The Roman Catholic Church is full of Satanic Doctrine!

THE ROMAN CHURCH OF ANTICHRIST

The Roman Catholic Church today is widely regarded as a Christian Church. The truth is that it is a pagan counterfeit of Christianity and is full of blasphemous doctrines that bars its victims from eternal salvation. Jesus said that if you are a Christian you will avoid the teachings of false prophets. They can deceive you and so any Church that is led astray is not Christian for it is not following Christ. The purpose of this book is to say something different about Roman Catholicism rather than repeat all the traditional refutations employed by Christians.

This article is designed to convince any honest person that the Roman Catholic Church is wrong and is not true to the gospel of Jesus Christ which alone brings salvation.

We must examine our religion (1 Thessalonians 5:21) for so many false prophets have gone out into the world. The greatest and basic commandments are to love God with our whole being, that is submit all things to him, and our neighbour as ourselves. This means that faith in what God has revealed in his word is to be the foundation of our lives for you can’t keep these commandments unless you believe that God revealed them and believe in anything he has said. It follows that it is our duty to study the things of God thoroughly and with careful thought and purified logic. We are to be willing to die if necessary for the sake of the gospel as the apostles’ example made plain. To die for your faith without doing this is fanaticism and wickedness and the fact is that most religious people commit the sin of not deepening their faith and making sure it is what God wants them to believe. God makes it clear that we have no excuse for being wrong when we have the resources to learn. That is why I say that organisations like the Catholic Church are nothing more than legalised rip-offs and their creeds are abominations in the sight of God even if they are orthodox for being orthodox is no good unless God is allowed to breathe his gift of charity into the heart.

The Bible attacks Catholicism’s latest novelty ratified at Vatican 2 that if you have the wrong faith, say if you believe sacraments will save you though God says you will be saved only by faith, and sincerely practice it you will go to Heaven. The Church’s first big leader after Christ, St Paul who was entrusted to preserve the revelation of Jesus, wrote that if Christ has not been raised then we are still in our sins despite being sincere and are lost and cannot be saved (1 Corinthians 15:17). This implies that if we think we have been saved by a saviour and repent of our sins God will not make allowances for us if we are wrong. In other words, sincerity will not save. The apostles risked their lives and died for the faith and God approved of this. Jesus died for his faith. They could have avoided these deaths by working somewhere else but they did not for it was not God’s will. When God tells us to die for the faith when we need to then it follows that faith must be necessary to save us from final damnation to Hell and not just any faith but correct faith. Any religious body that teaches that sincerity can save outside explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ is damning souls and it is better to have no ecumenical relations with it than to do that and give it an aura of respectability and cause even one soul to be eternally damned by that respectability. Since a sincere faith in the wrong religion will not save you it follows that you must have the basic ideas about how Jesus saved us and who he was correct. For example, if Jesus died for all your sins you will not be able to receive the benefits and pardon unless you affirm against Roman Catholicism that all sin merits everlasting punishment.

If sincerity were enough, God would accept idol worship for the idolaters would intend it to go to the real God if they are wrong. But the Bible says he is totally intolerant of idols and the worship (Deuteronomy 13, 1 Corinthians 10:14-21). If sincerity could suffice we would be better off with a religion with a bare minimum of rules and doctrines for that would make getting into Heaven easier. God is a righteous God and he cannot tolerate the view that sincerity is enough because it threatens morality to a great extent. Many people doing evil really believe that evil is right. If sincerity is enough then it is a good idea to believe that only a few things are really wrong and that everything else is at worst neutral and since people cannot agree on what is right and wrong disorder and destruction will be the fruit.

When Jesus said that it is by the fruits of the true prophets of God (Matthew 7:15,16) that you know them the principal fruit would have to be truth. If a prophet has loads of people praying and doing good works but his teaching is wrong then these people have wandered from God and the harm they are doing will not be noticed so truth is the most important fruit. Let nobody say that the Roman Church is in touch with the Holy Spirit because of its lovely fruits for it is a false Church.

Hebrews 10:26 says that wilful sin after learning the truth means that no sacrifice will save us anymore and guarantees a worse penalty than stoning to death (v 29). Apostasy is meant for we all sin (21:1). Apostasy is the only sin that excludes the saved person from salvation so if the saved person stays in Catholicism that person loses salvation and will never repent the way God demands. Flee from Catholicism and do it now (Matthew 8:21, 22). The Lord Jesus said that those who attribute the works of the Holy Spirit to the Devil will not be pardoned in this world or in the world to come (Matthew 12). Rome says that everybody commits this sin at some stage which is encouraging it.

Those who believe the Bible that once you are saved you are saved forever and cannot lose salvation no matter what you do (with the exception of apostasy) have to believe that if you are saved you will do good works which will be the evidence that you are saved. Reason says that the supreme good work, loyalty to the truth and working to spread it so that others will be saved and live holy lives, then will be a mark of the person who is really saved. So anybody who stays in Catholicism even for a short time after claiming to be saved is not really saved. God will not invite you or inspire you to do good works at the expense of the better ones. If a person is saved that person will do good works (James 2) because God is working in him and has changed him and these works will be chiefly whatever promotes the gospel. So if you are saved you will believe the fundamentals of the gospel. You will believe that the Bible alone contains the word of God.

Jesus said that no man can serve two masters or serve God and mammon for he must love one and hate the other. In the same way a man cannot serve the faith revealed by the Lamb of God while serving what he calls beliefs when these beliefs contradict that faith. Faith in Jesus is insincere if doctrines are accepted that make Jesus a bad person. If you really loved and served Jesus the bad doctrines would be dropped so they indicate that your faith is insincere and just a dose of self-deception.

Catholics say that baptism forgives sin and makes you an adopted child of God. The Bible speaks of Spirit baptism or Spirit washing as well as water baptism (Mark 1:8). So we don’t know if the verses that speak of baptism that forgives sins and gives the Holy Spirit mean water baptism. They probably do not for they would say if they meant water baptism. John 3:5 which has Jesus saying that water and the spirit are necessary for the new birth that makes one qualified for heaven says in the original translation water and wind which are both Old Testament emblems for the Holy Spirit. Plus Jesus could have said you need to be born again of water and the Holy Spirit without meaning that the water is the vehicle of regeneration. You need to pray to be regenerated by faith alone so the water baptism for repentance could have been the form this prayer took which might have been the custom then. If Jesus had come in a time when this was not a custom he might have said perhaps that you need to be reborn of prayer and the Spirit. The water of baptism is no good without repentance and trust in God so if he meant the baptismal waters it was the repentance and confidence in God that the waters stood for that he had in mind. Some assume he meant that the water has to be dealt with before the Spirit can come but he may not be speaking chronologically for the chapter is a bit jumbled which is why it is a bit hard to interpret. The order he had in mind could be, born again of the Holy Spirit and of water. It could be that providence arranges that anybody who is really saved will undergo water baptism. You could be born again of water in the physical sense for there is water in the womb and born again of the Spirit in the spiritual sense without implying that you cannot be born again of the Spirit until you are baptised.

