Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Bible Alone?





A fundamental principle which protestants hold to is that of the "Bible alone" or in Latin, "Sola Scriptura". It makes the claim that the Bible is the final authority or rule for everything that is to be believed as a Christian, whether in matters of faith or morals.

In my own spiritual journey which led me to embrace the truth of the Catholic Faith, this notion of Sola Scriptura became a point of agonizing debate.

Friday, July 29, 2011

What do we mean by the term "Protestant"?


The need to clarify our use of the term Protestant has come to our attention in correspondence with one our blog viewers. When we say in our blog title description that our intent is "to interact with Protestant ideas opposed to the Catholic Faith", we do not mean to exclude those non-Catholics who may want, for one reason or another, to distance themselves from being identified with this term (Protestant).

On the contrary, for our purposes here, Protestant includes Baptist as well as other denominations which protest against (or are at least opposed to) the teaching of the Catholic Church, whether or not individual adherents to these denominations believe themselves to have historical roots in (what has come to be known by many as) the Protestant reformation. While much more could be said on this subject, suffice it to say at this point that we are using the term in the way it has ordinarily been used in recent history by scholars and common folk alike. This common sense of the term includes Baptist as well as all the non-Catholic faith traditions which are represented among our family members and friends to whom the invitation to participate in this blog has been offered.

Perhaps at another time (if we judge it to be within our scope) we'll take this subject up further in a separate post.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A Case of Mistaken Identities: Would the Real Catholicism Please Stand Up?


"There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church, which is of course, quite a different thing....As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do." --Archbishop Fulton Sheen