Ah, so you're not a Protestant then? This gets interesting. Another new mushroom in the minefield of doctrinal disagreement?

The Incarnation is a game-changer. Christ made visible the invisible God, and thus it is allowed that images of Him be depicted, unless you're a Muslim, or Jew before the coming of Christ. Sacred images depict real people. The second commandment protects us from creating fantastical creatures that replace the true God. Sacred images depict real people and events that draw us to the true God.
Worship and veneration are not the same. Worshiping an idol is the equivalent of replacing God with a created thing (or ideology or passion). Venerating an image is an act of respect and love that glorifies the Creator (sort of like saluting to a soldier is an act of respect and honour that shows your loyalty to your country).
God instructed Moses to create images. Just in case anyone thought God’s commandment to Moses excluded all visual images of anything as idols, check out Exodus 36:35-37:9 where, per the instructions of God, Moses has images of cherubim embroidered into the curtains of the tabernacle and statues of the same cast for the Ark of the Covenant. Obviously, then, it is not images that are an issue, but our relationship to images.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Jan 17 2017, 01:45 PM

Graven image = a carved idol or representation of a god used as an object of worship. Mary and the saints are not gods nor God, plain and simple.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Jan 23 2017, 11:59 AM

Your quotation did not prove anything because the statues in itself are not worshipped as if the statues are gods. If the statue is broken, it will just be simply replaced, and not as if we believe that the one represented is broken in anyway. Which is why I still maintain your understanding of idols and ours are different.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Jan 23 2017, 02:09 PM

Statues are not idols. When Jesus was a Baby, He is indeed God, but the statue of the baby Jesus is not God. That's the difference that you cannot seem to see.

Right. Only rejected by the protestants that started in the 16th century, but accepted by the more ancient Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox. Pretty telling, eh?

Apocrypha is the term used by Protestants. The deuterocanonical books are considered canonical by Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East, but are considered non-canonical by most Protestants. Revelation 22:18-19? As it is said. What about you?

This post has been edited by yeeck: Jan 24 2017, 12:22 PM

Truth and Forgiveness

If the best of all possible results from recent political developments were to occur — a big if — the real problems that beset society will yet remain unfixed. The reason is that those real problems involve an order that lies well beyond political solutions. They are problems related to the family, to “relationships” (in the broadest sense), to morals, and to truth. If the modern State has only a limited jurisdiction in the first three, it seems to be positively allergic to the fourth.

Ultimately, it is a matter of people actually perceiving reality (the conformity of our mind to which is the very definition of truth), accepting it, and living accordingly in their private, family, and social lives. In using the term “reality” here, I include both natural reality and what has been revealed to us of supernatural reality.

To live according to the truth demands, among other things, the acquisition of virtue by carrying out acts proper to those virtues. Here, I would like to consider the quintessentially Christian act of forgiveness. It is worth our attention for several reasons, the most pressing of which is, in my opinion, what appears to be a terrible hardening of hearts in the world. We who strive to be counterrevolutionary, anti-Modernist, and in every way contrary to the spirit and maxims of the world need to keep in mind that the great saints practiced not only the virtues most immediately associated with Christian militancy, like fortitude, fidelity, and fearlessness, but they also practiced the “little” virtues — like mercy, meekness, humility, and kindness.

No, there is no contradiction. As Father Garrigou Lagrange reminds us more than once, the mark of the saint is the simultaneous practice of seemingly contrary virtues, like meekness and fortitude.

The subject of forgiveness immediately elicits some familiar biblical passages. Pride of place here must go to the words of Our Lord when He taught His disciples how to pray: “And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). And Our Lord goes on to append an inspired “footnote” to this verse after He completes the prayer: “For if you will forgive men their offences, your heavenly Father will forgive you also your offences. But if you will not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive you your offences” (vs. 14-15). Over and above its being a fantastic apologetical proof of the necessity of good works for salvation (withhold forgiveness and you’re not forgiven: i.e., you’re damned), this passage clearly obliges each one of us to practice forgiveness.

Saint Luke records another passage where Jesus makes our forgiveness by God contingent on our forgiving others: “Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven” (Luke 6:37).

In at least two places in his epistles, Saint Paul commands us to forgive others as God has forgiven us. To the Ephesians, he writes, “And be ye kind one to another; merciful, forgiving one another, even as God hath forgiven you in Christ” (Eph. 4:32).

A similar passage is found in the Epistle to the Colossians. Significantly, this particular verse is part of the Epistle reading for the Feast of the Holy Family, which means that if we read it with the mind of the Church as manifested in the liturgy, we will know that the Apostle’s directives here are a guide for a holy family life: “Bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if any have a complaint against another: even as the Lord hath forgiven you, so do you also” (Col. 3:13). Married folk, take heed!