Catholics are not born again. The baptismal rebirth belief prevents Catholics from accepting salvation by faith alone. Catholic baptism is occult because it is meant to be an opening to the idolatry of the Mass which is the supreme goal in Catholicism. Paul was told to wash away his sins in baptism but that could be because the rite was one of repentance. Peter says that baptism saves us by being an appeal to God for mercy which does not necessarily mean it is a sacrament. It is pure blasphemy to say that God rejects unbaptised babies and excludes them from Heaven if they die and accepts baptised ones just because they are baptised. The doctrine is the stuff from which racism and sexism and sectarianism are made. Real Christianity is not fanatical. It fits the way we would want to live even if our faith is wrong. If we are wrong no harm is done. To say such things about unbaptised babies is to further religious discrimination and is fanatical for the doctrine is anything but nice. Water baptism in Catholicism does not inspire and incline the baptised to do the chief good works and so it cannot be the rebirth the Bible means.

The Bible never mentions infant baptism but stresses that we must believe and trust in God before baptism. If the Church of Rome really cared about God it would repeat the baptism in early adulthood in case just in case the childhood one was invalid and useless. Bible baptism is not about giving the Holy Spirit but about showing your connection to the death and resurrection of Jesus so it should be done by total immersion to picture going down into the tomb with Jesus and rising up with him to a new life. Pouring water is not baptism (Romans 6). Some object that circumcision which was done to babies was replaced by baptism so baptism can be given to babies. But circumcision was given only to men and the reason it was given to children was that they would be qualified to inherit the land promised to Abraham. Baptism is superior in that women can get it and it was not limited to the Jewish race so the rules for it were radically different. With those changes there is no need to suppose that it was for infants. Some say that since baptism is a sign of regeneration even a Catholic baptism will do and it does not need to be repeated if you enter a Christian denomination. If it is that then it is meant to be an expression and reminder of how to obtain the new birth. This means the Catholic baptism is no good because it opposes the new birth by falsely claiming to be the new birth. It gives no evidence that it is the new birth and Jesus said that what was not for him was against him. Without the evidence, baptism then is against the new birth.

The Catholic Church assumes that Jesus made Peter the head of the Church and therefore that he was the first pope. Jesus called him the rock of the Church in Matthew 16 which need not mean that or mean that he was meant to have successors. He was called the rock because of his faith so he could only be the rock if he remained in that faith. Since Peter failed many times to sustain the Church with his rocklike faith it could be that Christ’s assertion was a conditional prophecy that Peter did not fulfil – obviously the words, on this rock I will build my Church could only apply if Peter remained as the rock. There is absolutely no proof that the papacy was started by God and was not a human mistake. Such a serious claim for Peter should be provable. So Catholicism has no right to be called the Church of Christ when it is built on the wrong rock. It is not the Church of Jesus but of the Jesus that the pope has invented for Jesus has to be seen through the eyes of the pope the alleged rock. The revealer is greater than the revealed so the pope is claiming to be greater than God for how could God be great when the pope determines how we shall understand and approach God? That is putting a man’s image of God before God.

The Law of Moses affirmed by Christ says that there has to be two trustworthy and independent eyewitnesses to serious civil and religious claims (Deuteronomy 19:15) – the standard for religious claims has to be stricter for spiritual things are more important (Matthew 10:34-39). There are no such witnesses at all for Peter being a pope or bishop of Rome.

As Peter was the only person at that time with the gift of faith from God that Jesus was the divine Son of God it is clear that if he was made the rock then there could have been other rocks too. Perhaps all of us are rocks when we have true faith. The Church can repose on many rocks because the rocks form a layer on which more rocks can be put. Jesus did stress that all were to be equal in his Church.

The Catholic claim that the Church is infallible and that the pope is infallible under some conditions is untenable. The Church says that infallibility is the result of the Church doing research and finding out that a doctrine is true and revealed by God and it is guided in this research so that it knows that the doctrine is from God and then it can define the doctrine and use its infallibility to get the people to believe in it. But the evidence for many of Rome’s doctrines is not good enough so her boast is plain arrogant hypocrisy. Also, the Church must be above God when it can know when God is talking to it. It must know more than God.

The infallibility cannot work without the research therefore the research is more important than the infallibility. You cannot trust a doctrine to be infallible unless you have seen and checked the research first in which case you don’t need the infallibility. Infallibility is totally useless. In practice, it leads to people believing a dogma just because the Church or pope proclaims it which is blasphemy for you need to be very sure that God who is to be the heart and soul of our lives has spoken.

Because the creed says the Church is one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic, the Church cannot add to the doctrine of the apostles. It is her dogma that any doctrine she teaches that is not in the apostolic doctrine is to be abandoned but it adds that it cannot err so this will never happen. This is why the Church says that infallible decrees from the Church or pope are not divinely inspired. But there has to be some kind of inspiration for the infallibility to work so what the Church is saying is incoherent and obviously absurd and deliberately deceptive.

In Roman theology, not all sin is mortal or ends your friendship with God. The sin that doesn’t is called venial.

God would do unlimited good for you so you owe him unlimited gratitude. To sin is to be infinitely unfair to him so it must be breaking your relationship with God completely.

God is unlimitedly good so he must hate all sin infinitely so all sin is mortal (James 2:10).

Paul said that we must not tell a lie even to save a person from eternal damnation for doing evil for the sake of good is wrong (Romans 3:7,8). When we can’t even tell a small lie that means that all sin is mortal. This shows that if we had to stop sinning to be saved we would never be saved when something so small is so bad for we all sin and lie one way or another.

The Church says that you can please God with good works done in a state of unrepented venial sin. The work has good results only but as regards the heart it is selfish and defiant of God and goodness. The work may be good in its results but it only looks good. How can you have the right motive when you are just really telling God that you will do good when it suits you? That is what you are saying by your good works when you refuse to repent before you do the good work (James 3:11, 12). The Church is deliberately lying because it teaches that the good works of a mortal sinner are not really good in God’s eyes because of the rebellious attitude being maintained so it is fully aware of the fact that one sin defiles all you do. Catholic holiness is really a mockery of good. The saints of Rome were frauds for they supported Rome’s hypocrisy. With a lie like that, how could we trust the Church when it validates the supernatural origin of its miracles like the cures at Lourdes? Good works that are neither inspired by God nor done by his grace are far more dangerous than obvious sin for they are subtly sinful and delude yourself and others into a false sense of security. Without true Christianity there can be no morality.

Rome says that sinners can administer the sacraments, the seven rites that give grace as long as they intend that the grace will be given. We are all sinners and when one sin defiles all we do and makes it sinful and makes us enemies of God it is impossible to see how we can sincerely intend to give sacramental grace for when we don’t love God we cannot love other people even if we think we do (1 John 4:20). The sacraments cannot work. The sacraments of the real Christians are just symbols. They cannot be more than that. For example, priestly absolution cannot pardon sins.

Rome says that all repented sin can be pardoned in confession to a priest if the person is sorry not just because the sin insulted God but also because the sin deserves punishment.

If the person were really contrite he would drop the selfish motive. He should repent because sin is bad and not because he will be punished if he does not repent. Only pure sorrow for the love of God should be able to pardon sin. Rome can only give artificial pardon for artificial repentance.

