he was an international jew banker




but shhhhhh



keep it on the downlow

Even worse. He was likely a Mason.

You mean, Pope John XXIII was a Satan-worshiper?

It may have been caused by the fluoride in the water.

nicely played

Interesting.

The Roman Secular Empire became the Roman Christian Empire (Church). The same administration that ran the Roman secular Empire merely transferred it's administrative duties to the Roman Christian Empire (Church).

I have finally become convinced that Christianity is NOT a religion or Church but each individual's attempt to build a relationship with their God and obtain Enlightenment.

Going to Church or belonging to an organization does not make one a Christian.

Very nice...

Yup, a decent voice and post it on YouTube ... that's proof that 1.2 BILLION Catholics are totally stupid.

kd

Well this post is proof you are totally stupid, unless your being sarcastic, which is what this post sounds like, but it is hard to tell.

Spirituality has nothing to do with religion.

And who was Pope anybody doesn't make the Catholic Church a bad thing. It is interesting history, but not much more than that.

The Pope IS the Catholic Church. To be a good Catholic in good standing with the Church you follow the Pope blindly. The Pope is God (Jesus) on earth. In all matters of religion, the Pope is infallible.

Incorrect. The Church has defined in the past that any pope who was a heretic was, by that fact alone, not the Pope, and no Catholic owed him any allegiance.

Oh man, do you ever have that wrong.

He was the first pope I ever heard of. I was in 4th grade, and almost all the kids in my class were Catholic. I learned they had a pope whose name was Pope John the 23rd. One of my classmates was named John Pope. As a 4th grader, I had the hardest time figuring out how Pope John and John Pope were connected!

As it happens, I saw Pope John XXIII just last week!

Steve.

Replying to derby dude - TRH committed postus interruptus

DD gets lots of stuff wrong.


Right so far.


Wrong on both counts.


He got this right, and most people I know who call themselves Christians would agree.

Steve.

Who's the Church if not the ruling elite of pope and college of Cardinals? The ruling hierarchy has always established the orthodox position of the Church and what constituted heresy.

There's a reason why I left the Church and Christianity a long time ago.

Nope.

You are close. I am not sure I would use the word Enlightenment. The word relationship is the key.




AMEN!!!!

I would add not belonging to a church does not mean one is not a Christian.

I do make minor mistakes occasionally but for the most part I'm right.

You have one of two choices: join organized religion i.e. a Church and follow the ruling hierarchy or be a mastic and develop a personal relationship with your Deity and become enlightened.

In early Christianity there were two camps, the organized Church camp under a ruling hierarchy and the Gnostic (mystic) camp without a ruling hierarchy. The first camp stressed salvation through the hierarchy and the second camp stressed salvation through a personal relationship with God, mysticism.

The first camp declared the second camp heretics and persecuted the second camp severely.

We still have the two camps today although the second camp is not usually persecuted today.

So what are you a follower or a mystic?

Catechism 101. The Church is comprised of all Catholics living and dead in unity with Christ. The pope is also called "The Vicar of Christ" meaning basically he's the top guy in the chain of command of the Church on earth. The pope's word is considered infallible only when he declares it so which is rarely. Reserved for essential (absolute) theological truths after much, much debate and prayer.

By enlightenment I mean one sees the "light" or the truth. After all Jesus (God) is suppose to be the "light" of the world. The "light" is truth that all of us seek in our own way.

That's true that one can belong to a Church and still be a Christian but I have found in any religion that peer pressure tends to make one conform to the Church. Hence, as a Pagan I march to the tune of my own drummer no matter how far way or measured the beat maybe.

Yes but it helps, a lot. It's easy enough to talk yourself into falsehoods even with a solid theology to serve as a framework around which to build your thoughts. Just recently talked with clergy to make sure my thinking hadn't gone astray; hadn't missed something or fallen into one of the many philosophical pitfalls.

Yup I know all that it was beat into my head in Catholic school. The Church is still a government and state and like our secular government and state the Church is whatever the ruling elite say it is.

What makes you think his thinking hasn't gone astray?

