What is the WORD of God? (Part 2 of 4)
Besides the near universal Christian belief that God chose those church Bishops who worked on deciding which scriptures would be canon, guiding their minds so they would decide to choose our present day books of the Bible, there is a parallel but equally imaginary belief, a historical model that is Church Centered rather than Christ (or Spirit) centered. To believe this Catholic model of history, you have to believe that the truths Jesus taught needed to be preserved by an unbroken chain of Bishops and Popes, beginning with Peter and that without them, the truth could not have prevailed. In this historical model, promoted by the Catholic Church and accepted De Facto by most Protestants, one believes that the Catholic Church’s battle against heresy and heretics may have been exceedingly harsh but was nevertheless necessary. In other words, without the Catholic Church’s intervention, heretics would have taken control and destroyed the truth, preventing Christianity from becoming the dominant world religion.
In this Church Centered model the Catholic Church is accepted into the fold of the faithful and given a prominent position as a preserver of truth. Let’s not forget that to this day the Roman Catholic Church considers itself to be the one and only true church. They also have a history of creating traditions and practices not found in the Bible, which must be followed by their faithful because the “Church” (the Holy Catholic Church) says so. They truly believe the Church trumps the Bible, so much so that Pope Innocent III proclaimed that every cleric must obey the Pope, even if that Pope commands what is evil. That’s not just blind allegiance it’s downright evil to proclaim such a thing. Some of the Catholic Church traditions include the worship of Mary as the “Mother of God”, Purgatory, their elaborate and ornate rituals, transubstantiation of the bread and wine (believing it becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ), oath taking (during the middle ages anyone who refused to take an oath was considered a heretic and condemned to die), and eating no meat on Good Friday.
Those who accept this Catholic promoted historical view must of necessity see some greater purpose to the Catholic Inquisitions, the Crusades, and their draconian censorship of any scripture they didn’t canonize. But how can we Christians overlook their wholesale “seek and destroy” mandate against immensely important historical documents and non-canon scriptures, making the Catholic Church’s evil intentions and actions part of God’s will? More importantly, how can we overlook the hundreds of thousands of people the Catholic Church had tortured, drowned, beheaded, or burned at the stake as heretics, all under the guise of this “truth” preservation? In the course of my research it amazed me to discover that most of Christianity has turned a blind eye to these historical facts, sweeping them under the carpet so to speak. Continuation of each denominations religious power is an obvious motivating factor. This is most likely why Christian’s everywhere just accept this whitewash of history.
However, doing evil or allowing it, in order to achieve what is believed to be a greater good is an example of Voltaire’s doctrine, “The end justifies the means”, not Christ’s doctrine of “Do unto others as you would have the do unto you”. Killing heretics just doesn’t fit with Christ’s Golden Rule. There appears to be two primary reasons why the rest of Christianity has been so complicit in this historical cover-up and they both arise from the same carnal mindset that gave birth to Catholicism and Protestantism.
First, every denomination has sought to create a pedigree past that would link back to the original apostles and Jesus, thereby creating an Apostolic Succession that bolsters their particular theology. And since, after it’s unholy alliance with Rome there was only “One Holy Catholic Church” (composed of two branches, Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic) any pedigree lineage would have to include this “Holy Catholic Church”. As history reveals, the Catholic Church continued this unholy alliance with governments around the world, for 13 centuries! It should be noted that the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Church were almost identical in both theology and governance up until the great schism of 1054.
By the 16th century, when the Protestant Reformation began, the Catholic Church had long ago destroyed all non-canon scriptures and numerous other historical documents pertaining to non-Catholic church groups, effectively erasing from the collective memory of mankind all trace of Christianity’s diverse historical heritage. Especially singled out for destruction where those documents and groups associated with a more spiritual, mystical path, such as Gnosticism. This included not only the Gnostics but the original, so-called primitive Christianity, the Quakers and some lesser known groups as well.
Because Cathars had embraced many of the tenets of Gnosticism Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against the entire Languedoc region of France in 1209 A.D. This war would rage on through two generations (about 40 years). The Catholic Church believes to this day that the crusades where just and righteous necessities, including their war of genocide against the Cathars, referred to proudly as the “Albigensian Crusade”. It is estimated that 500,000 men, women and children were slaughtered, simply because they didn’t accept the Catholic Church as God’s true and only Church. Twenty thousand, an entire town, were slaughtered when they refused to give up a few hundred Cathars. All the men, women and children were killed, including Cathars, Catholics and even Catholic priests, many in the Churches where they sought sanctuary. It is reported that before this siege an officer inquired of the Pope’s representative as to how they should tell the Christians from the heretics. He answered, “Kill them all. God will recognize His own”. The Northern noblemen, many of whom were members of the Knights Templar, were bribed into waging this war on behalf of the Catholic Church with promises of remission of all sins, a place in Heaven, and all the lands and material possessions they could carry away.
The Cathar region was also singled out for extermination of the entire population because it was a region where men and women enjoyed more educational and spiritual freedom then just about any place in Europe at that time. This region was experiencing a pre-renaissance Renaissance (the historical Renaissance took place between the 14th and 17th centuries). Philosophy, poetry, the study of other religions, scientific studies and enlightened reasoning flourished there and this was threatening to the antiquated, superstitious ideas of the Church. The majority of people followed a Gnostic tradition which focused on direct, personal knowledge of God, arrived at through meditation. Preachers and teachers in Gnostic congregations could be men or women. They rejected the validity of all clerical hierarchies, which included so-called “ordained” intercessors between man and God, whether they were called Priest, Bishop or Pope. There were differing branches of Gnosticism, with differing ideas as to the nature of Jesus. A Gnostic life was simple, devoid of rituals and Church buildings, but extremely devoted to God and a quiet, meditative, spiritual life.