Is forgiveness a virtue? No, according to Saint Thomas, it is an act of the virtue of mercy, which virtue inclines us to have pity on our neighbor. In his Commentary on the Our Father, Saint Thomas says that we are all bound to forgive those who seek our forgiveness. He cites Ecclesiasticus 28:2: “Forgive thy neighbor if he hath hurt thee: and then shall thy sins be forgiven to thee when thou prayest.” Showing the connection to mercy, he adds, “And from this follows that other beatitude: ‘Blessed are the merciful.’ For mercy causes us to have pity on our neighbor.” While all are bound to forgive those who ask our forgiveness, the perfect (i.e., those well advanced in the spiritual life) actively seek out their neighbor to forgive him, says the Angelic Doctor.

Perhaps we can consider the greatness of forgiveness in light of the sublimity of the virtue of which it is an act. Saint Thomas argues that charity is greater than mercy because charity has God as its object, but “of all the virtues which relate to our neighbor, mercy is the greatest, even as its act surpasses all others, since it belongs to one who is higher and better to supply the defect of another, in so far as the latter is deficient.” (The quoted passages in this and the next paragraph come from Saint Thomas’ Summa Theologiae.)

Now, forgiving others is not the only act of mercy, which is, in general, a “grief for another’s distress,” by which a man “supplies the defects of his neighbor.” Such a description gives mercy a fairly broad scope. According to Saint Thomas, who quotes Saint Augustine on the point, mercy “obeys the reason when mercy is vouchsafed in such a way that justice is safeguarded, whether we give to the needy or forgive the repentant.” If sin, with its consequent physical death and suffering, had not entered the world, there would be no need for mercy — not, at least, as a human virtue. It would still exist as a divine perfection in the Trinity. Moreover, charity — from which mercy results, according to Saint Thomas — would still exist as a virtue among the unfallen children of Adam.

Now, if we review the fourteen works of mercy, we will see in them a litany of so many of the corporal and spiritual defects of our neighbor that each work is intended to help remedy. And one of these (the fifth of the spiritual works of mercy) is “to forgive offenses willingly.”

The question is sometimes asked: Do we have to forgive those who do not ask for forgiveness? To the best of my knowledge, Saint Thomas has not addressed the point directly. Tim Staples makes, I believe, a very cogent argument for the negative response to this question. In summary, the argument is that we are not obliged to be more forgiving than God, and He demands contrition and repentance in order to forgive, as we know from such passages as “the sorrow that is according to God worketh penance, steadfast unto salvation” (II Cor. 7:10), and, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity” (I John 1:9). The validity of the sacrament of Penance depends upon contrition, so clearly God does not forgive unconditionally. Further, when Christ commands us to forgive a brother who has wronged us, He conditions the command on the brother’s repentance: “Take heed to yourselves. If thy brother sin against thee, reprove him: and if he do penance, forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day be converted unto thee, saying, I repent; forgive him” (Luke 17:3-4).

Such a withholding of forgiveness is not to be confused with bearing a grudge, which is a sort of petty resentment not at all compatible with any Christian virtue.

As Mr. Staples points out, while we are not obliged to forgive those who are not sorry, we are obliged to love them with theological charity — which is to wish their good, ultimately, their salvation. We are to love our enemies even if, for some good reason, we have not forgiven them a particular wrong for which they are not sorry. Further, we should recall that forgiveness is an act of the virtue of mercy. We can exercise mercy toward such a person in other ways than forgiveness, for instance, by praying for him to be contrite for his sins. Certainly, we must be disposed to forgive our impenitent brother, else how will we forgive him if he becomes penitent? We cultivate such a disposition by the practice of the virtues of mercy and charity. Humility also, which makes us cognizant of our own sinfulness and need for forgiveness, certainly helps. In fact, it is indispensable, because the proud man cannot easily overcome the affront to his personal majesty!

When Saint Thomas says, as we mentioned above, that the perfect man seeks out the brother who wronged him in order to forgive, he probably has in mind a charitable conversation by which that perfect man’s kind words enkindle a desire for forgiveness on the part of the wrongdoer. Such a person would be a peacemaker, which requires not only the virtues, but also the working of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost — especially Wisdom, which, according to Saint Thomas, is the gift proper to peacemakers.

And we can use a few more of those.

In the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M.

The second bolded part above was not part of the Wiki article but from your false understanding. St Jerome certainly is a Catholic and submitted to the authority of the Church.

