Rivals of Christ

The "Vicars of Christ"
Exposed

Page 3 of 3

"Vicars of Christ" tortured and killed
innocent people by the thousands,
just because, like Jesus and most of the
Christians of his day, they were Jews, and
they did so in the name of Jesus of Nazareth !

When Jesus promised that the "gates of hell will not prevail against his church", surely he didn't have this institution in mind, with its "Vicars of Christ" who themselves directed and applauded the torture and killing of thousands of Jews , and created an atmosphere that led in recent years with an effort to exterminate the whole of the Jewish nation.

Catholic anti-semitism has a very long history. In the fourth-century, St. John Chrysostom, the "Golden-Mouthed" Doctor of the Church, said over and over, "I hate the Jews' . . . No pardon is possible for the odious assassinators of the Lord. "God hates the Jews and always did."
In the year 1096 half of the Jews of Worms (in Germany) were slaughtered as a crusade passed through the town. The rest fled to the bishop's residence for protection. The Bishop agreed to save them, (but only) on condition that they ask to be baptized. The Jews retired to consider their decision. When the doors of the audience chamber were opened, all 800 Jews inside were dead. Some were decapitated; fathers had killed their babies before turning their knives on their wives and themselves: a groom had slain his bride. The first century tragedy of Masada was repeated everywhere in Germany and, later, throughout France. When the Crusade took the great prize, Jerusalem, one of their first acts was to set the synagogue on fire with all the Jews inside." (from page 157-8):
Pope Paul IV, who hated Jews, had worked on the document for hours at a time. . . Soon it was finished. On 17 July 1555, a mere two months after his election, he published Cum nimis absurdum, a Bull which never appears in pious anthologies of papal documents. For this was to prove a landmark in the history of anti-Semitism. . .
( It was said of him: ) 'His arm is dyed in blood to the elbow.' It is no surprise that during Paul's brief pontificate the population of Rome was almost halved. Jews, who had nowhere to run to, took the brunt of his bigotry. He knew by heart all the church's edicts against Judaism. The onslaught on the Jews had begun very early. In the Roman Empire, Jews had overcome initial hostility to win for themselves full citizenship by the Edict of Caracalla in the year 212. A century later, when Constantine became a Christian, persecution of Jews began. They were excluded from all civil and administrative posts, forbidden to employ Christians, or give to and receive from them medical aid. Intermarriage between Christians and Jews was classed as adultery and made a capital offence. In a lawsuit between Christians and Jews, only Christian witnesses were acceptable to the court. Fathers of the church, such as Ambrose in the West and Chrysostom in the East, provided a theological basis for despising Jews which has the power to shock even today. . .
Innocent III and the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 took up the cause of anti-Semitism with a will. And Paul IV, who hated every form of dissent, was determined to carry on, with impeccable cruelty, the work of the great Innocent. Cum nimis absurdum stressed that the Christ-killers, the Jews, were by nature slaves and should be treated as such. For the first time in the Papal States, they were to be confined to a particular area called, after the Venetian Foundry, a 'ghetto'. Each ghetto was to have but one entrance. Jews were obliged to sell all their property to Christians at knockdown prices; at best they realized 20 per cent of value, at worst a house went for a donkey, a vineyard for a suit of clothes. Forbidden to engage in commercial activity or deal in corn, they could otherwise sell food and secondhand clothes (strazzaria); thus was their status reduced to that of rag- pickers. They were allowed one synagogue in each city. Seven out of eight in Rome were destroyed, and in the Campagna eighteen out of nineteen. They were already without books; when he was a cardinal, Paul IV had burned them all, including the Talmud. They were obliged to wear, as a distinguishing mark, a yellow hat in public. They were to use only Italian and Latin in speech, in their calendars and accounts. They were never to employ Christians in any capacity, even to light their Sabbath fires in winter.
. . . A House for Catechumens, that is, for convert Jews, was to be built and paid for by Jews. Censors of Jewish books had to be paid for by Jews, as was the Gentile gate-keeper whose job it was to lock them in at night. . .
Roman Jews suffered specially in that their ghetto was a stretch along the right bank of the Tiber, malarial and frequently as waterlogged as Venice. Within a circuit of five hundred yards were crammed four to five thousand people. According to one Jewish writer, they were 'clothed in rags, living on rags, thriving on rags'. . .
The impact of Paul's Bull was immediate. Within days, there was a ghetto in Venice, another in Bologna called the Inferno. Paul's aim was to convert Jews en masse. Many did cross over to Christianity; most did not. Atrocities resulted everywhere. . .
Paul died in 1559, but his Bull had set a pattern that was to last for three centuries. . . Everywhere, synagogues were closed for months on end on the pretext that a single unauthorized book had been found there. . .
One Christian superstition of the time was that whoever was responsible for baptizing an infidel gained free passage to Paradise. Ruffians roamed the city, pouncing on Jewish children and christening them with rainwater. In the eighteenth century, Benedict XIV decided that a child baptized against his or her parents' wishes and contrary to the procedures of canon law was none the less a Christian and had to live as one. If he did not, he was labelled a heretic, with the dire penalties that entailed. The ghettos were loud in mourning when such crimes occurred. They grieved, too, when a Jew, converted to Christianity, did as the priest told him and snatched his children from the ghetto. Once they were baptized, the mother was never allowed to see them again. . .
In the worst days of papal oppression in Rome, Jews lived in a space confined by high walls. Naturally, they had to build upwards. As a result, houses collapsed, sometimes during wedding celebrations. Fires spread rapidly. . .
The French Revolution ushered in the age of enlightenment. The light did not reach the Vatican. A succession of popes reinforced the ancient prejudices against Jews, treating them as lepers unworthy of the protection of the law. Pius VII was followed by Leo II, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX - all good pupils of Paul IV. . . .
If a Christian doctor was called to treat a patient in the ghetto, he had first to try to convert him to Christ. If he failed, he was to leave as once. Three or four Jewish children were taken every Monday for baptism and turned into Christians. Whoever objected, even the parents, was hauled before the Inquisition. If two Christians testified that a Jew by word or deed had insulted a Catholic priest or the true religion, he was put to death.
Leo II (1823-9) decided Christians were getting lax. He again locked Jews inside ghettos. He also forbade vaccination against smallpox during an epidemic because it was 'against the natural law'. . .
In September 1870, Italian troops took Rome. They were greeted by scenes of jubilation only matched when the Allies recaptured the city after the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. Eleven days after Rome fell, on 2 October 1870, the Jews, by a royal decree, were given the freedom which the papacy had denied them for over fifteen hundred years. The last ghetto in Europe was dismantled. When that happened, Jews must have felt that their trials were over at last. How could they know that their darkest hour was still to come? (see pages 191-5):