The Christian mystic like the Zen Buddhist doesn't rely on others to tell him what to think. The Church Christian on the other hand, like the Buddhist does rely on others to tell him what to think.

Maybe 1,000 years or so ago when there were divine right kings. Pretty much where Islam is stuck. Now rather than a government/state or political force the Church is better characterized as the world's oldest and largest bureaucracy. With all the problems a bureaucracy brings.

I don't know if his thinking has gone astray or not. Debate and logical thought - from heat comes light. If Fr. Jerry, and he's studied philosophy and theology to a much greater depth than I, sees a problem with my philosophical argument he will propose an alternative. I'll consider it and correct my argument or propose a counter to his. I will accept no other's world view on its face. That is not understanding (enlightenment).

I have belonged to several churches in my life bot do not belong to any now. When I did belong it was because my personal beliefs aligned with theirs. But, I walked to the drum of my personal beliefs according to the leading of the Holey Spirit. Peer pressure does not effect my walk. There are many frustrated pastors who can attest to this.

I was wondering why this thread?
Didn't take long to find...From Wikipedia:
One of the first acts of Pope John XXIII, in 1960, was to eliminate the description of Jews as perfidius (Latin for "perfidious" or "faithless") in the prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy.
He interrupted the first Good Friday liturgy in his pontificate to address this issue when he first heard a celebrant refer to the Jews with that word.
He also made a confession for the Church of the sin of anti-semitism through the centuries.
While Vatican II was being held, John XXIII tasked Cardinal Augustin Bea with the creation of several important documents that pertained to reconciliation with Jewish people.
[...]
In 1965, the Catholic Herald newspaper quoted Pope John XXIII as saying:
We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren.
We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love.

Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did.

But never a doozey? How about this one?


Quite a lot is wrong with that. First, Christianity was not "organized" in it's early days. It was, as New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce described in the title of one of his books, "A Spreading Flame." It was expanding too fast to be organized. The apostles, notably Paul and John, were clearly standing against Gnosticism in their writings, but that's because Gnosticism was the first threat to the gospel message Peter preached at Pentecost. Keep in mind that when the thousands of new converts returned home after gathering in Jerusalem 50 days after Jesus' resurrection, no hierarchy was controlling the message they took back home. So you cannot show any kind of organization of "ruling hierarchy" in the first generation of Christians.

Your doozey of a mistake continues in how you identify what you call the other "camp" in the early church. To repeat your words:

You clearly do not understand Christianity because early Christians were not "mystics." Mysticism is by definition has "ineffable" truths -- views which cannot be expressed but must be directly experienced and individualized so much that they cannot be explained to another.

To the contrary, the New Testament is not a mystical document and does not teach mysticism. The foundational truths it teaches are that Jesus was God, lived in the flesh, died a real death, and thus identified with us in every way except he was without sin. These are certainly not mystical teachings. Besides the inaccuracies in your description, you have left out those who believed salvation comes to those who accept Jesus guiltless death as God's substitute for their own guilt, and his resurrection as the vindication of who he really was. No New Testament writer would consider those to be mystical truths.

The bottom line is that there is not a word in the New Testament about salvation through some kind of hierarchy. It teaches that we access God through Jesus, our prophet, priest and king. Nor is there a word in the New Testament about some kind of mystical salvation. It does not come through some sort of personal "enlightenment," but it comes through Jesus' death alone. That is why the Cross is critical to understanding Christianity. The Cross is a footnote (if even that) in both "camps" you talk about, the "hierarchy" and the "mystics."

Steve.

Reinforcing that "mysticism" is not a New Testament teaching...

You'd have to agree then that, since New Testament Christians found the writings of Paul, Peter, James, John and others to be important and relied on them for clarity of understanding, these Christians were far from being mystics.

Steve.

The Church is still a state with a government that has a lot of bureaucracies just like our own secular state and government.

You cannot have an organized religion without some type of governing body and bureaucracy. What makes Catholicism different is that it is a religious state modeled on the ancient Roman Empire. The government and bureaucracy is the same as the Roman Empire which is not surprising when you consider the history of the Church. The Vatican is a nation state.

