People disagree with strawman Catholicism.
A saint is a pretty simple concept. It’s someone who is in heaven with Christ.
The declaring of Saints is a process where the Church tries to decide if someone is in fact a Saint. The purpose for doing so is to give people role models to live by. Instead of looking up to celebrities we have all of these different examples of faithful people.
So Christ determines who is in heaven but his Church can let people on earth know if someone made it there and help tell their story. One of the earlier and simple ways is if someone was killed for their faith in Christ. One of the others is they perform a miracle who is obviously harder to prove.
And Sainthood can be removed by the Church if it thinks a mistake was made or new evidence comes out. Again this doesn’t affect the judgement Christ has made. That person could still be in heaven but the Church has just declared we aren’t sure.
Understand?
Let me explain the real story about Mother Teresa. People think she ran a hospital or some secular nonsense. The truth is India’s medical caste system threw terminally ill people out in the streets to die. Mother Teresa and her sisters were not medical workers and had no such training. All they did was take in terminally ill people thrown out of society and cared for them spiritually and physically as best they could. She helped bring countless pagan souls to Christ through her works of mercy.
People heard about her works and donated lots of money but she wasn’t a business woman who could grow an organization so she gave it to the Church. She just kept doing what she knew how and taught us how everyone has human dignity in the eyes of the Lord. That is why she is hated by the people currently trying to cull humanity.
The 1952 Werner von Braun book The Mars Project was about a future trip to Mars. When the astronauts arrived they found people traveling around Mars in hyperloops and the leader of Mars was known as The Elon.
The origin of the St Michael Prayer is when Pope Leo XIII has a vision that Satan was talking to God saying if he had 100 years of dominion over his Church he could destroy it. Many Catholics believe this 100 year period started in 1917 when the Virgin Mary appeared to the Children of Fatima in Portugal and told them unless the Church consecrates Russia to her immaculate heart the errors of Russia would spread across the world. This was followed by the miracle of the sun where tens of thousands of faithful and nonbelievers witnessed. Russia was never consecrated and her errors did spread.
Half way through that 100 years came the biggest social overthrow of tradition with divorce, abortion, the pill, the sexual revolution.
The end of this 100 year period was in 2017. Satan’s plans are being uncovered and Christ is going to restore his Church. 2018 was the beginning of the uncovering of all of the corruption within of the Church. The second coming of Christ will happen after the gospel is spread across the world and many people fall from the faith.
Yeah that’s a common Protestant misunderstanding of Catholicism. Catholics in no way think we earn our way into being saved. It is only Christ who saves us as demonstrated by the repentant thief on the cross next to Christ.
BUT
Faith is required but we can earn our way out of salvation. Judas had faith in Christ. The demons know exactly who Christ is and that he saves but they reject him. We can have faith that Christ saves us but reject him through sin and lose his grace for our salvation. Like the good thief all we have to do is confess our sins to Christ and he will do the rest. We believe you can have perfect contrition and be saved but Christ left his Church to minister to his people. Part of that is the continuation of the priesthood from the Jewish Priests to Catholic Priests. Instead of sacrificing animals to repent for our sins we can go to the Priest who acts in the person of Christ who himself forgives our sins.
Luther didn’t like this idea which is why he was so bitter about the book of James.
The real truth is Christ left a Church not a book. That is, for all of its problems, the Catholic Church. Don’t get me started on the current corrupt leadership. I didn’t stop being an American when Obama was President. The Church fathers assembled the Bible by selecting which texts were accurate and which were not guided by the Holy Spirit. They even had to do this to the Old Testament which Jews of the day argued about which texts were correct. The Catholics fathers went with the Greek version because that was most of the educated people used.
When the Protestants started removing books from the Bible they used the argument they found Hebrew texts that excluded some Old Testament texts. But those texts were written after Christ and the Jews of the time were trying to rewrite the texts to show Christ wasn’t who he claimed to be. Even some modern Jews such as those in Ethiopia have Old Testament with the same texts as the Catholic Bible.
My favorite translation is the English Douay-Rheims (1609) with the Latin Vulgate (405 AD) side by side. The English reads similar to KJV because it was done around the same time.
Been saying this from Jan 6.
Remember Trump said Pence would have to have more courage to certify the results? Makes it somewhat plausible Pence had to do it knowing that he would be hated and Lin adds gasoline to the fire.
Still won’t know for a while.
Christ left a Church not a book. The Church created the Bible to spread the faith.