The role of the Catholic Church and in the Jewish Holocaust,of Pope Pius XII in particular, is so serious a matter that it has to be addressed in a page of its own: http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/RCscandal

"Vicars of Christ" have often been
more corrupt rulers of the church
than their counterparts in civil government

To be a true-believing Roman Catholic is to believe that Jesus selected as his personal representatives on earth "Vicars" men ( some in their teens, and one even a pre-teen), with no qualifications whatsoever to lead a supposedly holy institution :
"When Lord Macaulay of England visited the papal states in 1838 he reported: "Corruption infects all the public offices. . . The States of the Pope are, I suppose, the worst governed in the civilized world; and the imbecility of the police, the venality of public servants, the desolation of the country, force themselves on the observation of the most heedless traveller."
By 1870 only tsarist Russia was more wickedly run than the Papal States. In the States there was no freedom of thought or expression, and no elections. Books and papers were censored. Jews were locked up in ghettos. Justice was a blind and hungry lion. It was frankly a police state flying the papal flag, with spies, inquisitors, reprisals, secret police, and executions for minor offenses a commonplace. A small corrupt, lascivious, tight-knit clerical oligarchy ruled in his Holiness's name, with a rod of iron." (p. 130)

"Vicars of Christ" have thought themselves
better equipped than scientists
to establish scientific truth.

