BRIEF REFUTATIONS OF ROMAN THEOLOGY

Since I fully dealt with some Roman Catholic doctrines in other pages, a brief refutation of them will suffice here.

Rome denies that you can be saved by your own works alone. It says you need the help of God’s grace. This is an excuse for teaching that faith and grace are needed. The Church is the channel of grace so the doctrine is useful for tricking people into thinking they need the Church to be saved. The doctrine is slander. It smears a person who does tremendous good without God and grace. The Pelagian heretics who saw through the Church and the doctrine of grace produced many holy men and women who denied that they needed God’s grace. The Church loathed the heresy because it implied that the Church was not needed for salvation – the lust for power reared its head and the Pelagians were smeared. It is interesting that Jesus who said all people should be equal and have no lords over them in case they would be abused was supposed to have been the founder of Roman Catholicism – a cult that is too open to abuse and which demands that all people belong to it.

Roman Catholicism claim that people who die in unforgiven mortal sin will go to Hell forever for God being infinitely good is offended by sin infinitely. But if that is true then our good works deserve unlimited happiness. It is wrong to do evil to a person when you could do good so if God sends people to hell then God is evil and hateful for he should concentrate on their good merit. If we are impenitent he should enable us to repent if we want to. So when there is a choice between an infinite reward and infinite punishment we should get the reward.

The Bible never says that only ordained men can confer sacraments or that there is a sacrament of Holy Orders. Anybody who the apostles laid hands on received the Holy Spirit and burst out into charismatic gifts. This has been interpreted as the sacrament of confirmation but this is wrong for the Holy Spirit was already in them and he might have decided to make them charismatic when the apostles showed their approval for them by laying hands on them. This may have been a precaution in case they would use the gifts for power and money and make a laughing stock of God.

Rome says that Jesus paid for the sins of all on the cross and even for those who would reject it. Then God is making sinners pay for their sins in Hell which is unjust for it is making them pay for what has already been paid. It is even worse to die for those who will accept him when he turns his back on them until they go to a priest for forgiveness or grace. He is insulting his own atonement if he did that and calling the Catholic Church to copy him.

Prayer to the saints is idolatry. Praying to a saint either means that you think that she or he will have the best influence with God or that it won’t but you just pray to the saint anyway. If the saints have more influence then God is reluctant to do what you pray for. This is an insult to him and implies that the saint is wiser and stronger. And if the saint does not have any power over God there is no sense in praying to her or him. It would only be a cover for indulging the desire to worship other Gods. It would be better to go straight and form a direct relationship with God.
 
Idolatry is the worship of what is not God as sacred. It's a violation of the right God has to be worshipped.
 
"Our Lady is the surest, the easiest, the shortest and most perfect means of going to Jesus Christ" - St Louis de Montfort
 
The Holy Spirit is bypassed in favour of Mary. Whoever thinks that it is not enough to go to Jesus directly is really just praying to Mary while pretending it brings him closer to Jesus. If Jesus is as approachable and understanding and as human as the Bible says there is no need for Mary. To go to her is really bypassing Jesus while pretending that this bypassing isn't happening. Indeed the only Jesus it can bring one close to is the one in one's head not the real one. The Catholic Church believes Jesus is physically present in the Eucharist or communion. To say that you need Mary to go to Jesus is strange if the Church really believes one is united with Jesus in tremendous intimacy by receiving communion. Clearly then one must keep one's focus on Mary even then. That is like having sex with your wife while looking at your wife's mother and giving her the attention. The doctrine stops the Catholic from connecting with Jesus. You should be connecting with Jesus if he is what he is supposed to be. Mary can supposedly only bring us to him in two ways, by being like him and because she herself is his top disciple. But to run after a mirror is not to run after the person in the mirror. And her being top disciple is irrelevant. Even when getting baptised, the Catholic must see it in terms of getting to Jesus only through Mary. The baptism is not really intended to cause a connection with Jesus but only a nominal one. Therefore the baptism is invalid. Catholics cannot be saved for they have a false connection with Jesus.
 
Many people get a nice glow inside them when they pray and think of God. They pray without realising that they are praying to this feeling.
 
The best theologians say that God is being itself and you cannot talk about what God is only about what he is not. They say that the thought of a God who is in time and like us is idolatry.
 
If you adore your perception of God, you are not adoring God. Even if your perception is right that is not the point. You are still intending to honour what you think God is not what he is. It would take a miracle for a person to really honour and worship God.
 
Our hearts deceive us very well. We could think we are adoring him when we are actually adoring a mental and emotional image of him.
 
When people who pray to God find idolatry so hard to avoid, it must be nearly impossible to honour a saint and pray to a saint without being an idolater. The veneration of saints then must be rejected outright as blasphemous and heretical and corrupting. It is a turning away from the true good which is God.
 
The claim that praying to Mary, "Hail Holy Queen Mother of Mercy! Hail Our Life our Sweetness and Our Hope!" is really asking God to make her his instrument to save us and bless us is a lie. It pretends the prayer only seems to be all about Mary. In reality it is honouring her to please God. If that is true then why not say, "O God honour Mary for it pleases you". "O God hear the prayers Mary says for us". The Catholic alleges that he prays to the saints and to Mary in such a way that God is the real object. But the Catholics prayers could be understood as favouring the saints and Mary above God. They don't pray any different from people who prefer the saints to God!
 