The Catholic priests think they can forgive sins. Priests cannot forgive for God for they are not God. Jesus allegedly started the sacrament in John 20:23 when he said, “If ye forgive anybody’s sins they are forgiven and if you do not they are not forgiven.” Obviously even if the Catholic interpretation is right then he had to have meant: “If you cause God to forgive sins etc.” You can cause this without performing absolution or saying, “I absolve you”. Or perhaps Jesus meant: “If you forgive the sins of any they are pardoned by God. I am giving you the power to see who to forgive by allowing into my Church and you will only choose those who have been and are pardoned by God. Those who hurt God need to be forgiven by his Church too for to hurt him is to offend it and deserve to be an outcast.” This understanding of the verse is the safest interpretation and it is the one we should follow because we can survive without absolving priests even if Jesus did create them. This is the natural meaning for even God cannot give anybody the power to forgive sins as if they were him. If the apostles could forgive sins there is no hint that the power was or could be passed on.

It would be evil if Jesus limited power to forgive sins to priests. It makes no sense to say that a virtuous layperson cannot absolve a dying person and the lowest kind of priest can. It makes no sense to say that a person can be pardoned for having weak sorrow for sin in confession and that a person with more sorrow cannot be pardoned without it. It is disgusting. It also contradicts the Church doctrine that God does all he can to keep people out of Hell.

The Church of Rome admits that priests are needed to absolve sins only because we do not repent solely out of pure love for God which wipes sins even without a priest. We will not repent properly and accept the grace of God so it is a sin to need a priest. Real love is strict for sin is degrading yourself and here we have a God who sets up a system so that we can go on being lazy! This God is not holy and to go to him for forgiveness is mockery for he should be looking after his own sins!

For a man to decide who God is going to forgive is intolerable blasphemy. God could not allow it if he wanted to and if Jesus said he did he would have committed a mistake – only one slip is necessary – that would show he was a fraud and not from God according to the strict decree given by God in Deuteronomy 18. Acts 5:3 and Galatians 6:13 show that the non-Catholic interpretation of Jesus’ words is right. The prophetic power to read hearts was needed to get the Church off to a good start. Paul wrote that anybody the Corinthian Church forgave he forgave (2 Corinthians 2). He could have said: “If you forgive anybody I forgive them” which matches Jesus’ words but the Corinthians are not forgiving for Paul like priests forgive for God. Paul says he forgives it in the person of Christ. The apostles were in the place of Christ on earth and this forgiving was about what affected the Church and order. It is like a Presbyterian minister standing in the place of Christ forgiving a schismatic faction in his congregation. Yet Catholics imagine they read priestly absolution in Paul. But that interpretation gives the absurd scenario of the Corinthians absolving people and Paul absolving them! Catholics say that distant absolutions are futile. The penitents have to be present.

When God won’t forgive a sinner who has the right dispositions until they go to confession that is clearly magic and occultism. Even the Satanist does not try to control God by magic like this sinister and arrogant religion does. When it is venial sin that God delays forgiving it looks all the more ridiculous and malicious and petty. Accepting forgiveness from God is the most important act of worship there is for you can only approach God through his mercy. For forgiveness to be reserved to the priest in any circumstances is for God to prevent worship. A God who does that to himself is depriving himself of what he deserves and blaspheming himself.

The Roman Church says a person with less sorrow for sin than another will be the one who gets God’s pardon if he or she is able to go to confession which is a disgraceful blasphemy. God said he wants us to serve him and this doctrine implies the opposite.

The God of the Bible hates sin for he is love (1 John 4:8). Sin is not his fault but ours for only a sinner could deliberately cause others to sin. Yet Catholicism says that her God preserved the Virgin Mary from all sin simply by making sure original sin would not touch her from the moment of her conception. He could have done the same for the rest of us so every one of our sins is his fault. He is the Devil. If God could stop us from sinning he would. Jesus was able to refrain from sin because he was God who will never sin so his case was different.

The doctrine of Purgatory says that if you die in venial sin or you have not done enough penance for your forgiven sins you will have to go to Purgatory to suffer before you can go into Heaven. You go there for agonising purification to be ready to go into God’s kingdom. But the Church says you cannot merit anything in Purgatory. You cannot help yourself and you need the prayers and good works of the saints and the living on earth to be done on your behalf for God to let up. This is an extraordinarily offensive to Christian ears. It has God preferring inflicting pain to letting you merit your own release by prayer and good works and getting rid of the suffering is harder than getting rid of the sin as if punishing is more important than reforming for it makes the punishment more to be feared than the sin. The only reason this blasphemy is made is because it is an excuse for charging for Masses and prayers to be said for the dead. It implies that God would keep you away from full union with his presence in Heaven just because you have not done enough penance though you are free from sin. This infers that sin is easier to get rid of than the punishment due to it. But the sin is the worst evil and should be harder to get rid of for you deserve the punishment so in a sense it is a good thing for you deserve it. The implication is that God’s morality leaves a lot to be desired. The inner union with God the child of God enjoys on earth is the essential union. In Heaven the only difference is that you are able to sense God and see and hear and enjoy him forever. Purgatory has the souls there having the essential union so why are they excluded from the sense union? It makes no sense.

The Catholic Church offers plenary indulgences, which are full cancellation of the punishment due to your sins that remains after sin is pardoned. They are offered if you fulfil some conditions. But it would be a sin to take these indulgences when you could atone by extra good works that benefit others and spread the gospel and prove your love by this sacrifice. So plenary indulgences cannot be possible.

The Mass is the heart of Roman Catholicism so if the Mass is not from God, Roman Catholicism is a false religion. It stakes its infallibility on the Mass. At Mass the priest allegedly transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ to be the spiritual food of grace for us – a miracle change called transubstantiation. We need God’s influence, his light in our hearts, and we need his assistance to overcome the tendency in us to sin. This is called grace and we do not need to eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus to get it. God would not do unnecessary miracles and as Christ is God he dwells in us anyway. The Bible says that miracles are signs so they cannot be unnecessary.

We do not need to eat Jesus for all we need as spiritual food is God’s grace and power. That is commonsense and commonsense is good (1 Corinthians 10:15). God deceives many unnecessarily if the communion is really Jesus which makes a liar of him. All Rome can say is that God does these miracles for a mysterious purpose. But that idea opens the road to all kinds of strange doctrines. You can say that God wants you to kill people with dimples for a strange purpose.

The Church takes the words of Jesus at the last supper, eg. “This is my body which will be given up for you” literally. But Church dogma says that the body that is present is the body of Jesus in its glorified and resurrected state (page 22, Is Jesus Really Present in the Eucharist? Michael Evans, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1986). That is why the Church calls it an unbloody sacrifice. But the words say it is the pre-resurrection body. The Church then pretends that part of what Jesus said is literal and ignores the rest of what he said. Jesus did not say it was his glorious body but actually denied that. The words of Jesus oppose the Mass and say the Lord’s Supper is symbolic.