Never has, never will.

Ed

Well it sounds like you have a pretty good father type there.

Enlightenment is not understanding as such it's knowing, intuition. Enlightenment is knowing the course of action you are taking is the right one even though you can't explain that course of action to anyone.

You know that fallowing the spiritual path of Christianity and Jesus is the right path for you, the light, even though you can't explain to anyone.

Just as I know following the spiritual path of Pagan Deism (the Divine Feminine Principle, Goddess) is the right path for me, the light, even though I can't explain it to anyone.

I don't doubt that the same here.

The Vatican as a nation-state? As a matter of protocol, sure. No standing army unless you count a company or two of Swiss Guards, no political agenda, no influence outside it's 110 acres except regarding morality. And if people should reject statements on morality no repercussions except that they get prayed for. Just like Caesar's empire.

I would say that you cannot have an organized religion without some type of structure, not particularly what we might call a government. (See Islam for that.)

And ex cathedra declarations are strictly for the purpose of confirming what has always and everywhere been believed by the Church, not for inventing new teachings.

Most are, a lot of study of Philosophy and Theology. If they spoke academically they'd loose most parishioners attention instantly.


Well I could, but it would take a long time and a solid background in Philosophy. There are others who are very good at explaining it from a more every day point of view. That is a very important part of Church ministry particularly since Pope John XXIII, to bring it back to the title of the thread.

Where do I start.

It's true in the very early years probably the first thirty or so the religion wasn't organized but it didn't take long to start organizing especially once the Roman bureaucrats joined the Church and once Constantine made Christianity the official state religion it was all over but the shouting.

Remember, the Old Testament was written in only the first seventy years or so and isn't the complete history of the Church if it's history at all of the Church.

As to the second part I'm dead right and you prove my point. Of course orthodox Christianity is not mysticism at least for the rank and file. The books that were accepted into the New Testament were the books that would provide for a ruling hierarchy. The ruling hierarchy needs ignorance in order to survive.

Read my tag line it says it all: "Self-reliance, free thinking, and wealth is anathema to the power of the state (secular) and the Church (religious state)."

The last thing the Church (religious state) needs or wants is a bunch of self-reliant, free thinking, and wealthy mystics running around. Look what happened to the Cathars.

Not as a matter of protocol. Mussolini made the Vatican a nation state. One doesn't need an army to be a nation state. Europe has a number of nation states that do not have an army.

Oh, no doubt that Christians that follow the New Testament are not mystics except for the handful of monks and nuns living in monasteries. New Testament Christian follow the official teachings of men in a conclave who put together books that would reenforce their position as the ruling hierarchy of the Church.

The heretics known as the mystics, Gnostics, Cathars, etc disagreed with the orthodox teachings of the organized Church and paid for that disagreement with their lives.

The orthodox Church won the war or at least the battle to suppress the heretics that disagreed with them. However, it appears that the heretics are coming back from the dead or maybe I should say the underground.

UN member nation too. What I mean is that the Vatican exercises governmental authority within its borders but not beyond. Just moral authority which all are free to ignore. Except for doctrine even Catholics.

Glad you agree, but that's not what you said earlier. You don't get to change your point when your point is proven incorrect.


I'm sure, or at least I hope, you actually mean the NEW Testament. And it's pretty well accepted that the New Testament is reliable history. Luke, for example (who wrote a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, arguably the biggest contributor to the New Testament) is today regarded as a historian of the first rank. I refer you again to F. F. Bruce and his book The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable? (There is also a more recent book that covers his ground and brings the issues more up to date; if I remember the name of it I'll insert it later.) Paul, while not writing history per se, does not contradict the history we know, and due to his travels produced a body of work that would be easy to discredit historically if that could be done.


Here, you're changing your point again. But to continue, there is far more to the acceptance of the New Testament books than you admit.

You confuse the church with the Church, and try to define it crisply and clearly (which even the theologians are unable to do) according to your own preconceptions.


The way you use the term "church" changes continually, so I'm going to go ahead and let you post away. No meaningful discussion can be had when the terms of the discussion are fluid.