St. Jerome who lived from 347 A.D. - 419 A.D.
Mini-bio: Dalmatian; priest, hermit, abbot, biblical scholar and translator, Doctor of the Church
In a letter to Pammachius (Epistle 66) says:

"Other husbands decorate the graves of their wives with violets, roses, lilies, and purple-colored flowers. By such tokens of love they relieve the grief of their hearts. Our Pammachius bedews the sacred ashes and the venerable remains with the balsam of alms; for he knows what is written:
'As fire is extinguished by water, so is sin effaced by almsdeeds.' "

I see that you also conveniently left out the later portion regarding St Jerome:

Other uses of apocrypha developed over the history of Western Christianity. The Gelasian Decree (generally held now as being the work of an anonymous scholar between 519 and 553) refers to religious works by church fathers Eusebius, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria as apocrypha. Augustine defined the word as meaning simply "obscurity of origin," implying that any book of unknown authorship or questionable authenticity would be considered apocryphal. On the other hand, Jerome (in Protogus Galeatus) declared that all books outside the Hebrew canon were apocryphal.[6] In practice, Jerome treated some books outside the Hebrew canon as if they were canonical, and the Western Church did not accept Jerome's definition of apocrypha, instead retaining the word's prior meaning (see: Deuterocanon). As a result, various church authorities labeled different books as apocrypha, treating them with varying levels of regard.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Jan 24 2017, 05:51 PM

LOL, you just confirmed it yourself...

From the so-called 'Dark Ages':

The “Apocrypha” and the Liturgy
GREGORY DIPIPPO

At yesterday’s presidential inauguration, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, read as a prayer a selection of verses from the ninth chapter of the Book of Wisdom. In the original, this passage is a prayer delivered as if from the mouth of King Solomon, and all of the first person plurals spoken by His Eminence (“God of our ancestors…”) are in the singular in the Biblical text. (Accommodations of this sort in the context of prayer are a well-established tradition of the Church.) I say “as if” because it is well-known, of course, that the Book of Wisdom was written hundreds of years after Solomon’s lifetime, and its attribution to him (which is strongly implied, but not explicitly stated, within the book itself) was known at the time it was written to be a literary device.

A writer on the website of Christianity Today, Daniel de Silva, published an article explaining to their (I assume mostly non-Catholic) readership why a Biblical reading at the ceremony “Isn’t in Your Bible,” namely, because it is from the group of books which Protestants generally call “the Apocrypha,” and Catholics the “Deuterocanonical books.” Both of these terms are really rather unfortunate, but we are now stuck with them after centuries of use. “Apocrypha” is a Greek word for “hidden”, and would be better reserved for things like the Gnostic so-called Gospels, rather than a group of works whose canonicity was almost undisputed in the Church for 15 centuries. (I say “almost” advisedly, as I will explain shortly.)

The term “deuterocanonical” was coined in 1566 by a scholar called Sixtus of Siena, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, at a point when the Protestant reformation had been going on for almost half a century, and the “disputed” nature of the books had become a fixed feature of Catholic-Protestant debate. I consider it unfortunate because it seems to imply (though this was certainly not Sixtus’ intention) either that there are degrees of canonicity within Scripture, which is heretical, or, as one Biblical commentary states, that their canonicity was recognized later, which is historically false. The Catholic Encyclopedia rightly states, in its article on the Canon of the Old Testament, that “The terms protocanonical and deuterocanonical … require a word of caution. They are not felicitous, and it would be wrong to infer from them that the Church successively possessed two distinct Biblical Canons.”

At a public debate held at Leipzig in 1519, Johann Eck, a very prominent theologian of the era, objected to Luther’s rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory, and therefore of praying for the dead, by citing a well-known passage from Second Maccabees (12, 46), which has been read at Masses for the Dead from time immemorial: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.” To this Luther replied that Second Maccabees was not a part of Scripture, and hence constituted no valid proof; the Catholic Encyclopedia is equally right to term this, in the article cited above, “a radical departure.” Certain other passages, such Tobit 4, 11, “For alms deliver from all sin, and from death, and will not suffer the soul to go into darkness,” became focal points of the controversy as well.

Subsequently, the debate over the place of the “Deuterocanonicals” in the Church has been very largely framed in terms of what the Fathers have to say about them in their writings. St Jerome is a crucial figure in this regard, because he is the only one who ever rejected them on the same grounds as the Protestants, namely, their absence from the Hebrew Bible; he is cited to this effect in the sixth “Article of Religion” of the Church of England. And thus de Silva writes “Jerome …was the loudest voice in this regard.”


