[overflow] Re: GHHS

["J. Spencer Love" <jsl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > I have since found out that some Catholics are taught that they
> > are Cath9olics and that non-Catholics are Christians.  It
> > still feels weird to me.
>
> It IS wierd.  But then being a Christian is like belonging to a family
> where the parents named all their kids Bob because they knew if they
> gave them different names they would only mix them up anyway.  :(

Sounds like bullshit to me, not "weird".  But that's post-Vatican II
and ecumenicism is much more in vogue since than it was then.  I
would really like to know if there are any Catholic groups who practice
this particular doctrine today.

(I was raised Catholic but would not for the past 29 years describe
myself as Christian -- or even earlier, but it might have interfered
with my singing in the choir.)

[snip]

> (Us "Mormons"--Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
> Saints, are on the other end of the stick, we have to fight FOR
> recognition as a Christians, a title which many ministers claim we have
> no right to, because-- of all things-- we don't believe in the Trinity.
> As far as anyone can tell, neither did most "early Christians" --but
> that's beside the point, of course.)

If these "ministers" are not Catholic, then they are just ignorant,
and if Catholic clergy, dangerously so, because the Trinity was one
of the doctrines that steamed people enough to split off from the
holy mother church into a cluster of mostly indistinguishable
Christian sects.  While Mormons are different enough from
"mainstream" Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian
thinking to give acute indigestion to their theologians and get
them labelled pejoratively (e.g., "cult) in their earlier days,
they are definitely Christians.

While some could sneer at Unitarians as not really being Christians,
and with some justification, their doctrine and liturgy is definitely
Christian-inspired and oddly, I have never seen them subject to this
attack.  I'm not old enough, I guess.

I'd characterize someone who said this as clueless, and if they are a
member of the clergy, as a charlatan.  Of course, there are a lot of
bigots out here, and some of them pretty ignorant.

						-- Spencer
-- 

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