To be a true-believing Roman Catholic is to believe that Jesus selected as his personal representatives on earth "Vicars" who are better equipped to establish scientific truths than all the scientists in the world put together.
Here's the way Pope Gregory VII spelled out the pope's prerogatives: "He can be judged by no one on earth.
The Roman church has never erred, nor can it err until the end of time.
The pope alone can depose bishops.
He can dethrone emperors and kings (and no doubt Presidents and Prime Ministers) and absolve their subjects from allegiance.
All princes are obliged to kiss his feet.
His delegates, even when not priests, have precedence over bishops.
A rightly elected pope is, without question, a saint, made so by the merits of Peter." (This sanctity he claimed to have experienced overwhelmingly at his election.) After Galileo gave one of his newly invented microscopes to his friend, Pope Urban, and the pope had marvelled at a world he had never known existed, the pope said to Galileo concerning the new book Galileo had just published about how the sun, rather than the earth is the fixed center of our universe: "You may have irrefutable proof of the earth's motion (around the sun). That does not prove the earth actually moves. . . God is above human reason and what seems perfectly reasonable to men may prove folly to God." Urban went on to say that he, as pope, was responsible for the salvation of souls. Sometimes scientific discussion imperilled souls. The Copernican system, unless taken as a pure mathematical device, might cast doubt on Scriptures. Should that happened, he would have to take steps to stamp it out.
Because the pope had read in the bible that the sun "comes up" and "goes down", the pope knew that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo (and any number of other scientists) couldn't be right about the earth revolving around the sun, instead of the other way around,
What wounded Galileo most was the disgrace. It had been visited on him for no reason he could understand. He thought of himself as a devoted Catholic. How could anyone insist on taking Genesis literally when there were overwhelming reasons for it being a myth! He was convinced that scientific problems could not be solved by a clerical police force. Ranged against him, he saw only ignorance, malice and impiety posing as Christian faith and virtue. Small-minded Vatican clerics had humiliated him but they could not stop the progress of science. His was the classic case of truth being crushed by power, genius being silenced by petty bureaucracy. It showed Rome's fear and hatred of the enquiring mind which was to be repeated time after time in the centuries ahead.
The church's backward march into the future meant that its war with science and progress was to go on. It warred against liberty and the democratic process at and after the French Revolution. It made war on Darwin and Freud, on biblical scholarship, on attempts to understand the world on its own terms, free from divine 'interventions from outside'. Today, it wages war against birth control and the equality of women. On each and every occasion, the Catholic church at the highest level refers to the Bible and natural law as it tries, with the best intentions, to halt the forward march of the world. It is a melancholy fact that it would be hard to find in the last four centuries one instance in which Rome greeted with unqualified joy a decisive advance of the human spirit. Any theologian who is censured today can at least take comfort in the fact that he is not treated as harshly as the Father of Modern Science. (p. 230)

The Papacy Revisited :

If popes ARE the successors of Peter:
Let's assume for the moment that Roman Catholics are right in believing that, as Bishops of Rome, their popes, and only their popes, are the authentic successors of Peter. What they are saying is that no clergyman is a true representative of Jesus who can't trace his or her ordination to a long line of brutal torturers, tyrants, murders, adulterers and fornicators who sold spiritual benefits for financial gain, which they used for gluttony, sexual orgies and personal gain.
Wouldn't you think that Jesus might say to these people something along the lines of what, {according to Luke 3: 7-9: } "John (the Baptist) said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

