without the works of the law.” – On Translation and on the Intercession of the Saints
Christ taught (in the words of St. James) “What shall it profit, my brethren, if a he has faith, but has not works? Shall faith be able to save him? So faith also, if it have not works is dead in itself.”[21]
Luther teaches: “For we account a man to be justified by faith alone, without the works of the law.” – On Translation and on the Intercession of the Saints
“There is no scandal greater, more dangerous, more venomous, than a good outward life, manifested by good works and a pious mode of life. That is the grand portal, the highway that leads to damnation." [24]
Social Justice
Christ taught: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.”[26]
Luther teaches [27]: “Peasants are no better than straw. They will not hear the word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whiz of bullets and it is only what they deserve.” [28]
“To kill a peasant is not murder; it is helping to extinguish the conflagration. Let there be no half measures! Crush them! Cut their throats! Transfix them. Leave no stone unturned! To kill a peasant is to destroy a mad dog!” – “If they say that I am very hard and merciless, mercy be damned. Let whoever can stab, strangle, and kill them like mad dogs”[29]
“I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain al the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead. All their blood is upon my head. But I put it all on our Lord God: for he commanded me to speak thus.”[30]
“God has given the law, and nobody observes it. He has in addition instituted rod masters, drivers and urgers; so then are rulers to drive, beat, choke, hang, burn, behead, and break upon the well of the vulgar masses.”[31]
“Like the drivers of donkeys, who have to belabor the donkeys incessantly with rods and whips, or they will not obey, so must the ruler do with the people; they must drive, beat throttle, hang, burn, behead and torture, so as to make themselves feared and to keep the people in check”[32]
“Wherever the princes take their power from, it does not regard us. It is the will of God, irrespective whether they have stolen their power or assumed it by robbery”[33]
The Jews
Christ taught: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”-Matt 22:39
Luther teaches: "My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire... Second, that all their books-- their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted...Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country...Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it...
Luther teaches: "My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire... Second, that all their books-- their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted...Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country...Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it...
He who hears this name [God] from a Jew must inform the authorities, or else throw sow dung at him when he sees him and chase him away".[34]
"Burn their synagogues. Forbid them all that I have mentioned above. Force them to work and treat them with every kind of severity, as Moses did in the desert and slew three thousand... If that is no use, we must drive them away like mad dogs, in order that we may not be partakers of their abominable blasphemy and of all their vices, and in order that we may not deserve the anger of God and be damned with them. I have done my duty. Let everyone see how he does his. I am excused."[35]
“ If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and push him over with the words I baptize thee in the name of Abraham”[36]
Marriage and Women
Christ taught: “For this reason shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder. . . Moses by reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, commits adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, commits adultery.”[38]
Luther teaches: “If the husband is unwilling, there is another who is; if the wife is unwilling, then let the maid come.”[39]
“Suppose I should counsel the wife of an impotent man, with his consent, to giver herself to another, say her husband’s brother, but to keep this marriage secret and to ascribe the children to the so-called putative father. The question is: Is such a women in a saved state? I answer, certainly.”[40]
“Know that Marriage is an outward material thing like any other secular business. The body has nothing to do with God. In this respect one can never sin against God, but only against one’s neighbour.”[42]
“As to divorce, it is still a debatable question whether it is allowable. For my part I prefer bigamy to it.”[43]
“The word and work of God is quite clear, viz., that women are made to be either wives or prostitutes.”[44]
“In spite of all the good I say of married life, I will not grant so much to nature as to admit that there is no sin in it. .. no conjugal due is ever rendered without sin. The matrimonial duty is never performed without sin.”[45]
Virtue and Vice
On Lying:
Christ taught: “You are of your father the devil: and the desires of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning: and he stood not in the truth, because truth is not in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof.”[46]
Luther teaches: “What harm could it do if a man told a good lusty lie in a worthy cause and for the sake of the Christian Churches?”[47]
“To lie in a case of necessity or for convenience or in excuse – such lying would not be against God; He was ready to take such lies on Himself”[48]
On God:
Christ taught: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.”[49]
Luther teaches: “I look upon God no better than a scoundrel”[50]
On Drunkenness:
Christ Taught (in the words of St. Paul): “Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: Neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers: Nor the effeminate nor liars with mankind nor thieves nor covetous nor drunkards” [51]
Luther teaches: “We eat and drink to kill ourselves, we eat and rink up to our last farthing.”[52]
On Pride:
Christ taught: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled” [53]
Luther teaches: “St. Augustine or St. Ambrosius cannot be compared with me.”[54]
“What I teach and write remains true even though the whole world should fall to pieces over it” [55]
On the Person of Christ
Christ taught: “Which of you shall convince Me of sin? If I say the truth to you, why do not believe Me? He that is of God, hears the words of God. Therefore you hear them not, because you are not of God.”[56]
Luther teaches: “Christ committed adultery first of all with the women at the well about whom St. John tell’s us. Was not everybody about Him saying: ‘Whatever has He been doing with her?’ Secondly, with Mary Magdalen, and thirdly with the women taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even, Christ who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died.”[57]
“I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ”[58]
“It does not matter how Christ behaved – what He taught is all that matters”[59]
Sacred Scripture
Christ taught: " For I testify to every one that hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book.”[60]
Luther teaches: "to my mind it (the book of the Apocalypse) bears upon it no marks of an apostolic or prophetic character... Everyone may form his own judgment of this book; as for myself, I feel an aversion to it, and to me this is sufficient reason for rejecting it."[61]
"If your Papist annoys you with the word ('alone' - Rom. 3:28), tell him straightway, Dr. Martin Luther will have it so: Papist and ass are one and the same thing. Whoever will not have my translation, let him give it the go-by: the devil's thanks to him who censures it without my will and knowledge. Luther will have it so, and he is a doctor above all the doctors in Popedom."[62]
Luther had a perverse habit of freely falsifying scripture to justify his purposes.
"The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible."[63]
"The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible."[63]
"The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe. I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much and has in it a great deal of heathenish foolishness."[64]
"...the epistle of St. James is an epistle full of straw, because it contains nothing evangelical."[66]
It is worth noting that while Luther claimed for himself the right to interpret scripture according to his own view, and claimed that he was intelligent enough to judge anyone and everything by scripture alone yet he openly affirms that "We cannot claim to fathom completely the meaning of a single verse of Scripture; we succeed in apprehending only the A B C of it, and even that imperfectly." - Luther, Table-talk, trans. Gustave Brunet, Paris, Garnier, 1844, pg. 288.
It is worth noting that while Luther claimed for himself the right to interpret scripture according to his own view, and claimed that he was intelligent enough to judge anyone and everything by scripture alone yet he openly affirms that "We cannot claim to fathom completely the meaning of a single verse of Scripture; we succeed in apprehending only the A B C of it, and even that imperfectly." - Luther, Table-talk, trans. Gustave Brunet, Paris, Garnier, 1844, pg. 288.
And again he states: "Let no one believe himself competent to understand Holy Scripture, unless he has, for a hundred years, governed the Church with the Prophets, with Elijiah and Elisha, St. John the Baptist, Jesus Christ and the Apostles." -Luther, Table-talk, trans. Gustave Brunet, Paris, Garnier, 1844, pg. 290.
Conclusion:
While I leave to the reader to draw his own conclusions, it suffices to say that what Luther really was; and the picture that is presented of him today by modern scholars, Lutherans and Protestants alike is far from the truth. Given this fact, it’s not difficult to see how a nation like Germany was able to blindly follow a person like Hitler if it had previously so readily embrace a person like Luther.[67] Adolf Hitler himself was indeed no doubt a true (spiritual) son of Luther and in many ways was only being logical to the principles set forth by Luther in his approach to things[68]. Hitler himself declared the reality of this point in one of his speeches saying: “I do insist on the certainty that sooner or later – once we hold power – Christianity will be overcome and the German Church established. Yes, the German church, without a Pope and without the bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”[69]
What is more is that from Luther’s own words (which I have stated above) we are able to grasp the origin of the inversion of orders in modern society, which we see has prevailed in the modern world. Luther ushered in this new era of apostasy from God in his attempt to rationalize his own perversity and make of it the foundations for civil society. The erroneous principles upon which the modern world is based undeniably come from Luther himself and can never be reconciled to the teachings of the Gospel no matter what Luther might have thought.
* The death mask as depicted above is the same as found in the book by the well known philosopher Jacques Maritain in his book "Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau" London: Sheed and Ward, 1950.
- N.B. Erlangen and Weimar refer to the different editions of Luther’s works. Luther’s literary work is very voluminous (the critical edition of Weimar, commenced in 1883, comprises many volumes), and is not easily found in libraries but when not having quoted from the original sources I have quoted from those authors who have draw from the original sources.
[1] As Luther himself stated “I am but a man prone to let himself be swept off his feet by Society, Drunkenness, the torments of the flesh.” – Weimar, Vol. 9, Pg. 215, Pg. 13. On another occasion, he states: “I burn with all the desires of my unconquered flesh” – Enders Vol. 3, Pg. 189.
[3] Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), Volume III, p. 364.
[4] D. Martini Lutheri Exegetica Opera Latina, published by Elsperger (Erlangen, Heyder, 1829-84), Vol. 18 pg. 146
[7] From the essay, 'Bondage of the Will,' 'Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. by Dillenberger, Anchor Books, 1962 p. 190.
[9] 'De Servo Arbitrio', 7, 113 seq., quoted by O'Hare, in 'The Facts About Luther, TAN Books, 1987, pp. 266-267.
[15] Erlangen, Vol. 44, Pg. 156-157. For more quotes in this regard see: “Three Reformers”, By Jacques Maritan, Pg. 34 ; Cf. also Jean Janssen, L’Allemagne et la Reforme. (Trans. E. Paris, Plon, 1887-1911), Vol VII, pg 427.
[16] Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Fol. (1516). Ficker, II, 198. Cf. Three Reformers, By Jacques Maritan, Pg. 31
[17] The Babylonian Captivity. It’s worth mentioning on this point that Luther himself had early written “Pray for me I am falling into the abyss of Sin” – Enders, Vol. 3, Pg. 193.
[18] 'Let Your Sins Be Strong, from 'The Wittenberg Project;' 'The Wartburg Segment', translated by Erika Flores, from Dr. Martin Luther's Saemmtliche Schriften, Letter No. 99, 1 Aug. 1521. - Cf. Also Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), VOl. II, pg. 404).
[19] J. Dollinger, La Reforme et les resultants qu’elle a produits. (Trans. E. Perrot, Paris, Gaume, 1848-49), Vol III, pg. 248
[20] Matt 5:16, Cf. Apoc 20:12, Gal 6:2, 1 Jn 3:18, Jas 4:17, I Cor 13:2, II Peter 1:10, Gal 6:9. There are also many warnings in scripture that warn against falling away from salvation (Gal 4:9, Col 1:23, 1 Tim 1:19, 4:1, Heb 3:12-14, 12:14-15, 2 Pet 2:20-21, Apoc 2:4-5).
[23] Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), VOl. III, pg. 47.
[24] Denifle’s Luther et Lutheranisme, Etude Faite d’apres les sources. Translation by J. Paquier (Paris, A. Picard, 1912-13), VOl. II, pg. 128.
[27] It is important to keep in mind that these peasants were actually Protestants who favoured Luther and his views, yet in order to please the German princes Luther and gain influence Luther did not hesitate to have even his own followers put to death! As one writer put it “I know of no example in history ( with the exception of Hitler’s famous, or rather infamous, June 30, 1934) where a man turned in such an inhuman, brutal, low way against his own followers – merely in order to establish his own position, without any reason.” – Peter F. Winer, Martin Luther, Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, Pg. 57
[34] Martin Luther; On the Jews and Their Lies, translated by Martin H. Bertram, Fortress Press, 1955
[35] About the Jews and Their Lies,' quoted by O'Hare, in 'The Facts About Luther, TAN Books, 1987, p. 290.
[45] Weimar, Vol 8. Pg. 654. In other words for Luther the matrimonial act is “a sin differing in nothing from adultery and fornication.” ibid. What then is the purpose of marriage for Luther you may ask? Luther affirms that it’s simply to satisfy one’s sexual cravings “The body asks for a women and must have it” or again “To marry is a remedy for fornication” – Grisar, “Luther”, vol. iv, pg. 145.
[52] Weimar, Vo. 9. pg. 215. We can also note on this point that the opinion of Luther’s contemporaries on the subject is unmistakable. They all agree that Luther “was addicted to over-drinking.” - Th. Brieger: “Aleander and Luther”, pg. 170, 307.
[57] Trishreden, Weimer Edition, Vol. 2, Pg. 107. - What a great blasphemy from a man who is regarded as “great reformer”!
[62] Amic. Discussion, 1, 127,'The Facts About Luther,' O'Hare, TAN Books, 1987, p. 201. Cf. Also J. Dollinger, La Reforme et les resultants qu’elle a produits. (Trans. E. Perrot, Paris, Gaume, 1848-49), Vol III, pg. 138.
[66] 'Preface to the New Testament,' ed. Dillenberger, p. 19. - Cf. Also Jean Janssen, L’Allemagne et la Reforme. (Trans. E. Paris, Plon, 1887-1911). Vol II, Pg. 218.
[67] Anyone who contends this point needs simply to read views of Luther concerning the state, civil authority and war. In his writings, we find that he openly states for example “Even if the authorities are wicked and unjust, nobody is entitled to oppose them, or to riot against them.” Or again “The ass must have blows and the People must be ruled by force. God knew this well, for it was not a fox’s brush He gave to rulers, but a sword.” - Weimar, Vol 30, Pg. 1. This point is dealt with in more detail by Peter F. Wiener in his work “Martin Luther, Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor”, Published by Marian House, Powers Lake, N.D. 58773.
[68] This was undeniably recognized by the Lutherans who welcomed and supported the regime of Hitler. A point worth mentioning in this regard is that this fact is so blatantly ignored by Protestants and the Liberal media who at the same time do not hesitate to unjustly put forward attacks against Pope Pius XII and his efforts against the Nazis.
[69] Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s speeches, edited by Prof. N.H. Baynes [oxford, 1942], pg. 369.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Who was Martin Luther?
By Rev. Fr. Philippe Marcille
Luther! The name evokes a rupture never repaired in the history of Christianity, an exceptional personality. Rare talents. An astonishing impact on society. And the whole placed in service to revolt: it ravaged him within, and he spread it without. He was to die of it. Half of Europe was to remain bathed in blood, prostrate, sterile for two centuries.
1483. Birth of Luther. For more than a century, the historians who have dispassionately studied the documents have concluded that intellectual utopia alone cannot explain Luther, and that his words betray a pathological state. Some recent works (1) remove all doubt.
The man's early years saw formed in him a neurotic anxiety which, becoming paroxysmal, was to become the motor of Martin Luther.
In his writings, especially the table talks piously recorded by his disciples, excrement, urine, and the like recur with a fierceness, a delectation, a frequency that already frightened his contemporaries, even the favorably disposed. "This man vomits s... by the mouthful," wrote his contemporary, the humanist Thomas More. Luther would even compose scurrilous doggerel, like one against the poet Lemmich, for example, in which in every line the four-letter word recurs...
Chronology
With the same frequency, a growling hatred of the pope. That also recurs incessantly. Without reasoning: like the relief found in invective. It is not the indignation of a good man against impiety. In 1510, his superiors had sent him to Rome, and he had been filled with admiration at the piety, the charity and the humanity of the pontifical justice, and he compared it to the lamentable state of Germany. No; there is something mad, excessive in his hatred mixed with fear. At the time of his excommunication, the first movement was fear, then hatred: "The pontifical acts are sealed with devil's s... (reading a decretal). It is nothing but a ghastly fart of the pope. What energy, to set off such a clap of thunder. It is a miracle that he did not burst his behind and his guts."(2)
Dalbiez multiplies the examples. His theology turns round an obsession: "A child has diarrhea in his diaper or on his father's lap with impunity; he remains none the less the heir of his patrimony. Thus our justice is not in us. And if I am not pious, the Christ keeps none the less his piety."(3)
It undoubtedly began while he was still little, stemming from the way some children of strong personality have of confronting their parents. His parents were rough and brutal. Luther's revolt against the blows was expressed by dirtying his pants. He was beaten bloody for it. He ended by yielding, not from docility, but from fear - a fear as violent as his vitality. This fear of his father was projected on God. Beneath the fear, bound but quite alive, remained a grumbling hatred. Against God, the inhibition was too strong, but the day when the unstable equilibrium broke, this hatred fixed upon the pope.
His vocation? One day lightening struck near him. God was going to strike him like his father. He fled to the monastery in a reflex of terror. The terror abated, but the tension of fear and hatred developed in him a neurotic anxiety that never left him. In the monastery chapel, the Gospel of the possessed man was read. He suddenly rolled on the ground crying out, "It isn't me, it isn't me."
The religious life seemed to stabilize him, judging by the portraits of 1505, but the virus had infected his mind. Studying theology, he reread - in light of his neurotic anxiety - the epistles of St. Paul. And he clung to that like a talisman against madness and despair.
With that aspect of his personality, there were also a prodigious vitality, a memory, an intellect, a rhetorical talent that held the attention of his superiors. Five years after his entry, lo! he was a priest (he was to faint from fright during his first Mass) and professor at the University of Wittenberg.
In 1517, the Augustinians, jealous of the Dominicans who had obtained a monopoly on preaching the jubilee indulgences, charged their brilliant orator to break the Dominican Tetzel. They had no hint of the hurricane they were unleashing. Purgatory, for Luther, meant the dogma of merits and of expiation, the return of his terror and his anxieties, the phantom that must be killed. Thus he preached salvation by the merits of Christ independently of our works. His successes emboldened him, reassured him: Yes, that is indeed the doctrine of Christ! Every one listens to me!
Then came the headlong course: posters against indulgences, challenges against the pope and the emperor, the exhilaration at seeing Germany move at the sound of his voice. Luther is one of the rare cases where the neurosis does not consume vitality and energy. On the contrary, it gave him a power of incantation, an exaltation, a communicative passion, a boldness, a bellowing energy that subjugated and drew crowds.
In Germany, everything that sought to move attached its wagon to the locomotive Luther: the humanists wishing to remake the world on the model of antiquity, the high nobility no longer willing to brook submission to the ecclesiastical power, the poor petty nobility coveting the riches of the Church to profit the younger members of the family, the peasants weary of oppression, the pious folk weary of the scandals given by bad bishops. His excesses were deplored, but they needed him too much.
The excommunication (1520) occurred at the appointed moment. Hutten, a brigand, needed a prophet: he made advances. Luther, who was terrified and had just written a letter of submission, threw himself into [Hutten's] arms. Hatred then took the upper hand.
Just wait, my Lord Bishops, devil's larva, the Doctor Martin is going to have you read a bull that will offend your ears, a Lutheran bull. Whoever shall help by his arm, his fortune, his goods, to devastate the bishops and the episcopal hierarchy, is a good son of God, a true Christian who keeps the commandments of the Lord.(4)
The Catholic theologians pointed out to him the consequences of his new theory: by implication, it denies not only purgatory, but also confession, good works, the Mass as a sacrifice for our sins, the visibility of the Church. But it was too late; Luther was intoxicated by the sentiment of liberation that he experienced by shouting what he had repressed within him, and "the reproaches awaken my adversaries, and make me intelligent," he said. His doctrine was completed early on, from 1517-1520. Luther was to add to it divorce and the authorization of bigamy, once he had been domesticated by the princes. For the roaring lion was to be muzzled.
The turning point came in the midst of the Peasants' War. In 1524, he had met people crazier, more extreme, more demagogic, and fouler than he: the Anabaptists. They urged the pillaging of castles, integral communism, and the sharing of wives with the very same arguments as Luther. There was an about turn. Luther threw himself into the arms of the political power.
Come, my princes, strike! To arms! Thrust! The times have come, blessed times where with blood a prince can win heaven more easily that we can with our prayers; I, Martin Luther, I myself ordered their tortures, impalement, beheading, bludgeoning.
He was listened to: a massacre took place, 100,000 victims according to one Protestant historian, the beginning of a nightmare that was to bind Germany for two centuries.
