With Pope Francis visiting the United States, and all of the excitement that comes with it, I think it time that many Christians come to grips with the truth that is the Roman Catholic Church. Sometimes being honest is difficult. The truth is hard to say, because often it is unpleasant. I don’t mean to insult anyone personally, but I do think that we need to follow the Bible and Christ wholeheartedly, and that means sometimes taking up a position that is controversial and very “intolerant.” Let us not forget that Jesus said:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
– Matthew 10:34-36
So, Jesus has already warned us that while the truth will set us free, it will also make us enemies of those who hate the truth. And that’s why I have to say that one of those enemies is the Catholic Church as an institution, and Pope Francis in particular. We don’t make enemies by going and picking fights, but as Christians, we simply become enemies with people, because we believe the Bible, and when a Christian tells people the Bible says they’re wrong, they don’t usually attack the Bible, but the Christian.
The honest truth is that while individual Catholics may innocently follow Catholicism because that is how they were raised, the Catholic Church itself is an organization based on the false interpretation of Scripture, religious hierarchy, and political control through tradition. In God’s eyes, the Pope is nothing less than a heretic and a false teacher, as is every high-ranking bishop or cardinal that willingly continues the lies told by the Vatican.
But before you gasp too loudly and lock and load your comment guns or your “back” buttons, let me ask this: don’t we know it? Don’t Christians, who know and profess to believe God’s Word, know that the Catholic Church is a den of heresy and false doctrines? We know, after all, that the Catholic Church once controlled almost the entire Western World, and that its influence was not so much religious as political. Despite the fact that the Catholic Church no longer engages overtly in inquisitions, it has not changed its statement of faith. Do I need to list the heretical doctrines of the Catholic Church? Do we not know them? Why do we as Believers in the Truth humor the Catholic Church? I’m not saying that your Catholic neighbors are horrible people and that you should shun them, or that there aren’t people in the Catholic Church who are helping those around them, or even that God Himself has not used the Catholic Church throughout history in His own way (let us not forget that God used both Nebuchadnezzar and Adolph Hitler for His purposes also).
I am speaking of the Catholic Church itself, not of the people caught up within the system. People can be deceived, and will be deceived, sometimes in great numbers. But those who have begun the work, and who maintain and improve upon it–these people are false teachers, liars, and thieves, whose only goal is to increase their power and influence.
Even some leaders within the Catholic Church are well-meaning, and I am not speaking of these either. Well-meaning people are everywhere, and there are even some real Christians stuck fast within the Catholic system, fearing to leave because they don’t want to be exiled as it were from their families.
How can I talk so strongly about the Catholic Church? How do I know they aren’t just another denomination with a few quirks that we can overlook? The fact is, the Catholic Church both adds and subtracts from the indisputable fundamentals of the church Jesus established. Here are four reasons to decry Catholicism and warn our Brothers and Sisters in Christ about this false Christianity. (I suppose I was bound to do one of these “list articles” sooner or later, and I’m sure my stock has fallen as a result)
1. Catholicism puts itself between God and Christians:
The Catholic Church realized hundreds of years ago that the direct link between God and Man through Jesus Christ was a threat to their base of power. If men can pray to God and obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life freely from a direct, personal relationship with Christ, then they don’t need an official hierarchy to govern them and dispense these “commodities.” So, the Catholic Church took upon itself to place its own priests in the middle of the relationship, telling its followers that they could not come to Christ directly, but needed to pray to and follow Mary, the Mother of God, who was more compassionate and would plead our case to Jesus. Sins, rather than being confessed to God himself or Jesus, needed to be confessed before a representative of the Church, and these priests would forgive our sins and issue “penance,” essentially religious “homework” in order to put us in right standing with God. This is heresy.
For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.
– 1 Timothy 2:5
This is a concept that the Christian church calls “the Priesthood of the Believer.” Meaning that we are all our own priests, and that we can ourselves come before God and ask His forgiveness, and obtain it, for it is freely given. In the Christian Church, Pastors are leaders and teachers, but they do not stand between their congregation and God, but with them, and a Pastor cannot forgive his own sins, much less the sins of his congregation.
2. The Catholic Church practices idolatry:
The Virgin Mary was a very special woman, chosen by God to be the vehicle by which His Son would enter this world. However, Mary herself was no more than a simple Hebrew woman. She was not chosen by God because she was special or had any mystical or cosmic power. The only real qualification that Mary had to have for God to use for that honored purpose was that she had to be in the line of David. (I believe) Mary was a Christian and had to believe on Christ the same way as every other human being. And when Mary died, she was immediately in God’s presence, worshiping and serving her savior. Mary does not intercede on our behalf to a dubious Christ, who may or may not forgive us.
