JUST A REMINDER
REGARDING FUNDAMENTALS OF THE FAITH

by The Orlando Truth

 

1. The Roman Catholic Church is Christ's Church, not the people’s Church. Christ founded His Church on St. Peter (the ROCK) and gave him alone the Keys of the Kingdom, as His Vicar on earth, to run the Church. Consider the parallel in the business world. Every corporation has a hierarchical structure. The owner (Christ) selects the President (Pope) and the Board of Directors (Apostles). The owner of the corporation makes the rules and decides everything about operating his company. The employees and customers have no authority and do not democratically decide to tell the owner how to run his business. Since hierarchical structure is so common in the business world, why is it so difficult to understand the same concept applying to the structure of Christ's Church? People in America are so imbued with the concept of democracy that they forget that hierarchical organizations exist everywhere.

 

2. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles to enable them to go and TEACH all nations what to believe, as Christ had previously commanded them. Teaching means spelling out definite doctrine. Doctrine, far from being a detail, is essential for a religion to proceed beyond vague spirituality. Because God loves us, He wants us to understand as much as possible about Him as can be done with our finite minds. This knowledge is obtained from doctrinal pronouncements of the authorized teaching body (Magisterium).

 

3. The Roman Catholic Church is based entirely on Christ’s Proclamation (the Kerygma). The source of everything that the Roman Catholic Church teaches came directly from Christ (God). When Christ left this earth and ascended into heaven, He was no longer here, so obviously His Revelation stopped. That Revelation, interpreted but never added to by the Living Tradition of the Church through the Pope and Magisterium authorized by Christ, is the sole Deposit of Faith. A so-called current vague and amorphous “encounter with a living God Whom one meets in the world, other people, and the worship of the church”, whatever feelings and emotions it may inspire, is not Christ's specific Proclamation and therefore can never have anything remotely to do with the authentic Church of Christ.

 

4. The brilliance of the Popes in promulgating the SYLLABUS OF ERRORS was that it so completely anticipated all the details embedded in the heresies of Modernism. The authoritative document of the Second Vatican Council, LUMEN GENTIUM (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), beautifully evidenced the continuing truth of all past teaching of the Church, very clearly confirming its truth for all future generations. All the tenets of Modernism were effectively repudiated by this definitive document, notwithstanding all misguided protests from dissenters/modernists to the contrary.

 

5. Nothing is more irrational than the concept of the “universal priesthood of all mankind”. This individual personal interpretation of Scripture producing contradictory results by everyone is absurd. How could a good and loving God be so cruel as to lead his people astray without any guidance? Intrinsic in the concept of a good and loving God is that He provided for a church structure that would clearly teach His truths of Faith and the moral law to be the same for all. An assembly of persons, all believing different things, cannot constitute a church and is ridiculous on its face. Uniformity of belief can only be accomplished through a centralized teaching source.

 

6. Any church, including each and every Protestant church, that is democratically organized as to its beliefs is, ipso facto, a false church. Democracy can never establish any truth. It is not a procedure for obtaining truth. Truth is discovered, not decided upon by vote. Democracy merely votes for what it wants, and the results of its votes will continually change as the desires of the voters change. They can never be consistent. They can never be uniform. They can never be universal. They can never be Catholic.