Oscar asked:A Methodist friend of mine accused the Catholic church of persecuting those during the reformation who left the Church to become Protestant. He also claimed the Church kept people from reading the bible on their own.Patrick Madrid replied:"... It is true that many things were done by Catholics in the name of religion, in the name of the Catholic church against Protestants ... We certainly deplore those things as we look back on them. We have to recognize a couple things. This was something that even though you had Catholics, perhaps even priests and bishops who were involved in some of these things, it itself does not reflect the teaching of the Catholic church per se. In other words the Catholic church does not teach that people who leave the Catholic church and become Protestant should be killed. It actually says exactly the opposite. That we should pray for these people and try to win them back. We should never do evil for some good outcome ...The second thing I would point out is that if this proves somehow, or disproves that the Catholic church and its claims to be the one true church, if it disproves those claims then what would he say when you point out all the Catholics who were killed by Protestants during the same period of time? All you have to do is look at a place such as England in the reign of ... Queen Elizabeth. We can go before and go to King Henry the VIII, her father, in the sixteenth century who ordered everyone to become members of the church of England, and if you didn't you would be killed. This is what happened to Saint Thomas More for example ... As you get into the reign of Queen Elizabeth the death toll was staggering. The sheer vastness of the number of Catholics, including many priests, not to mention lay people and religious sisters and brothers who were slaughtered simply for the crime of not converting to Protestantism. In itself that's a deplorable thing and every Catholic and every Protestant should deplore that. But at the same time it doesn't disprove the claims of Protestantism. The fact that the church of England members did terrible things in the name of the church of England doesn't disprove the claims of the church of England. It doesn't logically follow. I would say that on particular points, the church of England is teaching things that are not true, but that's a separate discussion. And it simply can't be settled by an appeal to who killed more people. That doesn't prove or disprove anything... Now as for the question of the bible ... one of the very first things that was done shortly after the reign of terror in the Roman empire in which Christians were being burned at the stake ... and all the persecutions that they went through for three hundred years ... we see ... Pope Damasus directing Saint Jerome to translate the holy bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into Latin because in the western church everyone who could read could read latin. So the purpose of the Latin vulgate was not to prevent people from reading the bible but to make it more available to them. To make it in a language that more people could read. And as I document in some of my books, one book in particular called Answer Me This, I document all the many different translations of the bible that were made well before the invention of the printing press. Which by the way was invented by a Catholic, and oh by the way one of the very first things he printed, Johannes Gutenberg, was a bible. But that's beside the point. I'm being facetious, Oscar. You should point out that the Catholic church was at the very forefront for many centuries before the Protestant reformation ever took place. The Catholic church was the undisputed leader in translating the holy bible into every known language. We have manuscript evidence of this. It's not a matter of conjecture. We know this based on proof." Copyrights:© 2013 Immaculate Heart Catholic RadioEditor's note: This is an excerpt of the answer provided. For the complete response download the podcast. |  Click icon for archived podcast answering this question in its entirety. Show air date: October 9, 2013 Question appeared in show: 27:27 |