The claims of the Papacy:
It may jolt Catholics to hear it, but "the great Fathers of the Church saw no connection between the verse which Jesus addressed to Peter and the Bishops of Rome. Not one of them applies "Thou art Peter" to anyone but Peter. One after another they analyze it: Cyprian, Origen, Cyril, Hilary, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine. They're not exactly Protestants. Not one of them calls the Bishop of Rome a Rock or applies to him specifically the promise of the keys. . .
The surprises do not stop there. For the Fathers, it is Peter's faith -- or the Lord in whom Peter has faith -- which is called the Rock, not Peter. All the Councils of the Church from Nicea in the fourth century to Constance in the 15th agree that Christ himself is the only foundation of the church, that is, a rock on which the church rests. (p. 24)
Perhaps this is why not one of the Fathers speaks of a transference of power from Peter to those who succeed him; not one speaks, as church documents do today, of an "inheritance". There's no hint of an abiding Petrine office. Insofar as the Fathers speak of an office, the reference is to the episcopate it in general. All bishops are successors to all the apostles.
What, then, becomes of the promises said to be made via Peter to his "successors", the Pope's? Do not popes inherit infallibility and worldwide jurisdiction from Peter?
The first problem about infallibility is that the new Testament makes it plain that Peter himself made tremendous errors both before and after Jesus died. When, for instance, Jesus insisted that he had to go up to Jerusalem where he would be crucified, Peter protested so much that Jesus called him a "satan" in his path. Some Catholic theologians have suggested that these words, "Get thee behind me Satan", should be added to the Petrine text already inscribed around Michelangelo's dome (i.e."Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevailed against it.")
After Jesus' resurrection, Peter made an equally bad blunder. "Heresy" is not too bad a word for it. The church's greatest ever canon lawyer, Gratian, said in 1150: "Peter compelled the gentiles to live as Jews and to depart from gospel truths".
As to worldwide jurisdiction, did it ever cross Peter's mind when he preached to his little flock at Antioch or Rome that he had command over the whole church? Such a idea had to wait until Christianity was integrated into the Roman Empire. Even then it took time for the papacy to grow to the stature that made such a pretention possible.
The difficulties not stop there. Popes are only said to be infallible when they address the whole church. When did they first do so? Certainly not in the first millennium. During that time, as everybody agrees, only General Councils expressed the mind of the church. Was the pope's supreme power suspended all that while? If the church managed to function without it for 1000 years, why should she need it at all?
So the early church did not look on Peter as Bishop of Rome, nor, therefore, did it think that each Bishop of Rome succeeded to Peter. Rome was held in highest esteem for rather different reasons. In the first place, it was where Peter and Paul had witnessed with their lives. Secondly, Rome was a sacred spot because there the faithful, clergy and laity, kept the apostle's bodies and reverenced them. Those bodies were kind of pledge of orthodoxy throughout the ages.

Papal pride:
(p. 166): The utterances of medieval pontiffs created this oppressive climate. It began, of course, with

Gregory VII's "The Pope cannot make a mistake".
Pascal II (1073 - 85), quoting a forged a letter of St. Ambrose, said: "Whoever does not agree with the Apostolic See is without doubt it a heretic."
Lucius III (1181 -5) decided that all differences among Catholics must be grave sins because they denied the Pope's authority which underpins the entire system.
Innocent III (1198-1216) said those who take literally Jesus' word and limit their speech to Yes and No are heretics and worthy of death.
Innocent IV (1243-54) described himself as "the bodily presence of Christ', presumably by a kind of transubstantiation at his election. Anyone who showed disrespect to him or his decrees was, naturally, a heretic.
Boniface VIII(1294-1303) not to be outdone, define it as Catholic doctrine that "every human being must do as the pope tells him".

"The Vicars of Christ" is full of fascinating and disturbing information that shows, in the words of its author, Peter De Rosa, that "all popes are fallible, that many made very bad mistakes, and that several were heretical. They contradicted the teaching of the church, contradicted each other and, not infrequently, contradicted themselves on essential Christian doctrine.
As a result, the tradition was that any pope, including the reigning pontiff, can be as mistaken as anyone else. He has no special grace to prevent him falling into heresy.
Further, there can be no question of a pope being right and the church wrong. If the pope distances himself from the church -- perhaps by not listening to it -- the pope, not the church, has to change his mind. If he refuses to listen and falls into heresy, he is pope no longer, for, having abandoned the faith, he is not even a Christian. (p. 235) One example of misguided policy:
The discipline of celibacy now in place actually led to unchastity. Proof of this comes in the writing of one of the great reforming saints, Bernard of Clairvaux. In the year 1135 he was responding to the Albigensian claim that marriage is sordid. Bernard said: 'Take from the Church an honourable marriage and an immaculate marriage bed, and do you not fill it with concubinage, incest, homosexuality and every kind of uncleanness?' (p. 409)

End of material from Peter De Rosa's book
The Vicars of Christ

The Catholic Church &
the "American Holocaust":