Henceforth the outcome was fixed: since there must be a religious authority, since the Church had been rejected, it was the political power that was to decide what must be believed. The Protestant Menzel in his monumental history of Germany observes:
The most remarkable aspect of the religious pacification is undoubtedly that, once religion and the Church were wrested from the spiritual authority under whose control they had been until then, they were placed under the control of the princes and the State. The Palatine electors, by virtue of the right of reformation that the pacification had established in fact, and that the Peace of Westphalia declared to be an original right of the Empire, constrained their subjects to switch from Catholicism to Lutheranism, from Lutheranism to Calvinism, then back to Lutheranism, then to Calvinism, and finally they wanted to make them return to Catholicism.(5)
Henceforth, for Luther, it was a headlong pitch into drunkenness and debauchery. The successive portraits of the heretic testify to the progressive decline. At Wittenberg, the nuns listened to the master, left their convents, preached, and ended in loose living. Luther married one, Catherine Bora, but he had at least one child by another. His sermons describe his own morals: "My God, give us many women and few children ....[H]owever ugly the woman, one who has no water to extinguish the fire uses dung."
One is not surprised, then, that when the prince of Hesse consulted him in order to obtain a justification of his bigamy, the old lecher needed no persuasion to find for him good theological arguments.
His flight, though, did not bring Luther peace. His exaltation sometimes gave way to a terrible lucidity. One evening, Luther being in the garden with Kaliche (Catherine Bora), witnesses recorded their dialogue:
"Look, how beautiful the sky is, how the stars twinkle," murmured Catherine.
"Yes, but they do not shine for us."
"Why not?"
A silence. "We left our convents."
"Then, we must return to our vows?"
"It is too late. The wagon is stuck too deep in the mud.”(6)
The last five years of Luther's life were sinister. His celebrity, which had exhilarated him, was waning. He well knew that he had been domesticated by the powerful. Catherine Bora became bitter and tyrannical. She had no more illusions about the prophet who had enthralled her. He was bitter. He vituperated, threatened, complained, drank. In his letters from this period, there recurs like a leitmotif, under different forms, the avowal: "I am drunk from morning till night."
His theology at this time reads like a desperate autobiography:
I know it: if someone has felt the terror and the weight of death, he would rather be a pig than suffer continually from such a crushing weight. In the street or on its dungheap, the pig imagines itself to be on a soft bed: it rests peacefully, snores delicately, sleeps deliciously. It fears neither king nor master, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor divine wrath. It has no worry, and it is not even troubled about what it will eat. If it is chased, it grunts. If it could speak, it would say: Fool! see how you let yourself be carried away by anger. You haven't the least part or parcel of my happiness; and were you very much more rich and powerful, you would never spend one hour that is as secure, sweet, and peaceful as are all of mine. Yes, the pig is not worried by death: it lives in perfect security, in the sweetness of living.
"I know longer know if God is the devil, or the devil God," he says.
1546. Luther was invited by the princes of Mansfeld to mediate a quarrel. He was treated magnificently. Everyone flocked to his sermons. Feast followed feast. During one drinking session, he rose and wrote on the wall an invective against the pope, amidst laughter and joking; suddenly, the old anguish overwhelmed him. The guests saw him return to his place, sinister, not opening his mouth. Not even drunkenness restored his usual loquacity.
His valets revealed later that on this night, February 18, 1546, they had carried the master dead drunk to his bed. Having returned the next morning to dress him, they found him hanged to the posts of his bed, strangled. The devil, with whom he boasted of having slept more often than with his wife, had communicated to him, with his hatred, his despair.(7)
How can the permanence of Protestantism be explained? After Luther's death, Melanchton hastened to reject the dogma of faith without works. But they could not turn back: the hatred of the pope was henceforth too ingrained, too visceral, in the Protestants. And then, there was the pillaging, and then the divorces, and then the ambition of princes, delighted to control religion: a wall that still separates the Protestants from the truth, from life, from salvation.
Rev. Fr. Philippe Marcille, formerly a Benedictine monk of Flavigny, France, joined the Society of St. Pius X in 1986 when his monastery accepted the novus ordo. He is an experienced retreat master of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.
1. L'angoisse de Luther, by Dalbiez (Tequi, 1974); Luther, by Ivan Gobry (L.T.R., 1991).
2. See Gobry, p. 451.
3. Table Talks, Vol. 2, No. 1712.
4. T. IL, Witt., fol. 120.
5. Rohbacher, Histoire de l'eglise, p. 10.
6. Audin, Histoire de Luther, Vol. 3 (Paris: 1846).
7. Ivan Gobry, Luther, (Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991). The substance of the biography and the account of his death are taken from this work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Audin. Histoire de Luther, Paris: 1846.
"Bonum Certamen," No. 63, 1981.
Dalbiez. L'angoisse de Luther. Ed. Tequi, 1974.
Gobry, Ivan. Luther. Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991.
Rohbacher. Histoire de L'eglise.
Sacchi, Henri. Guerre de Trente ans. Paris: Ed. 1'Harmattan, 1991.
Some of the citations were borrowed from a tract by Fr. Moureau.
Luther! The name evokes a rupture never repaired in the history of Christianity, an exceptional personality. Rare talents. An astonishing impact on society. And the whole placed in service to revolt: it ravaged him within, and he spread it without. He was to die of it. Half of Europe was to remain bathed in blood, prostrate, sterile for two centuries.
1483. Birth of Luther. For more than a century, the historians who have dispassionately studied the documents have concluded that intellectual utopia alone cannot explain Luther, and that his words betray a pathological state. Some recent works (1) remove all doubt.
The man's early years saw formed in him a neurotic anxiety which, becoming paroxysmal, was to become the motor of Martin Luther.
In his writings, especially the table talks piously recorded by his disciples, excrement, urine, and the like recur with a fierceness, a delectation, a frequency that already frightened his contemporaries, even the favorably disposed. "This man vomits s... by the mouthful," wrote his contemporary, the humanist Thomas More. Luther would even compose scurrilous doggerel, like one against the poet Lemmich, for example, in which in every line the four-letter word recurs...
Chronology
With the same frequency, a growling hatred of the pope. That also recurs incessantly. Without reasoning: like the relief found in invective. It is not the indignation of a good man against impiety. In 1510, his superiors had sent him to Rome, and he had been filled with admiration at the piety, the charity and the humanity of the pontifical justice, and he compared it to the lamentable state of Germany. No; there is something mad, excessive in his hatred mixed with fear. At the time of his excommunication, the first movement was fear, then hatred: "The pontifical acts are sealed with devil's s... (reading a decretal). It is nothing but a ghastly fart of the pope. What energy, to set off such a clap of thunder. It is a miracle that he did not burst his behind and his guts."(2)
Dalbiez multiplies the examples. His theology turns round an obsession: "A child has diarrhea in his diaper or on his father's lap with impunity; he remains none the less the heir of his patrimony. Thus our justice is not in us. And if I am not pious, the Christ keeps none the less his piety."(3)
It undoubtedly began while he was still little, stemming from the way some children of strong personality have of confronting their parents. His parents were rough and brutal. Luther's revolt against the blows was expressed by dirtying his pants. He was beaten bloody for it. He ended by yielding, not from docility, but from fear - a fear as violent as his vitality. This fear of his father was projected on God. Beneath the fear, bound but quite alive, remained a grumbling hatred. Against God, the inhibition was too strong, but the day when the unstable equilibrium broke, this hatred fixed upon the pope.
His vocation? One day lightening struck near him. God was going to strike him like his father. He fled to the monastery in a reflex of terror. The terror abated, but the tension of fear and hatred developed in him a neurotic anxiety that never left him. In the monastery chapel, the Gospel of the possessed man was read. He suddenly rolled on the ground crying out, "It isn't me, it isn't me."
The religious life seemed to stabilize him, judging by the portraits of 1505, but the virus had infected his mind. Studying theology, he reread - in light of his neurotic anxiety - the epistles of St. Paul. And he clung to that like a talisman against madness and despair.
With that aspect of his personality, there were also a prodigious vitality, a memory, an intellect, a rhetorical talent that held the attention of his superiors. Five years after his entry, lo! he was a priest (he was to faint from fright during his first Mass) and professor at the University of Wittenberg.
In 1517, the Augustinians, jealous of the Dominicans who had obtained a monopoly on preaching the jubilee indulgences, charged their brilliant orator to break the Dominican Tetzel. They had no hint of the hurricane they were unleashing. Purgatory, for Luther, meant the dogma of merits and of expiation, the return of his terror and his anxieties, the phantom that must be killed. Thus he preached salvation by the merits of Christ independently of our works. His successes emboldened him, reassured him: Yes, that is indeed the doctrine of Christ! Every one listens to me!
Then came the headlong course: posters against indulgences, challenges against the pope and the emperor, the exhilaration at seeing Germany move at the sound of his voice. Luther is one of the rare cases where the neurosis does not consume vitality and energy. On the contrary, it gave him a power of incantation, an exaltation, a communicative passion, a boldness, a bellowing energy that subjugated and drew crowds.
In Germany, everything that sought to move attached its wagon to the locomotive Luther: the humanists wishing to remake the world on the model of antiquity, the high nobility no longer willing to brook submission to the ecclesiastical power, the poor petty nobility coveting the riches of the Church to profit the younger members of the family, the peasants weary of oppression, the pious folk weary of the scandals given by bad bishops. His excesses were deplored, but they needed him too much.
The excommunication (1520) occurred at the appointed moment. Hutten, a brigand, needed a prophet: he made advances. Luther, who was terrified and had just written a letter of submission, threw himself into [Hutten's] arms. Hatred then took the upper hand.
Just wait, my Lord Bishops, devil's larva, the Doctor Martin is going to have you read a bull that will offend your ears, a Lutheran bull. Whoever shall help by his arm, his fortune, his goods, to devastate the bishops and the episcopal hierarchy, is a good son of God, a true Christian who keeps the commandments of the Lord.(4)
The Catholic theologians pointed out to him the consequences of his new theory: by implication, it denies not only purgatory, but also confession, good works, the Mass as a sacrifice for our sins, the visibility of the Church. But it was too late; Luther was intoxicated by the sentiment of liberation that he experienced by shouting what he had repressed within him, and "the reproaches awaken my adversaries, and make me intelligent," he said. His doctrine was completed early on, from 1517-1520. Luther was to add to it divorce and the authorization of bigamy, once he had been domesticated by the princes. For the roaring lion was to be muzzled.
The turning point came in the midst of the Peasants' War. In 1524, he had met people crazier, more extreme, more demagogic, and fouler than he: the Anabaptists. They urged the pillaging of castles, integral communism, and the sharing of wives with the very same arguments as Luther. There was an about turn. Luther threw himself into the arms of the political power.
Come, my princes, strike! To arms! Thrust! The times have come, blessed times where with blood a prince can win heaven more easily that we can with our prayers; I, Martin Luther, I myself ordered their tortures, impalement, beheading, bludgeoning.
He was listened to: a massacre took place, 100,000 victims according to one Protestant historian, the beginning of a nightmare that was to bind Germany for two centuries.
Henceforth the outcome was fixed: since there must be a religious authority, since the Church had been rejected, it was the political power that was to decide what must be believed. The Protestant Menzel in his monumental history of Germany observes:
The most remarkable aspect of the religious pacification is undoubtedly that, once religion and the Church were wrested from the spiritual authority under whose control they had been until then, they were placed under the control of the princes and the State. The Palatine electors, by virtue of the right of reformation that the pacification had established in fact, and that the Peace of Westphalia declared to be an original right of the Empire, constrained their subjects to switch from Catholicism to Lutheranism, from Lutheranism to Calvinism, then back to Lutheranism, then to Calvinism, and finally they wanted to make them return to Catholicism.(5)
Henceforth, for Luther, it was a headlong pitch into drunkenness and debauchery. The successive portraits of the heretic testify to the progressive decline. At Wittenberg, the nuns listened to the master, left their convents, preached, and ended in loose living. Luther married one, Catherine Bora, but he had at least one child by another. His sermons describe his own morals: "My God, give us many women and few children ....[H]owever ugly the woman, one who has no water to extinguish the fire uses dung."
One is not surprised, then, that when the prince of Hesse consulted him in order to obtain a justification of his bigamy, the old lecher needed no persuasion to find for him good theological arguments.
His flight, though, did not bring Luther peace. His exaltation sometimes gave way to a terrible lucidity. One evening, Luther being in the garden with Kaliche (Catherine Bora), witnesses recorded their dialogue:
"Look, how beautiful the sky is, how the stars twinkle," murmured Catherine.
"Yes, but they do not shine for us."
"Why not?"
A silence. "We left our convents."
"Then, we must return to our vows?"
"It is too late. The wagon is stuck too deep in the mud.”(6)
The last five years of Luther's life were sinister. His celebrity, which had exhilarated him, was waning. He well knew that he had been domesticated by the powerful. Catherine Bora became bitter and tyrannical. She had no more illusions about the prophet who had enthralled her. He was bitter. He vituperated, threatened, complained, drank. In his letters from this period, there recurs like a leitmotif, under different forms, the avowal: "I am drunk from morning till night."
His theology at this time reads like a desperate autobiography:
I know it: if someone has felt the terror and the weight of death, he would rather be a pig than suffer continually from such a crushing weight. In the street or on its dungheap, the pig imagines itself to be on a soft bed: it rests peacefully, snores delicately, sleeps deliciously. It fears neither king nor master, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor divine wrath. It has no worry, and it is not even troubled about what it will eat. If it is chased, it grunts. If it could speak, it would say: Fool! see how you let yourself be carried away by anger. You haven't the least part or parcel of my happiness; and were you very much more rich and powerful, you would never spend one hour that is as secure, sweet, and peaceful as are all of mine. Yes, the pig is not worried by death: it lives in perfect security, in the sweetness of living.
"I know longer know if God is the devil, or the devil God," he says.
1546. Luther was invited by the princes of Mansfeld to mediate a quarrel. He was treated magnificently. Everyone flocked to his sermons. Feast followed feast. During one drinking session, he rose and wrote on the wall an invective against the pope, amidst laughter and joking; suddenly, the old anguish overwhelmed him. The guests saw him return to his place, sinister, not opening his mouth. Not even drunkenness restored his usual loquacity.
His valets revealed later that on this night, February 18, 1546, they had carried the master dead drunk to his bed. Having returned the next morning to dress him, they found him hanged to the posts of his bed, strangled. The devil, with whom he boasted of having slept more often than with his wife, had communicated to him, with his hatred, his despair.(7)
How can the permanence of Protestantism be explained? After Luther's death, Melanchton hastened to reject the dogma of faith without works. But they could not turn back: the hatred of the pope was henceforth too ingrained, too visceral, in the Protestants. And then, there was the pillaging, and then the divorces, and then the ambition of princes, delighted to control religion: a wall that still separates the Protestants from the truth, from life, from salvation.
Rev. Fr. Philippe Marcille, formerly a Benedictine monk of Flavigny, France, joined the Society of St. Pius X in 1986 when his monastery accepted the novus ordo. He is an experienced retreat master of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.
1. L'angoisse de Luther, by Dalbiez (Tequi, 1974); Luther, by Ivan Gobry (L.T.R., 1991).
2. See Gobry, p. 451.
3. Table Talks, Vol. 2, No. 1712.
4. T. IL, Witt., fol. 120.
5. Rohbacher, Histoire de l'eglise, p. 10.
6. Audin, Histoire de Luther, Vol. 3 (Paris: 1846).
7. Ivan Gobry, Luther, (Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991). The substance of the biography and the account of his death are taken from this work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Audin. Histoire de Luther, Paris: 1846.
"Bonum Certamen," No. 63, 1981.
Dalbiez. L'angoisse de Luther. Ed. Tequi, 1974.
Gobry, Ivan. Luther. Paris: Ed. L.T.R., 1991.
Rohbacher. Histoire de L'eglise.
Sacchi, Henri. Guerre de Trente ans. Paris: Ed. 1'Harmattan, 1991.
Some of the citations were borrowed from a tract by Fr. Moureau.
Papal Coronation Oath
"I vow to change nothing of the received Tradition, and nothing thereof I have found before me guarded by my God-pleasing predecessors, to encroach upon, to alter, or to permit any innovation therein;
To the contrary: with glowing affection as her truly faithful student and successor, to safeguard reverently the passed-on good, with my whole strength and utmost effort;
To cleanse all that is in contradiction to the canonical order, should such appear; to guard the Holy Canons and Decrees of our Popes as if they were the divine ordinance of Heaven, because I am conscious of Thee, whose place I take through the Grace of God, whose Vicarship I possess with Thy support, being subject to severest accounting before Thy Divine Tribunal over all that I shall confess;
I swear to God Almighty and the Savior Jesus Christ that I will keep whatever has been revealed through Christ and His Successors and whatever the first councils and my predecessors have defined and declared.
I will keep without sacrifice to itself the discipline and the rite of the Church. I will put outside the Church whoever dares to go against this oath, may it be somebody else or I.
If I should undertake to act in anything of contrary sense, or should permit that it will be executed, Thou willst not be merciful to me on the dreadful Day of Divine Justice.
Accordingly, without exclusion, We subject to severest excommunication anyone -- be it Ourselves or be it another -- who would dare to undertake anything new in contradiction to this constituted evangelic Tradition and the purity of the orthodox Faith and the Christian religion, or would seek to change anything by his opposing efforts, or would agree with those who undertake such a blasphemous venture."
[This oath was written by Pope St. Agatho, 678AD, however, it is more likely centuries older. It was taken by all pontiffs until John Paul II, who did not.]
From: http://www.traditionalcatholic.net/Tradition/Information/Papal_Coronation_Oath.html
To the contrary: with glowing affection as her truly faithful student and successor, to safeguard reverently the passed-on good, with my whole strength and utmost effort;
To cleanse all that is in contradiction to the canonical order, should such appear; to guard the Holy Canons and Decrees of our Popes as if they were the divine ordinance of Heaven, because I am conscious of Thee, whose place I take through the Grace of God, whose Vicarship I possess with Thy support, being subject to severest accounting before Thy Divine Tribunal over all that I shall confess;
I swear to God Almighty and the Savior Jesus Christ that I will keep whatever has been revealed through Christ and His Successors and whatever the first councils and my predecessors have defined and declared.
I will keep without sacrifice to itself the discipline and the rite of the Church. I will put outside the Church whoever dares to go against this oath, may it be somebody else or I.
If I should undertake to act in anything of contrary sense, or should permit that it will be executed, Thou willst not be merciful to me on the dreadful Day of Divine Justice.
Accordingly, without exclusion, We subject to severest excommunication anyone -- be it Ourselves or be it another -- who would dare to undertake anything new in contradiction to this constituted evangelic Tradition and the purity of the orthodox Faith and the Christian religion, or would seek to change anything by his opposing efforts, or would agree with those who undertake such a blasphemous venture."
[This oath was written by Pope St. Agatho, 678AD, however, it is more likely centuries older. It was taken by all pontiffs until John Paul II, who did not.]
From: http://www.traditionalcatholic.net/Tradition/Information/Papal_Coronation_Oath.html
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
What are we to think of Calvin?
Rev . Fr. Philippe Marcille
The influence of John Calvin (1509-1564) has been immense, perhaps even more so than that of Luther. Certainly, without the bellowing revolutionary Luther, Calvin would not have been able to do anything; yet without Calvin, the revolt would not have had the political impact that it did in France and especially the United States.
Origins
He was born in Picardy, France, in 1509. His parents were well-to-do people. A very gifted student, he received a benefice from the Church and continued his studies at Paris. He was not well liked by his classmates: they nicknamed him "the accusative." He readily scolded others and tattled on them, while remaining aloof and bitter. But when in public, he would lose all his reserve and stand out in debates. An anti-Lutheran, defender of authority, he approved the legal actions brought against the most strident Lutherans.
The Personal Crisis
In 1532, at the College of France, he was still Catholic. By the end of 1533, he had suddenly turned Protestant, sold his benefices, and begun the life of an itinerant preacher. What happened?
Protestant hagiography has sought to explain it by edifying conversations in his room that would have taken place between Calvin and a Protestant cousin. Recent studies, however, have shown that the two were hundreds of miles apart at the time. A key, though, was left in part by Calvin himself:
Each and every time I entered within myself, a horror so great came over me that neither purifications nor satisfactions could have effaced it. The more I considered myself the more my conscience was pricked with sharp darts, so much so that only one consolation remained, and that was to deceive myself by forgetting about myself ....bewildered by the misery into which I had fallen, and even more so by the knowledge of how close I was to eternal death (Letter to Sadolet).
