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Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?… They are questions which have their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given to these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives. The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be (FR, 1,2).” Catholics share with other Christians a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the son of God made man who came to earth to redeem humanity's sins through His death and resurrection. They follow His teachings as set out in the New Testament and place their trust in God's promise of eternal life with Him. Catholicism, however, is distinct from other Christian churches in both its organisation and its teaching. Structure This is an online article from the Christian Research Journal. When you support the Journal, you... However, this “fire and brimstone” approach has been tempered by the Church. The phrase that I like is: “A lion in the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional.” There ought to be a strength to preaching the entire Gospel, but there should be overwhelming mercy in the pastoral care of souls.
Cults are usually formed, molded, and controlled by a single individual or small group.**When I read this, I think of the Pope and the Vatican. In the modern sense of the word, is the Catholic Church a “cult”? – No, we are not. In the ancient usage of the term, is the Catholic Church a cult(us)? – Absolutely, in terms of a definite form of worship and religious observance. Members of the community were forced to sever all ties with their families, and we were schooled on the premises.At one level, of course, the interpretation of Roman Catholicism is closely related to the interpretation of Christianity as such. By its own reading of history, Roman Catholicism originated with the very beginnings of Christianity. An essential component of the definition of any one of the other branches of Christendom, moreover, is its relation to Roman Catholicism: How did Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism come into schism? Was the break between the Church of England and Rome inevitable? Conversely, such questions are essential to the definition of Roman Catholicism itself, even to a definition that adheres strictly to the official Roman Catholic view, according to which the Roman Catholic Church has maintained an unbroken continuity since the days of the Apostles, while all other denominations, from the ancient Copts to the latest storefront church, are deviations from it. I think I too would have walked out had the priest at my dad’s funeral said no one wants a long eulogy. But viscerally, I knew that saying something personal was necessary for me and my family – and thus it was important that the service was not dominated by the needs of the church or people who didn’t know my dad well. It was a Church of England service. My dad hadn’t attended since he was a young man, but they were more receptive to my family’s needs than the Catholic church described by Georgina Lawton. Pure and simple, the center was my home, and I loved it and the people who were part of it. They were my family, all 100 of them.
Put succinctly, the Catholic Church supports asking questions. St. John Paul II wrote in Fides et Ratio:
Good news—this is your 5th America article this month.
The Tablet magazine surveyed 1,500 Mass-goers in England and Wales; 40 years after Pope Paul VI forbad birth control use in his encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life). Also known as the ‘Branch’, this cult was founded in 1955, led by David Koresh, who believed himself to be the ‘final prophet.’ As it was an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, there were power struggles between Koresh and its leaders. Koresh also had sexual relations with many of the female members of the cult, and sometimes even raped underage girls with their parents’ consent. Stories of acute child abuse by Koresh were also circulated though the state failed to collect enough evidence against him initially. Koresh also made his followers believe that the State was their enemy. In 1993, FBI tried to forcefully bring the Branch Davidians out of their Texas refuge, during which the building caught fire, and 80 members, including several children and Koresh himself, died. In the Church, the word “cult” is also employed to mean the veneration (not worship) of a person who has died. The foundation of a cult around a person is a banal word which just means venerable devotion. The person will then be titled “Venerable” by the Church; this is the first step on the way to “Blessed” (Beatification) and “Saint” (Canonization). This “cult” or special devotion and veneration also applies to each of the saints, including the greatest veneration owed to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Is the Catholic Church a Cult?
Cults, generally speaking, are small splinter groups with a fairly recent origin. Most American-based cults, for example, have to a greater or lesser degree splintered off from other Christian groups, and emerged in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Catholicism, on the other hand, is the largest body within Christendom, having almost a two-thousand-year history (it has historical continuity with apostolic, first century Christianity), and is the ecclesiastical tree from which Protestantism originally splintered. Still, at that time, I didn’t see some of the common threads between the way I was brought up and the cults that had made headlines in my lifetime. Shutting Out the World Remember, their whole argument is essentially just “the ends justifies the means.” They are trying to say that the ends — protecting a brainless embryo and fetus that might, only might become a person — justifies forcing a woman to carry that fetus against her will. But if the pregnancy isn’t voluntary, then by definition it’s involuntary. And as the pregnant woman is laboring — to carry and develop a child which alters her physical body and causes her to risk death in childbirth — it absolutely is involuntary servitude forced by the state. The 13 th Amendment bans this —but the Pope doesn’t care. He and Republicans have decided that the religious slavery of women is justified to make sure children are born. This severely twisted cult, founded by David Berg and also known as Family International, is devoted to pedophilia and sex, to put it bluntly. The followers of this cult believed that sex with children was natural and right. Based on the belief that apocalypse is coming (doomsday cult), this cult uses “flirty fishing”(use of sex) to get new members for it. The children who were born as a result of flirty fishing were referred to as “Jesus Babies”. Rose McGowan, the American actor escaped from this cult and revealed some of its brutality later. It is rumoured that the female members of this cult are also forced to go into prostitution and sex slavery! As a young teenager, I began to realize that my life’s path was out of my hands. I was in training to become a big sister, like my mother, and a celibate bride of Christ. Nothing could have been further from my dreams: a prince for a husband and a beautiful house surrounded by a flower garden and lots of children. When at the age of 16 I was forced to become a postulant, I felt trapped.
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The Scriptures use terms such as "apostasy,""false teacher,""false prophet,""error,""seducer,""heretic," and "doctrines Cults, generally speaking, are small splinter groups with a fairly recent origin.**Despite what Catholics would like the world to believe they were the original splinter group from Christianity.
A view of St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, and Rome from the top of Michelangelo’s dome in St. Peter’s Basilica. Photo by David Iliff/Creative Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0
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My telling of the story might have been impaired had I approached it from the point of view of describing a cult. That was for the audience to discern and for me, ultimately, to accept.
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