This morning someone from Facebook community caught my attention. The post was somewhat CATCHY and STRIKING testimonial from a Protestant Pastor, which is encouraging. I'll focus on the last phrase of his testimony which talks about the word Catholic as it's the one that appears to be hanging. Here’s his post:
"I have a confession. After examining all the
evidence, I have come to the conclusion that the "Mary" venerated by
Catholics is far greater in almost every way than the Biblical version of Mary
regarded by Protestants.
The Catholic "Mary" was born without
original sin; the Biblical Mary was born the same as everyone else.
The Catholic "Mary" was sinless; the
Biblical Mary is one of the "all" in the "all have sinned."
The Catholic "Mary" had to give God
permission to use her as the mother of Messiah; the Biblical Mary submitted to
the will of God.
The Catholic "Mary" was assumed into Heaven;
the Biblical Mary shows no evidence of such an assumption.
The Catholic "Mary" is given titles such as
"Queen of Heaven," "Spouse of the Holy Spirit," and
"Theotokos"; the only title the Biblical Mary has is spouse of
Joseph.
The Catholic "Mary" remains perpetually a
virgin; The Biblical Mary remained a virgin only until after the birth of
Jesus.
The Catholic "Mary" is regarded as a
co-Mediatrix and co-redemptrix; the Biblical Mary has no such office.
The Catholic "Mary" has multitudes of
statues built in her alleged image, and millions of Catholics bow to these
statues and pray to her; no one in Scripture ever made a statue to, bowed to,
or prayed to the Biblical Mary.
The Catholic "Mary" is alleged to make
appearances to people from time to time, during which she is alleged to utter
some un-Biblical prophecies and perform alleged miracles; the Biblical Mary
never spoke a prophetic word or performed a miracle in her life.
Yes, the Catholic "Mary" is greater than the
Biblical Mary in every way....
....EXCEPT ONE....
THE CATHOLIC "MARY" DOES NOT EXIST; THE
BIBLICAL MARY DOES."
NOW, let's establish where does this word CATHOLIC
come from:
The
Roman Catholic Church[2]
asserts that its origin is the Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus
Christ in approximately AD 30.
Jesus
left the adoption of a name for His Church to those whom He charged to teach
all nations. He called the spiritual society established, "My Church" (Matthew 16:18, "the Church" Matthew 18:17)
To
have a distinction between the Church and the Synagogue and to have a distinguishing name from those embracing Judaic and Gnostic errors, St. Ignatius (50-107 A.D.) employs the Greek word "Katholicos"
(universal) to describe the universality of the Church that Jesus established.
St. Ignatius was appointed Bishop of Antioch by St.Peter, the Bishop of Rome.
It is in his writings that the word Catholic used for the first time. St.
Augustine, when speaking about the Church of Christ, calls it the Catholic
Church 240 times in his writings.[3]
Around the year A.D. 107, a bishop, St. Ignatius of Antioch in the
Near East, was arrested, brought to Rome by armed guards and eventually
martyred there in the arena. In a farewell letter which this early bishop and
martyr wrote to his fellow Christians in Smyrna (today Izmir in modern Turkey),
he made the first written mention in history of "the Catholic
Church." He wrote, "Where the bishop is present, there is the
Catholic Church" (To the Smyrnaeans 8:2). Thus, the second century of
Christianity had scarcely begun when the name of the Catholic Church was
already in use.
The
Church referred to in the Creed [4] (recited on Sundays and holy days which speaks
of one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church) is more commonly called just the
Catholic Church than Roman Catholic Church.
The term Roman Catholic is not used by the Church herself; it is a
relatively modern term that is confined largely to the English language.
The
English-speaking bishops at the First Vatican Council in 1870, in fact,
conducted a vital and successful campaign to assure that the term Roman
Catholic was nowhere incorporated in any of the Council's official documents
about the Church herself, and the term was not included.
Likewise, the term
Roman Catholic could never be found in the 16 documents of the Second Vatican
Council. There are references to the Roman curia, the Roman missal, the Roman rite, to name a few, but the adjective Roman applied to the Church
herself refers to the Diocese of Rome.
