Dear Rev:
Further to our brief meeting just before Christmas, when you suggested that we have another talk, I was agreeable. In the interim I came across a copy of your bulletin, dated July 17, 2022. I read the bulletin several times and looked up all 25 of your Scripture references regarding worship, all of which I found to be consistent with the celebration of the Catholic Mass. I noticed that one of your Scripture quotes was only two verses and lacked the context that would be necessary for a clear understanding of what it was meant to convey. Your quote from 1 Corr. 11: 25-26, is part of the description where St. Paul admonishes the Corinthians for their irreverence when celebrating ‘The Lord’s Supper’. If you had included all the verses from 1 Corr. 11:23 through to verse 34 then verses of 25 and 26 would take on new meaning. Paul is talking about the transformation of the Bread and the Wine into Jesus’ Body and Blood, saying, “Therefore, whosoever shall eat this Bread or drink this Chalice of the Lord unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgement to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord.” Do you think that people would be brought to judgement by God for eating plain bread and drinking common wine? But Protestants want to say that St. Paul was only kidding and in turn that Jesus was only kidding when he said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven, if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. The Jews then disputed among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.” (John 6: 51-56) “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer walked with him.” (John 6: 66). You will notice that Jesus made no effort to stop them. He didn’t say you misunderstood me, I was only speaking symbolically. Instead, he immediately challenged the apostles, “Jesus said to the Twelve, Will you also go away?”(Jn. 6:67). Luther, Calvin and Swingley joined those who walked away 2000 years ago and still ask themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” They have been joined by millions who no longer walk with Him but worship another Jesus who apparently is not capable of giving us His flesh to eat. Forgetting that Jesus is the Son of God, they get stuck on the question, “Is this not Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (Jn.6:42). The leaders and adherents of the 30,000 plus Protestant denominations express a faith in a Jesus whom they insist could not do what St. John and St. Paul claimed that He did do.
The majority of these communities are far removed from Faith of the early Christians and today they even bear little resemblance to the original defectors. They all claim to be Christian and that they are saved through ‘faith alone’. You would think that if they were all worshipping the same Jesus they would be united in one community. However, accepting Martin Luther’s teaching that everyone is able to interpret the Scriptures for themselves, they end up making a Jesus in their own image and likeness. Their Jesus would not have chosen Peter, a man who denied Him three times, to be the Rock on which He would build His Church. Their Jesus was only kidding about the divorced and remarried not being able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Their Jesus was only kidding when he said to the apostles, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matt. 28:19-20). They don’t heed the counsel of St. Peter who instructed the first converts who asked what they should do, “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the Holy Spirit.”. Jesus asks, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you?” (Lk. 6:46). In the end their claim to be founded on the Bible falls apart and the only thing that gives them an appearances of unity is their anti-Catholicism.
Martin Luther’s followers want to call his movement a Reformation when in fact it was a rebellion against the One True Church instituted by Jesus Christ. Luther rejected Jesus telling us that He established His One Church on the foundation of the twelve apostles and that St. Peter was the Rock upon which He would build his Church. He rejected his oaths to God that he would be obedient to the Church and to the Authority of the Pope. Based on a false premise, he instituted a new church and proclaimed that all authority in the Church comes from the ‘Bible Alone’. However, the Bible makes no such claim for itself but rather St. Paul says, “… but I am writing these instructions to you so that if I am delayed you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth”. (1 Tim. 3:15). The other new doctrine invented by Luther was that, we are saved by ‘Faith Alone’. Like his first doctrine, it has no basis in the Bible. In fact the only place that we find the two words ‘faith’ and ‘alone’ together in the Bible is in James 2:24 where he says, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”
To further separate himself and his followers from the Church established by Christ:
Luther confiscated the Bible from the Church and then presumed to have the authority to remove seven of its books.
After falsely proclaiming the authority of the ‘Bible Alone’, he then rejects Jesus’s teaching in the Bible which forbids divorce and remarriage. In all four Gospels. Jesus tells us that a man who divorces his wife and remarries, commits adultery. St. Paul teaches us that adulterers cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven. ( 1 Corr. 6:9-10)
In defiance of the Bible, Luther invented his two false doctrines, ‘the Bible Alone’ and ‘Faith Alone’. However, Jesus says of people inventing new doctrines, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines, the precepts of men.” (Matt. 15: 8- 9) and St. Paul warns the Ephesians that we should not be like children who are, “…tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles.” (Ephesians 4:14).
Luther rejected Jesus who established the authority of St. Peter and the apostles as being the foundation of the faith and that this authority was passed on to their successors, the bishops. Having renounced apostolic succession, Luther attempted to render null and void his own ordination as a priest. Sacramental ordination is evidenced clearly in the Scriptures when St. Paul described the ordination of Timothy saying,”Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands on you.” (1Tim. 4:14). Being outside the Church and having no authority but his own, he assumed a position as head of his own new church, functioning as a pseudo pope.