It is only fair to wonder what could be the nature of such a burning self-reproach. There is one answer, based upon serious evidence, one that has always been passionately denied by the Protestants. In 1551, a Catholic controversialist revealed that the archives of the city of Noyon, Calvin's birth place, contain the record of a condemnation against Calvin, at age 18, for sodomy. He had by then already received the tonsure. His parents obtained clemency from the bishop, so that instead of being condemned to death as the law demanded, he was branded as a sign of infamy. The Catholic controversialist presented the evidence signed by all the eminent personages of the city. The English scholar Stapleton went there to examine the archives during Calvin's lifetime, and vouched for the fact. The contemporary German Lutherans spoke of it as an established fact (Schlusselburg, Théologie calvinienne).
At twenty-four, Calvin was at a crossroads. He had to choose between confession or Lutheranism. He chose: "Only believe, and you are as sure of your own eternal salvation as of the Redemption of Christ. Only believe, and despite all the crimes, not only will you remain in the grace of God, in justice, but you will always remain in grace and you will never be able to lose it" (Bossuet's summary of his doctrine in "Variations").
The Heresiarch
His career began. He wandered to Strasbourg, Basel, Ferrara, and finally settled at Geneva in 1536 as preacher. There he was to show his full worth, not only as a preacher, but also as a political virtuoso. In five years, he was able to solidify his authority over the Consistory the Council of the Ancients, a disciplinary tribunal that passed sentence on all public sinners]; first as leader of the Protestants in exterminating the Catholics (half the city fled, ruined, all their property and possessions confiscated), then as president of the Council that voted on the right interpretation of the Bible, and finally as chief of the tribunal and the army of informers and police in charge of morality and doctrine.
The Tyrant
He began obsessively multiplying laws of public morality. Death was the penalty for high treason against religion as well as for high treason against the city, and for the son who would strike or curse his father, and for the adulterer and the heretic. Children were whipped or hanged for calling their mother a devil. A mason wearily exclaimed "to the devil with the work and the master," and was denounced and condemned to three days in prison. Magicians and sorcerers were hunted down. They always confessed, of course. According to the city register, in 60 years, some 150 were burnt at the stake.
The years went by; Calvin's obsession gripped the Genevans. The number of dishes that could be served at table was regulated, as well as the shape of shoes, and the ladies' hair styles. In the registers are to be found condemnations such as these: "Three journeymen tanners were sentenced to three days on bread and water in prison for having eaten at lunch three dozen pates, which is a great immorality."
That was in 1558. Drunkenness, taverns and card games were punished by fines. The city's coffers filled up and served to pay new informers. For there were ears everywhere in the republic of evangelical liberty, and the failure to inform was itself a misdemeanor. "They are to be stationed in every quarter of the city, so that nothing can escape their eyes," wrote Calvin. Sermons were given on Thursdays and Sundays. Attendance was obligatory under pain of fine or flogging. Not even children were excused. The spies would verify that the streets and houses were empty. Every year, the controllers of orthodoxy went house-to-house to have everyone sign the profession of faith voted that year. The last Catholics disappeared by death or exile. None spoke of changing religion, for Calvin had had a law voted punishing by death anyone who would dare question the reforms of the "servant of Geneva."
Calvin's City
Outwardly Geneva become an exemplary city where an iron morality reigned. Inwardly it was rotten. The population had been augmented by refugees of all sorts: Protestants chased from France, but also delinquents seeking impunity. Calvin's law allowed divorce: people hastened to Geneva from Savoy and the province of Lyons to get remarried. The Protestant Genevan Galiffe, a genealogist, concluded from his studies that the Geneva of Calvin's time was the gutter of Europe. And Calvin knew it:
Out of ten evangelists, you will scarcely find a one who became evangelical for any other reason than to be able to abandon himself more freely to drinking and dissolute living.
Calvin humbly took the title of "servant of Geneva," but God, he held, spoke by his mouth. "Since God has deigned to make known to me what is good and what is evil, I must rule myself by this measure..." And everyone else, too! One morning the city awoke to find gallows had been erected in all the public squares, to which a placard was attached: "For whomever shall speak ill of Mr. Calvin." A letter from the dictator sums up his attitude: "It is necessary to rid the land of these damned cads who exhort the people to resist us, blacken our conduct ...such monsters must be stamped out."
Absolute Power
Calvin's life was not snow white: there are stories of seized inheritances, "spontaneous gifts" made to the great man by merchants, considerable sums sent from the queen of Navarre or the duchess of Ferrara or from other well-off foreigners destined for the poor of the city, but which disappeared into the poor pockets of the great man; marriages arranged for members of his family by threatening rich refugees with expulsion.
Lampoons were circulated: woe to whomever the evangelical police seized in possession of one of them. Some escaped from torture or death by fleeing in time. Calvin then had their wives banished and their goods confiscated. For security's sake, he had the death penalty voted for whomever would even speak of recalling the exiles from their banishment.
Daniel Berthelier, master of the Mint of Geneva, had learned at Noyon the truth about Calvin's past, and had kept written evidence at his house. He was discovered, horribly tortured, and finally beheaded.
It was the execution of Servetus that consolidated the dictator's power. Calvin had cleverly had his adversary's book sent to the hive of Protestant popes, all of whom, including Melancthon, congratulated him on instigating the condemnation of this horrible heretic. Calvin immediately exploited this fleeting prestige to have appointed as electors a multitude of the men who had taken refuge in Geneva, for reasons which were not always based on religion, whom he called "the confessors of the faith." He soon controlled an absolute majority on the Consistory. He then had his last adversaries hunted down, exiled, or educated. It was 1554: before him were ten years in which to exercise absolute power.
There was no more resistance. Even the most powerful citizens could be forced to walk bare-footed around the city, clothed in a shirt, a candle in- hand, crying out "Mercy to God," the ordeal ending by a public confession made kneeling before the Consistory.
When not consulting the spies' reports, Calvin wrote his own book of revelation entitled Institutes of the Christian Religion. He worked on it incessantly, rearranging it, augmenting and re-editing, until it reached a thousand quarto pages. Woe to the critics, whose criticism would elicit from the author a rain of invectives. His ire was as likely to inveigh against Protestants as Catholics. Of Lutherans he was provoked to say: "They are quicktempered, furious, fickle, inconstant, liars, full of canine impudence and diabolical pride."
The quality of Calvin's cold hatred was terrible indeed. It is manifested especially in the affair of Michael Servetus. This learned doctor, a closet Protestant, amused himself by picking out all the blunders and errors that he could find in Calvin's pride and joy, The Institutes. He then sent the book with his own annotations to Calvin. That was in 1546. Calvin clenched his teeth: "If he comes hither and I have any authority, I will never let him quit this place alive" (Letter to Viret, a preacher of Lausanne). He awaited the moment of vengeance for seven years. In 1553, Servetus published anonymously an anti-trinitarian treatise. Calvin, who knew all the publishing channels of Protestant books, was able to discover the author's identity. He denounced him, furnishing proof to the Inquisition, which condemned Servetus, and then helped to obtain the mitigation of his punishment in light of all the good he had done as a physician. The unfortunate Servetus fled to Geneva, where he was arrested on sight. He was made to rot in prison two months. He pleaded to be allowed to have clean clothes and linen, but Calvin opposed the request. He was condemned to be burned alive. Calvin himself arranged the pyre: the pile of faggots was disposed in a circle around the stake so as to make the condemned man be burnt slowly. Calvin remained for two hours at his window listening to the man's screams. He received the approbation of the Protestant hive.
After 1559, the spleen that he had vented on his enemies seemed to be concentrated in his own entrails: stomach aches, intestinal pains, nephritic colic, bloody coughing racked him. His successor Theodore Beza confined him to his room and maintained the legend of the great man. But he confided that his master was becoming daily more imperious and tyrannic. He had unforeseeable fits of anger. Nothing satisfied him. He scolded; he threatened; he inveighed against all the pastors. He made the members of the Consistory confess publicly before him.
He died on the 27th of May 1564 after, it seems, thanking God for his evangelical mission. Was he a prophet, as the Protestants think? Maybe, in the final analysis, the prophet of religious democracy, the Antichrist's democracy. As he lay dying, though, he never had upon his lips the final cry that graced the lips of his dying victim, Michael Servetus: "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me."
(Translated from Le Bachais, No. 35, November-December 1999, the publication of the Priory St. Pierre Julien Eymard, France)
The influence of John Calvin (1509-1564) has been immense, perhaps even more so than that of Luther. Certainly, without the bellowing revolutionary Luther, Calvin would not have been able to do anything; yet without Calvin, the revolt would not have had the political impact that it did in France and especially the United States.
Origins
He was born in Picardy, France, in 1509. His parents were well-to-do people. A very gifted student, he received a benefice from the Church and continued his studies at Paris. He was not well liked by his classmates: they nicknamed him "the accusative." He readily scolded others and tattled on them, while remaining aloof and bitter. But when in public, he would lose all his reserve and stand out in debates. An anti-Lutheran, defender of authority, he approved the legal actions brought against the most strident Lutherans.
The Personal Crisis
In 1532, at the College of France, he was still Catholic. By the end of 1533, he had suddenly turned Protestant, sold his benefices, and begun the life of an itinerant preacher. What happened?
Protestant hagiography has sought to explain it by edifying conversations in his room that would have taken place between Calvin and a Protestant cousin. Recent studies, however, have shown that the two were hundreds of miles apart at the time. A key, though, was left in part by Calvin himself:
Each and every time I entered within myself, a horror so great came over me that neither purifications nor satisfactions could have effaced it. The more I considered myself the more my conscience was pricked with sharp darts, so much so that only one consolation remained, and that was to deceive myself by forgetting about myself ....bewildered by the misery into which I had fallen, and even more so by the knowledge of how close I was to eternal death (Letter to Sadolet).
It is only fair to wonder what could be the nature of such a burning self-reproach. There is one answer, based upon serious evidence, one that has always been passionately denied by the Protestants. In 1551, a Catholic controversialist revealed that the archives of the city of Noyon, Calvin's birth place, contain the record of a condemnation against Calvin, at age 18, for sodomy. He had by then already received the tonsure. His parents obtained clemency from the bishop, so that instead of being condemned to death as the law demanded, he was branded as a sign of infamy. The Catholic controversialist presented the evidence signed by all the eminent personages of the city. The English scholar Stapleton went there to examine the archives during Calvin's lifetime, and vouched for the fact. The contemporary German Lutherans spoke of it as an established fact (Schlusselburg, Théologie calvinienne).
At twenty-four, Calvin was at a crossroads. He had to choose between confession or Lutheranism. He chose: "Only believe, and you are as sure of your own eternal salvation as of the Redemption of Christ. Only believe, and despite all the crimes, not only will you remain in the grace of God, in justice, but you will always remain in grace and you will never be able to lose it" (Bossuet's summary of his doctrine in "Variations").
The Heresiarch
His career began. He wandered to Strasbourg, Basel, Ferrara, and finally settled at Geneva in 1536 as preacher. There he was to show his full worth, not only as a preacher, but also as a political virtuoso. In five years, he was able to solidify his authority over the Consistory the Council of the Ancients, a disciplinary tribunal that passed sentence on all public sinners]; first as leader of the Protestants in exterminating the Catholics (half the city fled, ruined, all their property and possessions confiscated), then as president of the Council that voted on the right interpretation of the Bible, and finally as chief of the tribunal and the army of informers and police in charge of morality and doctrine.
The Tyrant
He began obsessively multiplying laws of public morality. Death was the penalty for high treason against religion as well as for high treason against the city, and for the son who would strike or curse his father, and for the adulterer and the heretic. Children were whipped or hanged for calling their mother a devil. A mason wearily exclaimed "to the devil with the work and the master," and was denounced and condemned to three days in prison. Magicians and sorcerers were hunted down. They always confessed, of course. According to the city register, in 60 years, some 150 were burnt at the stake.
The years went by; Calvin's obsession gripped the Genevans. The number of dishes that could be served at table was regulated, as well as the shape of shoes, and the ladies' hair styles. In the registers are to be found condemnations such as these: "Three journeymen tanners were sentenced to three days on bread and water in prison for having eaten at lunch three dozen pates, which is a great immorality."
That was in 1558. Drunkenness, taverns and card games were punished by fines. The city's coffers filled up and served to pay new informers. For there were ears everywhere in the republic of evangelical liberty, and the failure to inform was itself a misdemeanor. "They are to be stationed in every quarter of the city, so that nothing can escape their eyes," wrote Calvin. Sermons were given on Thursdays and Sundays. Attendance was obligatory under pain of fine or flogging. Not even children were excused. The spies would verify that the streets and houses were empty. Every year, the controllers of orthodoxy went house-to-house to have everyone sign the profession of faith voted that year. The last Catholics disappeared by death or exile. None spoke of changing religion, for Calvin had had a law voted punishing by death anyone who would dare question the reforms of the "servant of Geneva."
Calvin's City
Outwardly Geneva become an exemplary city where an iron morality reigned. Inwardly it was rotten. The population had been augmented by refugees of all sorts: Protestants chased from France, but also delinquents seeking impunity. Calvin's law allowed divorce: people hastened to Geneva from Savoy and the province of Lyons to get remarried. The Protestant Genevan Galiffe, a genealogist, concluded from his studies that the Geneva of Calvin's time was the gutter of Europe. And Calvin knew it:
Out of ten evangelists, you will scarcely find a one who became evangelical for any other reason than to be able to abandon himself more freely to drinking and dissolute living.
Calvin humbly took the title of "servant of Geneva," but God, he held, spoke by his mouth. "Since God has deigned to make known to me what is good and what is evil, I must rule myself by this measure..." And everyone else, too! One morning the city awoke to find gallows had been erected in all the public squares, to which a placard was attached: "For whomever shall speak ill of Mr. Calvin." A letter from the dictator sums up his attitude: "It is necessary to rid the land of these damned cads who exhort the people to resist us, blacken our conduct ...such monsters must be stamped out."
Absolute Power
Calvin's life was not snow white: there are stories of seized inheritances, "spontaneous gifts" made to the great man by merchants, considerable sums sent from the queen of Navarre or the duchess of Ferrara or from other well-off foreigners destined for the poor of the city, but which disappeared into the poor pockets of the great man; marriages arranged for members of his family by threatening rich refugees with expulsion.
Lampoons were circulated: woe to whomever the evangelical police seized in possession of one of them. Some escaped from torture or death by fleeing in time. Calvin then had their wives banished and their goods confiscated. For security's sake, he had the death penalty voted for whomever would even speak of recalling the exiles from their banishment.
Daniel Berthelier, master of the Mint of Geneva, had learned at Noyon the truth about Calvin's past, and had kept written evidence at his house. He was discovered, horribly tortured, and finally beheaded.
It was the execution of Servetus that consolidated the dictator's power. Calvin had cleverly had his adversary's book sent to the hive of Protestant popes, all of whom, including Melancthon, congratulated him on instigating the condemnation of this horrible heretic. Calvin immediately exploited this fleeting prestige to have appointed as electors a multitude of the men who had taken refuge in Geneva, for reasons which were not always based on religion, whom he called "the confessors of the faith." He soon controlled an absolute majority on the Consistory. He then had his last adversaries hunted down, exiled, or educated. It was 1554: before him were ten years in which to exercise absolute power.
There was no more resistance. Even the most powerful citizens could be forced to walk bare-footed around the city, clothed in a shirt, a candle in- hand, crying out "Mercy to God," the ordeal ending by a public confession made kneeling before the Consistory.
When not consulting the spies' reports, Calvin wrote his own book of revelation entitled Institutes of the Christian Religion. He worked on it incessantly, rearranging it, augmenting and re-editing, until it reached a thousand quarto pages. Woe to the critics, whose criticism would elicit from the author a rain of invectives. His ire was as likely to inveigh against Protestants as Catholics. Of Lutherans he was provoked to say: "They are quicktempered, furious, fickle, inconstant, liars, full of canine impudence and diabolical pride."
The quality of Calvin's cold hatred was terrible indeed. It is manifested especially in the affair of Michael Servetus. This learned doctor, a closet Protestant, amused himself by picking out all the blunders and errors that he could find in Calvin's pride and joy, The Institutes. He then sent the book with his own annotations to Calvin. That was in 1546. Calvin clenched his teeth: "If he comes hither and I have any authority, I will never let him quit this place alive" (Letter to Viret, a preacher of Lausanne). He awaited the moment of vengeance for seven years. In 1553, Servetus published anonymously an anti-trinitarian treatise. Calvin, who knew all the publishing channels of Protestant books, was able to discover the author's identity. He denounced him, furnishing proof to the Inquisition, which condemned Servetus, and then helped to obtain the mitigation of his punishment in light of all the good he had done as a physician. The unfortunate Servetus fled to Geneva, where he was arrested on sight. He was made to rot in prison two months. He pleaded to be allowed to have clean clothes and linen, but Calvin opposed the request. He was condemned to be burned alive. Calvin himself arranged the pyre: the pile of faggots was disposed in a circle around the stake so as to make the condemned man be burnt slowly. Calvin remained for two hours at his window listening to the man's screams. He received the approbation of the Protestant hive.
After 1559, the spleen that he had vented on his enemies seemed to be concentrated in his own entrails: stomach aches, intestinal pains, nephritic colic, bloody coughing racked him. His successor Theodore Beza confined him to his room and maintained the legend of the great man. But he confided that his master was becoming daily more imperious and tyrannic. He had unforeseeable fits of anger. Nothing satisfied him. He scolded; he threatened; he inveighed against all the pastors. He made the members of the Consistory confess publicly before him.
He died on the 27th of May 1564 after, it seems, thanking God for his evangelical mission. Was he a prophet, as the Protestants think? Maybe, in the final analysis, the prophet of religious democracy, the Antichrist's democracy. As he lay dying, though, he never had upon his lips the final cry that graced the lips of his dying victim, Michael Servetus: "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me."
(Translated from Le Bachais, No. 35, November-December 1999, the publication of the Priory St. Pierre Julien Eymard, France)
Friday, April 24, 2009
Great Catholic Documents: Quo Primum by Pope St. Pius V
This is the first in a series of documents we wish every Catholic to become familiar with. Pope St. Pius V's "Quo Primum" is of utmost importance to every Catholic, as it proves without a doubt that the Sacred Tridentine Mass, or Traditional Latin Mass, is granted to all Catholics forever, and can never be abolished.
QUO PRIMUM
Pope St. Pius V - July 14, 1570
From the very first, upon Our elevation to the chief Apostleship, We gladly turned our mind and energies and directed all out thoughts to those matters which concerned the preservation of a pure liturgy, and We strove with God's help, by every means in our power, to accomplish this purpose. For, besides other decrees of the sacred Council of Trent, there were stipulations for Us to revise and re-edit the sacred books: the Catechism, the Missal and the Breviary. With the Catechism published for the instruction of the faithful, by God's help, and the Breviary thoroughly revised for the worthy praise of God, in order that the Missal and Breviary may be in perfect harmony, as fitting and proper - for its most becoming that there be in the Church only one appropriate manner of reciting the Psalms and only one rite for the celebration of Mass - We deemed it necessary to give our immediate attention to what still remained to be done, viz, the re-editing of the Missal as soon as possible.
Hence, We decided to entrust this work to learned men of our selection. They very carefully collated all their work with the ancient codices in Our Vatican Library and with reliable, preserved or emended codices from elsewhere. Besides this, these men consulted the works of ancient and approved authors concerning the same sacred rites; and thus they have restored the Missal itself to the original form and rite of the holy Fathers. When this work has been gone over numerous times and further emended, after serious study and reflection, We commanded that the finished product be printed and published as soon as possible, so that all might enjoy the fruits of this labor; and thus, priests would know which prayers to use and which rites and ceremonies they were required to observe from now on in the celebration of Masses.