In "American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World" (Oxford University Press 1992), David E. Stannard shows that far from being discoverers and "missionaries", Columbus was a "conquistador", a slave trader and the man who initiated a genocide of an entire people and the clergy were his enablers. All of the founding fathers had serious flaws, true -- but Columbus was in a class by himself. We might as well have the founder of the KKK as a national hero as Columbus. How many people know that Columbus introduced measures generally attributed to later conquistadors, such as enslaving Indians and hunting them down with dogs?
David E. Stannard not only dispels common myths in his work. He tells the reader what was lost: the incredible variety of cultures and the impressive achievements Native Americans had developed throughout the millennia. How well known is the fact that most Native Americans were living in towns and villages as farmers, long before Columbus and that the majority of Native societies in Northern America was organized democratically, including women's right to vote, long before such an idea was conceivable to Europeans? How well known is it that -- unlike European cities of the time -- the magnificent capital of the Aztec society took its "drinking water . . . from springs . . . piped into the city by a huge aquaduct system" that amazed the Spaniards, just as they were amazed at the city's cleanliness and order: "at least 1000 public workers were employed to maintain the city's streets and keep them clean". (p. 5)
When Columbus and a handful of Spanish sailors landed in the Caribbean, this was the beginning of "far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world" (p. X) and cost more than a hundred million lives in five centuries.
How well known is it that in the Spanish missions in California the natives were forced to do slave labor and died in the thousands and that the missions were "furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines"? (p. 137)

When it came to the matter of the enslavement of black Africans, unlike some of the Protestant churches of the South that endorsed slaver, the Roman Catholic church took a different approach: it pretended that it was none of the church's business what their congregants did to other people, no matter how heinous, if the former where white and the latter black :

"The Roman Catholic Church had taken no position on slavery either before or during the war. 'By their silence,' one Catholic writer explained ' our prelates (i.e. hierarchy) divorced this burning political question from church affairs.' "

