The Reality of Romanism
Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 02:45PM 
Reading Francis Beckwith's interview with David Neff in Christianity Today, reminded me of how idyllic the Roman church can seem in the minds of those who embrace it (Click here: Q&A: Francis Beckwith | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction).
But then this news report appeared today which gives a much different picture of the supposed glories of Romanism (Click here: Pope to canonize first Brazilian saint - Yahoo! News).
All discussion of justification, the authority of Scripture, and reciting the Creed aside, the Pope is heading to Brazil to canonize Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvao, a Franciscan monk who is credited with 5000 miraculous healings. Over 1 million people are expected to be in attendance. The healings supposedly come as a result of swallowing rice paper pills prepared by the monk over two hundred years ago. According to the AP news report . . .
"The Vatican has officially certified the medical cases of two Brazilian women as divinely inspired miracles that justify the sainthood of Galvao. Both of these women spoke of their faith with The Associated Press, claiming that their children would not be alive today were it not for the tiny rice-paper pills that Friar Galvao handed out two centuries ago.
Although the friar died in 1822, the tradition is carried on by Brazilian nuns who toil in the Sao Paulo monastery where Galvao is buried, preparing thousands of the Tic Tac-sized pills distributed free each day to people seeking cures for all manner of ailments. Each one is inscribed with a prayer in Latin: `After birth, the Virgin remained intact. Mother of God, intercede on our behalf.'
Sandra Grossi de Almeida, 37, is one such believer. She had a uterine malformation that should have made it impossible for her to carry a child for more than four months. But in 1999, after taking the pills, she gave birth to Enzo, now 7. `I have faith," Grossi said, pointing to her son. I believe in God, and the proof is right here.'
Nearly 10 years before that, Daniela Cristina da Silva, then 4 years old, entered a coma and suffered a heart attack after liver and kidney complications from hepatitis A. `The doctors told me to pray because only a miracle could save her,' Daniela's mother Jacyra said recently. `My sister sneaked into the intensive care unit and forced my daughter to swallow Friar Galvao's pills.'"
So, if you "return home" to Rome, you get the whole ball of wax, including the beatification of saints who give out Tic-Tac size rice-paper pills which supposedly heal. And Pope Benedict XVI will be there to bless it all.
By the way, confessional Protestants affirm the historical evangelical doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, and the full authority of Scripture. And yes, we even recite the Creed every Lord's Day and we use a biblical-text based liturgy which is quite similar to that described by Justin Martyr in the second century.
Too bad Dr. Beckwith didn't consider a confessional Protestant church before embracing Romanism. Now he's stuck with Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvao and his rice-paper healing pills.
Reader Comments (50)
http://crossed-the-tiber.blogspot.com/2007/05/idol-worship-transcends-denominational.html
You've posted quite a bit here. Perhaps, if you're looking for some rebuttal, you should go here:
http://aomin.org/Roman.html
It does't appear you're really here to engage anyone, just propagandize, hence the stacks of links. If you're so convinced of your position, why do you care what we think? None of us here are going to convert to 'mother church.'
Christ is in our midst!
I am not the enemy. As a relatively new listener of the WHI and reader/subscriber of MR (within the last year or so) you must be patient with me. Confessional Protestantism intrigues me. I shall send you a private email to begin a friendship. I also live here in So. Cal.
Why did I post the links that I did? Very simply for reference. The first set are all of Dr. Francis J. Beckwith's posts to date. If we are discussing him it's important that each of us have read what he has wrote. The second set of posts from Communion of Saints website deal directly with the topic of this post - the Communion of Saints & miracles. If you desire to understand exactly what Catholics believe and why here is a good starting point. The Communion of Saints website deals with most, if not all, of the topics which prevent full union of Protestants with Catholics. The last link just proves the point that Protestants have problems of their own. I recognize BG is an Armenian and not a Calvinist therefore errors will abound in their thinking.
In regards to James White I would say the following. I much prefer the thought and work of R.C. Sproul, Michael Horton, William Edgar, John Frame, J.I. Packer, etc. Before the current generation of real thinkers I prefer the work of John G. Machen, John Murray, Francis Schaeffer, B.B. Warfield, Abraham Kuyper, etc. Before them Jonathan Edwards...
The Roman Church is a manifestation of the spirit of Antichrist that permeates this present evil age.
May the day be hastened when Christ returns and destroys his enemies with the sword of his mouth, and we all cry out in joy, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great!"