Only John 6 comes close to backing up the Roman doctrine that the bread and wine of communion become the body and blood of Christ. But since two eyewitnesses are needed according to the Bible to verify that God has spoken and if John is the word of God it follows that it must mean something else for such a serious doctrine could not appear in one scripture.

Jesus used eat in the passage in the sense of feed the soul with the bread of life meaning himself and the soul cannot literally eat. He was not saying the bread was literal for he was a man not bread and even the Catholic Church does not say he is bread. This tells us that though God may put the body and blood of Christ in the soul the eating is not literal and so it does not prove any transformation of bread into flesh. The Eucharist could be a reminder that God feeds all with the body and blood of Christ. John 6 condemns the Roman practice of transubstantiation as idolatry and heretical. The Church of Rome says that there have been miracles in which the bread and wine visibly changed into the flesh and blood of Jesus when priests celebrated Mass. These miracles contradict the theology of the apostles and even that of the Catholic Church which says the risen Lord has glorious flesh that is not subject to change or decay. The specimens of his body and blood the Church has are not glorious. The blood is clotted and the flesh is dry. It could be that they did not originate the way the Church says but that the devil just preserved flesh and blood.

John 6 is held by Catholics to prove the magical change. It uses symbolism in calling Jesus bread when he is not bread (Rome says he does not become bread but bread becomes him) and then starts about Jesus becoming food at verse 51 suggesting that the whole thing is symbolic for Jesus never stated that he was speaking literally from that verse on. He would have had to say he was being literal for when you talk in symbols and then switch to something that still seems to be symbolic for it is so strange nobody will understand you.

Catholics argue that since Jesus did not correct the Jews in John 6 as he discussed the bread of life being his flesh when they asked how he could give his flesh to eat that he must have meant it literally. The Jews asked how he could give his flesh to eat which would have to be taken to be sarcasm which Jesus chose not to answer for he didn’t have to if the sarcasm understanding was what the context demanded and it does demand that. Also, Jesus did not answer or refute the earlier sarcastic comment in verses 42, 43 where the Jews sneer about him saying he was the bread of life that descended from Heaven saying he was only the son of Joseph. When there is symbolism in the passage the whole thing should be taken figuratively because the principle of taking the most uncomplicated interpretation says so. We should not read miracles where we need only read metaphors.

It is possible however that Jesus did correct them when he said that they would have no life in them unless they would eat his flesh they would have realised that their literalism was wrong for he had already forgiven people and given them spiritual life with God and these people had not eaten him.

The Jews could not have known if Jesus meant a Eucharist for he had not instituted it yet so what they said was mockery and didn’t need to be answered for only genuine questions are entitled to be answered.

Even if John 6 does teach transubstantiation it still does not help the Catholic Church support it’s Mass.

Jesus said his flesh gives immortality unlike the bread from heaven that Moses gave which would appear to suggest that we will not get this bread – if it is physical bread that has been changed into Jesus - until we rise again when it will give us everlasting physical life (verse 58). Jesus might have offered us his body and blood under the forms of bread and wine now but he won’t give it to us until we are ready after death so that it makes our bodies immortal. God enables the person to eat this food and drink this blood at the resurrection. The words, “Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood has everlasting life and I will raise him up on the last day,” seem to say we can eat and drink them in this life. But it could be something like, “Whoever find the fountain of life will live forever” meaning “Whoever finds the fountain of life that I offer now but which you will not be ready for until the resurrection will live forever”. It’s not saying any individual will find it but that it can and will be found. Jesus was offering the Jews the Eucharist there and then if they would purify themselves of all sin but they won’t until they rise again and if they avoid Hell.

St Paul wrote that eating the bread and drinking the cup is a sign of union with Christ. It is a prayer that unites you to him. That is why to partake unworthily which is participation without recognising the body of Christ like the Docetists – those who denied Jesus had a body and said he was just a vision - did is a sin and brings judgment. Or perhaps the partakers did not recognise the body as being the source of their salvation by dying on the cross.

There is no evidence for the Roman doctrine of the Mass in the Bible. The doctrine is positively denied when Paul told the Corinthians it was okay to call the cup the new covenant in the blood of Jesus instead of the blood of Jesus.

The Bible and the Catholic Church say that nobody is ever completely free from sin in this world (1 John 1:8, Romans 3). To eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus while adhering to sin is just telling God you will do good when it pleases you so it is blasphemy. It is a bigger blasphemy when the actual body and blood of Jesus are being received. It would still be blasphemy to take bread and wine representing a sign that you will fight sin as much as you can but not as much therefore there is no way God will exacerbate sin by giving us the body and blood of Jesus. The Mass is pro-sin.

God could not turn the bread and wine into Jesus even if he wanted to because we are more sure that God exists and that Jesus was his Son than we are that the Eucharist is his body EVEN if the Gospel of John is the word of God. It is blasphemy to make the Eucharist equal to God and to be willing to die for it as the Church commands when this is the case.

The Mass cuts the Catholic Church completely off God and Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church has a different god from the Christian God. Its god is a piece of bread and a drop of wine. Their answer is that God is under the form of the bread and wine so that is not true. But it is true. To say that the Catholics just err about where Jesus is if he is not in the Eucharist and not in directing their worship to him is to say there is no such sin as idolatry. Dogmas have varying levels of importance. You cannot believe bread and wine can become God unless you believe in God first so God is the most important belief and you should be more sure he exists than that he can disguise himself as food and drink. Therefore it is blasphemy to say that God is the food and drink for the latter beliefs are not as certain. The Catholics put the latter beliefs before God so it is perfectly right to say they adore bread and wine not God.

To worship bread and wine as Jesus Christ when they are not Jesus Christ is to insult and be ungrateful to God without whom we would not be and who because of his perfection and infinite love is more deserving of love and sacrifices than any of us. If you are nasty towards God you are nasty towards all he has made for if there were no God they would not exist. Logic says it is worse to do anything to promote idolatry than to promote adultery. Sin is in the will/intent and not in any action however bad so it is foolish to say there is no harm in going to Mass therefore it is okay. The New Testament warns that we must not participate in false worship (1 Corinthians 10:20). It does not let you encourage adultery so it will not allow you to encourage idolatry whether the worshippers are sincere or not either. If you say nothing to Mass-goers though you do not go yourself, YOU are as good as going to Mass to mock God even if they don’t intentionally insult him for YOU know what the Mass really is and you are willing them to go when you do not discourage them. Saying nothing makes you a great sinner indeed (Ezekiel 33:8) and God commanded that instead of attending Mass we must flee idolatry (1 Corinthians 10:14). The one that encourages evil by doing nothing to fight it is worse than the one that does it for the latter is the one that will suffer for it in this world while the other in his or her craftiness and laziness does not. Their attitude is: “I’d rather this evil happened than I do anything about it”. How vindictive could you get? Error and evil thrive when God’s people do nothing. The true Christian is saved by repenting sin and having faith in the atonement of Jesus and not by works such as the Mass (Ephesians 2:8-10).