Let all everywhere adopt and observe what has been handed down by the Holy Roman Church, the Mother and Teacher of the other churches, and let Masses not be sung or read according to any other formula than that of this Missal published by Us. This ordinance applies henceforth, now, and forever, throughout all the provinces of the Christian world, to all patriarchs, cathedral churches, collegiate and parish churches, be they secular or religious, both of men and of women - even of military orders - and of churches or chapels without a specific congregation in which conventual Masses are sung aloud in choir or read privately in accord with the rites and customs of the Roman Church. This Missal is to be used by all churches, even by those which in their authorization are made exempt, whether by Apostolic indult, custom, or privilege, or even if by oath or official confirmation of the Holy See, or have their rights and faculties guaranteed to them by any other manner whatsoever.
This new rite alone is to be used unless approval of the practice of saying Mass differently was given at the very time of the institution and confirmation of the church by Apostolic See at least 200 years ago, or unless there has prevailed a custom of a similar kind which has been continuously followed for a period of not less than 200 years, in which most cases We in no wise rescind their above-mentioned prerogative or custom. However, if this Missal, which we have seen fit to publish, be more agreeable to these latter, We grant them permission to celebrate Mass according to its rite, provided they have the consent of their bishop or prelate or of their whole Chapter, everything else to the contrary notwithstanding.
All other of the churches referred to above, however, are hereby denied the use of other missals, which are to be discontinued entirely and absolutely; whereas, by this present Constitution, which will be valid henceforth, now, and forever, We order and enjoin that nothing must be added to Our recently published Missal, nothing omitted from it, nor anything whatsoever be changed within it under the penalty of Our displeasure.
We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.
Furthermore, by these presents [this law], in virtue of Our Apostolic authority, We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remain always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription - except, however, if more than two hundred years' standing.
It is Our will, therefore, and by the same authority, We decree that, after We publish this constitution and the edition of the Missal, the priests of the Roman Curia are, after thirty days, obliged to chant or read the Mass according to it; all others south of the Alps, after three months; and those beyond the Alps either within six months or whenever the Missal is available for sale. Wherefore, in order that the Missal be preserved incorrupt throughout the whole world and kept free of flaws and errors, the penalty for nonobservance for printers, whether mediately or immediately subject to Our dominion, and that of the Holy Roman Church, will be the forfeiting of their books and a fine of one hundred gold ducats, payable ipso facto to the Apostolic Treasury. Further, as for those located in other parts of the world, the penalty is excommunication latae sententiae, and such other penalties as may in Our judgment be imposed; and We decree by this law that they must not dare or presume either to print or to publish or to sell, or in any way to accept books of this nature without Our approval and consent, or without the express consent of the Apostolic Commissaries of those places, who will be appointed by Us. Said printer must receive a standard Missal and agree faithfully with it and in no wise vary from the Roman Missal of the large type (secundum magnum impressionem).
Accordingly, since it would be difficult for this present pronouncement to be sent to all parts of the Christian world and simultaneously come to light everywhere, We direct that it be, as usual, posted and published at the doors of the Basilica of the Prince of the Apostles, also at the Apostolic Chancery, and on the street at Campo Flora; furthermore, We direct that printed copies of this same edict signed by a notary public and made official by an ecclesiastical dignitary possess the same indubitable validity everywhere and in every nation, as if Our manuscript were shown there. Therefore, no one whosoever is permitted to alter this notice of Our permission, statute, ordinance, command, precept, grant, indult, declaration, will, decree, and prohibition. Should know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.
Given at St. Peter's in the year of the Lord's Incarnation, 1570, on the 14th of July of the Fifth year of Our Pontificate.
QUO PRIMUM
Pope St. Pius V - July 14, 1570
From the very first, upon Our elevation to the chief Apostleship, We gladly turned our mind and energies and directed all out thoughts to those matters which concerned the preservation of a pure liturgy, and We strove with God's help, by every means in our power, to accomplish this purpose. For, besides other decrees of the sacred Council of Trent, there were stipulations for Us to revise and re-edit the sacred books: the Catechism, the Missal and the Breviary. With the Catechism published for the instruction of the faithful, by God's help, and the Breviary thoroughly revised for the worthy praise of God, in order that the Missal and Breviary may be in perfect harmony, as fitting and proper - for its most becoming that there be in the Church only one appropriate manner of reciting the Psalms and only one rite for the celebration of Mass - We deemed it necessary to give our immediate attention to what still remained to be done, viz, the re-editing of the Missal as soon as possible.
Hence, We decided to entrust this work to learned men of our selection. They very carefully collated all their work with the ancient codices in Our Vatican Library and with reliable, preserved or emended codices from elsewhere. Besides this, these men consulted the works of ancient and approved authors concerning the same sacred rites; and thus they have restored the Missal itself to the original form and rite of the holy Fathers. When this work has been gone over numerous times and further emended, after serious study and reflection, We commanded that the finished product be printed and published as soon as possible, so that all might enjoy the fruits of this labor; and thus, priests would know which prayers to use and which rites and ceremonies they were required to observe from now on in the celebration of Masses.
Let all everywhere adopt and observe what has been handed down by the Holy Roman Church, the Mother and Teacher of the other churches, and let Masses not be sung or read according to any other formula than that of this Missal published by Us. This ordinance applies henceforth, now, and forever, throughout all the provinces of the Christian world, to all patriarchs, cathedral churches, collegiate and parish churches, be they secular or religious, both of men and of women - even of military orders - and of churches or chapels without a specific congregation in which conventual Masses are sung aloud in choir or read privately in accord with the rites and customs of the Roman Church. This Missal is to be used by all churches, even by those which in their authorization are made exempt, whether by Apostolic indult, custom, or privilege, or even if by oath or official confirmation of the Holy See, or have their rights and faculties guaranteed to them by any other manner whatsoever.
This new rite alone is to be used unless approval of the practice of saying Mass differently was given at the very time of the institution and confirmation of the church by Apostolic See at least 200 years ago, or unless there has prevailed a custom of a similar kind which has been continuously followed for a period of not less than 200 years, in which most cases We in no wise rescind their above-mentioned prerogative or custom. However, if this Missal, which we have seen fit to publish, be more agreeable to these latter, We grant them permission to celebrate Mass according to its rite, provided they have the consent of their bishop or prelate or of their whole Chapter, everything else to the contrary notwithstanding.
All other of the churches referred to above, however, are hereby denied the use of other missals, which are to be discontinued entirely and absolutely; whereas, by this present Constitution, which will be valid henceforth, now, and forever, We order and enjoin that nothing must be added to Our recently published Missal, nothing omitted from it, nor anything whatsoever be changed within it under the penalty of Our displeasure.
We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.
Furthermore, by these presents [this law], in virtue of Our Apostolic authority, We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remain always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription - except, however, if more than two hundred years' standing.
It is Our will, therefore, and by the same authority, We decree that, after We publish this constitution and the edition of the Missal, the priests of the Roman Curia are, after thirty days, obliged to chant or read the Mass according to it; all others south of the Alps, after three months; and those beyond the Alps either within six months or whenever the Missal is available for sale. Wherefore, in order that the Missal be preserved incorrupt throughout the whole world and kept free of flaws and errors, the penalty for nonobservance for printers, whether mediately or immediately subject to Our dominion, and that of the Holy Roman Church, will be the forfeiting of their books and a fine of one hundred gold ducats, payable ipso facto to the Apostolic Treasury. Further, as for those located in other parts of the world, the penalty is excommunication latae sententiae, and such other penalties as may in Our judgment be imposed; and We decree by this law that they must not dare or presume either to print or to publish or to sell, or in any way to accept books of this nature without Our approval and consent, or without the express consent of the Apostolic Commissaries of those places, who will be appointed by Us. Said printer must receive a standard Missal and agree faithfully with it and in no wise vary from the Roman Missal of the large type (secundum magnum impressionem).
Accordingly, since it would be difficult for this present pronouncement to be sent to all parts of the Christian world and simultaneously come to light everywhere, We direct that it be, as usual, posted and published at the doors of the Basilica of the Prince of the Apostles, also at the Apostolic Chancery, and on the street at Campo Flora; furthermore, We direct that printed copies of this same edict signed by a notary public and made official by an ecclesiastical dignitary possess the same indubitable validity everywhere and in every nation, as if Our manuscript were shown there. Therefore, no one whosoever is permitted to alter this notice of Our permission, statute, ordinance, command, precept, grant, indult, declaration, will, decree, and prohibition. Should know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.
Given at St. Peter's in the year of the Lord's Incarnation, 1570, on the 14th of July of the Fifth year of Our Pontificate.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Where to find the divine truth by Br. Lucas Cyprianus
On Christian Doctrine (Depositum Fidei) by Brother Lucas Feliers
Introduction:
Q: Who is a true Christian?
A: A true Christian is he who is baptized, who believes and professes the Christian Doctrine, and obeys the lawful pastors of the Church.
Q: What is Christian Doctrine?
A: Christian doctrine is the doctrine which Jesus Christ our Lord taught us to show us the way of salvation.
Q: Is it necessary to learn the doctrine taught by Jesus Christ?
A: It certainly is necessary to learn the doctrine taught by Jesus Christ, and those who fail to do so are guilty of a grave breach of duty.
Q: From whom are we to receive and learn Christian Doctrine?
A: We are to receive and learn Christian Doctrine from the Holy Catholic Church.
Q: How are we certain that the Christian Doctrine which we receive from the Holy Catholic Church is really true?
A: We are certain that the doctrine which we receive from the Holy Catholic Church is true, because Jesus Christ, the divine Author of this doctrine, committed it through His Apostles to the Church, which He founded and made the infallible teacher of all men, promising her His divine assistance until the end of time.
Q: Are there other proofs of the truth of Christian Doctrine?
A: The truth of Christian Doctrine is also shown by the eminent sanctity of numbers who have professed it and who still profess it, by the heroic fortitude of the martyrs, by its marvelous and rapid propagation in the world, and by its perfect preservation throughout so many centuries of ceaseless and varied struggles.
(Source: the Catechism of St PiusX)
Why are we to receive and learn Christian Doctrine from the Holy Catholic Church?
The Catholic Church is the mystical body of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The church is a visible society of all baptized people. Note that there are three kinds of baptism (sacramental baptism, baptism of desire and baptism of blood).
Jesus Christ is the divine author of the Christian doctrine. The divine revelation was completed at the end of the first century when the last Apostle, namely John, passed away. From that moment on NOTHING new was added to the divine doctrine also known as the “depositum fidei”. (read St. Pius X, Lamentabili, denz. 2021, John. 14:26; 15:15; 16:13, from tradition pe. Didache, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basilius, etc.)
The Church fathers say that those who belong to the Catholic Church are the ones who:
Believe what the Church always has taught (Dogmatic theology)
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, “(Matth. 28:19)
The Church has the obligation to TEACH all nations. This commandment comes from Jesus Christ and therefore from God Himself. As a result of this the church CANNOT make agreements with the nations and their falls religions. There is NO FREEDOM of faith. Everybody is OBLIGED to recognize, adore, worship and serve the true GOD in the way He wants it, namely within the Catholic Church.
God states in Genesis 3:15 that He will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy (Satan) seed and her seed.
This means an eternal WAR between the children of Mary (traditional Catholics) and the children of Satan (the false religions). This warfare will end up in hell and heaven. Forever and ever there will be an infinite separation between the seed of Mary and the seed of Satan. True children of God MAY NOT negotiate with other religions. But we need to teach and convert them to the TRUE GOD. This is the teachings of the Sacred Scripture, the Apostles, the Church fathers, the theologians, the Popes until Pope Pius XII, the Saints, etc.
Do what the Church always has taught ( Morality)
“Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you“(Matth. 28:20)
Everybody is obliged to obey and live according to the commandments of God.
Pray as the Church has always prayed (Liturgy)
“And He took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me“(Luke 22:19)
Here we talk about the way of worshipping God and the sacraments. Specifically, the Holy Mass which is a true Sacrifice, and NOT a meal as the Novus Ordo teaches. Therefore a true catholic cannot actively attend the Novus Ordo Missae. The only Masses which are valid, and at the same time pleasing to God are the traditional Masses as they go back to the Apostles.
Where do we find the Christian doctrine?
There are two sources in which we find the complete Christian doctrine
Sacred Scripture
Oral and written tradition or the apostolic tradition
1. Holy Scripture or the Holy Bible
How do we recognize the true Bible? As there are so many different kinds of H. Scriptures. The Protestants have their own, the Jehovah Witnesses have another one. The Catholic Bibles from nowadays are different then the once we had during the Middle Ages.
Here are some tips how to recognize the true Bible:
· Look for the following words at the beginning or at the end of the H. Scriptures
‘IMPRIMATUR’ with or without ‘NIHIL OBSTAT
· The date preferably before 1962 as the reforms of the second Vatican council have had their negative influence on the new editions of the Sacred Scripture
· Check if there are footnotes in it. This is important as there are passages in the Bible which are difficult to comprehend.
· Count the number of books in the index.
A true Bible contains 72 books and not 66 such as the protestant Bible.
Canon of the Bible:
Old Testament:
Law:
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Historical Books:
Josue (Joshua)
Judges
Ruth
I Kings [1 Samuel in Protestant Bibles]
II Kings [2 Samuel in Protestant Bibles]
III Kings [1Kings in Protestant Bibles]
IV Kings [2 Kings in Protestant Bibles]
I Paralipomenon [1 Chronicles in Protestant Bibles]
II Paralipomenon [2 Chronicles in Protestant Bibles]
I Esdras (Ezra)
II Esdras (Nehemias or Nehemiah)
Tobias (Tobit)
Judith
Esther
Wisdom:
Job
Psalm (The Davidic Psalter)
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Canticles (Canticle of Canticles of Song of Songs or Song of Solomon)
Wisdom (Wisdom of Soloman)
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach or The Wisdom of Sirach)
Prophets:
Machabees
Isaias (Isaiah)
Jeremias (Jeremiah)
Lamentations
Baruch
Ezechiel (Ezeckiel)
Daniel (longer than Protestant versions)
Twelve Minor Prophets
Osee (Hosea)
Joel
Amos
Abdias (Obadiah)
Jonas (Jonah)
Micheas (Michah)
Nahum
Habacuc (Habbakkuk)
Sophonias (Zephanaiah)
Aggeus (Haggai)
Zacharias (Zechariah)
Malachias (Malachi)
History continued, ca 120 B.C.
I Machabees (1 Maccabees)
II Machabees (2 Maccabees)
New Testament:
Gospels:
St. Matthew
St. Mark
St. Luke
St. John
Acts & Epistles:
Acts of the Apostles
Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians
Second Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Galatians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Philippians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Colossians
First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians
Second Epistle of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians
First Epistle of Saint Paul to Timothy
Second Epistle of Saint Paul to Timothy
Epistle of Saint Paul to Titus
Epistle of Saint Paul to Philemon
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews
Catholic Epistle of Saint James the Apostle
First Epistle of Saint Peter the Apostle and first Pope
Second Epistle of Saint Peter the Apostle and first Pope
First Epistle of Saint John the Apostle
Second Epistle of Saint John the Apostle
Third Epistle of Saint John the Apostle
Catholic Epistle of St. Jude
The Apocalypse of St. John
· A good test to see if you really have the most authentic Bible, conform to the original Vulgate is to check the following verse:
Ps 95:5 For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens.
95:5 Quoniam omnes dii gentium daemonia at vero Dominus caelos fecit
In the Novus Ordo Bibles you will not find the word ‘devils’ as there are, according to the reform of Vatican II, good elements in the non-Catholic religions. They do even claim that people can go to heaven by their own religions. (freedom of religion).
This is a heresy and an insult to God Almighty as well as a mortal sin against the First Commandement. Throughout the whole Sacred Scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, different councils, etc. it is stated that Outside The Catholic Church there is NO SALVATION. ‘Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.’ This means that only Catholics will go to Heaven. This theological statement has been declared as dogma by Pope Eugenius IV in the Conc. Florenc. Decr. Cantate Domino against the Jacobites.
2. Written and Oral Tradition or Apostolic tradition
Tradition is divine (Denz. 1800). The dogmatic council of Trent determined that the Tradition is more important than the Sacred Scripture because she:
ü Is older as the Church existed already before the last book of the New Testament was written
ü Is more complete as there is no mention of the seven sacraments, nor of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Virgin Mary
ü Tells us what the Sacred Scripture is
ü Explains the Holy Bible
Tradition is found in the ‘Loci Traditionis’:
ü The opinions of the Church Fathers when they all agree
ü The opinion of the theologians when they all agree
ü What is clearly and undoubtly written in the Sacred Scripture
ü The infallible sayings of the Popes of the 20 dogmatic Councils
(note that Vat II is only a pastoral council and therefore fallible)
The tradition teaches us through Saint Augustin the following fundamental rules of conduct and faith:
ü De fide unitas One in faith (dogma, morality, liturgy)
ü In dubio libertas freedom of having an opinion (pe were the creation days literal 24-hour days or geological periods)
ü In omnibus caritas in everything keep the love
One in faith (dogma, moral and liturgy)
Is there outside the Depositum Fidei anything else?
No. All teachings, doctrines, rules, etc. in regards to morality and faith, have to be found within the boundaries of the Sacred Scripture and Tradition which are both DIVINE.
‘All doctrine true which comes through the Church from the Apostles, who were taught by God through Christ. ALL OPINION WHICH HAS NO SUCH DIVINE ORIGIN AND APOSTOLIC TRADITION TO SHOW, is IPSO FACTO FALSE’ (Tertullian, ‘De Praescriptione Haereticorum, cap. 21).
‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, LET HIM BE ACCURSED.’ (Saint Paul to the Galatians 1:8)
Theologians, priests, bishops, and even the pope, when they teach or proclaim something different than divine tradition, are putting themselves in a heretical position, and by that fact they stop being ONE in faith which means that they are no longer Catholics, as they have altered the truth. And any kind of catholic, being laymen or clergy, have the obligation NOT to obey them in that heresy.
True theology is practiced within the boundaries of the Depositum Fidei.
What do we have to believe when there is contradiction within the Church about a certain matter?
Saint Vincens of Lerin gives the principles what we have to believe when, within the Church there are certain contradictions in his Commonitorium (For the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith against the Profane Novelties of ALL HERESIES)
Note that the principles he gives are very useful in our times as there are undoubtly contradictions (about 200) between the theology of Vatican II and Tradition. The Commonitorium of Saint Vincens of Lerin are very helpful in times of crisis and confusion.
Here are the principles:
v Commonitorium Chapter 2
A General Rule for distinguishing the Truth of the Catholic Faith from the Falsehood of Heretical Pravity.
[4.] I have often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or anyone else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church.
[5.] But here someone perhaps will ask, Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church's interpretation? For this reason,— because, owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another, lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.
[6.] Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors.
v Commonitorium Chapter 3
What is to be done if one or more dissent from the rest.
[7.] What then will a Catholic Christian do, if a small portion of the Church have cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What, surely, but prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member? What, if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole? Then it will be his care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty.
[8.] But what, if in antiquity itself there be found error on the part of two or three men, or at any rate of a city or even of a province? Then it will be his care by all means, to prefer the decrees, if such there be, of an ancient General Council to the rashness and ignorance of a few. But what, if some error should spring up on which no such decree is found to bear? Then he must collate and consult and interrogate the opinions of the ancients, of those, namely, who, though living in various times and places, yet continuing in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, stand forth acknowledged and approved authorities: and whatsoever he shall ascertain to have been held, written, taught, not by one or two of these only, but by all, equally, with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently, that he must understand that he himself also is to believe without any doubt or hesitation.
Appendix
Scripture:
Scripture Alone Disproves "Scripture Alone"
Gen. to Rev. - Scripture never says that Scripture is the sole infallible authority for God's Word. Scripture also mandates the use of tradition. This fact alone disproves sola Scriptura.
Matt. 28:19; Mark 16:15 - those that preached the Gospel to all creation but did not write the Gospel were not less obedient to Jesus, or their teachings less important.
Matt. 28:20 - "observe ALL I have commanded," but, as we see in John 20:30; 21:25, not ALL Jesus taught is in Scripture. So there must be things outside of Scripture that we must observe. This disproves "Bible alone" theology.
Mark 16:15 - Jesus commands the apostles to "preach," not write, and only three apostles wrote. The others who did not write were not less faithful to Jesus, because Jesus gave them no directive to write. There is no evidence in the Bible or elsewhere that Jesus intended the Bible to be sole authority of the Christian faith.