Cardinals,
for example, are called cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, but to be
designated with this as cardinals denotes an honorary clergy of the Holy
Father's home diocese, the Diocese of Rome. Each cardinal is given a titular
church in Rome, and when participating in the election of a new pope, they are
participating in a process that in ancient times was carried out by the clergy
of the Diocese of Rome.
Although
the Diocese of Rome is central to the Catholic Church, this does not mean that
the Roman rite, or, as is sometimes said, the Latin rite, is co-terminus with
the Church in general; that would mean neglecting the Byzantine (based on
liturgy developed by St. James for the Antiochaian church, but modified by St.
Basil (329-379) and St. John Chrysostom (344-407), Chaldean (the people in
modern day Iran and Iraq were once known as the Assyrians. The church
established itself there very early but the people in this area fell into the Nestorianism heresy in the 5th century), Maronite (pins its roots down from the work of St. Maron in the 4th century who established a monastery east of
Antioch. After which monks moved to the mountains in what is today Lebanon. This rite
never fell into heresy and was only detached from Rome by the political
reality of Moslem or Ottoman occupation. They employ a hybrid liturgy
based on the Antiochian St. James. They make up 17% of Lebanon's population and by the country's law the president of Lebanon is constantly a
Maronite),[5]
or other Oriental rites which are all very much part
of the Catholic Church today, as in the past.
In
today’s generation, much greater emphasis has been given to these
"non-Roman" rites of the Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council
devoted a special document, Orientalium Ecclesiarum (Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches), to the Eastern rites which belong to the Catholic Church, and the
new Catechism of the Catholic Church similarly provides significant awareness to
the distinctive traditions and spirituality of these Eastern rites.
Thus, the proper name of the universal Church is not the Roman Catholic Church. That
term caught on mostly in English-speaking countries was promoted mostly by Anglicans, supporters of the "branch theory" of the Church, namely,
that the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of the creed was supposed to
consist of three major branches, the Anglican, the Orthodox and the so-called
Roman Catholic. It was to evade that
kind of interpretation that the English-speaking bishops at Vatican I achieved in
warning the Church away from ever using the term officially herself: It too effortlessly
could be misconstrued.
Brought
by prevalent disagreement in the Church and equally widespread confusion in
this generation concerning what authentic Catholic identity is supposed to
consist of, many loyal Catholics have recently taken to using the term Roman
Catholic to affirm their understanding
that the Catholic Church of the Sunday creed is the same Church that is united
with the Vicar of Christ in Rome, the Pope, which correct. However, such Catholics should be cautious on
using the term, not only because of its doubtful origins in Anglican circles aiming
to suggest that there just might be some other Catholic Church around somewhere
besides the Roman one: but also because it frequently still is used today to suggest that
the Roman Catholic Church is something other and lesser than the Catholic
Church of the creed. It is usually used by some opposing theologians, for
example, who emerges to be trying to classify the Roman Catholic Church as just
another modern "Christian denomination" than the body that is indistinguishable
with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of the creed.
Hence, the proper name of the Church is the Catholic Church. It is not ever called
"the Christian Church," either. Although the well-regarded Oxford
University Press currently publishes a well-read and rather useful reference
book called "The Oxford Book of the Christian Church," the fact is that there has
never been a major entity in history called by that name; the Oxford University
Press has adopted an inaccuracy, for the Church of Christ has never been labeled
the Christian Church.
A
Protestant denomination in the United States does call itself by that name, but
that particular denomination is hardly what the Oxford University Press had in
mind when assigning to its reference book the title that it did. The assignment
of the title in question emerges to have been one more method, of which there
have been so many down through history, of declining to admit that there is, in
fact, one - and only one - entity existing in the world today to which the
designation "the Catholic Church" in the Creed might probably relevant.
The
entity in question, of course, is just that: the very visible, worldwide
Catholic Church, in which the 263rd successor of the Apostle Peter, Pope Francis,
edifies, oversees and purifies, along with some 3,000 other bishops around the
world, who are successors of the apostles of Jesus Christ.
It
is true that the followers of Christ early became known as "Christians"
(Acts 11:26). Nevertheless, the term Christian was not at all universally
applied to the Church herself. In the New Testament itself, the Church is
simply called "the Church." There was only one. In that early time
there were not yet any break-away bodies significant enough to be rival
claimants of the name and from which the Church might ever have to differentiate
herself.