Steve.

I assume that everyone knows that the Church wasn't organized immediately upon Jesus's death. I guess I shouldn't assume anything. Rome was nothing if not an organizing machine.

Yes I did mean the NEW Testament. Sorry for the poor proof reading. I'm usually in a hurry but that's no excuse.

As to the New Testament being reliable history, all legends and mythologies have some eliminate of historical truth but they are still stories none the less. I believe that the Bible is just a collections of legends and mythologies just like Pagan legends and mythologies. I do not put a lot of stock in stories written by anonymous dead men.

As to changing my point of view I have changed nothing. I stand by what I said.

When I use the term Church I'm referring to the the religious state of the Roman Christian Church. When I use the term with a small case "c" letter I'm referring to church the building. I thought I was clear.

All Christian sects are members of the same orthodox Church out of Roman just differences of theological opinions on the same subject. The Church is ALL orthodox Christian sects under one roof so to speak.

Derby, Edward Gibbon, in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, goes into quite a bit of detail about the history of the Church within the Roman Empire. You might enjoy reading it. He starts talking about the history of Christianity within the Empire in Chapter Fifteen.

I'm going to have to get that one of these days if I live long enough. Maybe I ought to see if the book is one the Internet and if Chapter Fifteen is there.

Thanks.

Here you go.

It's Chapter Fifteen. There are nine parts to this chapter.

Thanks I booked marked it as I'm going to be busy with tax class for the next few days but I'll get to when I'm done with tax class. I hope I can print it out. I'm going to be starting my antibiotics shortly for my cataract surgery. We'll see what we can get done.

Interesting....as a junior in high school in Germany (Army brat), I had the opportunity to be in Rome and I actiually saw John XXIII laying in state at the Vatican while the election for a new pope was going one.

One regret I have is that I actually had a ticket to the mass of the Cardinals and missed it. That's the mass prior to the selection of a new pope. Was there with three other classmates who also had tickets and a Catholic priest. The only morning we actually slept in. You almost have to be a head of state to get into that mass. The priest was a close personal friend of Cardinal Cushing from St. Louis.....therefore the tickets.

No argument from me on your statement.

In addition, the historian Will Durant, goes into very great detail about the origin and subsequent organization, and many divergences of early Christianity in his two books, Caesar and Christ, � 1948, and The Age Of Faith, Simon & Schuster, � 1950.

Both are very interesting reads.

L.W.

TRH...

As I read your posts It occurs to me that you have a lot in common with Mel Gibson's father. What say thou??? From Wikipedia; Hutton Gibson, Mel's dad:


____________________________________

Beliefs[edit]

Gibson is an outspoken critic of the modern post-conciliar Catholic Church and is a proponent of various conspiracy theories. He disseminates his views in a quarterly newsletter called The War is Now! and has self-published three collections of these periodicals: Is the Pope Catholic?, The Enemy is Here!, and The Enemy is Still Here![8][22]

Gibson believes that the Second Vatican Council introduced explicitly heretical and forbidden doctrines into the Catholic Church in order to destroy it from within.[citation needed] He also holds that every pope elected since John XXIII, inclusively, has been an anti-pope or illegitimate claimant to the papacy.[citation needed] This doctrine is called "Sedevacantism", from the Latin words Sede ("seat") and vacante ("vacant"), and affirms that the Pope's seat is effectively vacant because those occupying it do not do so legitimately.[citation needed]

Gibson has been especially critical of Pope John Paul II, whom he once described as "Garrulous Karolus the Koran Kisser".[1] His allegation that the Pope kissed the Qur'an is corroborated by a FIDES News Service report of June 1, 1999, which quotes the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Raphael I, as having confirmed to the news service that he was personally present when John Paul II kissed the text sacred to Muslims:



�

On May 14th I was received by the Pope, together with a delegation composed of the Shi'ite imam of Khadum mosque and the Sunni president of the council of administration of the Iraqi Islamic Bank. There was also a representative of the Iraqi ministry of religion. ... At the end of the audience the Pope bowed to the Muslim holy book, the Qu'ran, presented to him by the delegation, and he kissed it as a sign of respect. The photo of that gesture has been shown repeatedly on Iraqi television and it demonstrates that the Pope is not only aware of the suffering of the Iraqi people, he has also great respect for Islam."[8]

