CATHOLICISM'S UNECUMENISM AND HATE FOR OTHER FAITHS LASTED NEARLY TWO MILLENNIA

 
§1 It is not licit for the faithful by any manner to assist actively or have a part in the sacred [rites] of non-Catholics.

§2 Passive or merely material presence can be tolerated for the sake of honor or civil office, for grave reason approved by the bishop in case of doubt, at the funerals, weddings, and similar solemnities of non-Catholics, provided danger of perversion and scandal is absent (canon 1258, 1917 Code of Canon Law).
 
Whoever in any manner willingly and knowingly helps in the promulgation of heresy, or who communicates in things divine with heretics against the prescription of canon 1258, is suspected of heresy (canon 2316, 1917 Code).

One who is guilty of prohibited participation in [non-Catholic] religious rites is to be punished with a just penalty (canon 1365, 1983 Code of Canon Law).
 
The Catholic Church brought out infallible decrees at the Council of Trent condemning all Protestant doctrines and saying that the believers of these doctrines were anathema, that is extremely accursed.
 
In recent times the Church has stopped calling Protestants heretics and says they are separated brethren. It says they cannot be held to account for the errors and heresies of the reformers. It says then they have been misled and it is not their fault. This cannot be reconciled with Trent. The excuse is that truths revealed by God and decreed as true by the Church are not to be identified with the way they are formulated. The truth cannot be changed but the way it is expressed and formulated and put into words can be changed. So they say they are staying true to Trent but are formulating it differently. They are bringing Trent up to date. This is nonsense for words can never be separated from what the persons who made the words and put them together meant by them. In fact the meaning is more important than the words themselves. Trent and the Church of the time never believed in separated brethren but that Protestants were heretics. When it fulminated against Protestantism with its anathemas it meant all Protestants. The leaders of the Reformation were not singled out. Nobody argued at the time of Trent that the leaders led the people astray and it was not the peoples fault and therefore that the people were not heretics but separated brethren.
 
Since Vatican II, Catholics and Protestants hold prayers in common and attend each other’s services. The old rule that it is a mortal sin for Catholics to attend Protestant services is now gone though they are still expected to divert their attention if the minister starts challenging Roman dogma.
 
Ecumenical Councils are infallible in the Roman Catholic Church. Lateran 4 required the execution of heretics. The Church today says it refers to only violent warmongering heretics. Nothing in the decree indicates that the Church is telling the truth. It is just a cover up.
 
Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Mortalium Annos condemned the view that Catholics can pray and have ecumenical relations with other Christians and yet the first pope after his successor reversed this position. John XXIII was this pope. Ecumenism says that all religions are good or at least tolerable. The new Catholic version says this at least of all the one god religions like Anglicanism but holds that the Catholic Church is the one true Church and these religions are Catholic but don’t know it. This is the same as saying that the Catholic religion is the best but other religions are okay, they are good enough. This is in practice, the same as declaring that one religion can be as good as another. The Catholic Traditionalists who have separated from Rome over its ecumenism are right to say that that is the sin of indifferentism. Any religion that embraces any form of indifferentism is not Catholic in morals for Christ commanded that the chief duty was to seek converts for the truth. Any religion that does this is not Christian for Christianity preaches uncompromising obedience to doctrinal and moral and every kind of truth (though it does not really live up to it!). Jesus claimed to be the truth and the uncompromising truth for truth is only ruined and threatened if you will settle for semi-truth or half-truth.
 
In Radio Replies, 1, Question 1089, we read, “Is it a sin for a Catholic to attend weddings in Protestant churches? The law of the Catholic Church forbids participation in a religious service that is not Catholic because it is an implied repudiation of the faith which a Catholic professes to be the only true faith”. In the answer to Question 1091, we read concerning attendance at a Protestant service, “Our attendance would sanction to a certain extent their idea that their religion also is as good as our own. But our absence from their Churches gives them food for thought.” Attendance is not encouraging a Protestant to look into the Catholic Church to see if it is the true religion.

If Catholicism really is the truth, then anything that confuses is a sin so to attend would be an implied repudiation of the truth of Catholicism.
 
