Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mmh@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: 'Veneration of the 'Saints'' Message-ID: Date: 2 Jul 90 05:25:14 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London, UK. Lines: 55 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [This is responding to comments in which I said that many of my Catholic friends found that invocations of the saints had become superstitious. After a protest from Matthew, I commented: >people need to act in mutual respect. I do not condemn you for >continuing to follow your practices and attempting to do so in a pure >form. I'm simply asking you to understand that it might seem to >others that it was wiser to give up the practices completely. --clh] Your original comments (which I have repeated above) clearly read to me that you considered the use of saints as "good luck charms" to be a general and integral part of the faith, and not an error to which Catholics were particularly susceptible. It is as if I were to say that from my experience Protestantism was about men in ill-fitting suits appearing on television, suggesting that they had magic healing powers, and asking for large sums of money so they could buy themselves expensive cars, air-conditioned dog-kennels, etc etc. My feeling is that the many weird cults and charlatans that have sprung from American Protestantism indicate precisely the danger of denying the need for a Universal and ordered Church. Indeed, it is an interesting exercise to note how many of the things which Luther criticised in the Catholic Church of his time have close counterparts in the tele-evangelists. However, I know well that these are errors into which Protestantism can fall, and not an integral part of Protestantism. In fact, I had better add that I am sure there are people doing good evangelical work on the television, but that here in the UK where we don't have such things, we only get to hear about the more notorious abuses. Matthew Huntbach [I am sorry you got that impression. I said specifically that I accept the defense of prayers to the saints given by people in this group. I noted that getting rid of something that is being abused is only one approach, and that people of good will could well disagree whether it's better to do that or purify it. I certainly did not intend to imply that superstition is intrinsic to the Catholic faith. I was simply trying to make sure people realized that Protestants are doing what they are doing as a conscious choice, not simply because they misunderstand Catholic intent. One of the things that the Reformation did was to remove a lot of practices that had been subject to abuse, in order to concentrate attention on the fundamentals of the Faith. I do not condemn the other approach, which says that all of these things have some value, and it's worth going to the effort to clean them up when abuses occur. It's clear that both approaches have their characteristic ways of degenerating. Catholicism degenerates into superstition and abuse of ecclesiastical power. Protestantism degenerates into hypocritical Bible-thumping and legalism. I do not mean to raise Catholic abuses and deny Protestant ones. --clh]