Why its a mistake to give the Catholic
Church support via membership or donations
Why its a mistake to give the Catholic
Church support via membership or donations
PENITENTIAL PERILS - THE SACRAMENT OF CONFESSION IS MAN-MADE THUS THE
PRIEST HAS NO RIGHT TO HEAR YOUR SINS
THE SACRAMENT OF PRIESTS FORGIVING SINS
The Roman Catholic Church is notorious for its claim that its priests can
forgive sins as if they were God in the sacrament of penance which is now called
the sacrament of reconciliation.
The Roman Catholic Church claims to be infallible and in the decrees in which it
exercised this alleged charism it said that the sacrament of penance was
authorised and empowered by God.
"For those who fall into sin after baptism the sacrament of penance is as
necessary to salvation as is baptism for those who have not already been
baptised" - Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests page 261.
McHugh and Callan 1923.
That is very strong considering at the time the Church held there was no hope of
salvation for those who died without baptism unless they were actively preparing
for baptism and died or were martyred for Christ before they could get baptised.
There is no right to hear sins if there is no God or if Jesus who supposedly
gave priests the power did not or was a fraud. To send your child to confession
is wrong for the priest has no right to hear the sins and the child will not be
telling them for her own good. Telling a priest a sin has no magical power to
help you refrain from the sin. Telling somebody a sin may help but only if you
are friends and its over a cup of coffee. Telling every sin is pointless. Not
all sins need to be told. Going and telling a stranger in a dark box is useless.
Remember the Catholic only tells the sins and the number of times they were
committed. That is nothing like counselling where issues need a lot of
exploration and discussion. Confession is purely religious and you need to prove
the priest has the right to hear your sins and that cannot be done!
REASON AGAINST ABSOLUTION
If Catholics want the priest to pardon them in the cheerless semi-darkness of a
box then they should burn their Bibles for being Protestant. Nobody should want
the forgiveness of a God or Church that holds that God is right to withhold the
power to forgive sins from laypersons even in a state of absolute necessity. I
mean that if a person is dying you cannot absolve them unless you are a priest.
No matter how holy you are even the lowest scoundrel of a priest is needed to
save the person’s soul. This is extremely offensive to reasonable people.
The Church of Rome claims that priests can forgive sins. When the priest
absolves you in the name of God, God forgives the sins. Jesus is supposed to
have told the apostles that whoever’s sins they forgive are forgiven by God
(John 20:23). The institution of the doctrine of priestly absolution is ascribed
to him.
It is ludicrous to suggest that a priest can forgive sin as if he were God who
was sinned against for he is not God. Even God cannot equip a person to forgive
such for it is illogical.
Half-Protestant Catholics might feel that is not a case of priests forgiving you
as if they were the God that sin offends but one of priests letting God pardon
you. They want to say that it is God who forgives not the priest. But then they
think Jesus said to the apostles if you forgive the sins of any they are
remitted meaning absolution. The priest says, “I absolve you from your sins in
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
It is the priest who forgives and not God for God is compelled to obey the
priest when the priest says that such and such a sin does not exist anymore.
When God won’t forgive the sins until the moment the priest pronounces
absolution then the priest is letting God forgive you. Some say the priest is
not letting God forgive what he is doing is something that coincides with
forgiveness from God. They say God set up the entire arrangement so he has it
all planned and forgives because he wants to not because he is allowed to by the
priest. But God is giving priests the power to allow him. If a priest refuses
absolution to somebody who should get it God won’t forgive. Of course the priest
lets God forgive.
If God absolved one person who couldn’t find a priest then he would have to
absolve everybody that couldn’t get one. This would lead to priests being unable
to forgive anybody because no sinner can get to confession as soon as he or she
repents! It is a crazy God that gives grace to those who can’t make it to Mass
and who won’t forgive the sin of one who can’t get a confessor. He forgives
forgotten sins (page 215, Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, Part 2). They don’t
matter to him. They have not even been repented of. Then he evilly refuses to
forgive a person who really wants it and repents. This God does not do all he
can to keep us from sin and Hell and anyone who asserts with Rome that this is
not the case is trying to deceive.