That rule stirred up a great deal of suspicion and even abhorrence between Catholics and Protestants for it led to Catholic mourners turning abruptly away when a Protestant funeral they were attending reached the Church door. Needlessly insulting a dead person’s religion is a strange way of paying one’s respects. It is needless for it is one blind faith insulting another. They should have just stayed in the house.
 
The excuse was that praying with Protestants was tacitly approving of their religious errors. But Rome lets Catholics pray together despite some of them being in error too!
 
The prejudice expressed in the rule is clearly shown in the fact that Protestants were encouraged to pray during Catholics Masses and ceremonies with the Catholics, this was an admission that the Catholic Church thought there was nothing heretical or wrong in Catholic theology about the two religions uniting in prayer. All this division led to great antagonism and bloodshed in Northern Ireland.
 
The Church has never apologised for its divisive rules. It does not try to be as divisive any more. But there is still no apology. Thus we see it's current peaceable ways as just a strategy and not a repudiation of its alleged right to cause division.
 
The Church says we need the sacraments and we are deprived without them and the sacraments are for making you live more holy. This is just a fancy way of saying that the person outside the Church who does good and only good is not as good as the Catholic for the Catholic has the best way to get to God. It makes many see dreadful arrogance and insolence here. The sacraments neither matter or do real good when that is the bottom line. We do not need them on a humanist or religious level. Relations between Catholicism and other religions then are forms of patronising friendship - on Catholicism's part.
 
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible

BOOKS CONSULTED

A Shattered Visage The Real Face of Atheism, Ravi Zacharias, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Tenneessee, 1990
A Woman Rides the Beast, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1994
All Roads Lead to Rome, Michael de Semlyen, Dorchester House Publications, Bucks, 1993 (page 120 recounts Cardinal Konig of Vienna’s testimony that the Vatican helped Nazi war criminals to escape)
Blind Alley Beliefs, David Cook, Pickering & Inglis, Glasgow, 1979
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988
Christianity, David Albert Jones, OP, Family Publications, Oxford, 1999
Crisis of Moral Authority, Don Cupitt, SCM Press, London, 1985
Documents of the Christian Church, edited by Henry Bettenson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979
Ecumenical Jihad, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996
European Union and Roman Catholic Influence In Britain, David N Samuel, The Harrison Trust, Kent, 1995
“God, That’s not fair!’ Dick Dowsett, OMF Books, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Belmont, The Vine, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 3TZ] Kent, 1982
Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East Sussex, 1995
Human Rights, Michael Bertram Crowe Veritas, Dublin, 1978
In God’s Name, David Yallop, Corgi, London, 1987
Is the Roman Catholic Church a Secret Society? John V Simcox, Warren Sandell and Raymond Winch Watts & Co London, 1946
Is There Salvation Outside The Catholic Church? Fr J Bainvel SJ, TAN, Illinois, 1979
Jesus the Only Saviour, Tony and Patricia Higton, Monarch Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1993
New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Catholic University of America and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
Radio Replies, Vol 1, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1938
Radio Replies, Vol 2, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota 1940
Radio Replies, Vol 3, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota 1942
Religious Freedom, A Fundamental Right, Michael Swhwartz, Liguori Publications, Missouri, 1987
Roman Catholicism, Loraine Boettner, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Phillipsburg, New Jersey, 1987
Rome – Our Enemy, Clifford Smyth, Puritan Printing, Belfast, 1975
Spy in the Vatican 1941-45, Branko Bokun, Tom Stacey Books, London, 1973
The Church of Rome, Wilson Ewin, Bible Baptist Church, Nashua NH USA
The Last Temptation of Christ, Its Deception and What you Should Do About it, Erwin T Lutzer, Moody Press, Chicago, 1988
The Truth that Leads to Eternal Life, Watchtower, New York, 1968
The Unequal Yoke, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1946
The Upside-Down Kingdom, Donald B Kraybill Marshalls, Hants, 1978
Unholy Sacrifices of the New Age, Paul de Parrie and Mary Pride, Crossway Books, Westchester, Illinois 1988
Vicars of Christ, Peter de Rosa, Corgi Books, London, 1993
Walking with Unbelievers, Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, Veritas Dublin 1985
What About Those Who Have Never Heard? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986
Whatever Happened to Heaven? Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Publishers, Oregon, 1988