Very
early in post-apostolic times, however, the Church did acquire a proper name in
order to distinguish herself from rival bodies which by then were already
starting to - the Catholic Church. The name emerges in Christian literature for
the first time around the end of the first century. By the time it was
recorded, it had definitely already been in use.
In
a farewell letter when St. Ignatius of
Antioch in the Near East ( a bishop), was arrested, brought to Rome by armed
guards and eventually martyred there in the arena (around A.D. 107), he wrote
to his fellow Christians and made the the first written mention in history of
"the Catholic Church -"Where the bishop is present, there is the
Catholic Church" (To the Smyrneans 8:2). Hence, the second century of
Christianity had scarcely started when the name of the Catholic Church was
already in use.
Subsequently,
mention of the name turns to be frequent
in the written record. It emerges in the oldest written account the Catholic
Church possesses outside the New Testament of the martyrdom of a Christian for
his faith, the "Martyrdom of St. Polycarp," bishop of the same Church
of Smyrna (martyred around 155) to which St. Ignatius of Antioch had accounted.
The chronicler tells that in his final prayers before giving up his life for
Christ, St. Polycarp "remembered all who had met with him at any time,
both small and great, both those with and those without renown, and the whole
Catholic Church throughout the world."
The
term was already comprehended even then to be an especially fitting name
because the Catholic Church was for everybody, not just for experts, devotees
or the specially initiated who might have been fascinated to her. The Church was "catholic" because she
possesses the fullness of the means of salvation, destined to be "universal" in time
as well as in space, and it is to her that applied Jesus’ promise to Peter and
the other apostles that "the powers of death shall not prevail"
against her (Matthew 16:18).
The
Catechism of the Catholic Church in this day has concisely summed up all the
reasons why the name of the Church of Christ has been the Catholic Church:
"The Church is catholic," the Catechism teaches, "[because] she
proclaims the fullness of the faith. She bears in herself and administers the
totality of the means of salvation. She is sent out to all peoples. She speaks
to all men. She encompasses all times. She is 'missionary of her very
nature'" (Cathechism of the Catholic Church CCC 868).
The
bishops of the first ecumenical council of the Church, held at Nicaea in Asia
Minor in the year 325 A.D. legislated quite naturally in the name of the
universal body they called in the Council of Nicaea's official documents
"the Catholic Church." This council formulated the basic Creed in
which the term "catholic" was retained as one of the four marks of
the true Church of Christ. And it is the same name which can be read in all 16
documents of the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Church, Vatican Council II
In
the fourth century that St. Cyril of Jerusalem aptly wrote, "Inquire not
simply where the Lord's house is, for the sects of the profane also make an
attempt to call their own dens the houses of the Lord; nor inquire merely where
the church is, but where the Catholic Church is. For this is the peculiar name
of this Holy Body, the Mother of all, which is the Spouse of Our Lord Jesus
Christ" (Catecheses, XViii, 26).
In conclusion, Jesse Sellers in a sense is correct by saying that THE CATHOLIC "MARY" DOES NOT EXIST; THE BIBLICAL MARY DOES" because the word Catholic was established not within the time of Salvific period (Death, Resurrection, and Ascension account - the Church's institution in A.D. 30). The Blessed Virgin Mary died in 48A.D.[5] ,
[2] http://www.gotquestions.org/origin-Catholic-church.htm,
Question: "What is the origin of the Catholic Church?"
[3] Which
church is the True Church of Jesus Christ?,
http://www.marianland.com/truech04.html
)
[4] https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/churb3.htm, How Did the Catholic Church Get Her Name?
[5] Kenneth D. Whitehead, Who Are Christians? An Overview of the Main Branches, Churches, Denominations, Religious Orders, and other identifiable Groups within Christianity of the Past and Present compiled by Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D., http://catholic-resources.org/Courses/Christianity-Branches.htm )
[6] The Rites of the Catholic Church http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resources/liturgy/rites/the-rites-of-the-catholic-church/)
[7] Mary,
Mother of God, http://www.marypages.com/catholics_and_mary.htm
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