Echo_ohcE
I am not looking for rebuttal but would like to ask some questions to provoke some thought. Posts such as the one that I found and started to respond to lead me to believe that there is a fair amount of mis-understanding regarding what Catholics believe. I certainly don't expect you to convert to Mother Church since I believe you are already a member of the Church, albeit not in complete communion,But if you have a public blog with the com box open and make negative remarks about Catholicism, you will get folks like myself just trying to shed a little light.
Thanks and God bless you
You wrote,"Too bad Dr. Beckwith didn't consider a confessional Protestant church before embracing Romanism." It may bring comfort for one to think that those who convert to Rome from Evangelicalism are those "low-church, non-confessional, non-denominational" types but the reality is that many confessional types have come home to the Church of Rome. A short list includes, Frs. Al Kimmel, Dwight Longenecker, Jay Scott Newman, Richard John Neuhaus, Louis Bouyer, Ronald Knox, and Cardinal Newman. Also Drs. Ken Howell (former RTS professor and PCA minister), Scott Hahn, Phil Blosser, Rober Louis Wilken, Rusty Reno, Doug Farrow, Bruce Marshall, Reinhold Hutter, Marcus Grodi, Lutheran Bishop Bob Jacobson, Thomas Howard, Peter Kreeft, J. Budizeski (mispelled :)) to name just a few. I too have come back home to the Church and coming as a PCA minister and an RTS graduate who studied in Strasbourg with Mike and Rod in 1998. If confessionalism was the antidote for Dr. Beckwith, how come the PCA is currently embroiled in great controversy concerning the NPP and FV with presbyteries claiming heresy against their opponents? If confessionalism was the medicine Dr. Beckwith needed, how come you and Rod don't believe even remotely the same things about baptism? Your confessional statements say baptism is a sign of the covenant and is to be administered because the children are born to Christian parents. The Lutherans believe that the water of baptism really regenerates. Is the Lutheran right or not? Of course you will say they are wrong but, that begs the question, is the issue of baptism a non-essential issue not worth dividing over? If the Lutheran is right then baptism involves a real ontological change in the nature of the baptized, if not, then the Lutheran is guilty of false teaching and leading people astray! How about the question if a the believer can fall away. The Lutherans don't believe in that fifth point (I remember Rod joking he was a 1 1/2 point Calvinist) but the Reformed do. I ask you, can a born again, regenerated believer fall away? It would be interesting to see what you say. I suspect I know your answer might be, "those who fall away were never truly born again and regenerated" which of course, then brings us back to what happens in baptism! Anyway, I wish you and so many others from the Reformed tradition would actually read the Church Fathers and see what it is that they believed. If WTS Church history program was anything like RTS' then you probably did the 2nd century to the beginning of the 1500's and 1517-? with an emphasis on 1517-1650. Is that a fair representation? A fair read from St. Athanasius to St. Cyril of Jerusalem to St. Augustine, to St. John Chrysostom would show that they affirmed the sacrifice of the Mass, purgatory, and all denied the doctrine of sola fide to name just a few of the doctrines that the Reformed and Lutheran find repugnant. My basic point is this, Reformed Confessionalism is not the answer to the struggles of evangelicalism. The answer is submission to the Church intended and established by Jesus Christ, the Church with the Bishop of Rome who sits in Peter's chair!
This is not the way the historic confessions speak about the church nor is it even Biblical. The Reformers understood it as a visible institution founded by Christ himself, of which they were a continuation.
Did you read Carl Trueman's thoughts on the Church fathers?
Here:http://reformation21.org/Upcoming_Issues/Professor_Beckwith/330/
As Dr. Trueman notes, Calvin and Owen (among other Protestant "Fathers") are deeply dependent on the Church Fathers. They used these writings that are so supposedly so "Catholic" and not Protestant to support the solas of the reformation among other uniquely Protestant Doctrines. As Dr. Trueman says: "...to argue that the patristic authors are more Catholic than Protestant is arguably to impose anachronistic categories upon the first five centuries."
I did read Dr. Trueman's article. I fail to see how one could say it is anachronistic to say the Fathers are more Catholic than Protestant. The fact is the Fathers did believe such things as the Eucharist as the one and same sacrifice as Calvary, praying for the faithful departed and purgatory, faith and works necessary for salvation (e.g. St. Augustine explicitly rejects faith alone in the Enchidirion) etc... To Bernie I would say read the first thing the Westminster Confession of Faith says in reference about the Church, "The catholic or universal Church, which is invisible..." (25.2). There is a fundamental difference between the Church and Protestantism in that the Protestant(s) begin with a text and the Catholic begins with the Church. Thus, the Scripture cannot be distilled from the Church, nor does Scripture stand over the Church, but rather the Scripture lives within the life of the Church coming to the Church from the Church within the Church. That is why if you look at historical criticism and historical critical methodology they began in the Protestant world and tragically invaded the Catholic world and not the other way around because for the Protestant there was no problem doing theology apart from the Church.