All idolaters are sincere for insincere idolatry is not idolatry at all. Yet the Bible insists that idolaters will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9) and that idolaters sacrifice to demons even though they mean to sacrifice to their gods who are more good than bad (1 Corinthians 10:20). Separate yourself from the Catholic Church. The Old Testament gives revelations from God which say that there is no greater sin and danger than idolatry for the basic commandment is to love God with all your power and strength and he says that you are not doing that by idolatry. If Catholics were really saved they would stop going to Mass for that would be the first thing the grace of God would draw them away from for being idolatry the Mass attacks the source of grace and a holy life, God. It replaces him with food and drink.

The Bible argues that idols are useless for they cannot protect themselves and they rust and decay. Rome says its Eucharist can be desecrated and decay but is still Jesus because God allows this to happen for a mysterious purpose. But the idolaters thought the same about their idols! Jesus knew we should know this so he could have talked as if he meant transformation of the substance of bread and wine into his flesh and blood for he would expect us to know he did not mean it.

The Bible makes it clear that anything that is called a god or God that is not able to do anything for itself and which would therefore be unable to protect itself from destruction and decay is not what it is supposed to be (Isaiah 44:9-20; Jeremiah 10:1-16; Psalm 115). This should be enough to prove that the magical Eucharist of the Catholics is antichrist. All idolatrous worship is intended for God in the sense that the worshipper wants the reverence to go to the true God if his cult is wrong. Despite this, God says that such worship goes to Satan though it is not meant for him (1 Corinthians 10:20). This is the reason why the Mass has such a supernatural hold on millions. Its deception must be exposed for to do nothing about it is to encourage it. Faith in the Mass will lead to eternal damnation because the Catholic has no excuse for he or she is taught that idols cannot defend themselves which is why they are not really gods. God will condemn for what you should know but were too lazy to pay attention to.

The true Christian will gently discourage Mass going and paying money to a Church that cherishes the Mass and will do it out of respect for others and respect for the truth. You cannot really care about other people if you do not care about their spiritual good and their growth in wisdom. The easiest way to do that is by discreetly distributing this tract to the neighbours.

There have been people killed on the roads as they tried to make their way to Mass. There have been homes torn apart over parents being unable to accept their children refusing to go to Mass. Of course Christians will say that pubs have led to accidents and family dissension as well. But does that give the Church the right to tell people to come to this ceremony when there is no evidence for its supernatural power and authority and cause these things? No. The Mass is murderous and anti-family. The Church will say Mass saved lives by converting murderers and united many families far more than any harm done. But when there is no evidence for the Mass it follows that stupidity and superstition brought about these goods. These things are not goods but evils. You are not obligated to go to the pub but you are obligated to go to Mass which shows that the Mass kills.

The Law of Moses stated that any prophet who makes true prophecies and does miracles and then tries to draw Israel away to other gods – other gods included idols of Yahweh for Yahweh refuses to be worshipped through idols – is a fake. If Jesus claimed to turn bread and wine into his body and blood like the Catholic Church would have us believe that would be the proof that the resurrection and the other miracles were satanic delusions and to follow him is to ignore what God said in the Law of Moses and Jesus certainly stated that the Law of Moses was infallible in its doctrine.

There is no evidence in the Bible that Catholics should be offering Mass. They offer Mass thinking it is the same sacrifice as the Cross. John 6 forbids the Mass even if it teaches transubstantiation for it never says when the transubstantiation will take place and you get the impression that the body and blood of Jesus confer eternal physical life which would mean the miracle food will only be given out after the resurrection.

Since God is perfect he always does and commands what is best. The Bible says that Jesus intercedes for us (1 John 2:1). Therefore to have other intercessors is neglecting the best one for Jesus being the Son of God is the best (1 Timothy 2:5). It is a sin to pray to Mary. It’s ingratitude to God and God cannot degrade himself by choosing to be honoured through other intercessors. The Church says it is not degrading if God wants it done this way. But the whole point about doing it would be to honour God and not the saints so what would be the point? It is God in the saint not the saint you are supposed to see. It is degrading for it is so ludicrous and makes a fool of God.

To say that the saints influence God is to say that God needs to be told what to do. That is blasphemy and makes the saints the real Gods. Catholics say that the saints do not just influence God but God enables them to tell him what to do. This is like play-acting. God will always do what is best and to try and tell him what to do and influence him is to deny that. Prayer is an expression of trust in God and therefore submission to him alone. If God needs the prayers of the saints he will get them without having us talk to the saints as if they can see and hear everything we do and say.

Catholics object that people are allowed in the Bible to pray for one another. But that does not condone the evil practice of people praying in the place of one another. It is just people approaching God as a group rather than as individuals. It is the same principle as people getting together and praying the “Our Father”. They are not thinking they are better than other people so that they can approach God in their place and do the influencing on their behalf.

There is no error in the Bible though Rome now says there is. The Bible cannot be inspired if it errs. God cannot expect us to trust a book of miracles for you may only believe in miracles when the testimony is of the calibre that is needed to secure a murder conviction for it is always more probable that a mistake has been made or a lie told than that a miracle happened. Jesus warned about deceiving miracles so he espoused this sceptical attitude. The Church ignores the teaching of the so-called first pope that the Old Testament scriptures are even more surely revelations from God than the very transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. See 2 Peter 1:16-21. To reach that standard the Old Testament has to have absolute perfection and reliability. Another problem is that if the Bible is not wholly infallible and inspired by God then it follows that that you do not trust the Bible but your perception of it and so it is impossible for you to receive the salvation won by Jesus until you trust the Bible itself. Trusting your judgment of the Bible is a subtle form of selfishness and pollutes your entire Christianity. Bluntly, you are not a Christian. A main sign of being saved is an inclination to accept the Bible as wholly the word of God and free from error.

The Church claims that it put the Bible together therefore anybody who believes in the Bible should believe in the infallibility of the Catholic Church. To say that is to say that the Church is above the Bible for we cannot be sure what belongs in the Bible without her. But remember what the Church teaches about infallibility that to enable it to work the Church has to do a lot of research. This tells us that the Church realised by natural means that the Bible was the word of God. It discovered the Bible but did not make it. There is no evidence that any Bible author was a Catholic and God could use an apostate Church to learn what books belong in the Bible and to preserve the Bible. The fact is that all of the important books in the New Testament were accepted from the start.

By calling herself apostolic, the Church means that she has not added to and is true to the teaching of the apostles.

But there is no evidence behind the 1854 infallible dogma that Mary was conceived without original sin. It was a late doctrine and was very controversial and there was no need for Mary to be preserved like that or that early or at all for nobody cleaned her mother though the Church says she needed to be cleaned to be the mother of Jesus. She could have been cleaned of sin when she conceived Jesus. It is an example of an addition to the teaching of the apostles as is the papal dogma of the assumption. Most of Rome’s doctrines cannot be proved to have been taught or implied in the days of the apostles. The Church says that it does not add doctrines to what the apostles taught but instead it develops the doctrines that the apostles taught and works out new doctrines that follow from them. This is how it gets around the problem that the early Church was nothing like modern Catholicism.