Mortal sins are sins that keep the sinner from being God’s friend. Imperfect
contrition is repentance for the love of God and a less noble reason. Persons
who have only imperfect contrition for their mortal sins cannot get forgiven
without the priest. If God can forgive them during confession then he can do it
himself without the priest. He won’t. He is forcing them to stay in sin. The
Lord is making them continue to oppose him. It is not right for God to keep
persons who are fit for forgiveness out of his friendship just because the
priest is not near at hand. It is vindictively holding that they should be
pardoned and refusing to pardon. God is not love if he is not forgiving. To trap
a person in iniquity even for a moment is to stoop as low as that person has for
it is sinfully sustaining his or her sinful responsibility. The Catholic Church
cannot say that God is entitled to refuse forgiveness when Jesus paid the
sinners’ debt to God’s justice. If she does then she is denying her infallible
dogma that Jesus died for all.
If God is infinite good then he doesn’t deserve to be opposed so he is being
unjust to himself. God must like sin when he does that. Every bad person has the
right to be reformed, which Rome denies at this point to acclaim the divine
hypocrisy of claiming to detest sin and then forcing it on people by making them
stay in the sins they choose to commit.
It is blasphemous to teach in union with the pope that people with tremendous
and superior quality attrition – imperfect contrition – for sins should be made
to stay in them by God because they can’t get a priest while saying that persons
with barely any attrition that is barely repentance truly get forgiveness from
God through a priest. This makes finding a priest more important than being
sorry. It is insulting the penitent for nothing. Reason shows that the sorrow
for sin should come first. A forgiving God would not be more interested in
penitents meeting the priest than in their sorrow. If he is then he snobbishly
thinks that priests are something special and everybody else is muck.
The Catholic God acts strangely for one that is said to do all he can to keep
the human race from falling into the everlasting damnation of Hell. If those
people die suddenly God will be guilty of trapping them to get them thrown in
Hell. (Then Rome has the gall and the viciousness to criticise Prods for
teaching that God plots to get some sinners damned.) Even Rome agrees that that
is unloving.
People who need the priest's forgiveness and is not able to go and get it will
be tempted to commit more mortal sins when they are stuck in mortal sin anyway.
When one is a mortal sinner and going to Hell one need not shrink from adding
another to the collection. The Bible says that God never directly does what
tempts one to sin (James 1:13). He would sin against himself if he did and then
he would be all-evil.
All Roman Catholicism can say to our charge that her absolution system is evil
is that when we don’t deserve God’s mercy it is up to him to decide the manner
in which we will obtain pardon. That is only true if it is a loving way. The
Bible says forgiveness is a gift. You don’t inconvenience your wife or degrade
her even for a moment in the process of delivering a gift to her. In that case
the gift is not much of a gift at all.
The doctrine of absolution makes priests look outrageously selfish and arrogant.
If getting absolution from a priest is essential for eternal salvation what
would the sincere priest do? Never leave the confessional, that’s what! The
lesser evil of living in a box is to be preferred to letting souls commit more
sins, the greatest of all evils, and fall into Hell. To leave the confessional
is to force a mortal sinner to stay in sin for a while. And people are sinning
this way all the time. It is a mortal sin for a priest to keep a person in
mortal sin even for a minute. That is preventing someone from being God’s
friend. To approve of this for a minute is refusing to do God’s will if he loves
the sinner for he will want him back as soon as possible. Rome approves of
delays provided they are not too extreme. If the priest has to visit a sick
person and send those waiting in the chapel for confession away she doesn’t
mind. That is inconsistent with love as the Church interprets it. Healing souls
from the worst evil comes before consoling the sick or absolving many sinners
matters more than going away to absolve one. It is accusing God of doing evil at
the bidding of the Church.
The Catholic absolution doctrine infers that we should be more grateful to the
priest than God. It is the priest who makes God do what God wouldn’t do without
him. This is part of the hierarchy’s plot to be preferred to God and to truth.
The sacrament of reconciliation is extremely evil for it puts going to
confession and receiving absolution before doing good. Jesus would rather a
person was conditionally absolved and then made that absolution active by doing
some big good work. For example the idea could be, “I absolve you from your sins
now but that absolution will only take effect when you will visit the hospital
and take some lonely sick people out.” The Jesus of the Sermon of the Mount
could not approve of a system in which you display your repentance to a witness
without verification. He wanted such things private and for people to be God-centred
and other-centred and not to do good in front of others unless unavoidable.
