My Associate Pastor and friend, Fr Tom Washburn OFM offers us these words about Christ establishing one true Church...
"Here we go again. You know, sometimes I think that the media just can't help themselves. The headline on page 3 of my local paper today, "Pope reasserts Church's domination." The New York Times, "Pope cites 'defects' of other faiths." The Boston Globe, "Pope reasserts salvation comes from one church." The general tenor of these articles, "Pope Benedict XVI reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released yesterday that says other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation." Like I said, here we go again.
The challenge is that a good headline and lead often trumps the truth or the details which are inevitably more complex and complicated than anything that you could fit in a headline. The Pope has not made any type of move to invalidate the goodness that exists in many of the different Christian denominations or even other religions in the world. As usual for our theologian-Pope, he is seeking again to clarify things..." Read his entire post here.
2 comments:
I guess the media wanted to incite something big between the Catholic church and the other religions/denominations. The following link is from Worldnetdaily.
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56612
Pope Benedict said it with charity, but the fact is there is something seriously defective about the Protestant ecclesial communities. They do not have the Eucharist. We may have hope that the elements of the Gospel they do have will result in their salvation, but we need to mourn the elements of the Gospel that they lack.
So often in the years before I became Catholic I got the impression from Catholic friends that this was just a cultural thing or a preference. It was like I preferred vanilla ice cream and they preferred chocolate, however, I was ok and they were ok. No big deal. The Pope is clarifying again that it in fact is a big deal. We do need to be charitable in our evangelization and in our dealings with Protestants, but to pretend that it doesn't matter is not charity at all. I am as disturbed by the attempts of Catholics to water down what the Holy Father said as with the attempts of the media to exaggerate it.
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