17 Jul '11 20:03>
Originally posted by jaywilljaywill, thanks for your courteous reply. I will try to reciprocate; you'll have to forgive me for any brusqueness in what follows (for which forgiveness I ask in advance 🙂 )
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Clearly you didn't bother to read the passages and the notes from the Douay-Rheims Bible.
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I will get to that this session.
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What I am saying, or rather asking, is: what justifies your applying I Tim 4 to the Ca ...[text shortened]... hurch.
I will not visit your website to see what it has to offer.
jaywill said:
Wasn't it you who refered to asking advice on Christian marriage issues from the Jesuit priests ?
pyx replies:
No, that was Kunsoo. I'm not sure what his(?) religious affiliation is, if any. I just jumped in to defend the Catholic Church, of which I am (by the grace of God) a member.
I wouldn't particularly defend the Jesuits as they are today. The Church (in the English-speaking world especially) is near a low point of faithfulness and orthodoxy, and the Jesuit Order is not in good shape right now. From what I know, there are faithful and good Jesuits, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, unfortunately. So flippant as it may have been, kunsoo's friend's comment was probably unfortunately all too accurate 🙂
jaywill said:
MIXTURE is the nature of the Roman Catholic Church. That is the MIXTURE of biblical things with bantantly unbiblical things.
pyx replies:
I would disagree with that statement (surprise, surprise), as well as your calling the Catholic Church "the oldest Christian sect." (She is God's Church, not a sect). I challenge you to find one single Catholic doctrine (or so much as a practice approved by the universal Church) that cannot be reconciled with the Bible. The first bishops of the Catholic Church (the Apostles, including St. Paul) *wrote* the Bible, after all, and a council of the Catholic Church determined the content of the Bible, and the Church claims to be the authentic interpreter of the Bible, so I think they're going to be pretty careful that they don't transgress the boundaries of Scripture when they do their office (Matt. 28:20).
That being said, the Catholic Church is definitely a mixture of the wheat and the chaff (and while I'd like to think I'm part of the wheat, that too is for God to determine, and not me 🙂 )
And I don't have a website that's worth your time, anyway. 🙂 drbo.org belongs to somebody else; it's the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible (as revised by Dr. Challoner).. it's an excellent (and very faithful, in the sense of being literal) translation. I have heard stories of people taking Bible classes at seminary and quoting something from the DRV and getting their professor's attention for its fidelity to the original languages.
Priestly (and religious) celibacy is a discipline, not a doctrine, but even so, it has roots that go back to St. Paul (cf I Cor 7). There are married priests in the Catholic Church (some of the Eastern-rite churches, and some Anglican convert priests in the Roman rite, may be married). But even in the primitive church, I believe that once a priest was ordained, he was not allowed to marry, and if a married priest's wife died, he could not remarry. And even in the Orthodox Church, only unmarried priests may become bishops.
If requiring priests to be celibate is a "doctrine of demons," I wonder why God allowed it to go on for 15 centuries before moving somebody to correct it 🙂