Luke 1:1-4 - Luke acknowledges that the faithful have already received the teachings of Christ, and is writing his Gospel only so that they "realize the certainty of the teachings you have received." Luke writes to verify the oral tradition they already received.
John 20:30; 21:25 - Jesus did many other things not written in the Scriptures. These have been preserved through the oral apostolic tradition and they are equally a part of the Deposit of Faith.
Acts 8:30-31; Heb. 5:12 - these verses show that we need help in interpreting the Scriptures. We cannot interpret them infallibly on our own. We need divinely appointed leadership within the Church to teach us.
Acts 15:1-14 – Peter resolves the Church’s first doctrinal issue regarding circumcision without referring to Scriptures.
Acts 17:28 – Paul quotes the writings of the pagan poets when he taught at the Aeropagus. Thus, Paul appeals to sources outside of Scripture to teach about God.
1 Cor. 5:9-11 - this verse shows that a prior letter written to Corinth is equally authoritative but not part of the New Testament canon. Paul is again appealing to a source outside of Scripture to teach the Corinthians. This disproves Scripture alone.
1 Cor. 11:2 - Paul commends the faithful to obey apostolic tradition, and not Scripture alone.
Phil. 4:9 - Paul says that what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do. There is nothing ever about obeying Scripture alone.
Col. 4:16 - this verse shows that a prior letter written to Laodicea is equally authoritative but not part of the New Testament canon. Paul once again appeals to a source outside of the Bible to teach about the Word of God.
1 Thess. 2:13 – Paul says, “when you received the word of God, which you heard from us..” How can the Bible be teaching first century Christians that only the Bible is their infallible source of teaching if, at the same time, oral revelation was being given to them as well? Protestants can’t claim that there is one authority (Bible) while allowing two sources of authority (Bible and oral revelation).
1 Thess. 3:10 - Paul wants to see the Thessalonians face to face and supply what is lacking. His letter is not enough.
2 Thess. 2:14 - Paul says that God has called us "through our Gospel." What is the fullness of the Gospel?
2 Thess. 2:15 - the fullness of the Gospel is the apostolic tradition which includes either teaching by word of mouth or by letter. Scripture does not say "letter alone." The Catholic Church has the fullness of the Christian faith through its rich traditions of Scripture, oral tradition and teaching authority (or Magisterium).
2 Thess 3:6 - Paul instructs us to obey apostolic tradition. There is no instruction in the Scriptures about obeying the Bible alone (the word "Bible" is not even in the Bible).
1 Tim. 3:14-15 - Paul prefers to speak and not write, and is writing only in the event that he is delayed and cannot be with Timothy.
2 Tim. 2:2 - Paul says apostolic tradition is passed on to future generations, but he says nothing about all apostolic traditions being eventually committed to the Bible.
2 Tim. 3:14 - continue in what you have learned and believed knowing from whom you learned it. Again, this refers to tradition which is found outside of the Bible.
James 4:5 - James even appeals to Scripture outside of the Old Testament canon ("He yearns jealously over the spirit which He has made...")
2 Peter 1:20 - interpreting Scripture is not a matter of one's own private interpretation. Therefore, it must be a matter of "public" interpretation of the Church. The Divine Word needs a Divine Interpreter. Private judgment leads to divisions, and this is why there are 30,000 different Protestant denominations.
2 Peter 3:15-16 - Peter says Paul's letters are inspired, but not all his letters are in the New Testament canon. See, for example, 1 Cor. 5:9-10; Col. 4:16. Also, Peter's use of the word "ignorant" means unschooled, which presupposes the requirement of oral apostolic instruction that comes from the Church.
2 Peter 3:16 - the Scriptures are difficult to understand and can be distorted by the ignorant to their destruction. God did not guarantee the Holy Spirit would lead each of us to infallibly interpret the Scriptures. But this is what Protestants must argue in order to support their doctrine of sola Scriptura. History and countless divisions in Protestantism disprove it.
1 John 4:1 - again, God instructs us to test all things, test all spirits. Notwithstanding what many Protestants argue, God's Word is not always obvious.
1 Sam. 3:1-9 - for example, the Lord speaks to Samuel, but Samuel doesn't recognize it is God. The Word of God is not self-attesting.
1 Kings 13:1-32 - in this story, we see that a man can't discern between God's word (the commandment "don't eat") and a prophet's erroneous word (that God had rescinded his commandment "don't eat"). The words of the Bible, in spite of what many Protestants must argue, are not always clear and understandable. This is why there are 30,000 different Protestant churches and one Holy Catholic Church.
Gen. to Rev. - Protestants must admit that knowing what books belong in the Bible is necessary for our salvation. However, because the Bible has no "inspired contents page," you must look outside the Bible to see how its books were selected. This destroys the sola Scriptura theory. The canon of Scripture is a Revelation from God which is necessary for our salvation, and which comes from outside the Bible. Instead, this Revelation was given by God to the Catholic Church, the pinnacle and foundation of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15).
All Scripture is Inspired"- 2 Tim. 3:16-17
2 Tim. 3:14 - Protestants usually use 2 Tim. 3:16-17 to prove that the Bible is the sole authority of God's word. But examining these texts disproves their claim. Here, Paul appeals to apostolic tradition right before the Protestants' often quoted verse 2 Tim. 3:16-17. Thus, there is an appeal to tradition before there is an appeal to the Scriptures, and Protestants generally ignore this fact.
2 Tim. 3:15 - Paul then appeals to the sacred writings of Scripture referring to the Old Testament Scriptures with which Timothy was raised (not the New Testament which was not even compiled at the time of Paul's teaching). This verse also proves that one can come to faith in Jesus Christ without the New Testament.
2 Tim. 3:16 - this verse says that Scripture is "profitable" for every good work, but not exclusive. The word "profitable" is "ophelimos" in Greek. "Ophelimos" only means useful, which underscores that Scripture is not mandatory or exclusive. Protestants unbiblically argue that profitable means exclusive.
2 Tim. 3:16 - further, the verse "all Scripture" uses the words "pasa graphe" which actually means every (not all) Scripture. This means every passage of Scripture is useful. Thus, the erroneous Protestant reading of "pasa graphe" would mean every single passage of Scripture is exclusive. This would mean Christians could not only use "sola Matthew," or "sola Mark," but could rely on one single verse from a Gospel as the exclusive authority of God's word. This, of course, is not true and even Protestants would agree. Also, "pasa graphe" cannot mean "all of Scripture" because there was no New Testament canon to which Paul could have been referring, unless Protestants argue that the New Testament is not being included by Paul.
2 Tim. 3:16 - also, these inspired Old Testament Scriptures Paul is referring to included the deuterocanonical books which the Protestants removed from the Bible 1,500 years later.
2 Tim. 3:17 - Paul's reference to the "man of God" who may be complete refers to a clergyman, not a layman. It is an instruction to a bishop of the Church. So, although Protestants use it to prove their case, the passage is not even relevant to most of the faithful.
2 Tim. 3:17 - further, Paul's use of the word "complete" for every good work is "artios" which simply means the clergy is "suitable" or "fit." Also, artios does not describe the Scriptures, it describes the clergyman. So, Protestants cannot use this verse to argue the Scriptures are complete.
James 1:4 - steadfastness also makes a man "perfect (teleioi) and complete (holoklepoi), lacking nothing." This verse is important because "teleioi"and "holoklepoi" are much stronger words than "artios," but Protestants do not argue that steadfastness is all one needs to be a Christian.
Titus 3:8 - good deeds are also "profitable" to men. For Protestants especially, profitable cannot mean "exclusive" here.
2 Tim 2:21- purity is also profitable for "any good work" ("pan ergon agathon"). This wording is the same as 2 Tim. 3:17, which shows that the Scriptures are not exclusive, and that other things (good deeds and purity) are also profitable to men.
Col. 4:12 - prayer also makes men "fully assured." Nowhere does Scripture say the Christian faith is based solely on a book.
2 Tim. 3:16-17 - Finally, if these verses really mean that Paul was teaching sola Scriptura to the early Church, then why in 1 Thess. 2:13 does Paul teach that he is giving Revelation from God orally? Either Paul is contradicting his own teaching on sola Scriptura, or Paul was not teaching sola Scriptura in 2 Tim. 3:16-17. This is a critical point which Protestants cannot reconcile with their sola Scriptura position.
Other Passages used to Support "Sola Scriptura"
John 5:39 - some non-Catholics use this verse to prove sola Scriptura. But when Jesus said "search the Scriptures," He was rebuking the Jews who did not believe that He was the Messiah. Jesus tells them to search the Scriptures to verify the Messianic prophecies and His oral teaching, and does not say "search the Scriptures alone." Moreover, since the New Testament was not yet written, the passage is not relevant to the Protestant claim of sola Scriptura.
John 10:35 - some Protestants also use this verse "Scripture cannot be broken" to somehow prove sola Scriptura. But this statement refers to the Old Testament Scriptures and has nothing to do with the exclusivity of Scripture and the New Testament.
John 20:31 - Protestants also use this verse to prove sola Scriptura. Indeed, Scripture assists in learning to believe in Jesus, but this passage does not say Scripture is exclusive, or even necessary, to be saved by Jesus.
Acts 17:11-12 - here we see the verse "they searched the Scriptures." This refers to the Bereans who used the Old Testament to confirm the oral teachings about the Messiah. The verses do not say the Bereans searched the Scriptures alone (which is what Protestants are attempting to prove when quoting this passage). Moreover, the Bereans accepted the oral teaching from Paul as God's word before searching the Scriptures, which disproves the Berean's use of sola Scriptura.
Acts 17:11-12 - Also, the Bereans, being more "noble" or "fair minded," meant that they were more reasonable and less violent than the Thessalonians in Acts. 17:5-9. Their greater fairmindedness was not because of their use of Scripture, which Paul directed his listeners to do as was his custom (Acts 17:3).
1 Cor. 4:6 - this is one of the most confusing passages in Scripture. Many scholars believe the phrase "don't go above the line" was inserted by a translator as an instruction to someone in the translation process. Others say Paul is quoting a proverb regarding kids learning to write by tracing letters. By saying don't go above line, Paul is probably instructing them not to be arrogant. But even if the phrase is taken literally, to what was Paul referring? The Talmud? The Mosaic law? The Old Testament Scriptures? This proves too much for the Protestant because there was no New Testament canon at the time Paul wrote this, and the text says nothing about the Bible being the sole rule and guide of faith.
Rev. 1:11,19 - Non-Catholics sometimes refer to Jesus' commands to John to write as support for the theory that the Bible is the only source of Christian faith. Yes, Jesus commands John to write because John was in exile in Patmos and could not preach the Word (which was Jesus' usual command). Further, such a commandment would be limited to the book that John wrote, the Book of Revelation, and would have nothing to do with the other Scriptures.
Rev. 22:18-19 - some Protestants argue against Catholic tradition by citing this verse, "don't add to the prophecies in this book." But this commandment only refers to the book of Revelation, not the entire Bible which came 300 years later.
Deut 4:2; 12:32 - moreover, God commands the same thing here but this did not preclude Christians from accepting the Old Testament books after Deuteronomy or the New Testament.
Tradition / Church Fathers:
Scripture Must be Interpreted in Light of Church Tradition
“Those, therefore, who desert the preaching of the Church, call in question the knowledge of the holy presbyters, not taking into consideration of how much greater consequence is a religious man, even in a private station, than a blasphemous and impudent sophist. Now, such are all the heretics, and those who imagine that they have hit upon something more beyond the truth, so that by following those things already mentioned, proceeding on their way variously, in harmoniously, and foolishly, not keeping always to the same opinions with regard to the same things, as blind men are led by the blind, they shall deservedly fall into the ditch of ignorance lying in their path, ever seeking and never finding out the truth. It behooves us, therefore, to avoid their doctrines, and to take careful heed lest we suffer any injury from them; but to flee to the Church, and be brought up in her bosom, and be nourished with the Lord's Scriptures." Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5,20:2 (A.D. 180).
"Since this is the case, in order that the truth may be adjudged to belong to us, "as many as walk according to the rule," which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reason of our position is clear, when it determines that heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we, without the Scriptures, prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For as they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians, because it is not from Christ that they get that which they pursue of their own mere choice, and from the pursuit incur and admit the name of heretics. Thus, not being Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, "Who are you? When and whence did you come?" Tertullian, Prescription against the Heretics, 37 (A.D. 200).
"Now the cause, in all the points previously enumerated, of the false opinions, and of the impious statements or ignorant assertions about God, appears to be nothing else than the not understanding the Scripture according to its spiritual meaning, but the interpretation of it agreeably to the mere letter. And therefore, to those who believe that the sacred books are not the compositions of men, but that they were composed by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, agreeably to the will of the Father of all things through Jesus Christ, and that they have come down to us, we must point out the ways (of interpreting them) which appear (correct) to us, who cling to the standard of the heavenly Church of Jesus Christ according to the succession of the apostles." Origen, First Principles, 4,1:9 (A.D. 230).
"The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church. The Lord warns, saying, 'He who is not with me is against me, and he who gathereth not with me scattereth.'" Cyprian, Unity of the Church, 6 (A.D. 256).
"But in learning the Faith and in professing it, acquire and keep that only, which is now delivered to thee by the Church, and which has been built up strongly out of all the Scriptures....Take heed then, brethren, and hold fast the traditions which ye now receive, and write them and the table of your heart." Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 5:12 (A.D. 350).
"[T]hey who are placed without the Church, cannot attain to any understanding of the divine word. For the ship exhibits a type of Church, the word of life placed and preached within which, they who are without, and lie near like barren and useless sands, cannot understand." Hilary of Poitiers, On Matthew, Homily 13:1 (A.D. 355).
"But beyond these [Scriptural] sayings, let us look at the very tradition, teaching and faith of the Catholic Church from the beginning, which the Lord gave, the Apostles preached, and the Fathers kept." Athanasius, Four Letters to Serapion of Thmuis, 1:28 (A.D. 360).
"This then I consider the sense of this passage, and that, a very ecclesiasitcal sense." Athanasius, Discourse Against the Arians, 1:44 (A.D. 362).
"It is the church which perfect truth perfects. The church of believers is great, and its bosom most ample; it embraces the fullness of the two Testaments." Ephraem, Against Heresies (ante A.D. 373).
"Now I accept no newer creed written for me by other men, nor do I venture to propound the outcome of my own intelligence, lest I make the words of true religion merely human words; but what I have been taught by the holy Fathers, that I announce to all who question me. In my Church the creed written by the holy Fathers in synod at Nicea is in use." Basil, To the Church of Antioch, Epistle 140:2 (A.D. 373).
"For they [heretics] do not teach as the church does; their message does no accord with the truth." Epiphanius, Panarion, 47 (A.D. 377).
"[S]eeing, I say, that the Church teaches this in plain language, that the Only-begotten is essentially God, very God of the essence of the very God, how ought one who opposes her decisions to overthrow the preconceived opinion... And let no one interrupt me, by saying that what we confess should also be confirmed by constructive reasoning: for it is enough for proof of our statement, that the tradition has come down to us from our Fathers, handled on, like some inheritance, by succession from the apostles and the saints who came after them." Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 4:6 (c. A.D. 384).
"Wherefore all other generations are strangers to truth; all the generations of heretics hold not the truth: the church alone, with pious affection, is in possession of the truth." Ambrose, Commentary of Psalm 118,19 (A.D. 388).
"They teach what they themselves have learnt from their predecessors. They have received those rites which they explain from the Church's tradition. They preach only 'the dogmas of the Church'" John Chrysostom, Baptismal Instruction (A.D. 389).
"But when proper words make Scripture ambiguous, we must see in the first place that there is nothing wrong in our punctuation or pronunciation. Accordingly, if, when attention is given to the passage, it shall appear to be uncertain in what way it ought to be punctuated or pronounced, let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church, and of which I treated at sufficient length when I was speaking in the first book about things." Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3,2:2 (A.D. 397).
" 'So then, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye were taught, whether by word, or by Epistle of ours.' Hence it is manifest, that they did not deliver all things by Epistle, but many things also unwritten, and in like manner both the one and the other are worthy of credit. Therefore let us think the tradition of the Church also worthy of credit. It is a tradition, seek no farther." John Chrysostom, Homily on 2nd Thessalonians, 4:2 (A.D. 404).
"My resolution is, to read the ancients, to try everything, to hold fast what is good, and not to recede from the faith of the Catholic Church." Jerome, To Minervius & Alexander, Epistle 119 (A.D. 406).
"But those reasons which I have here given, I have either gathered from the authority of the church, according to the tradition of our forefathers, or from the testimony of the divine Scriptures, or from the nature itself of numbers and of similitudes. No sober person will decide against reason, no Christian against the Scriptures, no peaceable person against the church." Augustine, On the Trinity, 4,6:10 (A.D. 416).
"But it will be said, If the words, the sentiments, the promises of Scripture, are appealed to by the Devil and his disciples, of whom some are false apostles, some false prophets and false teachers, and all without exception heretics, what are Catholics and the sons of Mother Church to do? How are they to distinguish truth from falsehood in the sacred Scriptures? They must be very careful to pursue that course which, in the beginning of this Commonitory, we said that holy and learned men had commended to us, that is to say, they must interpret the sacred Canon according to the traditions of the Universal Church and in keeping with the rules of Catholic doctrine, in which Catholic and Universal Church, moreover, they must follow universality, antiquity, consent." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Antinquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 70 (A.D. 434).
"[H]old fast the faith in simplicity of mind; establishing the tradition of the church as a foundation, in the inmost recesses of thy heart, hold the doctrines which are well-pleasing unto God." Cyril of Alexandria, Festal Letters, Homily 8 (A.D. 442).
Scripture is not Subject to Private Interpretation
“True knowledge is [that which consists in] the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine, and neither receiving addition nor [suffering] curtailment [in the truths which she believes]; and [it consists in] reading [the word of God] without falsification, and a lawful and diligent exposition in harmony with the Scriptures, both without danger and without blasphemy; and [above all, it consists in] the pre-eminent gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and which excels all the other gifts [of God]." Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4,33:8 (inter A.D. 180-199).
"But if there be any (heresies) which are bold enough to plant themselves in the midst of the apostolic age, that they may thereby seem to have been handed down by the apostles, because they existed in the time of the apostles, we can say: Let them produce the original records of their churches; let them unfold the roll of their bishops, running down in due succession from the beginning in such a manner that [that first bishop of theirs] bishop shall be able to show for his ordainer and predecessor some one of the apostles or of apostolic men - a man, moreover, who continued steadfast with the apostles. For this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed therein by John; as also the church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter. In exactly the same way the other churches likewise exhibit (their several worthies), whom, as having been appointed to their episcopal places by apostles, they regard as transmitters of the apostolic seed. Let the heretics contrive something of the same kind…” Tertullian, On Prescription against the Heretics, 32 (c. A.D. 200).
“To this test, therefore will they be submitted for proof by those churches, who, although they derive not their founder from apostles or apostolic men (as being of much later date, for they are in fact being founded daily), yet, since they agree in the same faith, they are accounted as not less apostolic because they are akin in doctrine. Then let all the heresies, when challenged to these two tests by our apostolic church, offer their proof of how they deem themselves to be apostolic. But in truth they neither are so, nor are they able to prove themselves to be what they are not. Nor are they admitted to peaceful relations and communion by such churches as are in any way connected with apostles, inasmuch as they are in no sense themselves apostolic because of their diversity as to the mysteries of the faith." Tertullian, On Prescription against the Heretics, 32 (c. A.D. 200).
"For those are slothful who, having it in their power to provide themselves with proper proofs for the divine Scriptures from the Scriptures themselves, select only what contributes to their own pleasures. And those have a craving for glory who voluntarily evade, by arguments of a diverse sort, the things delivered by the blessed apostles and teachers, which are wedded to inspired words; opposing the divine tradition by human teachings, in order to establish the heresy." Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 7:16 (post A.D. 202).
"When heretics show us the canonical Scriptures, in which every Christian believes and trusts, they seem to be saying: 'Lo, he is in the inner rooms [the word of truth] ' (Matt 24.6). But we must not believe them, nor leave the original tradition of the Church, nor believe otherwise than we have been taught by the succession in the Church of God." Origen, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 46, PG 13:1667 (ante A.D. 254).