The miracles of Rome are of the Devil. It makes no sense to say that if God sent Mary to appear and heal at Lourdes or Medjugorje or Fatima that these revelations are not equal to scripture as the Catholic Church says. It cannot believe that. Many of the miracles of scripture have less direct evidential support than these miracles so if these miracles are from God they are additions to scripture and are as important if not more. It makes no sense to make the new miracles optional for belief and bind people to believe in the scriptural ones like Rome does. It makes no sense to say this revelation is scripture and this other one is not. That is arbitrary. The only thing that can be done is to attribute all the miracles since the Bible was finished to Satan and/or to fraud or error. To accept them is to say the Bible ones are unreliable too. The revelations are not reliable when they have not answered these problems but encouraging them by encouraging acceptance of all the doctrines of Rome. The Devil can do good miracles for a mysterious purpose which could be to incite unbelievers to greater anger and duplicity at what is happening and thus to greater sin. Any good work can make the forces of chance lay themselves out in such a pattern that a huge disaster results. It’s like a domino effect. The Devil would not support the Catholic Church unless he is using the faith of that Church to lead souls to Hell for he would not waste energy on lesser evils. The Church just arbitrarily decides what visions or miracles are real for hundreds have either been ignored just because they contradicted the Church or for no reason. If she were honest she would just look at the evidence and declare the miracle real if it was real but that some bad source was behind it.

The Roman Church only approves of a handful of supposed apparitions and miracles. These miracles are supposed to be evidence that the Catholic Church is approved by God as the one right Church. They say that to disbelieve all these miracles is just like saying that no human testimony is reliable. But bizarrely they say you can do this if you wish as if that would not be a sin! The Church states that most apparitions have, from a Catholic viewpoint, erred or lied, which is why they reject them. So it does not matter if an apparition is supernatural or not as long as it fits Catholic doctrine and yet the Church says that the supernatural events show that God approves of the Church and its doctrines. If testimony is so valuable then the apparitions themselves testify that God has nothing to do with them and what most apparitions say comes first. The Church approved of the apparitions of Mary at Fatima in 1917 even though Lucia the only surviving witness was not telling them everything and waited until the 1940’s to tell all. How can an apparition be validly authenticated in circumstances like that? The real virgin Mary wouldn’t appear in a Church that cannot be relied on to check things properly for God would want her real apparitions authenticated and its repute to be a good one.

These miracles are the real reason why the Church of Rome has such a hold on many people. Refute the miracles and they will be less interested in their Church. In the absence of apostles and prophets to supervise us it is dangerous to follow signs and wonders for Jesus warned that the disciples of the devil could fool the elect themselves with their signs. All miracles reported by the Catholic Church then are either hoaxes or of the Devil and their followers are not being careful and are not following Jesus by following them.

The Church says that faith is a gift from God. If it is then the gift is caused by divine inspiration in your heart that draws you to see the truth of the gospel. It is God testifying to you personally that his word is true so you are believing God not man. But the miracles of the Church are what the worshipers find most convincing not the Bible. Even the Church says this is bad for it says faith has to be based on the word of God not on private revelations that are not part of the word of God but just draw attention to it. So that means the Devil is doing them to draw a person away from supernatural faith to a substitute. It is an extremely clever scheme.

Revelation 17, 18 predicts the coming of a religion led by Rome that is behind all evil – it must provide an occult force that supplies Satan with power to work in the world. Jesus said that we would not have a clue when he would return which would be false if that religion is yet to come so the Bible condemns Roman Catholicism even if it is not that religion. The Pope sits in God’s house as if he were God for he tells us what to think about God so it is really the pope we honour if we listen and not God. To see God through anyone else’s eyes is really to honour that person the most because you are interested in what that person says about God and not God as he is in himself and it is idolatry and shows that only a book written by God and entirely infallible could have the right to tell us what to believe about God. The pope sitting in God’s house as if he were God fulfils 2 Thessalonians 2. The Roman Church says that the pope cannot be the antichrist for the Bible says that denial that Jesus came in the flesh and was the Christ is a mark of the Antichrist (1 John 4:2) but the pope affirms both. But the Bible only means that at that time it was useful for the Antichrist to influence people to deny these doctrines. It does not mean that will be all he will ever do – he could focus on the destruction of other doctrines later. The pope presents a wafer as Jesus which is just as serious and you could say that the pope denies the Father and the Son as the antichrist does and adores what he wants them to be and not what they are. He worships figments of his imagination – mental idols. He denies that Jesus came in the flesh which is of the spirit of the Antichrist for he opposes that Jesus and has this imaginary one. His God and Jesus are another God and another Jesus (2 Corinthians 11:4). Demon possession is very common though it is usually well concealed by the Devil who does not like bad publicity or exorcists coming. Jesus told the Jews that if he cast out Devils by the power of the Devil then the Devil’s kingdom would collapse clearly suggesting that the Devil’s power came from possessing people and he stressed the vast power the Devil has in the world. The true Church of God is an invisible Church – you cannot see who belongs to it. It is all the true Christians of the world in different times and places united in their graces and hearts by the Holy Spirit to function as the body of Christ. To join it you just have to be born again by faith and repentance and trust in the saving blood of Jesus.

Paul was right with God (Romans 5:1) despite being a sinner (Galatians 3:22). Being justified or right with God is not being made righteous but being proclaimed righteous which is the solution for the contradiction. Salvation is by faith alone and not good works for when you believe your sins are covered by the good Jesus did in your place so that God declares you righteous though you are not. We must repent past and present and future sins to get saved. The justification we get by good works (James 2) is not the kind that earns salvation. Good works are the result of salvation.

Ephesians 2:8,9 says that we are saved by grace through faith. It is uttered to people who were saved some time before so the author is telling them that they are still justified by faith without good works. He is not saying you are saved by faith and repentance at the start and then after this gift and fresh start you have to work for your salvation.

Paul in Romans 7 tells us that God loved Jacob but hated Esau. Catholics say it only means that God gave Jacob more material favours than Esau but did what was best for both under the circumstances so he did not literally hate Esau. But Paul stated that the natural response to his teaching was that God is being unfair. Paul rejects this for he says it is a matter of mercy meaning that God owes nobody nothing and not even the power to change their lives and be holy. Now the response to this is that God cannot find fault with sinners when he causes their sinfulness. To this Paul replies that God is the potter and we are the clay so God can do what he likes with us. Obviously then Paul meant hate literally. He was not talking about material favours at all. These are not even hinted at in the passage. The passage teaches the great Reformation doctrine that God saves those whom he loves and damns those he hates in Hell forever. The Catholic God who loves everybody is not the God of the Bible but an idol. He is a blasphemous representation of the true God. We know that it is nonsense to say God can love the sinner but hate the sin for if you hate the sin you must hate the person who wills the sin just like you hate the colour red if you hate the redness of an apple. The Catholic God is a hypocrite. The Catholic solution that only God can enable you to love the sinner and hate the sin by his grace as if it were some sort of miracle is unacceptable and a canopy for hypocrisy for even God cannot do the impossible.

You can receive Jesus into your life now. Dear Lord Jesus. I know you died on the cross to pay for all my sins. I renounce the creeds of men and the ways of the world and want to live for you – I renounce the baptism I received as a child for that was a trick of Satan and now I accept the real rebirth which comes by faith and not good works. I receive you into my heart as Saviour and I confess you as my Lord. I trust that you have saved me by your precious death and I accept that salvation here and now and I know I will see you in Heaven and be with you forever because you have saved me.

