Test All Things
At a glance: Roman Catholicism holds to many essentials of the Orthodox Biblical faith. However, due to what Pope John Paul II calls, “Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, and the Church’s Magisterium” i.e., the addition of traditions and the vast teachings of saints, Popes and apparitions, the Roman church has accepted and taught many non-biblical doctrines. Some that we may not have to divide over but many that are dangerously non-biblical.
There is a sort of trend within the hierarchical system of Roman Catholicism in which the church sets teachings before its people which could all to easily be misunderstood and lead to serious sin. For example at my nieces first communion all the little children went one by one, blessed themselves with holy water and then bowed down to a large wood carving of Jesus on the cross. Children and adult lay people are taught to pray before statues and icons, they place flowers and candles before them, they wear medals and scapulars.
The Roman church attempts, in its definition of doctrine, to insure that Catholics practice no pagan superstitions or idolatry. However, when the church allows children, lay people and clergy to utilize all sorts of religious paraphernalia it cannot insure proper usage. Having worked at a Roman Catholic church for almost four years (as of March 2002), I have seen first hand over and over again the reactions of people when they learn that a medal they want is not available, that the candle they bought is not blessed, or that they cannot pay for a mass on the date they wanted. A priest removed the statue of a saint from the church when he had prayed to the saint it represents to have a lost object found and it did not turn up. Some people who keep statues at home will turn the statue around so that it faces the wall when their prayers to that saint have not been answered (a sort of punishment). There is an elderly lady who, although she is a member of one church, comes to another to light candles. The second church had been under construction for some time and so she could not get in to light the candles. I was recently told of how worried she is and who she is keeping track of how many she will have to light in order to make up what she missed.
How terribly sad it is for a religious system to bewitch people into hyper-superstition. These poor people react as if these religious traditions and paraphernalia were absolutely essential. The church cannot insure that a child, lay person or clergy for that matter will deal properly with these things and so the patent answer that a Catholic apologist gives is that people might be practicing errors but that the church does not officially teach those erroneous things. And if we argue that the Pope infallibly stated such and such a false teaching the response is always that technically that statement was not made infallibly. As it has been said, the infallibility of the Pope dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
The point being that the Roman church presents its devotees with a lot open manholes, blindfolds them and says to them, “Don’t fall in.” It is reminiscent of Jesus’ rebuke, “You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to” (Matthew 23:13). “you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers” (Luke 11:46).
Roman Catholic Apologists are careful to point out that Mary is not to be worshipped,
that she is not divine and that all devotion to her is meant to point us to
God Himself. However, when we see the final outcome, the logical conclusion
of the Catholic church’s combination of Scripture, plus tradition, plus
apparition messages, we end up with a Mary who is remarkably and un-biblically
similar to Jesus and God in general.
Both are a part of the plan of salvation, both are our redeemer, both were born
without sin, both were sinless throughout their lives, both went body and soul
into heaven, both are intercessors, we may pray to them both, salvation comes
by both, world peace comes by both, Jesus is the King and Mary is the Queen,
Jesus’ heart was pierced by a spear—Mary’s with a sword (symbolic),
Jesus’ brow was pierced by thorns—Mary’s Immaculate Heart
is pierced by thorns, Jesus is the new Adam—Mary is the new Eve, God is
our Father—Mary is our Mother. True that there are various qualifications
to be made to all these dogmas however, regardless of the Vatican’s technicalities,
semantics and loopholes, it is easy to see how the lines between Creator and
creature can be all to easily blurred. When teaching on the Stations of the
Cross, Hermano Juan Sandoval referred to them as The Stations of Our Lady. The
Stations of the Cross retell step by step, the sufferings of Jesus from His
being condemned to death to His being lain in the tomb. Penitente, Juan Sandoval
robs this from Jesus and attributes it to Mary. The very time of the forgiveness
of the sins of the world is stolen from Jesus and given to the Mary of dogma,
what a terrible offense to Christ.
Catholic apologist Karl Keating states, “In the Catholic scheme of things,
she [Mary] is certainly different from other women, so much so that she is considered
worthy of special devotion (not of course of worship, latria, but of a level
of honor, hyperdulia, higher than other saints receive). Her status accounts
for the attention paid her. Fundamentalists think that what she gets, by way
of devotion, is necessarily taken from Christ.”
While this is a well stated technicality, we should consider the little child,
the layman or even the priest, who are taught to kneel before a statue of Mary,
to place a candle and flowers before it, and pray to Mary before it. Can these
people fully appreciate and intellectualize the grammatical and theological
distinctions between latria and hyperdulia?
Thus Pope Paul VI wrote, “Nor is it to be feared that the greater veneration, liturgical as well as private, given to her may obscure or diminish ‘the adoration which is offered to the Incarnate Word, as well as to the Father and to the Holy Spirit.’”