But, just because some of the Fathers support modern RC dogma doesn't mean that the Fathers are "Catholic." How do you explain Owen's or Calvin's use of the Fathers? Are Owen and Calvin "Catholic"? Obviously, they are not. So, there must be some theological thread within the Fathers themselves (maybe not all of them) that support, to some extent, the Theology developed by Calvin and Owen (among others). As Dr. Trueman has said elsewhere, Owen's use of the Fathers was, in part, to show that the Theology he was developing was not something novel, but was something that had Historical continuity within the Church tradition itself. So, it seems that both Protestants and "Catholics" can claim the Fathers as an authority.
I agree that the Westminster Confession posits a nebulous definition of the church, namely one that is "invisible" and "more or less pure" (whatever that means). However, the earliest Reformed confessions do not use that formulation at all.
For example, the Belgic Confession (composed in 1561 - about fifty years before the Westminster Confession) describes the holy catholic church in article 27 thusly:
"We believe and confess one single catholic or universal church-- a holy congregation and gathering of true Christian believers, awaiting their entire salvation in Jesus Christ being washed by his blood, and sanctified and sealed by the Holy Spirit..."
In article 28 it goes on to say "there is no salvation apart from it" and that "no one ought to withdraw from it".
In other words, contrary to the WC, the Belgic Confession speaks of a universal church that is organized into local visible bodies, where people are obliged to join. Also, the Heidelberg Catechism makes a distinction between true and false churches: those that have the pure preaching of the gospel, administer the sacraments in a worthy manner and exercise church discipline are true churches. Those that don't or distort these practices are not.
As far as your comment about historical criticism is concerned, I agree with you but I fail to see how that has anything to do with what I'm talking about.
I think what the WCF means by "pure and less-pure" is those churches that have the three true marks of the church: (1) word (2) sacraments and (3) discipline. A church with a faulty administration of the sacraments but had a spot-on presentation of the word would be "less-pure" than a church that had a correct view on both. Hope that helps.
Of course, the assumption is that if one were to become Catholic, one would necessarily "leave the solas." This kind of comment, however, is a bit to "straw-man"ish for my tastes, especially when I read thoughtful engagement with protestantism from people like Fr. Louis Bouyer and Fr. Yves Congar (for an article on Bouyer's work that shows that the solas are as much a part of Catholic thought as Protestant, see http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features/mbrumley_bouyer1_nov04.asp)
Speaking as a Protestant, sometimes it seems that Protestants are less willing to develop or progress than even Catholics! In other words, even if progress has been made in the Protestant-Catholic dialogue that has brought clarity to doctrinal positions on both sides, and the result has been to see more agreement than was at one time thought, some getto Protestants either don't care or would instead go on living as if we're still in the year 1517. The read the harsh attacks by Calvin on the Catholic Church and assume there as valid today as they were in his time - or that the Catholic Church has not progressed in any way since his time (if you think the Catholic Church can not progress or develop in their doctrine, you have a misunderstanding of Catholicism - read, for example, Fr. John Henry Newman's work, "On the Development of Doctrine.") I, in all honesty, have some real issues with some points of Catholic doctrine, and thus am not Catholic. But I refuse to engage the Catholic Church through fundamentalist ignorance that fails to address the real issues that separate Protestants and Catholics (this would be represented, as an example in my mind, through bloggers like John MacArthur's blogger man Dan Phillips: see http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2007/05/dealing-biblically-with-apostasy.html)
I believe in the Reformation, there was both true and false reform - both good and bad, as is the case with most monumental events such as that. I would hope in our day, 500 years removed, we could, as Protestants, be a bit more self-reflective, as well as developments that have genuinelly occurred (if, indeed they have) in the Catholic Church as they have reflected upon themselves. Never unity at the expense of truth!! But also never disunity as a result of ignorance.
I must retract an earlier statement I made on this blog.. I stated that the spirit of Johann Tetzel was alive and well in the Roman Church. Tetzel sold indulgences, I must commend the nuns for giving the rice away for free. Just thought I'd say that, for accuracy...doesn't really change anything, still think its pretty bizarre.