The Roman Catholic Church is governed like a dictatorship, from an imperial court called the "Roman Curia", which has codified the church's rules and regulations ("Canon Law"), and functions as the church's "Supreme Court", under the "Supreme Pontiff". A retinue of "Princes of the Church", all appointed by the Pope govern sections of the church called "dioceses" under his (and the Curia's) direction. All Catholic bishops take an oath (not to serve the Church as a whole, or its people), but "to maintain, defend, increase and advance the rights, honors, privileges and authority of their Lord the Pope." (Vicars of Christ p. 143) The principal tools the Catholic Church has used to lead its members has been the "Mass", mandatory on Sundays for all the faithful and optional on weekdays for its more pious members, and Catholic education, in the form of full time Catholic schools where possible or extra-curricular Catholic education for youth unable to attend such schools. Unfortunately, while the Mass was bible-based, it was celebrated for centuries in Latin, a dead language, and during most of those centuries the Catholic Church discouraged the reading of the scriptures, which it considered dangerous. While "heretics" were saying things like : 'The reading of the Holy Scriptures is for all men.' 'Christians are to sanctify the Lord's Day with reading godly books, more particularly the Holy Scriptures.' 'To pull the New Testament out of the hands of Christians is to shut the mouth of Christ against them.' 'To forbid Christians the reading of the Holy Scripture and especially the Gospel is to forbid the use of the Light by the children of Light and to punish them with a kind of excommunication.' Pope Clement XI called all of these ideas Jansenist heresies and condemned them in 1713 in these words: "We declare, condemn and disallow all and each of these Propositions as false, captious, ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, scandalous, pernicious, rash, injurious to the Church and its practices, not only outrageous against the Church but even against the secular powers, seditious, impious, blasphemous, suspected of heresy and savouring of heresy itself, as also encouraging heretics and heresies and even schism, erroneous, often condemned, and lastly also heretical, containing divers heresies manifestly tending to innovation". ( P. 232) Although some of what Catholics have been taught in its schools and from its pulpits has had to do with the Bible, a good deal of it had to do with unique inventions of the Catholic Church that have little if any connection with the teaching of Jesus Christ contained in the Gospels. Sadly, when the church spoke of Christ and the Bible, it tended to speak in Latin, a dead language which few priests let alone lay people really understand. But when it spoke of it's own dubious Roman inventions, it always spoke in the vernacular. When Popes have taught these doctrines, should they not have at least noted that they were not doing so as representatives of Jesus Christ : First mention of infant baptism - 215 a.d. Prayers for the dead - about 300 a.d. Making the sign of the cross 300 a.d. Wax Candles - 320 a.d. Emperor Constantine converted (more or less) - 312 a.d. Constantine declared Sunday a civil holiday (Holy Day) - 321 a.d. Council of Nicea adopts "Creed" and recognizes episcopacy Veneration of angels and dead saints - 375 a.d. The use of images - 375 a.d. The Mass as a daily celebration - 394 a.d Council of Carthage: canonization of Scripture - 394 a.d. Latin Vulgate Bible by Jerome - 405 a.d. Edict of Innocent I: Compulsory infant baptism - 407 a.d. The beginning of the exaltation of Mary. The term Mother of God first applied to her by the Council of Ephesus - 431 a.d. Priests begin to dress differently than laymen. - 500 a.d. Extreme unction - 526 a.d. First monastic order begun by Benedict of Nursia - 529 a.d. The doctrine of purgatory is established by Gregory I. - 593 a.d. Latin language used in prayer and worship commanded by Gregory I - 600 a.d. Prayers directed to Mary, dead saints and to angels - 600 a.d. Title of "Pope" (Bishop of the universe) given to Boniface III by the Emperor Phocas - 607 a.d. Kissing the pope's foot begins with Pope Constantine - 709 a.d. Temporal power of the popes is conferred by Pepin, King of the Franks - 750 a.d. Worship of the cross, images and relics is now officially authorized - 786 a.d. Holy Water (mixed with a pinch of salt and blessed by a priest) comes into use. - 850 a.d The worship of Joseph as a saint - 890 a.d. College of Cardinals established (for election of popes) - 927 a.d. Baptism of bells instituted by Pope John XIII - 965 a.d. The canonization of dead saints is first done by Pope John XV - 995 a.d. Fasting on Fridays and during "Lent" begins - 998 a.d. The mass has gradually developed into a sacrifice and attendance is now obligatory - 1050. The celibacy of the priesthood is required by Pope Gregory II - 1079. The rosary, a mechanical praying with beads, invented by Peter the Hermit - 1090. The Inquisition, in operation for centuries, is now made official by Council of Verona - 1184. The sale of indulgences begins - 1190. Doctrine of transubstantiation is proclaimed by Pope Innocent III as the power to bring down God out of heaven into a cup and wafer - 1215. Auricular confession of sins to a priest is instituted by Pope Innocent III and required annually in the Lateran council. - 1215. The adoration of the wafer (host) is decreed by Pope Honorius III - 1220. Laymen are officially forbidden to have or read the Bible - by the Council of Valencia - 1229. Protection by a piece of cloth, the scapular is invented by Simon Stock, a british monk - 1251. Laymen are forbidden to drink the cup at communion, by order of the Council of Constance - 1414. Purgatory is proclaimed as a dogma by Council of Florence - 1439. Doctrine of seven sacraments is affirmed on pain of mortal sin - 1439. These SEVEN key sacraments make the clergy crucial to every aspect of every Catholic's life. The sale of indulgences (by Tetzel) begins in 1504. Rebuilding of St. Peter with money from indulgence business begins 1506. Cult of holy house of Loretto, transported from Holy Land by angels recognized by Pope Julius II -1507. The first part of the "Ave Maria" saying is made official - 1508. The last part of the "Ave Maria" has been prepared, and is required of the faithful by Pope Sixtus V - 1593. The Jesuit Order is founded by Ignatius Loyola; Luther publishes Bible & Calvin publishes his Institutes - 1534. Pope Paul III creates the Inquisition, the first Roman Congregation of what is now the Vatican Curia - 1542. Tradition (the sayings of the popes and councils) is declared to be equal in authority with the bible, by the Council of Trent.