Gerard Verschuuren - Forty Anti-Catholic Lies: A Mythbusting Apologist Sets the Record Straight

Gerard M. Verschuuren, Ph.D.

Forty

Anti-Catholic

Lies

A Myth-Busting
Apologist Sets the
Record Straight

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2018 by Gerard M. Verschuuren

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Perceptions Design Studio in collaboration with Coronation Media.

On the cover: 1555 engraving of the execution of women convicted as witches (image H2MFBE), courtesy of gameover/Alamy Stock Photo; and 1518 engraving of the Eighth Crusade (12701272), led by Louis IX of France, landing at Carthage (image BFY9WA), courtesy of Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations have been taken from the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV), copyright 1965 and 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for the United States of America copyright 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright 1997, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Verschuuren, G. M. N. (Geert M. N.), author.

Title: Forty anti-Catholic lies : a myth-busting apologist sets the record

straight / by Gerard M. Verschuuren, Ph.D.

Description: Manchester, New Hampshire : Sophia Institute Press, 2018. |

Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018013702 | ISBN 9781622825240 (pbk. : alk. paper) ePub ISBN 9781622825257

Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church Apologetic works.

Classification: LCC BX1752 .V47 2018 | DDC 282 dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013702

Contents

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

Preface

If you are a Catholic, you should know your Catholic Faith. If you are not a Catholic but have an opinion about the Catholic Faith, you should know what the Catholic Faith really is, so you dont spread misinformation about what Catholics believe.

Unfortunately, there is much misinformation in our culture about Catholicism. It has been spread through books, newspapers, television, the Internet, and other mass media. Some say it is fabricated information based on an antireligious bias, and specifically an anti-Catholic prejudice in media and academia. Whatever the underlying motive, there is definitely a propaganda war going on against the Catholic Church.

Nowadays, anti-Catholic rhetoric is often disguised. Many liberals and progressives do not oppose Catholics because they are Catholics that could be seen as discrimination but because Catholics are believed to have certain beliefs out of line with mainstream thinking. Those alleged beliefs, however, are often caricatures and misrepresentations of the real beliefs Catholics hold.

What do Catholics really believe? Asking any Catholic is not always the best way to find out, for some Catholics may not even know the basics of their own Faith, or they may already have been affected by the misinformation that keeps bombarding all of us. As Albert Einstein put it, It is easier to split atoms than prejudices. So we need to go beyond just scratching the surface.

Lets try to set the facts straight in this book. In a rather arbitrary order, we will discuss some more popular myths and fabrications about Catholics. You can read them consecutively or use the table of contents to search for specific topics. In each case, we will try to separate real Catholic beliefs from fabricated beliefs about the Catholic Faith, so you can learn from them yourself or prepare yourself better for discussions with those who attack your Faith. Our goal is religious correctness rather than political correctness.

In this book, I speak of lies about the Catholic Church. Although a lie is usually defined as a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive, I do not mean that all people who believe in these lies necessarily have a deliberate intent to deceive others about Catholicism. They are sometimes only misinformed and lack the correct knowledge in which case their lie is only an inaccurate or false statement. To better inform them, I wrote this book. For those who use these lies intentionally to smear the Catholic Church, I can only hope and pray that this book may change their intentions.

I often use the term Catholics instead of the term the Catholic Church. Let this not deceive you. I do not mean that Catholics form a single unified bloc; there are always disagreements, and even dissenters. But in general, Catholics as a group are more homogenous than Protestants, because Catholics have much in common that sets them apart from other Christians. The main reason for this is that the Catholic Church makes it her mission to keep Catholics united in doctrine and in morals. How much this is possible is up to you to decide when reading this book.

Part 1

Catholicism and the Bible

Catholics are forbidden to read the Bible

The lie

The Catholic Church ignores, opposes, hides, and even sometimes destroys the Bible in order to keep it from the people. Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible on their own. In fact, thats part of what got Martin Luther in trouble when he translated the Bible into German so everyone could read it.

The personal reading, understanding, and interpreting of Scripture was, and still is, considered a very serious threat to the authority of the Catholic Church. She does not want Catholics to read the Bible out of fear that her doctrines will be found out to be false. As a result, most Catholics live a life of sine Scriptura ( without Scripture), whereas most Protestants live a life of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone ).

The truth

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 25 percent of Evangelical Protestants read the Bible daily, as do 20 percent of other Protestants, while daily Bible-reading is done by only 7 percent of Catholics. The poll also showed that 44 percent of Catholics rarely or never read the Bible, whereas this is true of only 7 percent of Evangelicals and 13 percent of other Protestants. No wonder Catholics usually have trouble in reciting whole phrases from the Bible or locating them in the Bible. They even have a hard time looking up a specific book in the Bible.

Although it is true that Catholics do not always read the Scriptures, they always hear the Scriptures, for you cant go to Mass without hearing Scripture readings over and over again. There are several reasons Catholics did not, and still do not, read Scripture as often as Protestants do.

The first reason is that, for many centuries, the faithful were not educated enough to be able to read at all. Most people were, at best, only functionally literate. This explains why the Church used stained-glass windows and art to tell Bible stories. Obviously, Bible reading requires readers which were for centuries in short supply. Besides, due to invading vandals such as Huns, Visigoths, and Vikings during the Dark Ages, the infrastructure of Europe had been devastated, and education had been hampered (see chapter 28). This also affected Bible reading. Had it not been for the Catholic Church hiding all her Bibles and her textbooks from the rampaging and pillaging of these vandals, however, all schools of learning would have died during these Dark Ages. On the other hand, it is still amazing to see that some saints from this dark period in history were able to read the Bible even in Hebrew: St. Jerome, St. Paula, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Gall, St. Alcuin, and St. Rabanus, to name just a few.