�


Gibson has also used his newsletter to argue against Feeneyism.[23]

At the January 2004 We The People conference, Gibson advocated that the states secede from the Federal government of the United States and that the United States public debt be abolished.[24]

In March 2003, shortly before Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was released in American film theaters, Hutton Gibson provoked widespread outrage when he was broadcast by radio talk show host Steve Feuerstein and subsequently reported on a separate occasion in a New York Times Magazine article, saying on both occasions that the Holocaust was a fabrication.

One week before Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was released in American film theaters, Hutton Gibson told radio talk show host Steve Feuerstein that the Holocaust was fabricated and "mostly fictional".[25] He said that the Jews had simply emigrated to other countries rather than having been killed, a view which some observers described as Holocaust denial.[25][26] He claimed that census statistics prove there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before.[27] Gibson said that certain Jews advocate a global religion and one world government.[25] Gibson's family claimed that Steve Feuerstein misrepresented himself when he called Gibson and never revealed that he was being taped with the intent to broadcast his comments on his show, Speak Your Piece.[28]

In his interview for the New York Times Magazine article, Gibson dismissed historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated:



�

"Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," he said. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?"
Across the table, Joye [Gibson's wife] suddenly looked up from her plate. [...] She had kept quiet most of the day, so it was a surprise when she cheerfully piped in. "There weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe," she said.

"Anyway, there were more after the war than before," Hutton added.

The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an arrangement between Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany. Hitler "had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs," he said.[1]

�


Gibson was further quoted as saying the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews"[2] and that the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by remote control: "Hutton flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks. 'Anybody can put out a passenger list,' he said".[1]

In the early 1990s, Gibson and Tom Costello hosted a video called Catholics, Where Has Our Church Gone?[29] which is critical of the changes made to the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council and espouses the Siri Thesis that in 1958, after the death of Pope Pius XII, the man originally elected pope was not Angelo Roncalli, but another cardinal, "probably Cardinal Siri of Genoa" (a staunch conservative candidate and first papabile). Gibson stated that the white smoke which emanated from a chimney in the Sistine Chapel to announce a new pope's election was done in error; black smoke signifying that the papacy was still vacant was quickly created and the public was not informed of the reason for the initial white smoke. A still photograph of a newspaper story about this event is shown. "Had our church gone up in smoke"? asked Gibson. He stated that the new pope was forced to resign under duress and two days later, the "modernist Roncalli" was elected pope and took the name "John XXIII". In 1962, Roncalli, as Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council.[29] In 2006, Hutton Gibson reversed his position on the Siri Thesis, asserting that this theory was based on a mistranslation of an article written on October 27, 1958 by Silvio Negro for the evening edition of the Milan-based Corriere della Sera.[30] A similar event also happened in 1939; in that case a confusing mixture of white and black smoke emanated from the Sistine Chapel chimney. In a note to Vatican Radio, the secretary of the Papal conclave at the time, a monsignor named Santoro said that a new pope, Eugenio Pacelli, had been properly elected regardless of the color of the smoke. Pacelli took the name Pius XII.[31]

Sedevacantism",

I "Googled" your question. Click on the site address below for an answer to your question:


https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=pope+john+xxiii

That is not true

Tom

Sedevacantism...

TRH is this what you believe?

Roman Catholics are presumed to believe what the Church has always and everywhere taught with its highest degree of authority, one part of which is that no formal heretic can legitimately be the pope. It appears clear that John XXIII and all the popes that followed him were/are, by Roman Catholic standards, formal heretics. Were I still a practicing Roman Catholic, I would conclude that the last legitimate pope was Pius XII.

The Roman Catholic Church has, several times in the past already, declared that certain popes (and even strings of them) were invalid. Those the Church refers to as "antipopes." Google the various antipopes that the Roman Catholic Church has declared in its long history (at least forty). Many times, the formal declarations only came long after their deaths.