If prayer is simple trust in God, "Thy will be done for you know what is best and have all power", then anything else, especially prayers to saints, is not honouring God.
 
Evil is what irrational. Praying to saints is evil.
 
It gets worse. Here is an example of how it does. The Church has had saints like Pope Cyriac who never existed (page 81, Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, Vol 2).
 
Imagine then how bad it is that Catholics worship the Eucharist as Jesus Christ! They pretend that a wafer in which no physical change has taken place is still physically changed into the real body and blood of Jesus! That is worse than anything the pagans ever did! They never intentionally worshipped idols of wood and stone. They thought the spirits of the gods lived in them. That was what they worshipped.
 
The teaching of incoherent Catholicism is that what makes Jesus Jesus is not physical implies that he is not his body. Thus the Catholic Church is antichrist for denying the coming of Jesus in the flesh. It also denies that he is the Christ. The Christ means that Jesus is the rightful king of Israel and will rule from there one day. The Catholic Church calls Jesus the Christ but it means the wrong thing by the word. It makes him out to be a spiritual king - a king in name only and not a political king. However the word Christ means one who is anointed as a king like David - he was a political king. Read 1 John. It says that those who deny that Jesus is his body and is the Christ is not a child of God or begotten of God. They may think they are but they are destined to spend eternity away from God and are antichrists.
 
The Vatican advocates a form of disguised Satan-worship because it teaches that God can stop us from sinning without removing our free will. God did that with the Virgin Mary who never sinned because she was conceived without original sin. Still, he let us be born in it. The Bible says that sin removes free will for sin is slavery and bondage. So, the Immaculate Conception doctrine destroys the free will defence which is the excuse Christians offer when asked how God could be so cruel and enables them to blame humanity. There are many other doctrines of Rome that mark it with the sign of Satan the Beast. Some have been written about in this book but others can be exposed in my other books. The Immaculate Conception dogma which was made in 1854 by Pope Pius IX was against early tradition which did see some people as sinless but excepted the Virgin Mary (page 135, Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, Vol 2). This says plainly that there was no devotion to the Virgin Mary like there is in Roman Catholicism now. It also says that the pope was faking infallibility when he made the dogma for the rules say he cannot do that with anything that is not in early tradition or implied by it.

Rome says that the existence of God can be rationally believed. On the strength of its alleged infallibility, Vatican 1, declared this. But there is no evidence for God at all. Evidence is no good when he is so mysterious. When we can’t explain why he allows evil then what good is it? This proves that Roman Catholicism is fallible not infallible.

Apologists for Roman Catholicism say that though the Church says that God’s existence can be rationally demonstrated she does not say that we have succeeded in proving God’s existence yet. But when one thinks about the five proofs of St Thomas, from movement, causality, necessity, design and degrees of goodness and it is plain that if they fail then there is no rational proof. How else could you prove God than by showing that all things must have been started off by him and depend on him who designed them? The apologists are not talking sensible - and their attempt to maintain the infallibility of Rome is futile.

Catholicism has made a dogma of the notion that faith is a supernatural gift of God implying anybody who does not believe sinfully refuses the gift. Faith must then be caused by divine influence on the intellect – God putting ideas in your mind. If God manipulates your feelings to make you believe that is the dangerous notion that you feel must be what God wants you to believe. It would follow that everybody who hears of Catholicism must feel that Catholicism is true if it is true and God never lies. If the implanting of ideas teaching is the true one then anybody who hears of the true Church must see something in it that is the truth of God or get a feeling of God calling them to check out the teaching and the Church. He has received truth from God by it meaning that he gets the message that it is the true Church. And if we cannot see the faith as true unless God gives us light then we don’t have free will with regard to faith. The doctrine of faith being supernatural infers that ecumenism is nonsense for if the other religions associating with the Catholic Church were good they would become Catholic and so it espouses sectarianism and two-faced dishonesty.

Rome says with the Bible that grace is an unmerited gift from God. Rome adds that nobody can please God and deserve rewards from him without grace. This denies free will. Yet this religion says that if we can’t choose God then we are not sinners for we can’t help ourselves doing wrong. Yet this religion condemns the Calvinists for saying that we can’t choose God on our own.

E. J. Cuskelly, M.S.C. wrote in The Kindness of God (pages 162-3) that grace is simply the attractiveness of God. God does not put energy into a person to attract him. It is just a person liking God because God makes himself seem nice through external influences. Obviously, grace is not a free gift for God can’t help being the way he is. And the things that make God attractive like nature and religion classes do not really do this. It is how we take them that does this and even then they fail. And so, it is not right to say John made me like Mary for that is only liking John’s portrayal of her and not Mary as she really is. The Church is speaking nonsense. Pelagius declared that grace isn’t necessary for salvation contrary to Catholic doctrine. He said we could reach God without God’s assistance but we find that the Catholic Church really teaches the same thing! To teach that grace is the attractiveness of God is a very narrow and bigoted thing to do. It dictates to other people what they should find attractive. Many are happy enough without thinking of God and take comfort in having a nice enough life after death.