FOR FURTHER READING

Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995. Shows that the Bible is true.

Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, John W Haley, Whitaker Press, Pennsylvania. Shows that all Bible contradictions only seem to be contradictions and can be easily solved.

How to be a Christian without being religious, Fritz Ridenour, Gospel Light Publications, 1981

APPENDIX

CATHOLICISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM REFUTED

Catholicism and Fundamentalism (Ignatius, San Francisco, 1988) claims that Catholicism has been debunked unsuccessfully by Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. Instead of saying anything worthwhile it simply just repeats the age-old arguments for the Catholic Church that have been proven fallacious centuries ago. It was written by Karl Keating who is the head of an organisation called Catholic Answers which endeavours to stem the flow of Catholics converting to Fundamentalism. An example of the perversity of the book is in Chapter 8. The way it deals with Chick Publications and Alberto Rivera is very odd. Riveira claimed to be a Jesuit bishop and to have had access to the evil inner workings of the Catholic Church. No evidence is given that this man was never ordained. We are not told who he really was. The chapter on the baptism of infants accuses fundamentalists of knowing that the Bible never says that baptism is to be restricted to adults only but they only assume that it is meant for adults for no clear mention of baptising children is there. Weak arguments follow for the Catholic position that babies can be validly baptised and indeed should be. But who has the strongest position? The Fundamentalists for it is never said that baptism is necessary for salvation so that babies would need it. The Catholics build too much on mere assumptions.

CLAIM: PROTESTANTS HAVE NO RATIONAL BASIS TO BELIEVE BIBLE

Page 20 - Fundamentalists have no rational basis to believe in Bible.
Page 21 – They supreme proof of the deity of the word is the power to change lives.
Page 131 - argues against John Calvin’s doctrine that the Holy Spirit shows you that the Bible is true is relying on subjective feelings. Keating sums it up on page 132 by saying that the Protestant has no way of knowing what books belong in scripture so the Protestant should not be using the scripture to prove anything. Page 123 ridicules the fundamentalists who say they believe the Bible to be the inspired word of God because the Holy Spirit tells them so in their hearts. Then we are told on page 124 that the Catholic Church checks the Bible out like it was an ordinary book and then decides if it is the word of God as if fundamentalists haven’t done that too. He then says we know from the Bible that Jesus founded an infallible Church and the Bible is the word of God because the infallible Church says so and we can trust it because we trust the Bible (page 125).

If you can work out that the Bible is God’s word then you wouldn’t need the Church to tell you that it is God’s word. The Fundamentalists say that since we know from the way Jesus helps us overcome sin, from the fact that the gospels are plausible that the Son of God must have come. The New Testament must then be his word for he would not let his word be lost. The ridicule that is heaped on the view that the Spirit guides the Christian to believe in the word of God is astonishing for the Catholic Church itself says you need the Spirit to believe in the authority of the Bible and of the Church. It says that intellectual agreement is not enough and will not save. You have to believe because the Spirit tells you that you are right.

CLAIM: EXTREME UNCTION A SACRAMENT

Page 39 – The apostle James is quoted to prove the early origin of extreme unction when James never taught the dogma.

The Protestant interpretation is unmentioned. Yet Keating often accuses Protestants of not thinking that the Catholics have an answer to the problems Protestant has with Catholicism’s claims to be the right religion. There is nothing in the epistle to indicate a sacrament.

CLAIM: ALL SIN IS NOT MORTAL

Page 101 - 1 John 5:17 proves that not all sin is fatal or mortal.

John meant that by mortal sin a sin that was so terrible that it was a sin to pray for the guilty party to repent of it. Catholics believe in praying for mortal sinners that they might repent. John is thinking of the sin of stubbornly making sure one will never convert to God. There is no point in praying for them for their heart is closed.

CLAIM: DICTATION THEORY REFUTED

Page 129 rejects the theory that God dictated the Bible when Luke wrote in his prologue that he wrote the Gospel of Luke by researching on his own. He argues that when Paul showed he forgot if he baptised other people apart from a couple he named it would mean that God didn’t remember.

Keating holds that the pope has to research and evaluate evidence for a teaching he wants to make an infallible proclamation for. He says that does not mean that God is not guiding the pope so Luke doing research could be part of the way God wants to spell out the wording for his gospel. This point is made clear enough in fundamentalist writings so Keating is just covering up the truth to make them look stupid.

CLAIM: INFALLIBILITY DOES NOT GIVE NEW REVELATIONS

Page 153 argues that revelation did not end with the completion of the New Testament but contained in the apostles who lived after that time until they died. This justifies Catholic tradition. Revelation of doctrines stopped with the death of the last apostle. He stated before that that no further revelation would be made after the death of the last apostle (page 142). The early fathers said the same thing because that was their argument against the claims of the Gnostic heretics to have secret traditions (page 143). He sees the exercise of infallibility by the Catholic Church not as contradicting this fact for it just means protection from error and not inspiration.

When God let it be so hard to find out what the apostles taught orally after the New Testament was written it could be he plans to restore this knowledge one day. Perhaps he will drop gold plates down from Heaven! But the proper solution to the problem is that though the apostles lived until after the completion of the New Testament they had nothing more to add to it. Their living on does not mean that they gave out other doctrines as well.

CLAIM: ALL ARE REDEEMED

Page 169 says that we are all redeemed though many of us will be lost for redemption does not guarantee salvation.

The trouble is that the Protestant objection that this means Jesus pays for our sins and we pay ourselves if we do not accept Jesus as saviour is correct for it seeks to avoid double-punishment for sins and to preserve justice.

Page 172 accepts the Catholic assertion that when Paul called the living “saints” he only meant they would be saints if they keep the commandments and that the Protestant understanding that they are saints now is wrong.

Paul himself never supported that interpretation. He meant that they were not saints in themselves but legally saints. They were treated by God as righteous though they were not righteous in themselves.

Page 173 says that a born again pastor can commit a terrible sin proving he was not saved according to his faith. Then it concludes that this means that nobody can know for sure who was saved or not.

The New Testament teaches that all sins are serious and that even Christians who are saved will sin but they don’t have to sin for God changes their inclinations so that they like good better. The pastor will not have the habit of sin if he is really saved.

CLAIM: PRIESTS LIKE THE APOSTLES CAN FORGIVE SINS

Page 183 argues that if the apostles had the power to forgive sins they would have passed it on for the powers were necessary to keep the Church going as a society of God.

We will see in a moment that they could not transmit it.

Page 185 says the apostles could not know which sins to forgive or not to forgive unless they were first told by the penitent which implies that Jesus instituted confession. Was Jesus speaking to the Holy Spirit who he breathed into the apostles?

This is rubbish. It is their sincere sorrow that counts. A person could confess sins to you and you still would not know if they are really sorry or not. You would need a psychic gift to be able to tell if their contrition was genuine or was just a dose of self-deception. Or you would need the Holy Spirit. Priests cannot tell for sure so they should not be absolving sins.

