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By Sharon Sullivan
“Yahoo!” web sites having anything to do with The Passion of the Christ are "hot." It was among the most popular topics searched-for the week it opened on Yahoo.com, meaning Roman Catholicism just became popular. Record-breaking box office sales sent Mel Gibson’s gruesome reminder of the sufferings of Christ off the charts. Mel’s Jesus, Jim Caveziel, on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show had evangelical Christians packing out theatres, but relatively few Roman Catholics bought tickets, I’m told. And fewer former Catholic, evangelical Christians went, either, I’m guessing. We grew up on “the sufferings of Christ,” bathed on that message from the cradle.
Let twenty million "recovering Catholics" in the evangelical church assure you: that message doesn’t get anyone “saved.”
Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ does that: that the Lamb of God was slain for the sins of the world, and rose from the dead to pay the full penalty for each of our sins. And, most importantly, that believing that message and confessing it with our mouths means we are saved from the consequence of our sins, born again from above, and from that point on saved absolutely, irrevocably and eternally.
But Roman Catholic priests cannot preach that gospel. They certainly never preached it to us! Worse, few evangelical Christians realize that “Catholic evangelist extrodinaire” Mel Gibson’s achievement, which was to make that religion wildly popular, is dangerous to every American citizen. Right now, untold prayers to the Virgin Mary are going up as we speak. What for? That evangelical Protestants and anyone else dragged along will be led through Mel “home to Rome.” We are not in The One True Church, you see. In their mercy for us then, they’re praying we find the “fullness of the faith” in Roman Catholicism. They think we're headed for hell.
And our seemingly unanimous evangelical support of this film may in fact answer their prayers. It already wasn’t politically correct to mention our Protestant distinctions compared to Roman Catholicism in this Presidential election year – and not even the “recovering Catholics” in the evangelical church could pipe up about the theological conflicts. In the words of one Catholic evangelist I met on-line, we “were not well-catechised.” Evangelical Christians (and, apparently, their pastors) know dangerously little about this religion. I dare you to find ten evangelical Christians who could tell you anything about Martin Luther’s “protest” of it five hundred years ago or Catholicism's refusal to change. As short of this knowledge as we evangelical Christians are, this may prove to be the greatest Roman Catholic conversion experience since Constantine declared the Roman Empire Christian in 343 AD. For those who'd like the study, however, this man's web site links to thousands of reasons why not to follow the crowd: http://www.pro-gospel.org.
Some complained that Mary’s depiction was overblown in the film. But neither Mel nor Mary’s unbiblical tradition should have kept us away from the theatres. The main problem with Roman Catholicism is still the same problem we had with it at the Protestant Reformation: they don't preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther was ex-communicated in 1521 AD on charges of “heresy” for believing the gospel. Tell a Roman Catholic that they don't have the gospel, and they'll respond, "Oh, that's nonsense. Of course we do. We have all four of them: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." Meanwhile, here is but one current example of their contrary beliefs. The salvation we gain by our faith in Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross to the Catholic is “the sin of presumption”:
Catechism of The Catholic Church, revised edition, 1997, (Paragraph 2092): “There are two kinds of presumption. Either man presumes upon his own capacities, (hoping to be able to save himself without help from on high), or he presumes upon God's almighty power or his mercy (hoping to obtain his forgiveness without conversion and glory without merit).” (Note: Having confidence in (or, presuming upon) God Almighty’s power and mercy is precisely how one is converted – not to Roman Catholicism, but to Jesus Christ directly.)
What should most disturb us at this critical time, is that the same Roman Catholic Canon Laws which condemned men to burn at the stake at the Council of Trent (held between 1547 - 1563AD) for disagreeing with their church laws were upheld in every detail at their most recent council, Vatican II, in 1965!
The Council of Trent, SESSION THE SIXTH, Celebrated on the thirteenth day of the month of January, 1547. DECREE ON JUSTIFICATION:
CANON XII If any one saith, that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ's sake; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified; let him be anathema.[which means ‘cursed’]
CANON XIII If any one saith, that it is necessary for every one, for obtaining the remission of sins, that he believe for certain, and without any wavering arising from his own infirmity and disposition, that his sins are forgiven him; let him be anathema.
Historically, this religion gains the upper hand when given a place of authority over governments – by force of the law. European governments, not their religion necessarily, get the blame for the Crusades, pogroms, Inquisitions and most recently those martyred at the Protestant Reformation. One woman has commented "If you really want to understand a group, watch how they respond when given absolute power." And few of us realize that the Roman Catholic Office of Inquisition is still open for business. They’ve changed its name, to hide it, but a CNN article dated March 30, 2001, states that “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was once known as the Holy Inquisition. It is headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, one of Pope John Paul II's closest advisers. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [sic.] is known as "the Pope's enforcer" because of his determination to uphold the traditional teachings of the church.” We have already witnessed the absolute power displayed in Roman Catholicism in our Protestant past.
Alarming is that their numbers were growing before Mel Gibson's theatrics. American Catholic numbers, expected to markedly decrease in 2002, the year of their scandal, increased by 1.1 million souls. (How quickly we forgot about those priests, eh?) At last count there were sixty-six million Roman Catholic Americans. Imagine the power in their force at the polls when seventy million evangelical Christians adopt their beliefs by the sway of the crowd.
The rest of us? We’re sitting ducks, no thanks to Mel’s film and our evangelical pastors’ support of it. Yes, it just became very popular to be Roman-American Catholic, I'm afraid.
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