Four Anglican ministers and their congregations here in Melbourne are
leaving the Anglican Church and joining the Catholic Church. They believe that there is no longer a place for them in the old church:
So many of us have tried to find a space within established Anglicanism, but there's really no space for us any more. If you don't embrace the new religion they don't want you.
May God be praised, let us hope that they aren't discouraged to any great degree by the progressivists that have infiltrated Our Lord's One True Church. Let us pray that such conversions will become more frequent as time goes on. I think that this is likely to be the case, as those Anglicans who are in earnest in doing good & avoiding evil will be sent more graces from Our Lord, so that they will evntually come to realise that the Catholic Church is the true Church.
ReplyDeleteThey will no longer want to go on being members of an heretical sect, founded so that a depraved tyrant could satisfy his base passions, & forced upon the English people in the years that followed so that a cabal of worthless murdering thieving filth could keep all that they'd looted from the Church.
@ Anon.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but my response to this is not yours. I'm grieving for what the Anglicans were.
They were great. In NZ, the CMS (Christian Missionary Society) rocked: we has missionaries opposing integration with the British Empire. The theologians of Anglican evangelicalism include J I Packer, C S Lewis... and in older times J. Donne and R. Baxter.
I'm reformed, and I disagree with much in Anglicanism, but the loss of that light should make us all sad.
The one mistake they made is they joined a church that seemed very traditional. But many points of their theology is contrary to the inspired word of god.
ReplyDeleteNot to say tradition is bad but based and is consistent with the Bible.
They should just set up their own informal house churches or normal churches if they can afford it and make it as completely close to the apostolic model as possible like in the book of acts and the letter s of paul.
The so-called 'Reformed" sects were all founded by men of notoriously bad character. Look at Luther with his blessing of bigamous marriages, his gluttony & drunkeness, which he excused by saying that belief in Christ was sufficient for salvation. This is why he so intensely disliked the Epistle of St. James, & wanted to remove it from his version of the Holy Bible; it contains the following verse "Thou believest that there is one God. Thou dost well : the devils also believe and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?" Chapter II verses 19 & 20.
ReplyDeleteAlso the very words of Our Lord Himself contradict the heresiarchs."And I say to thee: That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." Gospel of St. Matthew XVI 18 & 19.
Again in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians I verse 8,"But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema." What did the heresiarchs do but preach another gospel?
I know that Protestants will say that their teachings put things right, this is flatly contradicted by reading the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, they described the Holy Mass, not a Protestant service, they believed in the Real Presence, they were devoted to the Most Holy Mother of God, they were in short Catholics.
Everywhere that Protestantism took hold, it was largely adopted by the masses because of the lower moral standards. No charity, as after all good works were no longer necessary for salvation. Luther himself wrote of this phenomena. The Rulers adopted it because it allowed them to loot the Church & to rule without restraint of any kind, as Luther taught that a prince needn't act as a Christian when carrying out the various duties of state. This is where the modern idea of a politician supposedly being morally free to vote for unjust laws, because he is acting according to his political office, & not as a private person came from.
The English people by & large did not want the new religion, there were several armed risings against its imposition, it took the tyrants two generations to root out the Faith, by methods strikingly similar to those later used by the communists in the Soviet Union & other countries, that is by brutal repression of the older "counter-revolutionaries" combined with intensive brainwashing of the young people with the new ideas.
This isn't all that surprising as the doctrines of the French Revolution, that is of political liberalism are no more than the doctrines of Protestantism, of religious liberalsim, applied to the political sphere. The Protestant sect of the Anabaptists tried to set up a communist state in Muenster, the sanguinary history of which reads like the history of a communist coup during the 20th century, such as in Cuba.
First every man would be his own Pope, then every man would be his own king, now every man will dare try to assert that he is his own god, determing what is good & evil according to what gratifies his ego & what does not. Modern man has adopted Crowley's dictum, "do as thou wilt" wholeheartedly, it all sprang from the orginal shipwreck of Christendom brought about by the prototypical modern revolution of Protestantism, which was simply another manifestation of the primordial non serviam first uttered against God before the world was made.
The modern evils that we see round about us were nearly all of them potential, in the philosophical sense of that word, in the Protestant Revolt, it has just taken a few centuries for them to become actual.
As much as I may agree with the proposition that Protestantism is essentially heretical, and although as Catholic I too am constantly amused by so-called "Bible Christians" who deride Catholics while basing their theology on the product of Catholic culture... let us not have this thread deteriorate into a sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics. I know many Catholics who are reprehensible liberal leftists and many Protestants who are more faithful to the teachings of the Early Fathers. When it comes to the culture wars, we need the good from all denominations working together. Let's just agree to disagree on the theological differences, and get on with the real struggle: a liberalism whose god is the Fallen One.
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of putting a fair amount of fuel into the fire...
ReplyDeleteMost Catholics understand as much about the reformed position as I do about Thomism.
What Luther rediscovered was a position that was formulated by Augustine. You have to remember that the Catholic Pope at the time was pretty darn unworthy: it was the period of the Borgias treating the papacy as just another state.
So his attempt to reform the church -- in particular, to stop the sale of indulgences as if the grace of God can be bought with any currency but the blood of Christ -- led to a heresy trial, and a split.
But he was not the real theologian of the reformation. That was Calvin: converted to evangelicism from RCC -- and he had a full RCC education. His commentaries refer continally to the schoolmen (by which he refers to Thomists). He was not unfamiliar with their teaching.
It is simply stupid to argue ad hominem. There have been some very saintly people who are not christian, in fact are anti christian. And I know many bad Christians, among whom I count myself.
But Luther, Erasmus, Calvin and Ignatius Loyala would all, every one of them, be horrified by this period. There is a long and ignoble tradition of sexual impropriety in the church -- which is why it has been preached about so much. But the simony and venality of the reformation pale into insignificance when compared with the approval of open sin -- that would be counted as mortal if you like classifying them -- being seen as normal and not as a disqualification for leadership in any kirk.
I know too many good Anglican and I have read too many good Anglican theologians. This is not a time for sectarian celebration. It is a time for grieving.