CLAIM: EARLY CHRISTIANS PRAYED FOR THE DEAD

Page 192 argues that the early Christian Church prayed for the dead for such prayers were offered in the heretical Acts of Paul and Thecla.

This is desperation. What about the immoral acts attributed to the child Jesus in the apocryphal gospels and the apocryphal acts which state that Jesus and Thomas were twin?

CLAIM: PETER WAS THE ROCK

Chapter 17 (like page 63) argues that Jesus made Peter the rock he would build his Church on. It admits that the Greek makes a distinction between peter and the rock the Church would build on but argues that in the Aramaic in which Jesus spoke there would be no difference and that grammatically Peter has to be the rock.

Verbally in the Aramaic there might have been no distinction but Jesus could have indicated by his tone of voice that there was a distinction which was why Matthew refrained from using the same words.

CLAIM: FATHERS ACKNOWLEDGED ROME’S INFALLIBILITY

Page 217 quotes some fathers saying that Rome was right and no error comes from it as inferring that the papacy was infallible. That is nonsense for the pope being right does not make him infallible. The bigoted cranks Leslie and Rumble are cited as stating that before Vatican 1 of 1870 the popes were not as sure as they are now that they have infallibility.

This contradicts the other statement of Keating that infallibility is not inspiration so it depends on careful research and valid logical examination of that research so that the Holy Spirit can guide the pope or Church to the right conclusion. From this it follows that the evidence supports the infallible statement and can make it certain even without infallibility.

CLAIM: THE CONTRACEPTION BAN IS INFALLIBLE

Page 218 states that the ban on contraception in humanae vitae was infallible not because the people was using his gift but because the Church always taught that contraception was wrong.

Glad to hear it for it proves that the Catholic cult is not infallible. It is totally unfair that barren couples should have all the sex they want while fertile ones have to suffer by having no sex or sex within the regulations of the Church that could result in an unwanted pregnancy.

CLAIM: NOTHING IN PAPAL HISTORY REFUTES PAPACY DOGMA

Page 218 also criticises ex-priest Zachello for saying there was once three popes. It pedantically states that there was one pope always and admits that at times there was difficulty with knowing who the real pope was for there were others claiming to be the true pope. Zachello and all of us know that only one of these men was the valid pope and we only call the others popes in the sense that that is what they said they were.

Page 220 tells us that Pope Stephen VII declared that the ordinations performed by his predecessor pope Formosus were invalid and that Formosus was not a real pope.

Typically, Keating and the Catholic Church pretend that there is no problem with this and that it does not disprove papal supremacy or papal infallibility. But Stephen was claiming that Formosus was head of a false Church. If Formosus was a true pope then Stephen was a schismatic for not acknowledging him even though he was dead. Stephen accused the Church of being infested with fake ordinations. Stephen officially decreed that it was heresy to believe that Formosus was a real pope even though Keating lies that he did not interfere with doctrine and contradict the faith of the Church. Keating lies that these two popes did not dispute the faith and contradict each other in their official teaching for Formosus claimed to be true pope and Stephen denied it. Stephen denied that the Church under him was the true Catholic Church for only an untrue Catholic Church, a counterfeit can be built on the wrong rock. There can be no worse heresy than that so they did dispute on matters of faith.

CLAIM: MASS, NEITHER ABSURD OR UNBIBLICAL

Page 253 says that if you mix arsenic with dough to make the communion wafer the arsenic does not change into Jesus for it is not bread.

So if you can make bread without the raising agent does it follow that the raising agent when included does not change into Jesus when you don’t need it? If it changes so does the arsenic for then you have arsenic flavoured bread. It is totally absurd to say that salt cannot be turned into Jesus when there is no bread and to say that molecules of salt in the wafer become Jesus.

Chapter 9 argues that the Bible approves of transubstantiation and does not condemn it.

John 6 which is supposed to teach the doctrine then would mean that the body and blood are able to become something like spirit that can enter your soul and feed you. But you don’t need food turning into a man for it to do that.

Page 44 argues that there is no idolatry in the Catholic Mass for they believe God to be there.

The cheek of this argument is amazing. What if he is not? They agree with the Bible that to pray to old gods like Thor or Jupiter is the sin of idolatry. But how could idolatry be a sin if you can worship as the true God what is not the true God? Why did God in the Law he gave Moses forbid any images to be made of the Lord God?

CLAIM: SAINT WORSHIP IS NOT IDOLATRY

Page 260 claims that praying to the saints is not idolatry because giving worship to men is not idolatry and idolatry is just giving to what is not God the worship that is due to God alone.

The worship given to men is political worship. The idolatry ban in the Bible forbids religious worship to be given to men. The pagans prayed to deified men like Ascelepius. They thought he was a god but he could not do what he liked and would have had to consult with other gods before he could grant a prayer. He was not the highest God. This figure was the same in all essentials as the Catholic saint. Saint worship is idolatry and is even more criminal in Catholics for they have the true God than it is in pagans who don’t know any better.

CLAIM: PRIVATE APPARITIONS NOT BINDING ON BELIEF

Page 261 says that private revelations such as visions from Lourdes are binding only on the person to whom they are made and the rest of us don’t have to believe.

Then why is this not said of the apostles who had visions of Jesus? We are commanded by the Church to believe in those on pain of excommunication. Are Catholic apparitions worked by Satan then to make most people suspect that they should doubt the miracles of the Bible and so lose the salvation that comes by a consistent and true faith in Jesus Christ?

Plus when the Church only tolerates reverence paid to apparitions when there is no heresy against Romanism in the messages it follows that you are entitled to disbelieve in your own vision of Jesus or Mary if it contradicts the Church meaning that what the Church says comes first even if Jesus or Mary says otherwise – but what you see and hear should come first!

The apparitions are attempting to add to revelation and undermine it that is why they should be banned by the Church as the work of the Devil or evil men. They are only allowed for they are good for getting converts.

CLAIM: MARY ALWAYS A VIRGIN

Page 285 rejects the Protestant belief that Mary lost her virginity to Joseph after giving birth to Jesus. The belief is based on Matthew saying he didn’t do anything with her until after she gave birth.

In 1 Maccabees 5:54 the soldiers are said to return in peace and none of them was slain until he returned. Keating states that we don’t assume that until means what it usually means here for the soldiers were not slain when they returned so we can’t say that Matthew meant that Joseph and relations with Mary after the delivery.

Page 286 states that Jerome said that the doctrine that Mary was not a virgin all her life was a novelty. Keating wants us to think that this doctrine was unquestioned in the early Church.

The stuff about it being a novelty was a lie for the Carpocratians and several others in the late first century denied that Mary was always a virgin. They might have been heretics but they could have considered it historically true that Mary lost her virginity. The Mormons say that the Mormon Church never questioned that Joseph Smith was innocent of the charges of black magic utilized to find treasure and yet there is no doubt that he was guilty. Religions habitually lie about their idols so why should the early Christian Church be trusted concerning Mary?

We can tell from the quote that until is not until there but a bad expression. In Matthew it is different for you can’t tell if he means until or not which makes it most likely that he does mean until.