"A most precious possession therefore is the knowledge of doctrines: also there is need of a wakeful soul, since there are many that make spoil through philosophy and vain deceit. The Greeks on the one hand draw men away by their smooth tongue, for honey droppeth from a harlot's lips: whereas they of the Circumcision deceive those who come to them by means of the Divine Scriptures, which they miserably misinterpret though studying them from childhood to all age, and growing old in ignorance. But the children of heretics, by their good words and smooth tongue, deceive the hearts of the innocent, disguising with the name of Christ as it were with honey the poisoned arrows of their impious doctrines: concerning all of whom together the Lord saith, Take heed lest any man mislead you. This is the reason for the teaching of the Creed and for expositions upon it." Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 4:2 (A.D. 350).
"And, O wretched heretic! You turn the weapons granted to the Church against the Synagogue, against belief in the Church's preaching, and distort against the common salvation of all the sure meaning of a saving doctrine." Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, 12:36 (inter A.D. 356-359).
"But since they allege the divine oracles and force on them a misinterpretation, according to their private sense, it becomes necessary to meet them just so far as to vindicate these passages, and to show that they bear an orthodox sense, and that our opponents are in error." Athanasius, Discourse Against the Arians, I:37 (A.D. 362).
"To refuse to follow the Fathers, not holding their declaration of more authority than one's own opinion, is conduct worthy of blame, as being brimful of self-sufficiency." Basil, EpistleTo the Canonicae, 52:1 (A.D. 370).
"While (the sects) mutually refute and condemn each other, it has happened to truth as to Gideon; that is, while they fight against each other, and fall under wounds mutually inflicted, they crown her. All the heretics acknowledge that there is a true Scripture. Had they all falsely believed that none existed, someone might reply that such Scripture was unknown to them. But now that have themselves taken away the force of such plea, from the fact that they have mutilated the very Scriptures. For they have corrupted the sacred copies; and words which ought to have but one interpretation, they have wrested to strange significations. Whilst, when one of them attempts this, and cuts off a member of his own body, the rest demand and claim back the severed limb...It is the church which perfect truth perfects. The church of believers is great, and its bosom most ample; it embraces the fulness (or, the whole) of the two Testaments." Ephraem, Adv. Haeres (ante A.D. 373).
"Who knows not that what separates the Church from heresy is this term, 'product of creation, ' applied to the Son? Accordingly, the doctrinal difference being universally acknowledged, what would be the reasonable course for a man to take who endeavors to show that his opinions are more true than ours?" Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 4:6 (inter A.D. 380-384).
"For heresies, and certain tenets of perversity, ensnaring souls and hurling them into the deep, have not sprung up except when good Scriptures are not rightly understood, and when that in them which is not rightly understood is rashly and boldly asserted. And so, dearly beloved, ought we very cautiously to hear those things for the understanding of which we are but little ones, and that, too, with pious heart and with trembling, as it is written, holding this rule of soundness, that we rejoice as in food in that which we have been able to understand, according to the faith with which we are imbued…" Augustine, On the Gospel of John, Homily XVIII:1 (A.D. 416).
"If you produce from the divine scriptures something that we all share, we shall have to listen. But those words which are not found in the scriptures are under no circumstance accepted by us, especially since the Lord warns us, saying, In vain they worship me, teaching human commandments and precepts' (Mt 5:19)" Maximinus (Arch-Arian Heretic), Debate with Maximinus, 1 (c. A.D. 428).
"Therefore, as I said above, if you had been a follower and assertor of Sabellianism or Arianism or any heresy you please, you might shelter yourself under the example of your parents, the teaching of your instructors, the company of those about you, the faith of your creed. I ask, O you heretic, nothing unfair, and nothing hard. As you have been brought up in the Catholic faith, do that which you would do for a wrong belief. Hold fast to the teaching of your parents. Hold fast the faith of the Church: hold fast the truth of the Creed: hold fast the salvation of baptism." John Cassian, Incarnation of the Lord, 6:5 (c. A.D. 429).
"I have often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical depravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or any one else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 2:4 (A.D. 434).
"But the Church of Christ, the careful and watchful guardian of the doctrines deposited in her charge, never changes anything in them, never diminishes, never adds, does not cut off what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose her own, does not appropriate what is another's, but while dealing faithfully and judiciously with ancient doctrine, keeps this one object carefully in view, if there be anything which antiquity has left shapeless and rudimentary, to fashion and polish it, if anything already reduced to shape and developed, to consolidate and strengthen it, if any already ratified and defined to keep and guard it. Finally, what other object have Councils ever aimed at in their decrees, than to provide that what was before believed in simplicity should in future be believed intelligently, that what was before preached coldly should in future be preached earnestly, that what was before practiced negligently should thenceforward be practiced with double solicitude? This, I say, is what the Catholic Church, roused by the novelties of heretics, has accomplished by the decrees of her Councils, this, and nothing else, has thenceforward consigned to posterity in writing what she had received from those of olden times only by tradition, comprising a great amount of matter in a few words, and often, for the better understanding, designating an old article of the faith by the characteristic of a new name." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 23:59 (A.D. 434).
"[A]ll heresies, that they evermore delight in profane novelties, scorn the decisions of antiquity, and ...make shipwreck of the faith. On the other hand, it is the sure characteristic of Catholics to keep that which has been committed to their trust by the holy Fathers..." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Anitquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 24:63 (A.D. 434).
"His (Nestorius) first attempt at innovation was, that the holy Virgin, who bore the Word of God, who took flesh of her, ought not to be confessed to be the mother of God, but only the mother of Christ; though of old, yea from the first, the preachers of the orthodox faith taught, agreeably to the apostolic tradition, that the mother of God. And now let me produce his blasphemous artifice and observation unknown to any one before him." Theodoret of Cyrus, Compendium of Heretics' Fables, 12 (c.A.D. 453).
The Catholic Church Determined the Canon of Scripture
"For the blessed apostle Paul himself, following the rule of his predecessor John, writes only by name to seven Churches in the following order--to the Corinthians afirst...there is a second to the Corinthians and to the Thessalonians, yet one Church is recognized as being spread over the entire world...Howbeit to Philemon one, to Titus one, and to Timothy two were put in writing...to be in honour however with the Catholic Church for the ordering of ecclesiastical discipline...one to the Laodicenes, another to the Alexandrians, both forged in Paul's name to suit the heresy of Marcion, and several others, which cannot be received into the Catholic Church; for it is not fitting that gall be mixed with honey. The Epistle of Jude no doubt, and the couple bearing the name of John, are accepted by the Catholic Church...But of Arsinous, called also Valentinus, or of Militiades we receive nothing at all." The fragment of Muratori (A.D. 177).
"The same authority of the apostolic churches will afford evidence to the other Gospels also, which we possess equally through their means, and according to their usage--I mean the Gospels of John and Matthew--whilst that which Mark published may be affirmed to be Peter's whose interpreter Mark was. For even Luke's form of the Gospel men usually ascribe to Paul." Tertullian, Against Marcion, 4:5 (A.D. 212).
"In his [Origen] first book on Matthew's Gospel, maintaining the Canon of the Church, he testifies that he knows only four Gospels, writing as follows: Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the first was written by Matthew, who was once a publican, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it was prepared for the converts from Judaism, and published in the Hebrew language. The second is by Mark, who composed it according to the instructions of Peter, who in his Catholic epistle acknowledges him as a son, saying, 'The church that is at Babylon elected together with you, saluteth you, and so doth Marcus, my son.' And the third by Luke, the Gospel commended by Paul, and composed for Gentile converts. Last of all that by John." Origen, Commentary on Matthew, fragment in Eusebius Church History, 6:25,3 (A.D. 244).
"Learn also diligently, and from the Church, what are the books of the Old Testaments, and what those of the New." Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 4:33 (A.D. 350).
"Likewise it has been said: Now indeed we must treat of the divine Scriptures, what the universal Catholic Church accepts and what she ought to shun. The order of the Old Testament begins here: Genesis one book, Exodus one book, Leviticus one book, Numbers one book, Deuteronomy one book, Josue Nave one book, Judges one book, Ruth one book, Kings four books, Paralipomenon two books, Psalms one book, Solomon three books, Proverbs one book, Ecclesiastes one book, Canticle of Canticles one book, likewise Wisdom one book, Ecclesiasticus one book. Likewise the order of the Prophets. Isaias one book, Jeremias one book,with Ginoth, that is, with his lamentations, Ezechiel one book,Daniel one book, Osee one book, Micheas one book, Joel one book, Abdias one book, Jonas one book, Nahum one book, Habacuc one book, Sophonias one book, Aggeus one book, Zacharias one book, Malachias one book. Likewise the order of the histories. Job one book, Tobias one book, Esdras two books, Esther one book, Judith one book, Machabees two books. Likewise the order of the writings of the New and eternal Testament, which only the holy and Catholic Church supports. Of the Gospels, according to Matthew one book, according to Mark one book, according to Luke one book, according to John one book. The Epistles of Paul [the apostle] in number fourteen. To the Romans one, to the Corinthians two, to the Ephesians one, to the Thessalonians two, to the Galatians one, to the Philippians one, to the Colossians one, to Timothy two, to Titus one, to Philemon one, to the Hebrews one. Likewise the Apocalypse of John, one book. And the Acts of the Apostles one book. Likewise the canonical epistles in number seven. Of Peter the Apostle two epistles, of James the Apostle one epistle, of John the Apostle one epistle, of another John, the presbyter, two epistles, of Jude the Zealut, the Apostle one epistle." Pope Damasus (regn. A.D. 366-384), Decree of the Council of Rome, The Canon of Scripture (A.D. 382).
"Besides the canonical Scriptures, nothing shall be read, in the church under the title of divine writings.'. The canonical books are:---Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings, the two books of Paraleipomena (Chronicles), Job, the Psalms of David, the five books of Solomon, the twelve books of the (Minor) Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, two books of Esdras, two books of the Maccabees. The books of the New Testament are:---the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Epistles of S. Paul, one Epistle of S. Paul to the Hebrews, two Epistles of S. Peter, three Epistles of S. John, the Epistle of S. James, the Epistle of S. Jude, the Revelation of S. John. Concerning the confirmation of this canon, the transmarine Church shall be consulted." Council of Hippo, Canon 36 (A.D. 393).
"I beseech you to bear patiently, if I also write, by way of remembrance, of matters with which you are acquainted, influenced by the need and advantage of the Church. In proceeding to make mention of these things [the canon], I shall adopt, to comment my undertaking, the pattern of Luke...to reduce into order for themselves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely inspired Scripture, concerning which we have been fully persuaded, as they who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, delivered to the fathers; it seemed good to me also, having been urged thereto by true brethren, and having learned from the beginning, to set before you the books included in the Canon..." Athanasius, Festal Letters, 39 (A.D. 397).
"[It has been decided] that nothing except the Canonical Scriptures should be read in the church under the name of the Divine Scriptures. But the Canonical Scriptures are: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Josue, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, Paralipomenon two books, Job, the Psalter of David, five books of Solomon, twelve books of the Prophets, Isaias, Jeremias, Daniel, Ezechiel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, two books of Esdras, two books of the Maccabees. Moreover, of the New Testament: Four books of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles one book, thirteen epistles of Paul the Apostle, one of the same to the Hebrews, two of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, the Apocalypse of John." Council of Carthage III, Canon 47 (A.D. 397).
"The authority of our books [Scriptures], which is confirmed by agreement of so many nations, supported by a succession of apostles, bishops, and councils, is against you." Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean, 13:5 (c. A.D. 400).
"If any one shall say, or shall believe, that other Scriptures, besides those which the Catholic Church has received, are to be esteemed of authority, or to be venerated, let him be anathema." Council of Toledo, Canon 12 (A.D. 400).
"A brief addition shows what books really are received in the canon. These are the desiderata of which you wished to be informed verbally: of Moses five books, that is, of Genesis, of Exodus, of Leviticus, of Numbers, of Deuteronomy, and Josue, of Judges one book, of Kings four books, also Ruth, of the Prophets sixteen books, of Solomon five books, the Psalms. Likewise of the histories, Job one book, of Tobias one book, Esther one, Judith one, of the Machabees two, of Esdras two, Paralipomenon two books. Likewise of the New Testament: of the Gospels four books, of Paul the Apostle fourteen epistles, of John three, epistles of Peter two, an epistle of Jude, an epistle of James, the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse of John." Pope Innocent (regn. A.D. 401-417), Epistle to Exsuperius Bishop of Toulose, 6:7,13 (A.D. 405).
"Item, that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in the church under the name of divine Scripture. But the Canonical Scriptures are as follows: Genesis...The Revelation of John...for these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in the church." Council of Carthage, African Code, Canon 24 (A.D. 419).
"The book of the Apocalypse which John the wise wrote, and which has been honoured by the approval of the Fathers." Cyril of Alexandria, Worship and Adoration in Spirit and in Truth, 5 (A.D. 425).
"Now the whole canon of Scripture on which we say this judgment is to be exercised, is contained in the following books:--Five books of Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; one book of Joshua the son of Nun; one of Judges; one short book called Ruth, which seems rather to belong to the beginning of Kings; next, four books of Kings, and two of Chronicles --these last not following one another, but running parallel, so to speak, and going over the same ground. The books now mentioned are history, which contains a connected narrative of the times, and follows the order of the events. There are other books which seem to follow no regular order, and are connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, and Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, and the two of Ezra, which last look more like a sequel to the continuous regular history which terminates with the books of Kings and Chronicles. Next are the Prophets, in which there is one book of the Psalms of David; and three books of Solomon, viz., Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. For two books, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon from a certain resemblance of style, but the most likely opinion is that they were written by Jesus the son of Sirach. Still they are to be reckoned among the prophetical books, since they have attained recognition as being authoritative.
The remainder are the books which are strictly called the Prophets: twelve separate books of the prophets which are connected with one another, and having never been disjoined, are reckoned as one book; the names of these prophets are as follows:--Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; then there are the four greater prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel. The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books. That of the New Testament, again, is contained within the following:--Four books of the Gospel, according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John; fourteen epistles of the Apostle Paul--one to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, one to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, two to the Thessalonians, one to the Colossians, two to Timothy, one to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews: two of Peter; three of John; one of Jude; and one of James; one book of the Acts of the Apostles; and one of the Revelation of John." Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2:8,12 (A.D. 426).
Introduction:
Q: Who is a true Christian?
A: A true Christian is he who is baptized, who believes and professes the Christian Doctrine, and obeys the lawful pastors of the Church.
Q: What is Christian Doctrine?
A: Christian doctrine is the doctrine which Jesus Christ our Lord taught us to show us the way of salvation.
Q: Is it necessary to learn the doctrine taught by Jesus Christ?
A: It certainly is necessary to learn the doctrine taught by Jesus Christ, and those who fail to do so are guilty of a grave breach of duty.
Q: From whom are we to receive and learn Christian Doctrine?
A: We are to receive and learn Christian Doctrine from the Holy Catholic Church.
Q: How are we certain that the Christian Doctrine which we receive from the Holy Catholic Church is really true?
A: We are certain that the doctrine which we receive from the Holy Catholic Church is true, because Jesus Christ, the divine Author of this doctrine, committed it through His Apostles to the Church, which He founded and made the infallible teacher of all men, promising her His divine assistance until the end of time.
Q: Are there other proofs of the truth of Christian Doctrine?
A: The truth of Christian Doctrine is also shown by the eminent sanctity of numbers who have professed it and who still profess it, by the heroic fortitude of the martyrs, by its marvelous and rapid propagation in the world, and by its perfect preservation throughout so many centuries of ceaseless and varied struggles.
(Source: the Catechism of St PiusX)
Why are we to receive and learn Christian Doctrine from the Holy Catholic Church?
The Catholic Church is the mystical body of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The church is a visible society of all baptized people. Note that there are three kinds of baptism (sacramental baptism, baptism of desire and baptism of blood).
Jesus Christ is the divine author of the Christian doctrine. The divine revelation was completed at the end of the first century when the last Apostle, namely John, passed away. From that moment on NOTHING new was added to the divine doctrine also known as the “depositum fidei”. (read St. Pius X, Lamentabili, denz. 2021, John. 14:26; 15:15; 16:13, from tradition pe. Didache, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basilius, etc.)
The Church fathers say that those who belong to the Catholic Church are the ones who:
Believe what the Church always has taught (Dogmatic theology)
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, “(Matth. 28:19)
The Church has the obligation to TEACH all nations. This commandment comes from Jesus Christ and therefore from God Himself. As a result of this the church CANNOT make agreements with the nations and their falls religions. There is NO FREEDOM of faith. Everybody is OBLIGED to recognize, adore, worship and serve the true GOD in the way He wants it, namely within the Catholic Church.
God states in Genesis 3:15 that He will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy (Satan) seed and her seed.
This means an eternal WAR between the children of Mary (traditional Catholics) and the children of Satan (the false religions). This warfare will end up in hell and heaven. Forever and ever there will be an infinite separation between the seed of Mary and the seed of Satan. True children of God MAY NOT negotiate with other religions. But we need to teach and convert them to the TRUE GOD. This is the teachings of the Sacred Scripture, the Apostles, the Church fathers, the theologians, the Popes until Pope Pius XII, the Saints, etc.
Do what the Church always has taught ( Morality)
“Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you“(Matth. 28:20)
Everybody is obliged to obey and live according to the commandments of God.
Pray as the Church has always prayed (Liturgy)
“And He took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me“(Luke 22:19)
Here we talk about the way of worshipping God and the sacraments. Specifically, the Holy Mass which is a true Sacrifice, and NOT a meal as the Novus Ordo teaches. Therefore a true catholic cannot actively attend the Novus Ordo Missae. The only Masses which are valid, and at the same time pleasing to God are the traditional Masses as they go back to the Apostles.
Where do we find the Christian doctrine?
There are two sources in which we find the complete Christian doctrine
Sacred Scripture
Oral and written tradition or the apostolic tradition
1. Holy Scripture or the Holy Bible
How do we recognize the true Bible? As there are so many different kinds of H. Scriptures. The Protestants have their own, the Jehovah Witnesses have another one. The Catholic Bibles from nowadays are different then the once we had during the Middle Ages.
Here are some tips how to recognize the true Bible:
· Look for the following words at the beginning or at the end of the H. Scriptures
‘IMPRIMATUR’ with or without ‘NIHIL OBSTAT
· The date preferably before 1962 as the reforms of the second Vatican council have had their negative influence on the new editions of the Sacred Scripture
· Check if there are footnotes in it. This is important as there are passages in the Bible which are difficult to comprehend.
· Count the number of books in the index.
A true Bible contains 72 books and not 66 such as the protestant Bible.
Canon of the Bible:
Old Testament:
Law:
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Historical Books:
Josue (Joshua)
Judges
Ruth
I Kings [1 Samuel in Protestant Bibles]
II Kings [2 Samuel in Protestant Bibles]
III Kings [1Kings in Protestant Bibles]
IV Kings [2 Kings in Protestant Bibles]
I Paralipomenon [1 Chronicles in Protestant Bibles]
II Paralipomenon [2 Chronicles in Protestant Bibles]
I Esdras (Ezra)
II Esdras (Nehemias or Nehemiah)
Tobias (Tobit)
Judith
Esther
Wisdom:
Job
Psalm (The Davidic Psalter)
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Canticles (Canticle of Canticles of Song of Songs or Song of Solomon)
Wisdom (Wisdom of Soloman)
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach or The Wisdom of Sirach)
Prophets:
Machabees
Isaias (Isaiah)
Jeremias (Jeremiah)
Lamentations
Baruch
Ezechiel (Ezeckiel)
Daniel (longer than Protestant versions)
Twelve Minor Prophets
Osee (Hosea)
Joel
Amos
Abdias (Obadiah)
Jonas (Jonah)
Micheas (Michah)
Nahum
Habacuc (Habbakkuk)
Sophonias (Zephanaiah)
Aggeus (Haggai)
Zacharias (Zechariah)
Malachias (Malachi)
History continued, ca 120 B.C.