When God comes first according to the Catholic Church it follows that you should
not forgive anybody who says they are sorry for hurting you until they go to
confession first. That is in case you are forgiving somebody who God has not
forgiven. That kind of blackmail proved useful in the gullible past.
No mature person could accept the priestly pretensions to having the power to
remove sins as true.
Jesus said we must firstly love God with all our being and in second place our
neighbour as ourselves. When God forbids us to put anything or anyone alongside
him in our affections he really only cares about himself. That is all he made us
for. It also means that those who do not believe cannot find any satisfaction in
being helped by a Christian for that help is not given for their sake but for
God’s so it is harmful to unbelievers. So when God is like that it is none of
his business what we do and he has no right expecting us to come to him for
pardon.
What business is it of God’s if I hurt another person? This is a big problem for
the sacrament of reconciliation which plainly says it is his business and the
business of the Church officials who are invested with divine judicial
authority. Christians say God made the person and loves the person so to hurt
the person is to insult his work and his love for that person. You are abusing
the gifts God gave you so that you can hurt this person. You are insulting God.
So God is not worried about a person being hurt. He is worried about the insult
to the gifts he has given to the person so he is worried about what he has done
for the person being desecrated.
If a doctor saves the life of X and J seriously injures X does J have to express
more sorrow to the doctor than X? Of course not.
Some say God doesn’t demand an apology from you to him when you hurt a person
because the person is a person but because he loves the person. Religion claims
that God alone matters and is to be loved which proves this. It is not the
person who matters but God being offended.
The scandalous thing about this is that God is not literally offended. He is
perfectly happy and cannot change and cannot feel pain. He only intellectually
asserts that the sin should not happen but it does not harm him or make him sad.
The scandal is that something beyond pain is put before something that can
experience suffering. That is not the kind of morality we want by any standard.
We cannot deter ourselves from hurting others by telling ourselves it is wrong
for it hurts God. We cannot have the fellow-feeling for God as we do a fellow
human being. To go for forgiveness to God instead of the person you hurt is thus
evil.
It cannot be God’s business when we hurt a person simply because that person is
a person with feelings. In other words, it is not God’s concern if a person is
hurt even if it is his concern that his love and gifts for that person have been
affronted. God is not the person but the victim is the person therefore it is
the victim’s concern only. God may disapprove of the person being hurt but that
does not entitle him to be requested for his forgiveness. He is only forgiving
for the insult to himself and his gifts but he is not forgiving for hurting the
other person for that is not possible. That is between you and the other person.
To go to confession instead of pleading for forgiveness from the person you have
hurt is disgusting. If everybody knew that it was none of God’s business when we
hurt another person nobody would follow religion anymore. The doctrine of the
forgiving God who can forgive what is none of his business is dangerous for it
suggests that God’s thinking is not ours and that we should follow his whether
it makes sense or not or hurts or not.
A person should be ashamed to go to confession and confess that they have hurt
another person when they won’t go and confess and express sorrow and try to make
amends fully to the victim FIRST. You would be proven more genuine if you did
that. It is easier to admit you are wrong to God than to the other person. It is
therefore egotistical to confess sin to God and not others as the Catholic
Church has you doing it. God should not reward this insult to the victim by
forgiving the sin in confession.
Jesus had a point when he said that you must keep your sacrifice to God until
you make peace with your brother you fell out with first and then go and
sacrifice (Matthew 5:23-24). Confession and winning God’s forgiveness in the
absolution are offering yourself as a sacrifice to God to live in service of
him. Jesus meant animal sacrifice but that makes no difference. If you have to
reconcile with the people you have hurt and the people you have made
insufficient effort to heal their animosity towards you in relation to animal
sacrifice, how much more will you have to do it before confession or before
going to Mass in which the Church claims to offer the sacrifice of Christ on
Calvary to God? How much harder you will have to try! And you have to be
reconciled with yourself by obtaining God’s forgiveness for your own sins first.
And how hypocritical it is for Catholic priests to be celebrating Mass every day
when the standard of nobility is so high? The sacrifice of a person who hasn’t
asked forgiveness of the people he has hurt and who hasn’t tried to make amends
is an insult to God. the heart is more important than any sacrifice. It is like
giving the queen tea but expressing no respect for her.
It is scandalous to teach as Roman Catholicism does that if I hurt another
person I will be forgiven in confession even if I never go near them first. And
especially when that cult says that if I hurt a person and instantly make amends
in a state of repentance, I will not be forgiven until I go to confession. So
the person who hasn’t made amends yet is better off than the person who has!
