There are many Catholics that are not as knowledgeable as you, and they treat many Catholic rituals in the same way as pagans treat theirs. It is a superstitious ritual that pleases the gods.
And you know this how? Have you met any of these supposed Catholics?
Also by Catholic, do you mean Roman Catholic or are you referring to the entire Church Catholic referred to in the Nicene Creed?
That is what I am referring to primarily. If you believe that Mary can pray for you and hear the prayers of millions of people in the world, have at it,
As I’ve made clear, we ask the Theotokos and other saints for their intercession. And a major aspect of salvation is Theosis - becoming by grace what Christ is by nature - eternal, blessed with miraculous abilities, and indeed some of these miraculous abilities appear in this life, as demonstrated, for example, by the bilocation of St. John Maximovitch. Roman Catholics report similar experiences with their saints - in the process of ecumenical reunion our churches will no doubt form a combined martyrology or synaxarion to use the Eastern term of those saints of each church acceptable to be venerated by the other (some Orthodox saints are venerated by Roman Catholics even now, for example, St. Gregory Palamas, who is venerated in the Byzantine Rite churches such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church).
but it is Christ who has mercy on your soul.
Absolutely no one disputes that Christ alone is capable of saving us - indeed the Blessed Virgin Mary was saved by Him, a fact demonstrated by the miraculous assumption of her body after her repose. The idea that anyone else saves us is antithetical to Christianity, since we worship Christ our Lord, God and Savior, who became incarnate and sacrificed Himself on the Cross in order to remake man in His image, so that we might become sons of the Father by adoption, achieving a state higher than that of Adam before the fall.
And the idea that Christians can save themselves is Pelagianism, which is rejected by all ancient churches (interestingly, how Pelagianism is rejected varies between the Orthodox and Catholics - historically the early church relied mainly on the anti-Pelagian arguments not of St. Augustine, who was venerated rather for his morality and for works like The City of God, but by another Latin monastic, St. John Cassian. However in the Middle Ages, St. Augustine came to dominate Patristics in the West, at the expense of most other Patristic figures, probably because of the volume of his work and the fact it was available in Latin, and a shortage of books, and as a result the Roman model of anti-Pelagian hamartiology is one based on St. Augustine. This results in the perceived need for the Immaculate Conception, a dogma we Orthodox Christians reject.
. I was trying to show that there is a big difference between orthodox Catholic doctrine and the superstitious Catholic. I don’t agree with much of the Roman doctrine, but I’m not in any way ready to condemn.
I appreciate your respect for right-believing Catholics, but I think your concerns about crypto-Paganism in the Catholic church are, while not unfounded, the less severe problem; a more severe problem is that of liberal “Cafeteria Catholics” who reject Roman Catholic moral teachings on homosexuality and other important points, and who have become extremely powerful. Everything you hear about the “Synod on Synodality” and the ‘Synodal Way Forward” is an attempt by liberal German bishops to try to secure autonomy from the Church in Rome so that they can change their position on homosexuality.
However, this is not a reason to regard the Roman church as evil, which is what this thread is about. In the face of such threats, and also the unwarranted mistreatment of traditional Catholics by some liberal bishops, and the continued absurd abusive criticism of the Roman Catholic church by non-Catholics despite repeated pleas by myself and others that it cease, I stand in solidarity with my traditional Roman Catholic friends such as
@boughtwithaprice @chevyontheriver @Michie and
@Xeno.of.athens.
I would also note I have never criticized Messianic Judaism and insofar as it has led to some of the Jews who did not convert early on to convert, while retaining their traditional prayers, I am interested in it, and I am interested in Messianic liturgy, since Jewish liturgy is a major area of interest to me (it is extremely fascinating to study the thrice daily prayers of Judaism, which developed into the three daily prayers of the Divine Office, Vespers at dusk, Compline at night and Matins at dawn, the change in time being required to avoid observation by potential Roman persecutors. Later the Divine Office of most churches developed to add additional offices, which for a time were prayed at the intended time but are now grouped together to form longer services, however, in the case of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, due to the genocide waged against them by the 12th century Muslim warlord Tamerlane, which turned them from what was the world’s largest church, geographically, into one of the smallest, leaving intact only the suroye (Assyrians) in the Fertile Crescent and the Mar Thoma Christians, who are partially of Jewish descent, being related to the Kochin Jews, of Kerala, India, the monastic use of their liturgy was lost and all that survives are the three ancient offices. Additionally their liturgy preserves an unusually large number of Jewish influences - the Divine Liturgy of Addai and Mari, their primary Holy Communion service, has the seven-fold structure of a Jewish table blessing, their lectionary typically has four lessons per service, two Old Testament lessons, which are a Torah and Haftarah pairing that matches the Jewish pairings, albeit in a sometimes altered sequence, since these related lessons are read as prophecies in support of the Epistle and Gospel, as in other liturgical rites. And their churches historically had a Bema connected to the Altar via a walkway, with the Gospel and other scriptures being read at the Bema, and some recent East Syriac churches have resumed this pattern (we also see the use of a Bema in other Eastern Christian liturgical spaces albeit in a different configuration - the main difference in architecture between an Eastern church and a synagogue is the replacement of the Torah Ark with the altar on which the Holy Eucharist is offered.