Officially speaking, we need not fear that devotion to Mary would obscure that of God but as far as actual practice is concerned Elliot Miller point out, “While in theory these categories are intended to prevent idolatrous worship of created beings, in practice they have little effect on the religious feeling of the masses. How could feelings be subject to such coldly analytical distinctions?…During the Second Vatican Council the bishop of Cuernavaca (Mexico) acknowledged: ‘Devotion to Mary and the saints, especially in our [Latin American] countries, at times obscures devotion to Christ.’”
Let us consider the manner of the worship of God and the adoration of Mary.
The person will bow down to both (either before nothing or before a statue).
Both are prayed to. Both are to be supplicated (to ask humbly of). Both are
to be thanked.
What then is the difference between worship and adoration? The difference is
a very fine line drawn in the sand ever in danger of being all to easily obscured.
The difference must be a minute mental attitude.
Note also the words of Raphael Patai; Noted anthropologist and Biblical scholar
who taught Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “In contrast
to Christianity, in parts of which the Mother of the Messiah became a central
divine personality whose popular worship frequently tended to overshadow that
of her son, in Judaism the Mother of the Messiah remained a shadowy and enigmatic
human figure to whom little attention is paid.” While the Catholic church
would outright deny his claim that Mary’s popular worship frequently tended
to overshadow that of her son the point is clear that is the message that the
world is getting from Roman Catholicism. While discussing my faith in Jesus
as Messiah with my parents, my own mother said, “We Jews believe in one
God, but Christians have Mary and the saints.” Again, technicalities aside,
I now had to answer for Roman Catholicism’s doings.
Also, note that Fr. Virgilio P. Elzondo; priest of the Archdiocese of San Antonio,
professor at the Mexican-American Cultural Center, the University of Notre Dame
and the University of Texas has pointed out that there are “people who
do not await the Church’s O.K. before venerating people.” When the
gates for exalting, venerating or being devoted to dead people are opened no
one can control the flood.
The Bible teaches “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate
the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the
other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24).
Mammon is translated as money, but a wider ranging implication is that we cannot
serve God and anything else that will deviate our attention from God, our complete
devotion to Christ.
Since that patent Catholic defense for Marian dogmas (as well as many others) is that the teachings can be traced back to a few centuries after Christ, we will turn this argument around in order to show how simple it would be to prove that Roman Catholicism worships Mary and idols, something which is denied by them, tooth and nail.
There are countless martyrs who were killed because they were not willing to simply place a little pinch of incense on the coals burning before an image of Caesar and say “Caesar is Lord.” These Christians believed that if they did so they would be denying Christ and worshipping and idol and the Caesar whom it represents. These Christians believed this even though if they offered the incense they would have done it with no intention of worshipping the image, they would have done it in order to stay alive, yet they chose death in pure, single-minded, complete devotion to Christ. This is a well-known fact of history, but why is it that the Catholic church does not accept this ancient belief of early Christians? Rather, they flagrantly violate this authentic early belief and they pray before images, they offer candles and flowers to them, they adorn them with rosaries and scapulars, and even crown them (as was done with the image of Our Lady of Fatima). They substitute “Caesar is Lord” for referring to Mary as Our Lady (Lady is the feminine counterpart of Lord), Heavenly Mother, Queen of Heaven, Intercessor, Savior, Redeemer, etc.
We do not make this point in order to prove that all Roman Catholics and others
which practice likewise rituals are idol worshipers. Rather, we are interested
in showing that if we put to use the simplistic tactic of claiming that because
a belief is old it must be true, we can turn this argument around and put the
Catholic church in a quandary.
Consider that God did commanded Moses to make an image. “the people grew
impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses…Then the
LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites
died…The LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a snake and put it up on a pole;
anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’ So Moses made a bronze
snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked
at the bronze snake, he lived” (Numbers 21:4-6, 8-9).
However, when the people of Israel began to misuse this image by burning incense
to it, the king destroyed it. This was so that it would not be worshipped, because
the people were deviating from the worship of the one true God.
“In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son
of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign…He removed the high places, smashed
the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze
snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense
to it (It was called Nehushtan)” (2nd Kings 18:1, 4).
“NEHUSHTAN — of copper; a brazen thing a name of contempt given
to the serpent Moses had made in the wilderness (Num. 21:8), and which Hezekiah
destroyed because the children of Israel began to regard it as an idol and ‘burn
incense to it.’ The lapse of nearly one thousand years had invested the
‘brazen serpent’ with a mysterious sanctity; and in order to deliver
the people from their infatuation, and impress them with the idea of its worthlessness,
Hezekiah called it, in contempt, ‘Nehushtan,’ a brazen thing, a
mere piece of brass (2 Kings 18:4).”
Our point is that the line between hyperdulia and straight out worship is like a line drawn in the sand.