But in the Catholic Churches and in Catholic homes there are numerous statues of the Virgin Mary. The title given her by the Catholics–“Mary Mother of God”–is nothing short of blasphemy and would have horrified Mary herself. God has no mother, for He created all things. May was the mother of Jesus’ human body, but she was not His mother and she did not have any hand in Christ’s creation. The Bible clearly teaches that God placed Christ inside her. Thus only the physical matter of which Christ’s body was made came from her. His person, His being… already existed, and had always existed. What she made for Him was no more than the flesh and blood that would contain Him, and even that was ultimately created by God Himself, for He created Mary also. The Catholic Church commands its followers to recite prayers to Mary, kneeling before her statues. This is simply idolatry, though instead of an image of Baal or Moloch, Catholicism set up a Christian individual as the idol.
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
– Romans 1:21-23
God hates idolatry, in the same way that a wife or husband cannot live with a rival to the one they love. God will not have us bowing before statues of men or women or anything.
3. The Catholic Church teaches error about Salvation:
Catholicism teaches that Christians can and do lose their place in heaven, and that Salvation is not a free gift but must be obtained through good works and (tellingly) favor with the Catholic Church. The Roman Church at one point even practiced the buying and selling of “indulgences,” which were oral or written confirmations that God had forgiven a Catholic either wholly or partially from a sin or group of sins. These indulgences could be purchased for money for oneself or for someone else, and there was at one time even the practice of buying people out of purgatory, where families supposedly paid for the rest of the sins their loved one hadn’t confessed before death. If a family member was “stuck” in purgatory, the family could buy them a ticket into heaven, essentially. While the practice of selling indulgences is no longer prevalent in the Catholic Church, the concepts of purgatory and of doing good deeds (or “charity” to the Church itself) remains to this day.
The Bible clearly teaches that while without works, faith is “dead” (James 2), works without faith are completely ineffectual.
Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.
– Galatians 2:16
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.
– Ephesians 2:8-9
It’s clear that while our faith should produce good works, as James says, God will not be satisfied with works alone, nor can they atone for our sin. Only Christ’s work on the cross can atone for sin, and that is why Catholicism is in error on the issue of Salvation, an error that serves to enrich and enlarge the organization that is the Catholic Church, and does nothing but weaken the Church of Jesus Christ.
4. The Biblical basis for the Catholic Church is a deliberate misinterpretation of God’s Word:
The authority of the Catholic Church and of the Pope in particular comes from the Petrine Theory, which is a corrupted interpretation of Matthew 16:18:
He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
– Matthew 16:15-19
The idea propounded by Catholicism is that Jesus was telling Peter that on this rock (i.e. Peter) Christ would build His church, thereby somehow giving Peter power to become the Pope. This is a deliberate error, for Christ was not referring to Peter (petros) in the verse, but to something before that (petra). Christ is the Rock of Ages, and the head of the church. Christ is referred to as the cornerstone.
Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.
– Ephesians 2:19-22
For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
– 1 Corinthians 3:11
Christ built the church not upon one special man, or upon his descendants, but upon Himself–upon the profession of men that Christ is God indeed, and the only way to be redeemed from sin. The Catholic Church elevates a man above other men, and gives him power that no man can have, but Christ alone. God does not need a single man to dictate new traditions to His people, ignoring the Bible which He has given to the Church, the true church. We should not obey men, but God Himself, for we are responsible for our own relationship with Christ. There is but one head of the church, and that is Jesus Himself.
Whatever Christ meant by giving Peter the “keys” was addressed specifically to Peter himself, and the Catholic tradition that this blessing was passed on to Peter’s descendants is nothing less than that–a tradition. We should not base our faith upon the traditions of men but on the Word of God.
Whatever other heresies the Catholic Church promotes, these four alone should be worth our speaking out against it. In the end, no matter how nice we may want to be to our Catholic neighbors, and no matter how much good the Catholic Church may be doing from a humanitarian perspective, the fact remains that it is teaching error. Nor is this a matter of the day on which to have services, or which songs to sing, or what to wear to church. This is a matter of salvation, and the souls of human beings. Ultimately, the Catholic Church has sent and is sending people to Hell. It is telling them that they have to follow its traditions and that the Church must mediate for them, and in doing so it is keeping people from the truth: that by faith we are saved through grace, through Christ’s death on the cross, by our belief in the power of His sacrifice alone to cover our sins with His blood. Nothing we can do can help us reach Heaven. Christ, not the Catholic Church, has redeemed our souls from Hell. The Catholic Church, regardless of the good intentions of some, is a self-serving, power-driven organization that has shown itself to be ruthless in the expansion and protection of its base of power.
Brothers and Sisters, we should not coddle people who are in error. Catholics need the good news of Jesus Christ as much as anyone. Rather than being “close” to True Christianity, they are farther than any atheist, because they have been deceived by a false Christianity, one that digs deep not only into individuals, but into whole families. God help us love and reach our Catholic neighbors before their religion drags them unwitting into a Christless eternity.
Word Weld 
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