- 1545. The apocryphal books are added to the bible by the Council of Trent - 1546. Pope Paul IV initiates the "Index of Forbidden Books" - 1559.. The creed of Pope Pius IV is imposed as the official creed of the church - 1560. Pope Gregory XVI condemns "freedom of conscience" as "a mad opinion". The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is proclaimed by Pope Pius IX - 1854. The "Syllabus of Errors" is proclaimed by Pope Pius X, and ratified by the First Vatican Council, as the truth of God. (Condemned and repudicated are : freedom of religion, speech, press, and all scientific discoveries that have not been approved by the church). - 1864. The temporal authority of the pope over all rulers is officially reaffirmed - 1864. The absolute infallibility of the pope in all matters of a faith and morals is proclaimed by the First Vatican Council - 1870. Pope Pius X publishes the encyclical letters Lamentabili and Pascendi against "Modernism". Public schools are condemned by Pope Pius XI - 1930. The Assumption of the Pope Virgin Mary (bodily ascension into heaven shortly after her death) is proclaimed by Pope Pius XII - 1950. Birth Control issue removed from the competence of the General Council of the Church by Pope Paul VI - 1963. Mary is proclaimed to be "the Mother of God", by Pope Paul VI - 1965. The "Index of Forbidden Books" discontinued by Pope Paul VI - 1966.
We have yet to date the Roman Catholic innovations below :
Novel forms of worship : "Sacred Heart of Jesus" "Christ the King" The Infant of Prague The "Queenship" of Mary Mary "Mediatrix of all graces" The "Way of the Cross" The "Novena" Shrines of all kinds "Our Lady of Fatima" "Our Lady of Lourdes" "Patron Saints" with power in specialized areas "Easter duties" (Confession and communion at least once a year)	Theological Inventions: Crucial role of the Pope, and through him of all clergy Limbo Reverence for and submission to its "men of God" the duties of wives to their husbands preparations for marriage (Cana conferences) publishing bands of marriage strict ban on marriage after divorce (except for those wealthy enough to get special treatment, such as "annulment") burial of Catholics in Catholics-only cemeteries Identifying the following as "Mortal Sins": masturbation birth control abortion
This is What Jesus Himself Taught : Regarding the behavior of his leaders: Only one of the four Gospels even mentions the word "church" and all of the instances fit on a single page of Matthews Gospel, i.e. verses 18 in Ch. 16, and verses 15,17 & 21 n Ch. 18. Jesus never used the word "priest" or "priesthood" to refer to anything other than the Jewish priesthood. according to Matthew, Ch. 23: "At that time, Jesus addressed the crowds and His disciples, saying : 'The scribes and the Pharisees speak with the authority of Moses, so you must do what they tell you and follow their instructions. But don't make the mistake of imitating their lives! For, they preach but do not practice. They pile up back-breaking burdens and lay them on other men's shoulders -- yet they themselves will not so much as raise a finger to move them. Their whole lives are planned with an eye to effect. They increase the size of their prayer books and lengthen the tassels of their robes; they love seats of honor at public functions and front places and to have men call them 'rabbi' or 'teacher'. As for yourselves, don't you ever be called 'rabbi' -- you only have one teacher, and all of you are brother of one another. And don't call any human being 'father' -- for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. And you must not let people call you 'leaders' -- for you have only one leader, the Anointed One (Christ). The only 'superior' among you is the one who serves the others. For, every man who promotes himself will be humbled, and every man who learns to be humble will find promotion. But alas for you, you scribes and Pharisees, play actors (hypocrites) that you are! You lock the doors of the kingdom of Heaven in men's faces. You will not go inside yourselves, and neither will you allow others to enter." "You know that among the pagans, rulers lord it over their subjects and their great men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you. No, anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be your slave, just as the son of man came, not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matt. Ch. 20) " If anyone wishes to be first, he must make himself the last, and the servant of the rest." Regarding prayers like the "rosary": Jesus gave us the prayer "Our Father" (in Matthew 6:7-9), but in doing so he introduced it with the following instructions: "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. "Pray then in this way: Our Father ". . . Although Catholics use the "Our Father" in the rosary, isn't the whole idea of the rosary a perfect example of how Jesus told NOT to pray? Back to Page 2 of 3

We've had our say. Now it's your turn :

[email protected]
Click here to this page
or here to to others (or yourself),

There is much more where this came from at

See why you may already be one of us!

The "Vicars of Christ" Exposed

"Vicars of Christ" tortured and killed innocent people by the thousands, just because, like Jesus and most of the Christians of his day, they were Jews, and they did so in the name of Jesus of Nazareth !

"Vicars of Christ" have often been more corrupt rulers of the church than their counterparts in civil government

"Vicars of Christ" have thought themselves better equipped than scientists to establish scientific truth.

The Papacy Revisited :

The Vicars of Christ

The Catholic Church & the "American Holocaust":

This is What Jesus Himself Taught :

Web discoveries

The "Vicars of Christ"
Exposed

"Vicars of Christ" tortured and killed
innocent people by the thousands,
just because, like Jesus and most of the
Christians of his day, they were Jews, and
they did so in the name of Jesus of Nazareth !

"Vicars of Christ" have often been
more corrupt rulers of the church
than their counterparts in civil government

"Vicars of Christ" have thought themselves
better equipped than scientists
to establish scientific truth.

The Catholic Church &
the "American Holocaust":

This is What
Jesus Himself Taught :