St Jerome in His Study, by Joos van Cleve, 1521

Three things call for note here. One is that not even Jerome was consistent on this point; he included Tobit, Judith, and the Deuterocanonical additions to both Esther and Daniel in his great project of Biblical translations, and in some of his later writings, cites some of them without distinction from the rest of Scripture. (The versions of Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the two books of the Maccabees included in the Vulgate are not his.) The second is that the other Church Fathers are similarly inconsistent; St Athanasius, for example, in an epistle of the year 367, includes Baruch in the canonical list, and omits Esther. The third is that citations in the New Testament cannot serve as a definitive yardstick for canonicity, since it contains none from certain books whose canonicity was disputed even among the Jews (Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs), two from the book of Wisdom (2, 13 in Matthew 27, 43 and 7, 26 in Hebrews 1, 3), and an explicit citation from the indisputably apocryphal Book of Enoch. (Jude, 14-15)

The opinion of the vast majority of the Fathers is best explained by referring to the great Biblical scholar Origen. (ca. 185-255). A friend of his named Africanus, one of his sponsors in the decades-long production of a massive corpus of Biblical exegesis, claimed that the Greek puns in the story of Susanna proved that it could not be part of the original text of the book of Daniel. Origen’s defense of the story, and of the other deuterocanonical books, repeatedly refers to the “use” of the book in the churches, i.e., in the liturgy. He also cites in its defense a saying of the book of Proverbs, “Thou shalt not remove the ancient landmarks which thy fathers have set,” (22:28), a passage long understood by Jewish commentators as a command to preserve the ancient traditions of religious practice. This opinion is confirmed by St Augustine, and several early synods whose acts have come down to us.

As I have written before, the story of Susanna occupies a particularly prominent place in the liturgy of Lent in the West, and in the art of the primitive Church. Readings from almost all of the other Deuterocanonical books are attributed in the ancient Roman lectionaries, most of which carry through right into the Missal of St Pius V. The books of Wisdom and Sirach are particularly prominent, especially on the feasts of Confessors; this is especially significant precisely because St Jerome did not produce either a revised or freshly translated version of either of them. The canticle known from its first word as the Benedicite, Daniel 3, 57-88 and 56, was sung in the Roman Divine Office on every single Sunday and feast until 1913. (It is still, of course, said very often in both Form of the Office to this day.)

One might cite innumerable examples from other ancient rites of the Church, but I will here confine myself to a few particularly interesting ones. The 7th century Lectionary of Luxeuil, the most ancient lectionary of the Gallican Rite, prescribes that the entire book of Tobias be read on Rogation Monday after None, that of Judith on Tuesday, and that of Esther (with the additions) on Wednesday. (It is no wonder that the clergy of Gaul enthusiastically embraced Charlemagne’s forced transition to the Roman Rite.) The Ambrosian Liturgy makes the same use of the Benedicite as the Roman, and places Susanna in an even more prominent position, on Holy Thursday. A passage from Baruch 3 is read on the Third Sunday of October, the feast of Milan cathedral’s dedication; a longer excerpt from the same chapter was read at the Roman vigils of Easter and Pentecost until 1954.


Folio 165v of the Lectionary of Luxeuil, with the rubric for Rogation Monday, “Liber Tobith usque ad finem, postea Evangelium - the Book of Tobit, until the end, and afterwards the Gospel.” (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 9427)

In the Byzantine Rite, a prayer said every single day at Vespers cites the Song of the Three Children, which also figures among the group of canticles at Orthros called the Odes. The entire third chapter of Daniel, including the additions, is read at the Easter Vigil, with the choir singing “Sing to the Lord and exalt him above all forever” as a refrain. (Video below; Exodus 13, 20 - 15, 19 is also read in a similar fashion.) Many of the more important feasts have three Scriptural readings at Vespers; among those assigned to the feasts of Confessors, there are two which are titled liturgically as “from the Wisdom of Solomon”, but are actually very complicated centos, composite readings from more than one book, mixing the words of the protocanonical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes quite indiscriminately with those of Wisdom and Sirach. (You can read them at the following link, where they are the first two readings on the feast of St Nicholas: http://www.antiochianladiocese.org/files/s...ec-05-VESP.pdf)

There's nothing wrong with that link.

If what you are hinting is that Catholics number the 10 Commandments differently from Protestants, have a read at this:

http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/10_commandments.php

Abortion is the Antichrist’s demonic parody of the Eucharist. That is why it uses the same holy words, “This is my body,” with the blasphemously opposite meaning. - Dr. Peter Kreeft

http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/statues_in_church.php

Wishing all Chinese Catholics a Blessed Lunar New Year ahead showered with God's many special graces. In your charity remember the suffering of the persecuted Catholics in China of the underground Church:

Read again what I said above.