It is the function of a priest to offer sacrifice and following Jesus’s command to “Do this as a remembrance of me.” He represents Jesus in the one sacrifice of offering His Body and Blood to the Father for our salvation. If there is no priesthood then there can be no sacrifice of the Mass where bread and wine are, transformed into the Body and Blood of Jesus. When the Jews asked, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ Jesus tells them that His flesh is food indeed and His Blood is drink indeed. He accomplished this at the ‘Last Supper’ when He took the bread in His sacred hands and said “This is my body… Taking the Chalice also He said, “This is my blood”. Jesus makes it possible for us to eat His Body and drink His Blood by presenting Himself to us in the appearances of bread and wine. It is in the Mass that the only true worship of God takes place where Jesus’ offers Himself as the perfect sacrifice to the Father for the salvation of many. By attending the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and receiving Him in Holy Communion, the faithful are enabled to participate in that one true act of worship. When Luther rejected the Sacrament of the Eucharist, he rejected Jesus, Who is the source and summit of the Christian Faith.
On his own authority and not that of the Bible, he rejected the Sacraments of Holy Orders, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Confession, and the Sacrament of the Sick. But having assumed a type of papal authority in his own new church he proclaimed that Baptism and Marriage were still to be considered sacraments.
Luther renounced his membership in the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church established by Jesus Christ. He rejects Jesus’ promise to send the Holy Spirit to be with the Church always. Luther wants us to believe that the Holy Spirit abandoned His Church came to rest upon him. During the previous fifteen hundred years, it was only the members of this Catholic Church who were identified as Christians. Can Martin Luther totally rebel against established Christianity and still presume to call himself a Christian?
Because Luther had no biblical or intellectual arguments to justify his rebellion, he resorted to force, persecuting anyone who resisted him. Lutheranism was made the ‘State Religion’ in Germany resulting in the political leaders confiscating Catholic Church property and punishing Catholics who resisted Lutheranism. The Catholic people were subjected to the same persecution by the Protestant rebels in Sweden, Switzerland and England.
I have had discussions with a number of Protestant ministers who seemed to lack sufficient confidence in the power of preaching the ’Bible Alone’ and so found it necessary to resort to preaching anti-Catholic propaganda. While they were anxious to engage in anti-Catholic rhetoric, I quickly discovered that they knew next to nothing about what the Catholic Church actually teaches. One would think that their sense of honesty would compel them to know the subject that they are condemning. However, I was not able to convince them to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. By doing so, they would discover their errors which would undermine their agenda and cause them to question their stance.
In your bulletin you don’t hesitate to ask your congregants to pray for individuals and the Antigonish community and at the same time falsely accuse Catholics of praying to dead people. However, the only people whom we Catholics ask to pray for us are very much alive, either here on earth or in heaven. Do you not believe that there are people living in heaven and that they too can pray for us? Jesus tells us, “… for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to the angels and are sons of the Resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead but of the living; for all live in him.” (Lk. 20:36-38) The author of The Letter to the Hebrews tells us, “Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us”. (Hebrews 12:1).
Your comparison of Rosary Beads to Buddhist “prayer wheels’ displays an unfounded contempt for Jesus’ mother, Mary and great ignorance of Catholic teaching. The fifteen decades of the Rosary are a meditation on the incarnation, birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, until He comes again. The first part of the ‘Hail Mary’ is taken from the Bible, Hail Mary full of grace, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. (Lk 1:28, Lk.1:48-49). In the second part, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen, we are petitioning Jesus’ mother to pray for us at the two most crucial times in our lives, now and at the hour of our death. Anyone would be enriched by this meditation and yet Protestants would rather remain in the dark then to discover Mary as our spiritual Mother. Does your Jesus consider it okay to show contempt for His mother?
I also discovered from these conversations that these ministers are particularly interested in converting Catholics out of the Church to become members of their communities. A couple of them were very anxious to inform me that they themselves were formerly Catholics. There have been many people who unfortunately left the Catholic Church due to having a poor formation in the faith. Because of their ignorance they were easy targets for Protestant fundamentalist preachers who would quote Bible verses to them out of context. In every such instance I expect that the person leaving the One Holy Catholic Church had no idea of what it was that they were leaving.
To have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, we must first know who He is. There cannot be 30,000 churches with 30,000 different Christs. St. Paul says, “There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all”. (Ephesians 4: 4-6).
Is the Jesus that you claim to know and have a personal relationship with, truly the Jesus revealed to us in the Bible? St. Paul talks about the importance of knowing the true Jesus saying, “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Phil.3:8). Jesus tells us, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And then; I will declare to them, I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.” (Matt. 7:21-23). What could Jesus mean by saying, “I never knew you” except that the person never really knew Him?
There is one Lord Jesus Christ.
There is only one Church instituted by Jesus Christ, not 30,000 churches.
There is one faith.
There is one baptism whereby our sins are forgiven and we are made Children of God.
I believe that Jesus Christ is who He says He is and that everything He says is true.
May the peace of Jesus Christ, which surpasses all understanding, be with you.
Peter Borromeo
peterborromeo1564@gmail.com