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… which incidentally is exactly why people were worried about JFK becoming the first Catholic president back in the day: would he refuse orders from Rome if his immortal soul were on the line?
This argument was already dumb propaganda back when it first emerged - historically, no one is more on bad terms with a Pope and tassels with him more predictably than a Catholic Monarch. The Pope is not Jesus Christ and papal infallibility is an extremely narrow domain with few actual applications. The entire institution of Gallicanism in France should be enough to prove that a Catholic head of State has enormous leeway in dealing with Papal authority.
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I always found this ridiculous. If you trip over a European history book and land face first on a random page your eyes will fall on a paragraph about a Catholic monarch with the title "Defender of the Faith" whose imperial regalia is festooned with crosses who rules a Catholic confessional state flagrantly ignoring direct papal orders and doing whatever he finds politically, socially, or sexually expedient. The pope is not nearly the boogeyman-puppetmaster he's made out to be. But I expect most educated people know that and are making these accusations in bad faith.
Every Catholic monarch of a Catholic state is Catholic by definition. If you’re the next Crown Prince of Liechtenstein, a devoutly (and officially) Catholic country ruled by a Catholic monarch, you can’t really abandon Catholicism, which both your people believe in and which forms the spiritual justification for your rule. If you’re an atheist you can break the rules but you have to keep your beliefs to yourself.
A religious Catholic by choice in a non-Catholic land is already signalling much more devotion to Rome and to the Pope than someone who doesn’t really have a choice. They are more likely to actually believe. The threat of eternal damnation carries more weight.
The history of Catholic political influence post-1970 suggests there is exactly one very weakly enforced red line for Catholic monarchs, and that's abortion. The princes of Liechtenstein otherwise do whatever they want(as do the princes of Monaco, the government of Andorra, etc). While there's a few Catholic organizations that formally require their members to do more than that in order to remain members in good standing(the Knights of Columbus can technically expel a member for missing mass, even if in practice nobody's taking attendance), Catholic monarchs don't have to be members of them- this isn't mormonism which regularly checks the practices of members. The six minima for religious practice are firmly on the honor system and you can't get excommunicated for just not doing them.
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Like how the rulers of devoutly catholic England, Sweden, Denmark, etc, couldn't? Rulers have abandoned the faith of their subjects since the time of the second oldest religion.
You’re making my point. The leaders of those countries are still nominally members of the state church (or indeed head of it).
Now imagine, say, the president of Germany announces he’s converting to the Anglican Church. That’s interesting. That’s unusual. That suggests a much more genuine belief than King Charles formally being an Anglican.
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That's interesting. I'm not an expert in the topic, but my reading it seems to me that there is a rich history of political leaders ignoring the Catholic hierarchy's orders. Maybe political leaders, historically, even ignored its orders more often than they followed them, though I really don't know.
Catholics are not allowed to ignore the pope. A Catholic potus has an obligation to obey the pope or they are not Catholic. I’ve always said Jews have the same issue with Israel and their tribe.
The pre-eminent Catholic school in Americas motto is literal God-Country-Notre Dame.
That being said Catholic and Jews have already conquered this country and the Wasp are dead so the old evangelicals have already made their choice to back the Catholics.
Billions of Catholics ignore the pope's directives every day. You may feel this is some sort of contradiction of the religion, but you are grossly, vastly outvoted.
Insert Ex Cathedra explanation here
You are correct it needs to be taken only when he’s speaking “infallible”. When he’s speaking like on Iran then it’s just under advisement. My point stands though at “certain” times a Catholic POTUS obligation would be to what Rome says over domestic popular opinion. On his Iran speaking it would need to be taken under advisement and their own moral judgement.
My opinion is military target strikes are mostly fine. Targeting the electric grid probably not ok.
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Protestantism always struck me as a dead end theologically. Sola Scriptura ultimately leads to complete doctrinal anarchy. Scripture according to ‘whose’ interpretation? Mine? Yours? Church tradition? It’s a complete misnomer to reject Sacred Tradition because it provides the historical framework of interpretation for reading the Bible.
Do you think that all texts lead to anarchy? The text has an objective meaning aside from the interpretation thereof: the correct stance would be scripture according to the sense genuinely latent in the text.
You may object: but we may disagree on what that sense is. Okay, true. There are disagreements within every religion. Sufficiently bad errors may warrant ecclesiastical or civil (were we to live in a state that still took an interest in such things) censure.
All that said, I'm fine with some degree of looking at tradition and so on.
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I'd be happy to go into more discussion on this, but just as a first point, Protestants don't reject Sacred Tradition, they simply give it a lower status than Scripture itself. This is how the Bible tells us to treat Scripture. 2 Tim 3:16 - Scripture is God-breathed, i.e. it has a unique ontological status. Or Proverbs 30:5-6 - "Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar." Likewise we are given the positive example of the Bereans, who "searched Scripture to see if these things were so" in Acts 17:11 - in other words, they judged the teachings of men by testing them against the Scriptures. This should be an obvious principle.
Those who hold Sacred Tradition to be on the same level of authority as Scripture are the ones with a burden of proof. And it's quite a tough burden to reach when you actually look at the historical context of Church teachings, with such fun items as multiple co-existing Popes writing against each other, or dueling 'ecumenical' councils that came to opposite conclusions (see e.g. the Council of Hieria vs Nicea 2). Catholics also had to invent the concept of 'Development of Doctrine' to cover the fact that their Sacred Tradition has clearly and significantly changed over time.
Depends on the Protestant. I grew up in a non-denominational Protestant church which absolutely would've rejected the idea of tradition having any sort of authority (which is the bit that makes it sacred). Their belief was that only the Bible had any authority over the Church.
That is, in fairness, not the Catholic teaching. Sacred Tradition is held to be authoritative, but with less authority than the divinely-inspired Scripture (so if there were ever to be a conflict between the two, Scripture wins).
I think you'll find this is not the case. Catholics hold Sacred Tradition and Scripture to be equal authorities, as they are both divinely inspired. What you have described is quite literally Sola Scriptura. If Catholics believed this there would be no disagreement over this issue.
The confusion here is what constitutes tradition and authority. If that church's pastor told an adherent, say, 'you can't live with your fiancée before marriage or you will have to leave this church' - that would be authoritative over the adherent, based on that pastor's interpretation of scripture, which is what 'tradition' means. But it would not be as authoritative as Scripture. If someone could demonstrate from Scripture that this tradition/teaching were false, the paster would presumably need to recant it. That's what the Reformation was all about, identifying traditions that contradicted Scripture and trying to fix them.
In other words, the paster would disagree over which traditions are authoritative, and how much authority they hold. He would agree that any traditions of men should be held up to the standard of Scripture, and if Scripture contradicts the tradition then it must be discarded. But things as simple as holding a service with worship music and Bible teaching are not in Scripture - they are traditions that do not contradict Scripture.
If on the other hand you mean that your church rejected 'Sacred Tradition' in the sense of 'the specific traditions of the Roman Catholic Church' then, uh, no duh.
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From what I've seen, the answer is 'yes'. And if the differences are too great, you just split the church. That's how you end up with small villages with three churches. And some of the really devout people don't go to church at all. They know it all themselves anyway.
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