What do Catholics...

What Catholics believe

A. Mary was conceived free of original sin (called the Immaculate Conception)

B. She never committed personal sin

C. When she died she was assumed body and soul into heaven

D. She is 100% dependent on God, and by her subordinate cooperation she plays a role in all the graces that come to us

Why Catholics believe this

1. Preliminary texts on the general holiness of Mary from Scripture (the following texts do not prove any Marian doctrines -- such te

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Do Catholics worship...

No. In fact, the Church has come out repeatedly against the worship of statues, in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the new Catechism, and so on. As far as bowing to God while in the presence of statues of the saints, that's no more worship than it is to kneel near another praying Christian, or a priest facing you. Nor are you worshipping the pages of your Bible if you kneel with it in your hand. I have knelt with statues of saints as I have asked the saints in heaven to pray for me,... [Read More]

But doesn't Jesus...

In fact, Jesus clearly upholds Tradition in the New Testament as we will see, but before we do that, let's look carefully at the scene that people use as evidence that Jesus is hostile to Tradition.

The entirety of it is that Jesus castigates the Pharisees for their corrupt traditions in a teaching recorded in Mark 7:1-23, and Matthew 15:1-20. The differences between the two accounts of this scene are negligible, and so I will go through the account in Mark:

Mark 7

1
"Now when the Ph

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Why are priests called...

Moreover, do not call anyone your Father on earth, for One is your Father, the heavenly one, Yahweh.
(Matthew 23:9)

Context and common sense gives us many clues that Jesus did not want us to remove the word "father" from the language unless applied to Yahweh. Our first clue is that the term "father" is a metaphor for God, and the metaphor would lose all meaning if it couldn't apply to anyone on earth. Moreover, whatever word you used to rename biological... [Read More]

What is the Communion of...

Christians have always believed that the Church exists not only in this world but extends into heaven, and the saints in heaven can pray for us, if we ask them to (consider Revelation 5:8; 8:3-4; Matthew 18:10; Tobit 12:12, 15; cf. Hebrews 11:4-12:1 for the "great cloud of witnesses"). For intercessory prayer in general: 1 Timothy 2:1-4; Ephesians 6:18; Romans 15:30; Colossians 4:3; 1 Thessalonians 1:2; for the suprasensible unity of all Christians: 1 Corinthians 12:25-27; Romans... [Read More]