I Machabees (1 Maccabees)
II Machabees (2 Maccabees)
New Testament:
Gospels:
St. Matthew
St. Mark
St. Luke
St. John
Acts & Epistles:
Acts of the Apostles
Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians
Second Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Galatians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Philippians
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Colossians
First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians
Second Epistle of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians
First Epistle of Saint Paul to Timothy
Second Epistle of Saint Paul to Timothy
Epistle of Saint Paul to Titus
Epistle of Saint Paul to Philemon
Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews
Catholic Epistle of Saint James the Apostle
First Epistle of Saint Peter the Apostle and first Pope
Second Epistle of Saint Peter the Apostle and first Pope
First Epistle of Saint John the Apostle
Second Epistle of Saint John the Apostle
Third Epistle of Saint John the Apostle
Catholic Epistle of St. Jude
The Apocalypse of St. John
· A good test to see if you really have the most authentic Bible, conform to the original Vulgate is to check the following verse:
Ps 95:5 For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens.
95:5 Quoniam omnes dii gentium daemonia at vero Dominus caelos fecit
In the Novus Ordo Bibles you will not find the word ‘devils’ as there are, according to the reform of Vatican II, good elements in the non-Catholic religions. They do even claim that people can go to heaven by their own religions. (freedom of religion).
This is a heresy and an insult to God Almighty as well as a mortal sin against the First Commandement. Throughout the whole Sacred Scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, different councils, etc. it is stated that Outside The Catholic Church there is NO SALVATION. ‘Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.’ This means that only Catholics will go to Heaven. This theological statement has been declared as dogma by Pope Eugenius IV in the Conc. Florenc. Decr. Cantate Domino against the Jacobites.
2. Written and Oral Tradition or Apostolic tradition
Tradition is divine (Denz. 1800). The dogmatic council of Trent determined that the Tradition is more important than the Sacred Scripture because she:
ü Is older as the Church existed already before the last book of the New Testament was written
ü Is more complete as there is no mention of the seven sacraments, nor of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Virgin Mary
ü Tells us what the Sacred Scripture is
ü Explains the Holy Bible
Tradition is found in the ‘Loci Traditionis’:
ü The opinions of the Church Fathers when they all agree
ü The opinion of the theologians when they all agree
ü What is clearly and undoubtly written in the Sacred Scripture
ü The infallible sayings of the Popes of the 20 dogmatic Councils
(note that Vat II is only a pastoral council and therefore fallible)
The tradition teaches us through Saint Augustin the following fundamental rules of conduct and faith:
ü De fide unitas One in faith (dogma, morality, liturgy)
ü In dubio libertas freedom of having an opinion (pe were the creation days literal 24-hour days or geological periods)
ü In omnibus caritas in everything keep the love
One in faith (dogma, moral and liturgy)
Is there outside the Depositum Fidei anything else?
No. All teachings, doctrines, rules, etc. in regards to morality and faith, have to be found within the boundaries of the Sacred Scripture and Tradition which are both DIVINE.
‘All doctrine true which comes through the Church from the Apostles, who were taught by God through Christ. ALL OPINION WHICH HAS NO SUCH DIVINE ORIGIN AND APOSTOLIC TRADITION TO SHOW, is IPSO FACTO FALSE’ (Tertullian, ‘De Praescriptione Haereticorum, cap. 21).
‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, LET HIM BE ACCURSED.’ (Saint Paul to the Galatians 1:8)
Theologians, priests, bishops, and even the pope, when they teach or proclaim something different than divine tradition, are putting themselves in a heretical position, and by that fact they stop being ONE in faith which means that they are no longer Catholics, as they have altered the truth. And any kind of catholic, being laymen or clergy, have the obligation NOT to obey them in that heresy.
True theology is practiced within the boundaries of the Depositum Fidei.
What do we have to believe when there is contradiction within the Church about a certain matter?
Saint Vincens of Lerin gives the principles what we have to believe when, within the Church there are certain contradictions in his Commonitorium (For the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith against the Profane Novelties of ALL HERESIES)
Note that the principles he gives are very useful in our times as there are undoubtly contradictions (about 200) between the theology of Vatican II and Tradition. The Commonitorium of Saint Vincens of Lerin are very helpful in times of crisis and confusion.
Here are the principles:
v Commonitorium Chapter 2
A General Rule for distinguishing the Truth of the Catholic Faith from the Falsehood of Heretical Pravity.
[4.] I have often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or anyone else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church.
[5.] But here someone perhaps will ask, Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church's interpretation? For this reason,— because, owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another, lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.
[6.] Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors.
v Commonitorium Chapter 3
What is to be done if one or more dissent from the rest.
[7.] What then will a Catholic Christian do, if a small portion of the Church have cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What, surely, but prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member? What, if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole? Then it will be his care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty.
[8.] But what, if in antiquity itself there be found error on the part of two or three men, or at any rate of a city or even of a province? Then it will be his care by all means, to prefer the decrees, if such there be, of an ancient General Council to the rashness and ignorance of a few. But what, if some error should spring up on which no such decree is found to bear? Then he must collate and consult and interrogate the opinions of the ancients, of those, namely, who, though living in various times and places, yet continuing in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, stand forth acknowledged and approved authorities: and whatsoever he shall ascertain to have been held, written, taught, not by one or two of these only, but by all, equally, with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently, that he must understand that he himself also is to believe without any doubt or hesitation.
Appendix
Scripture:
Scripture Alone Disproves "Scripture Alone"
Gen. to Rev. - Scripture never says that Scripture is the sole infallible authority for God's Word. Scripture also mandates the use of tradition. This fact alone disproves sola Scriptura.
Matt. 28:19; Mark 16:15 - those that preached the Gospel to all creation but did not write the Gospel were not less obedient to Jesus, or their teachings less important.
Matt. 28:20 - "observe ALL I have commanded," but, as we see in John 20:30; 21:25, not ALL Jesus taught is in Scripture. So there must be things outside of Scripture that we must observe. This disproves "Bible alone" theology.
Mark 16:15 - Jesus commands the apostles to "preach," not write, and only three apostles wrote. The others who did not write were not less faithful to Jesus, because Jesus gave them no directive to write. There is no evidence in the Bible or elsewhere that Jesus intended the Bible to be sole authority of the Christian faith.
Luke 1:1-4 - Luke acknowledges that the faithful have already received the teachings of Christ, and is writing his Gospel only so that they "realize the certainty of the teachings you have received." Luke writes to verify the oral tradition they already received.
John 20:30; 21:25 - Jesus did many other things not written in the Scriptures. These have been preserved through the oral apostolic tradition and they are equally a part of the Deposit of Faith.
Acts 8:30-31; Heb. 5:12 - these verses show that we need help in interpreting the Scriptures. We cannot interpret them infallibly on our own. We need divinely appointed leadership within the Church to teach us.
Acts 15:1-14 – Peter resolves the Church’s first doctrinal issue regarding circumcision without referring to Scriptures.
Acts 17:28 – Paul quotes the writings of the pagan poets when he taught at the Aeropagus. Thus, Paul appeals to sources outside of Scripture to teach about God.
1 Cor. 5:9-11 - this verse shows that a prior letter written to Corinth is equally authoritative but not part of the New Testament canon. Paul is again appealing to a source outside of Scripture to teach the Corinthians. This disproves Scripture alone.
1 Cor. 11:2 - Paul commends the faithful to obey apostolic tradition, and not Scripture alone.
Phil. 4:9 - Paul says that what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do. There is nothing ever about obeying Scripture alone.
Col. 4:16 - this verse shows that a prior letter written to Laodicea is equally authoritative but not part of the New Testament canon. Paul once again appeals to a source outside of the Bible to teach about the Word of God.
1 Thess. 2:13 – Paul says, “when you received the word of God, which you heard from us..” How can the Bible be teaching first century Christians that only the Bible is their infallible source of teaching if, at the same time, oral revelation was being given to them as well? Protestants can’t claim that there is one authority (Bible) while allowing two sources of authority (Bible and oral revelation).
1 Thess. 3:10 - Paul wants to see the Thessalonians face to face and supply what is lacking. His letter is not enough.
2 Thess. 2:14 - Paul says that God has called us "through our Gospel." What is the fullness of the Gospel?
2 Thess. 2:15 - the fullness of the Gospel is the apostolic tradition which includes either teaching by word of mouth or by letter. Scripture does not say "letter alone." The Catholic Church has the fullness of the Christian faith through its rich traditions of Scripture, oral tradition and teaching authority (or Magisterium).
2 Thess 3:6 - Paul instructs us to obey apostolic tradition. There is no instruction in the Scriptures about obeying the Bible alone (the word "Bible" is not even in the Bible).
1 Tim. 3:14-15 - Paul prefers to speak and not write, and is writing only in the event that he is delayed and cannot be with Timothy.
2 Tim. 2:2 - Paul says apostolic tradition is passed on to future generations, but he says nothing about all apostolic traditions being eventually committed to the Bible.
2 Tim. 3:14 - continue in what you have learned and believed knowing from whom you learned it. Again, this refers to tradition which is found outside of the Bible.
James 4:5 - James even appeals to Scripture outside of the Old Testament canon ("He yearns jealously over the spirit which He has made...")
2 Peter 1:20 - interpreting Scripture is not a matter of one's own private interpretation. Therefore, it must be a matter of "public" interpretation of the Church. The Divine Word needs a Divine Interpreter. Private judgment leads to divisions, and this is why there are 30,000 different Protestant denominations.
2 Peter 3:15-16 - Peter says Paul's letters are inspired, but not all his letters are in the New Testament canon. See, for example, 1 Cor. 5:9-10; Col. 4:16. Also, Peter's use of the word "ignorant" means unschooled, which presupposes the requirement of oral apostolic instruction that comes from the Church.
2 Peter 3:16 - the Scriptures are difficult to understand and can be distorted by the ignorant to their destruction. God did not guarantee the Holy Spirit would lead each of us to infallibly interpret the Scriptures. But this is what Protestants must argue in order to support their doctrine of sola Scriptura. History and countless divisions in Protestantism disprove it.
1 John 4:1 - again, God instructs us to test all things, test all spirits. Notwithstanding what many Protestants argue, God's Word is not always obvious.
1 Sam. 3:1-9 - for example, the Lord speaks to Samuel, but Samuel doesn't recognize it is God. The Word of God is not self-attesting.
1 Kings 13:1-32 - in this story, we see that a man can't discern between God's word (the commandment "don't eat") and a prophet's erroneous word (that God had rescinded his commandment "don't eat"). The words of the Bible, in spite of what many Protestants must argue, are not always clear and understandable. This is why there are 30,000 different Protestant churches and one Holy Catholic Church.
Gen. to Rev. - Protestants must admit that knowing what books belong in the Bible is necessary for our salvation. However, because the Bible has no "inspired contents page," you must look outside the Bible to see how its books were selected. This destroys the sola Scriptura theory. The canon of Scripture is a Revelation from God which is necessary for our salvation, and which comes from outside the Bible. Instead, this Revelation was given by God to the Catholic Church, the pinnacle and foundation of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15).
All Scripture is Inspired"- 2 Tim. 3:16-17
2 Tim. 3:14 - Protestants usually use 2 Tim. 3:16-17 to prove that the Bible is the sole authority of God's word. But examining these texts disproves their claim. Here, Paul appeals to apostolic tradition right before the Protestants' often quoted verse 2 Tim. 3:16-17. Thus, there is an appeal to tradition before there is an appeal to the Scriptures, and Protestants generally ignore this fact.
2 Tim. 3:15 - Paul then appeals to the sacred writings of Scripture referring to the Old Testament Scriptures with which Timothy was raised (not the New Testament which was not even compiled at the time of Paul's teaching). This verse also proves that one can come to faith in Jesus Christ without the New Testament.
2 Tim. 3:16 - this verse says that Scripture is "profitable" for every good work, but not exclusive. The word "profitable" is "ophelimos" in Greek. "Ophelimos" only means useful, which underscores that Scripture is not mandatory or exclusive. Protestants unbiblically argue that profitable means exclusive.
2 Tim. 3:16 - further, the verse "all Scripture" uses the words "pasa graphe" which actually means every (not all) Scripture. This means every passage of Scripture is useful. Thus, the erroneous Protestant reading of "pasa graphe" would mean every single passage of Scripture is exclusive. This would mean Christians could not only use "sola Matthew," or "sola Mark," but could rely on one single verse from a Gospel as the exclusive authority of God's word. This, of course, is not true and even Protestants would agree. Also, "pasa graphe" cannot mean "all of Scripture" because there was no New Testament canon to which Paul could have been referring, unless Protestants argue that the New Testament is not being included by Paul.
2 Tim. 3:16 - also, these inspired Old Testament Scriptures Paul is referring to included the deuterocanonical books which the Protestants removed from the Bible 1,500 years later.
2 Tim. 3:17 - Paul's reference to the "man of God" who may be complete refers to a clergyman, not a layman. It is an instruction to a bishop of the Church. So, although Protestants use it to prove their case, the passage is not even relevant to most of the faithful.
2 Tim. 3:17 - further, Paul's use of the word "complete" for every good work is "artios" which simply means the clergy is "suitable" or "fit." Also, artios does not describe the Scriptures, it describes the clergyman. So, Protestants cannot use this verse to argue the Scriptures are complete.
James 1:4 - steadfastness also makes a man "perfect (teleioi) and complete (holoklepoi), lacking nothing." This verse is important because "teleioi"and "holoklepoi" are much stronger words than "artios," but Protestants do not argue that steadfastness is all one needs to be a Christian.
Titus 3:8 - good deeds are also "profitable" to men. For Protestants especially, profitable cannot mean "exclusive" here.
2 Tim 2:21- purity is also profitable for "any good work" ("pan ergon agathon"). This wording is the same as 2 Tim. 3:17, which shows that the Scriptures are not exclusive, and that other things (good deeds and purity) are also profitable to men.
Col. 4:12 - prayer also makes men "fully assured." Nowhere does Scripture say the Christian faith is based solely on a book.
2 Tim. 3:16-17 - Finally, if these verses really mean that Paul was teaching sola Scriptura to the early Church, then why in 1 Thess. 2:13 does Paul teach that he is giving Revelation from God orally? Either Paul is contradicting his own teaching on sola Scriptura, or Paul was not teaching sola Scriptura in 2 Tim. 3:16-17. This is a critical point which Protestants cannot reconcile with their sola Scriptura position.
Other Passages used to Support "Sola Scriptura"
John 5:39 - some non-Catholics use this verse to prove sola Scriptura. But when Jesus said "search the Scriptures," He was rebuking the Jews who did not believe that He was the Messiah. Jesus tells them to search the Scriptures to verify the Messianic prophecies and His oral teaching, and does not say "search the Scriptures alone." Moreover, since the New Testament was not yet written, the passage is not relevant to the Protestant claim of sola Scriptura.
John 10:35 - some Protestants also use this verse "Scripture cannot be broken" to somehow prove sola Scriptura. But this statement refers to the Old Testament Scriptures and has nothing to do with the exclusivity of Scripture and the New Testament.
John 20:31 - Protestants also use this verse to prove sola Scriptura. Indeed, Scripture assists in learning to believe in Jesus, but this passage does not say Scripture is exclusive, or even necessary, to be saved by Jesus.
Acts 17:11-12 - here we see the verse "they searched the Scriptures." This refers to the Bereans who used the Old Testament to confirm the oral teachings about the Messiah. The verses do not say the Bereans searched the Scriptures alone (which is what Protestants are attempting to prove when quoting this passage). Moreover, the Bereans accepted the oral teaching from Paul as God's word before searching the Scriptures, which disproves the Berean's use of sola Scriptura.
Acts 17:11-12 - Also, the Bereans, being more "noble" or "fair minded," meant that they were more reasonable and less violent than the Thessalonians in Acts. 17:5-9. Their greater fairmindedness was not because of their use of Scripture, which Paul directed his listeners to do as was his custom (Acts 17:3).
1 Cor. 4:6 - this is one of the most confusing passages in Scripture. Many scholars believe the phrase "don't go above the line" was inserted by a translator as an instruction to someone in the translation process. Others say Paul is quoting a proverb regarding kids learning to write by tracing letters. By saying don't go above line, Paul is probably instructing them not to be arrogant. But even if the phrase is taken literally, to what was Paul referring? The Talmud? The Mosaic law? The Old Testament Scriptures? This proves too much for the Protestant because there was no New Testament canon at the time Paul wrote this, and the text says nothing about the Bible being the sole rule and guide of faith.
Rev. 1:11,19 - Non-Catholics sometimes refer to Jesus' commands to John to write as support for the theory that the Bible is the only source of Christian faith. Yes, Jesus commands John to write because John was in exile in Patmos and could not preach the Word (which was Jesus' usual command). Further, such a commandment would be limited to the book that John wrote, the Book of Revelation, and would have nothing to do with the other Scriptures.
Rev. 22:18-19 - some Protestants argue against Catholic tradition by citing this verse, "don't add to the prophecies in this book." But this commandment only refers to the book of Revelation, not the entire Bible which came 300 years later.
Deut 4:2; 12:32 - moreover, God commands the same thing here but this did not preclude Christians from accepting the Old Testament books after Deuteronomy or the New Testament.
Tradition / Church Fathers:
Scripture Must be Interpreted in Light of Church Tradition
“Those, therefore, who desert the preaching of the Church, call in question the knowledge of the holy presbyters, not taking into consideration of how much greater consequence is a religious man, even in a private station, than a blasphemous and impudent sophist. Now, such are all the heretics, and those who imagine that they have hit upon something more beyond the truth, so that by following those things already mentioned, proceeding on their way variously, in harmoniously, and foolishly, not keeping always to the same opinions with regard to the same things, as blind men are led by the blind, they shall deservedly fall into the ditch of ignorance lying in their path, ever seeking and never finding out the truth. It behooves us, therefore, to avoid their doctrines, and to take careful heed lest we suffer any injury from them; but to flee to the Church, and be brought up in her bosom, and be nourished with the Lord's Scriptures." Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5,20:2 (A.D. 180).
"Since this is the case, in order that the truth may be adjudged to belong to us, "as many as walk according to the rule," which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reason of our position is clear, when it determines that heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we, without the Scriptures, prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For as they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians, because it is not from Christ that they get that which they pursue of their own mere choice, and from the pursuit incur and admit the name of heretics. Thus, not being Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, "Who are you? When and whence did you come?" Tertullian, Prescription against the Heretics, 37 (A.D. 200).
"Now the cause, in all the points previously enumerated, of the false opinions, and of the impious statements or ignorant assertions about God, appears to be nothing else than the not understanding the Scripture according to its spiritual meaning, but the interpretation of it agreeably to the mere letter. And therefore, to those who believe that the sacred books are not the compositions of men, but that they were composed by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, agreeably to the will of the Father of all things through Jesus Christ, and that they have come down to us, we must point out the ways (of interpreting them) which appear (correct) to us, who cling to the standard of the heavenly Church of Jesus Christ according to the succession of the apostles." Origen, First Principles, 4,1:9 (A.D. 230).
"The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church. The Lord warns, saying, 'He who is not with me is against me, and he who gathereth not with me scattereth.'" Cyprian, Unity of the Church, 6 (A.D. 256).
"But in learning the Faith and in professing it, acquire and keep that only, which is now delivered to thee by the Church, and which has been built up strongly out of all the Scriptures....Take heed then, brethren, and hold fast the traditions which ye now receive, and write them and the table of your heart." Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 5:12 (A.D. 350).
"[T]hey who are placed without the Church, cannot attain to any understanding of the divine word. For the ship exhibits a type of Church, the word of life placed and preached within which, they who are without, and lie near like barren and useless sands, cannot understand." Hilary of Poitiers, On Matthew, Homily 13:1 (A.D. 355).
"But beyond these [Scriptural] sayings, let us look at the very tradition, teaching and faith of the Catholic Church from the beginning, which the Lord gave, the Apostles preached, and the Fathers kept." Athanasius, Four Letters to Serapion of Thmuis, 1:28 (A.D. 360).
"This then I consider the sense of this passage, and that, a very ecclesiasitcal sense." Athanasius, Discourse Against the Arians, 1:44 (A.D. 362).
"It is the church which perfect truth perfects. The church of believers is great, and its bosom most ample; it embraces the fullness of the two Testaments." Ephraem, Against Heresies (ante A.D. 373).