Roman Catholicism is an evil religion and the enemy of right and wrong.
ATONEMENT PREVENTS ABSOLUTION
The Catholic Church believes that Jesus somehow earned forgiveness for us and
that this pardon is distributed in confession by the priest.
Now, when our sins are paid for, what right does God have to keep the freedom
from sin we are entitled to from us until we go to confession? It is different
for men to make conditions for legal pardon but that is because we don’t see
into people’s hearts but God does and so he can do the right thing easily and
the moment the person is open to his grace. The sacrament of reconciliation
contradicts God’s love and willingness to keep us out of Hell. There is no need
for the sacrament.
If Jesus paid for our sins then we are not forgiven in confession because
instead of being forgiven our sins are punished though someone else had to pay.
So, the atonement means that priests cannot really forgive sins. They are told
to intend to but how can they? And their absolution is invalid if they don’t.
FINALLY
Jesus did not give priests the power to forgive sins in confession and if he
tried to then he was a disgrace and tricking people with fake forgiveness. If
you do wrong the only forgiveness you may get is forgiveness from real persons.
Forgiveness is too big of a matter for anybody to be telling you God forgives
you when there is no God! Nobody should encourage anybody to go to confession or
to believe in the sacrament. If you feel it is man not God who forgives you in
confession then it follows that confession has nothing to do with it if you have
a conversion. You cannot really take man’s forgiveness that seriously for it is
only man’s. People subliminally realising this could explain why confession in
practice means people using it as an excuse for keeping up the sins.
www.tracts.ukgo.com/loraine_boettner.htm
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A PATH FROM ROME, Anthony Kenny Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1985
BLESS ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED, Quentin Donoghue, Linda Shapiro, McClelland
and Stewart, Toronto, 1984
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, Dublin, 1995
CONFESSION OF A ROMAN CATHOLIC, Paul Whitcomb, Tan, Illinois, 1985
CONFESSION QUIZZES TO A STREET PREACHER, Frs Rumble and Carty, TAN, Illinois,
1976
CONFESSION, WHY WE GO, James Tolhurst, Faith Pamphlets, Surrey, 1975
DIFFICULTIES, Mgr Ronald Knox and Arnold Lunn, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1958
ENCHIRIDION SYMBOLORUM ET DEFINITIONUM, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A
Schonmetzer, Barcelona, 1963
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEOLOGY, Edited by Karl Rahner, Burns and Oates, London, 1977
GOING TO CONFESSION TODAY, Patrick McCarthy CC, Irish Messenger Publications,
Dublin 1981
LIFE IN CHRIST, PART 3, Fergal McGrath S.J., MH Gill and Son Ltd, Dublin, 1960
LIVING IN CHRIST, A Dreze SJ, Geoffrey Chapman, London-Melbourne 1969
NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, The Catholic University of America and the
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
ORDINATION, Rev Willie Bridcut, Irish Church Missions, Dublin
PEACE OF SOUL, Fulton Sheen, Universe, London, 1962
PENANCE CONSIDERED Michael S Bostock, Wickliffe Press London, 1985
PENANCE SACRAMENT OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of Dublin,
Veritas, Dublin, 1985
ROMAN CATHOLICISM WHAT IS FINAL AUTHORITY? Harold J Berry, Back to the Bible,
Nebraska, 1974
SALVATION, THE BIBLE AND ROMAN CATHOLICISM, William Webster, Banner of Truth,
Edinburgh, 1990
SECRETS OF ROMANISM, Joseph Zacchello, Loizeaux Brothers, New Jersey, 1984
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS THE ANSWER, Paul Whitcomb, TAN, Illinois, 1986
THE CODE OF CANON LAW, Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland, William
Collins and William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983
THE QUESTION AND ANSWER CATHOLIC CATECHISM, John A Hardon SJ, Image Books,
Doubleday and Company, New York, 1981
THE SECRET OF CATHOLIC POWER, LH Lehmann, Protestant Truth Pamphlets, Agora
Publishing Company, New York
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London,
1961
TRADITIONAL DOCTRINES OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, EXAMINED, Rev CCJ Butlin,
Protestant Truth Society, London
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HEAVEN? Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1988
BIBLE VERSIONS USED
The Amplified Bible