"Now I accept no newer creed written for me by other men, nor do I venture to propound the outcome of my own intelligence, lest I make the words of true religion merely human words; but what I have been taught by the holy Fathers, that I announce to all who question me. In my Church the creed written by the holy Fathers in synod at Nicea is in use." Basil, To the Church of Antioch, Epistle 140:2 (A.D. 373).
"For they [heretics] do not teach as the church does; their message does no accord with the truth." Epiphanius, Panarion, 47 (A.D. 377).
"[S]eeing, I say, that the Church teaches this in plain language, that the Only-begotten is essentially God, very God of the essence of the very God, how ought one who opposes her decisions to overthrow the preconceived opinion... And let no one interrupt me, by saying that what we confess should also be confirmed by constructive reasoning: for it is enough for proof of our statement, that the tradition has come down to us from our Fathers, handled on, like some inheritance, by succession from the apostles and the saints who came after them." Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 4:6 (c. A.D. 384).
"Wherefore all other generations are strangers to truth; all the generations of heretics hold not the truth: the church alone, with pious affection, is in possession of the truth." Ambrose, Commentary of Psalm 118,19 (A.D. 388).
"They teach what they themselves have learnt from their predecessors. They have received those rites which they explain from the Church's tradition. They preach only 'the dogmas of the Church'" John Chrysostom, Baptismal Instruction (A.D. 389).
"But when proper words make Scripture ambiguous, we must see in the first place that there is nothing wrong in our punctuation or pronunciation. Accordingly, if, when attention is given to the passage, it shall appear to be uncertain in what way it ought to be punctuated or pronounced, let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church, and of which I treated at sufficient length when I was speaking in the first book about things." Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3,2:2 (A.D. 397).
" 'So then, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye were taught, whether by word, or by Epistle of ours.' Hence it is manifest, that they did not deliver all things by Epistle, but many things also unwritten, and in like manner both the one and the other are worthy of credit. Therefore let us think the tradition of the Church also worthy of credit. It is a tradition, seek no farther." John Chrysostom, Homily on 2nd Thessalonians, 4:2 (A.D. 404).
"My resolution is, to read the ancients, to try everything, to hold fast what is good, and not to recede from the faith of the Catholic Church." Jerome, To Minervius & Alexander, Epistle 119 (A.D. 406).
"But those reasons which I have here given, I have either gathered from the authority of the church, according to the tradition of our forefathers, or from the testimony of the divine Scriptures, or from the nature itself of numbers and of similitudes. No sober person will decide against reason, no Christian against the Scriptures, no peaceable person against the church." Augustine, On the Trinity, 4,6:10 (A.D. 416).
"But it will be said, If the words, the sentiments, the promises of Scripture, are appealed to by the Devil and his disciples, of whom some are false apostles, some false prophets and false teachers, and all without exception heretics, what are Catholics and the sons of Mother Church to do? How are they to distinguish truth from falsehood in the sacred Scriptures? They must be very careful to pursue that course which, in the beginning of this Commonitory, we said that holy and learned men had commended to us, that is to say, they must interpret the sacred Canon according to the traditions of the Universal Church and in keeping with the rules of Catholic doctrine, in which Catholic and Universal Church, moreover, they must follow universality, antiquity, consent." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Antinquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 70 (A.D. 434).
"[H]old fast the faith in simplicity of mind; establishing the tradition of the church as a foundation, in the inmost recesses of thy heart, hold the doctrines which are well-pleasing unto God." Cyril of Alexandria, Festal Letters, Homily 8 (A.D. 442).
Scripture is not Subject to Private Interpretation
“True knowledge is [that which consists in] the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine, and neither receiving addition nor [suffering] curtailment [in the truths which she believes]; and [it consists in] reading [the word of God] without falsification, and a lawful and diligent exposition in harmony with the Scriptures, both without danger and without blasphemy; and [above all, it consists in] the pre-eminent gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and which excels all the other gifts [of God]." Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4,33:8 (inter A.D. 180-199).
"But if there be any (heresies) which are bold enough to plant themselves in the midst of the apostolic age, that they may thereby seem to have been handed down by the apostles, because they existed in the time of the apostles, we can say: Let them produce the original records of their churches; let them unfold the roll of their bishops, running down in due succession from the beginning in such a manner that [that first bishop of theirs] bishop shall be able to show for his ordainer and predecessor some one of the apostles or of apostolic men - a man, moreover, who continued steadfast with the apostles. For this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed therein by John; as also the church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter. In exactly the same way the other churches likewise exhibit (their several worthies), whom, as having been appointed to their episcopal places by apostles, they regard as transmitters of the apostolic seed. Let the heretics contrive something of the same kind…” Tertullian, On Prescription against the Heretics, 32 (c. A.D. 200).
“To this test, therefore will they be submitted for proof by those churches, who, although they derive not their founder from apostles or apostolic men (as being of much later date, for they are in fact being founded daily), yet, since they agree in the same faith, they are accounted as not less apostolic because they are akin in doctrine. Then let all the heresies, when challenged to these two tests by our apostolic church, offer their proof of how they deem themselves to be apostolic. But in truth they neither are so, nor are they able to prove themselves to be what they are not. Nor are they admitted to peaceful relations and communion by such churches as are in any way connected with apostles, inasmuch as they are in no sense themselves apostolic because of their diversity as to the mysteries of the faith." Tertullian, On Prescription against the Heretics, 32 (c. A.D. 200).
"For those are slothful who, having it in their power to provide themselves with proper proofs for the divine Scriptures from the Scriptures themselves, select only what contributes to their own pleasures. And those have a craving for glory who voluntarily evade, by arguments of a diverse sort, the things delivered by the blessed apostles and teachers, which are wedded to inspired words; opposing the divine tradition by human teachings, in order to establish the heresy." Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 7:16 (post A.D. 202).
"When heretics show us the canonical Scriptures, in which every Christian believes and trusts, they seem to be saying: 'Lo, he is in the inner rooms [the word of truth] ' (Matt 24.6). But we must not believe them, nor leave the original tradition of the Church, nor believe otherwise than we have been taught by the succession in the Church of God." Origen, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 46, PG 13:1667 (ante A.D. 254).
"A most precious possession therefore is the knowledge of doctrines: also there is need of a wakeful soul, since there are many that make spoil through philosophy and vain deceit. The Greeks on the one hand draw men away by their smooth tongue, for honey droppeth from a harlot's lips: whereas they of the Circumcision deceive those who come to them by means of the Divine Scriptures, which they miserably misinterpret though studying them from childhood to all age, and growing old in ignorance. But the children of heretics, by their good words and smooth tongue, deceive the hearts of the innocent, disguising with the name of Christ as it were with honey the poisoned arrows of their impious doctrines: concerning all of whom together the Lord saith, Take heed lest any man mislead you. This is the reason for the teaching of the Creed and for expositions upon it." Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 4:2 (A.D. 350).
"And, O wretched heretic! You turn the weapons granted to the Church against the Synagogue, against belief in the Church's preaching, and distort against the common salvation of all the sure meaning of a saving doctrine." Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, 12:36 (inter A.D. 356-359).
"But since they allege the divine oracles and force on them a misinterpretation, according to their private sense, it becomes necessary to meet them just so far as to vindicate these passages, and to show that they bear an orthodox sense, and that our opponents are in error." Athanasius, Discourse Against the Arians, I:37 (A.D. 362).
"To refuse to follow the Fathers, not holding their declaration of more authority than one's own opinion, is conduct worthy of blame, as being brimful of self-sufficiency." Basil, EpistleTo the Canonicae, 52:1 (A.D. 370).
"While (the sects) mutually refute and condemn each other, it has happened to truth as to Gideon; that is, while they fight against each other, and fall under wounds mutually inflicted, they crown her. All the heretics acknowledge that there is a true Scripture. Had they all falsely believed that none existed, someone might reply that such Scripture was unknown to them. But now that have themselves taken away the force of such plea, from the fact that they have mutilated the very Scriptures. For they have corrupted the sacred copies; and words which ought to have but one interpretation, they have wrested to strange significations. Whilst, when one of them attempts this, and cuts off a member of his own body, the rest demand and claim back the severed limb...It is the church which perfect truth perfects. The church of believers is great, and its bosom most ample; it embraces the fulness (or, the whole) of the two Testaments." Ephraem, Adv. Haeres (ante A.D. 373).
"Who knows not that what separates the Church from heresy is this term, 'product of creation, ' applied to the Son? Accordingly, the doctrinal difference being universally acknowledged, what would be the reasonable course for a man to take who endeavors to show that his opinions are more true than ours?" Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 4:6 (inter A.D. 380-384).
"For heresies, and certain tenets of perversity, ensnaring souls and hurling them into the deep, have not sprung up except when good Scriptures are not rightly understood, and when that in them which is not rightly understood is rashly and boldly asserted. And so, dearly beloved, ought we very cautiously to hear those things for the understanding of which we are but little ones, and that, too, with pious heart and with trembling, as it is written, holding this rule of soundness, that we rejoice as in food in that which we have been able to understand, according to the faith with which we are imbued…" Augustine, On the Gospel of John, Homily XVIII:1 (A.D. 416).
"If you produce from the divine scriptures something that we all share, we shall have to listen. But those words which are not found in the scriptures are under no circumstance accepted by us, especially since the Lord warns us, saying, In vain they worship me, teaching human commandments and precepts' (Mt 5:19)" Maximinus (Arch-Arian Heretic), Debate with Maximinus, 1 (c. A.D. 428).
"Therefore, as I said above, if you had been a follower and assertor of Sabellianism or Arianism or any heresy you please, you might shelter yourself under the example of your parents, the teaching of your instructors, the company of those about you, the faith of your creed. I ask, O you heretic, nothing unfair, and nothing hard. As you have been brought up in the Catholic faith, do that which you would do for a wrong belief. Hold fast to the teaching of your parents. Hold fast the faith of the Church: hold fast the truth of the Creed: hold fast the salvation of baptism." John Cassian, Incarnation of the Lord, 6:5 (c. A.D. 429).
"I have often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical depravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or any one else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 2:4 (A.D. 434).
"But the Church of Christ, the careful and watchful guardian of the doctrines deposited in her charge, never changes anything in them, never diminishes, never adds, does not cut off what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose her own, does not appropriate what is another's, but while dealing faithfully and judiciously with ancient doctrine, keeps this one object carefully in view, if there be anything which antiquity has left shapeless and rudimentary, to fashion and polish it, if anything already reduced to shape and developed, to consolidate and strengthen it, if any already ratified and defined to keep and guard it. Finally, what other object have Councils ever aimed at in their decrees, than to provide that what was before believed in simplicity should in future be believed intelligently, that what was before preached coldly should in future be preached earnestly, that what was before practiced negligently should thenceforward be practiced with double solicitude? This, I say, is what the Catholic Church, roused by the novelties of heretics, has accomplished by the decrees of her Councils, this, and nothing else, has thenceforward consigned to posterity in writing what she had received from those of olden times only by tradition, comprising a great amount of matter in a few words, and often, for the better understanding, designating an old article of the faith by the characteristic of a new name." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 23:59 (A.D. 434).
"[A]ll heresies, that they evermore delight in profane novelties, scorn the decisions of antiquity, and ...make shipwreck of the faith. On the other hand, it is the sure characteristic of Catholics to keep that which has been committed to their trust by the holy Fathers..." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitory of the Anitquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, 24:63 (A.D. 434).
"His (Nestorius) first attempt at innovation was, that the holy Virgin, who bore the Word of God, who took flesh of her, ought not to be confessed to be the mother of God, but only the mother of Christ; though of old, yea from the first, the preachers of the orthodox faith taught, agreeably to the apostolic tradition, that the mother of God. And now let me produce his blasphemous artifice and observation unknown to any one before him." Theodoret of Cyrus, Compendium of Heretics' Fables, 12 (c.A.D. 453).
The Catholic Church Determined the Canon of Scripture
"For the blessed apostle Paul himself, following the rule of his predecessor John, writes only by name to seven Churches in the following order--to the Corinthians afirst...there is a second to the Corinthians and to the Thessalonians, yet one Church is recognized as being spread over the entire world...Howbeit to Philemon one, to Titus one, and to Timothy two were put in writing...to be in honour however with the Catholic Church for the ordering of ecclesiastical discipline...one to the Laodicenes, another to the Alexandrians, both forged in Paul's name to suit the heresy of Marcion, and several others, which cannot be received into the Catholic Church; for it is not fitting that gall be mixed with honey. The Epistle of Jude no doubt, and the couple bearing the name of John, are accepted by the Catholic Church...But of Arsinous, called also Valentinus, or of Militiades we receive nothing at all." The fragment of Muratori (A.D. 177).
"The same authority of the apostolic churches will afford evidence to the other Gospels also, which we possess equally through their means, and according to their usage--I mean the Gospels of John and Matthew--whilst that which Mark published may be affirmed to be Peter's whose interpreter Mark was. For even Luke's form of the Gospel men usually ascribe to Paul." Tertullian, Against Marcion, 4:5 (A.D. 212).
"In his [Origen] first book on Matthew's Gospel, maintaining the Canon of the Church, he testifies that he knows only four Gospels, writing as follows: Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the first was written by Matthew, who was once a publican, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it was prepared for the converts from Judaism, and published in the Hebrew language. The second is by Mark, who composed it according to the instructions of Peter, who in his Catholic epistle acknowledges him as a son, saying, 'The church that is at Babylon elected together with you, saluteth you, and so doth Marcus, my son.' And the third by Luke, the Gospel commended by Paul, and composed for Gentile converts. Last of all that by John." Origen, Commentary on Matthew, fragment in Eusebius Church History, 6:25,3 (A.D. 244).
"Learn also diligently, and from the Church, what are the books of the Old Testaments, and what those of the New." Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 4:33 (A.D. 350).
"Likewise it has been said: Now indeed we must treat of the divine Scriptures, what the universal Catholic Church accepts and what she ought to shun. The order of the Old Testament begins here: Genesis one book, Exodus one book, Leviticus one book, Numbers one book, Deuteronomy one book, Josue Nave one book, Judges one book, Ruth one book, Kings four books, Paralipomenon two books, Psalms one book, Solomon three books, Proverbs one book, Ecclesiastes one book, Canticle of Canticles one book, likewise Wisdom one book, Ecclesiasticus one book. Likewise the order of the Prophets. Isaias one book, Jeremias one book,with Ginoth, that is, with his lamentations, Ezechiel one book,Daniel one book, Osee one book, Micheas one book, Joel one book, Abdias one book, Jonas one book, Nahum one book, Habacuc one book, Sophonias one book, Aggeus one book, Zacharias one book, Malachias one book. Likewise the order of the histories. Job one book, Tobias one book, Esdras two books, Esther one book, Judith one book, Machabees two books. Likewise the order of the writings of the New and eternal Testament, which only the holy and Catholic Church supports. Of the Gospels, according to Matthew one book, according to Mark one book, according to Luke one book, according to John one book. The Epistles of Paul [the apostle] in number fourteen. To the Romans one, to the Corinthians two, to the Ephesians one, to the Thessalonians two, to the Galatians one, to the Philippians one, to the Colossians one, to Timothy two, to Titus one, to Philemon one, to the Hebrews one. Likewise the Apocalypse of John, one book. And the Acts of the Apostles one book. Likewise the canonical epistles in number seven. Of Peter the Apostle two epistles, of James the Apostle one epistle, of John the Apostle one epistle, of another John, the presbyter, two epistles, of Jude the Zealut, the Apostle one epistle." Pope Damasus (regn. A.D. 366-384), Decree of the Council of Rome, The Canon of Scripture (A.D. 382).
"Besides the canonical Scriptures, nothing shall be read, in the church under the title of divine writings.'. The canonical books are:---Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings, the two books of Paraleipomena (Chronicles), Job, the Psalms of David, the five books of Solomon, the twelve books of the (Minor) Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, two books of Esdras, two books of the Maccabees. The books of the New Testament are:---the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Epistles of S. Paul, one Epistle of S. Paul to the Hebrews, two Epistles of S. Peter, three Epistles of S. John, the Epistle of S. James, the Epistle of S. Jude, the Revelation of S. John. Concerning the confirmation of this canon, the transmarine Church shall be consulted." Council of Hippo, Canon 36 (A.D. 393).
"I beseech you to bear patiently, if I also write, by way of remembrance, of matters with which you are acquainted, influenced by the need and advantage of the Church. In proceeding to make mention of these things [the canon], I shall adopt, to comment my undertaking, the pattern of Luke...to reduce into order for themselves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely inspired Scripture, concerning which we have been fully persuaded, as they who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, delivered to the fathers; it seemed good to me also, having been urged thereto by true brethren, and having learned from the beginning, to set before you the books included in the Canon..." Athanasius, Festal Letters, 39 (A.D. 397).
"[It has been decided] that nothing except the Canonical Scriptures should be read in the church under the name of the Divine Scriptures. But the Canonical Scriptures are: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Josue, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, Paralipomenon two books, Job, the Psalter of David, five books of Solomon, twelve books of the Prophets, Isaias, Jeremias, Daniel, Ezechiel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, two books of Esdras, two books of the Maccabees. Moreover, of the New Testament: Four books of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles one book, thirteen epistles of Paul the Apostle, one of the same to the Hebrews, two of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, the Apocalypse of John." Council of Carthage III, Canon 47 (A.D. 397).
"The authority of our books [Scriptures], which is confirmed by agreement of so many nations, supported by a succession of apostles, bishops, and councils, is against you." Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean, 13:5 (c. A.D. 400).
"If any one shall say, or shall believe, that other Scriptures, besides those which the Catholic Church has received, are to be esteemed of authority, or to be venerated, let him be anathema." Council of Toledo, Canon 12 (A.D. 400).
"A brief addition shows what books really are received in the canon. These are the desiderata of which you wished to be informed verbally: of Moses five books, that is, of Genesis, of Exodus, of Leviticus, of Numbers, of Deuteronomy, and Josue, of Judges one book, of Kings four books, also Ruth, of the Prophets sixteen books, of Solomon five books, the Psalms. Likewise of the histories, Job one book, of Tobias one book, Esther one, Judith one, of the Machabees two, of Esdras two, Paralipomenon two books. Likewise of the New Testament: of the Gospels four books, of Paul the Apostle fourteen epistles, of John three, epistles of Peter two, an epistle of Jude, an epistle of James, the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse of John." Pope Innocent (regn. A.D. 401-417), Epistle to Exsuperius Bishop of Toulose, 6:7,13 (A.D. 405).
"Item, that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in the church under the name of divine Scripture. But the Canonical Scriptures are as follows: Genesis...The Revelation of John...for these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in the church." Council of Carthage, African Code, Canon 24 (A.D. 419).
"The book of the Apocalypse which John the wise wrote, and which has been honoured by the approval of the Fathers." Cyril of Alexandria, Worship and Adoration in Spirit and in Truth, 5 (A.D. 425).
"Now the whole canon of Scripture on which we say this judgment is to be exercised, is contained in the following books:--Five books of Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; one book of Joshua the son of Nun; one of Judges; one short book called Ruth, which seems rather to belong to the beginning of Kings; next, four books of Kings, and two of Chronicles --these last not following one another, but running parallel, so to speak, and going over the same ground. The books now mentioned are history, which contains a connected narrative of the times, and follows the order of the events. There are other books which seem to follow no regular order, and are connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, and Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, and the two of Ezra, which last look more like a sequel to the continuous regular history which terminates with the books of Kings and Chronicles. Next are the Prophets, in which there is one book of the Psalms of David; and three books of Solomon, viz., Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. For two books, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon from a certain resemblance of style, but the most likely opinion is that they were written by Jesus the son of Sirach. Still they are to be reckoned among the prophetical books, since they have attained recognition as being authoritative.
The remainder are the books which are strictly called the Prophets: twelve separate books of the prophets which are connected with one another, and having never been disjoined, are reckoned as one book; the names of these prophets are as follows:--Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; then there are the four greater prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel. The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books. That of the New Testament, again, is contained within the following:--Four books of the Gospel, according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John; fourteen epistles of the Apostle Paul--one to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, one to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, two to the Thessalonians, one to the Colossians, two to Timothy, one to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews: two of Peter; three of John; one of Jude; and one of James; one book of the Acts of the Apostles; and one of the Revelation of John." Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2:8,12 (A.D. 426).
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