There can be no doubt this was an act of genocide. However, I wouldn’t say it was an act of Christian genocide because those who did this could not possibly be followers of Jesus Christ! They were followers of men who invented a religion called Catholicism that distorts what Jesus taught for the purpose of building their own religious empire. Just to get an idea of how twisted the thinking of a religious person can be, I’m going to give you a sampling from my research, which shows how Catholics see Pope Innocent III and the Albigensian Crusade (and please don’t think I’m a Protestant anti-Catholic; I consider myself neither and see no significant difference between the two, as I’ll explain later).
In the Catholic Encyclopedia we read, “Pope Innocent III, one of the greatest popes of the Middle Ages…”. In the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia we read, “[Pope] Innocent [III] was also a zealous protector of the true Faith and a strenuous opponent of heresy. His chief activity was turned against the Albigenses [Cathars is what they called themselves] who had become so numerous and aggressive that they were no longer satisfied with being adherents of heretical doctrines but even endeavored to spread their heresy…”. And this glowing report from an anonymous individual’s Catholic website, “His Holiness, Innocent III, always one of my favorite pontiffs, Innocent III is often cited as the representation of the peak of papal power and Christian influence. During his six years on the papal throne, virtually all of Europe was united under the Christian religion, the Catholic Church was triumphant and even the secular powers, almost to a man, recognized the Papacy as the source of their legitimacy and the Pope as their feudal lord. Pope Innocent III encouraged this and is remembered as the champion of the “Papal Monarchy. He was impeccably honest, virtuous and highly moral. Through all his actions, Innocent III embodied to the greatest extent exactly what Christendom was supposed to be. The Church above all else, Christ as the center of society, focus on the spiritual rather than the temporal and a society in which God was given supremacy in all things, even in government; which is why the Vicar of Christ acted as the lord of all the kings and princes in Europe”.
Unless one is a brainwashed Catholic, anyone who would take the time to research Pope Innocent III could not help but see a huge disconnect with reality in the above statements about his “holiness” being “virtuous and highly moral”. On a site created by the French citizens of the Languedoc region (the region of the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade) we get a different point of view, one that does not gloss over the truth regarding Pope Innocent III. “Innocent did much to bolster the position of the papacy. He claimed to have been given the whole world to rule over by God… It was Innocent’s desire to sit at the apex of the feudal system… He stated that every cleric must obey the Pope, even if he commands what is evil, for no one may judge the Pope. His views on human rights were also conventional. He set the pace by declaring Magna Carta, the great charter of English rights and liberties drawn up in 1215, to be void. He declared it to be contrary to the moral law and excommunicated anyone who maintained its pretentions. Virtually all English speaking peoples have thus been automatically excommunicated for the last 8 centuries… Since 1184, when Pope Lucius III published Ad abolendum, the refusal to take an oath has been automatic confirmation of heresy in the Roman Church. Pope Innocent III confirmed that those who took Jesus’ teaching on this matter literally were heretics, and that they deserved to die. In 1199, Pope Innocent III declared heresy to be high treason against God, and of course the penalty for that was death. He also held orthodox views on abortion, though those views would now be regarded with horror. Innocent stated that a monk who had persuaded his mistress to have an abortion was not guilty of murder as long as the fetus had not yet been animated… Roman Canon law maintained the distinction between a fetus animatus and a fetus inanimatus until 1869 when it was suddenly abandoned. We do not hear much about it nowadays. Innocent also held orthodox views on Jews. His conventional anti-Semitic ideas would influence Europe into the twentieth century and beyond. There was for example nothing at all new in Nazi anti-Semitism. It was simply repackaged traditional Christian anti-Semitism promoted by men like Innocent III. The whole panoply of Nazi persecution was founded on Christian precedents espoused by Innocent. Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws of 1935 were modeled in part on the decrees of Innocent III and Paul IV… Before the war Hitler had boasted to Bishop Berning of Osnabruch that he was doing what the Church had done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively.”
All this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg as far as examples of Pope Innocent III’s “moral and virtuous” character!! Continuing with quotes from the Languedoc-France.info website, “It was Innocent III who made explicit the right of husbands to go off without their wives permission. Crusaders could abandon their families without a word of explanation – without even saying goodbye – emulating Jesus’s early disciples”. By the reign of Pope Innoncent III, the great 1154 schism between Eastern Orthodox and Western Roman Catholic had occurred. Crusades were NOT wars waged by holy men and the following example from the Fourth Crusade, which took place between 1202 and 1204, just 4 years before his infamous call for a crusade against the Cathars (or Albigenses as the Catholic Church derisively referred to them) proves that fact. The Fourth Crusade, although it began ostensibly as a crusade against the Muslims, ended up being waged against their fellow Christians, the Eastern Orthodox cities of Constantinople and Zara. “The victorious crusaders amused themselves in the usual way, even though this was the capitol of Christendom. As well as the standard bout of murder and destruction, the men of the cross desecrated imperial tombs, plundered churches, stole holy relics, wrecked houses, vandalized libraries, destroyed whatever loot they could not carry, raped nuns, and set a prostitute on the Patriarch’s throne (the Patriarch is like the Pope to Eastern Orthodox Churches) in Santa Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, the greatest Church in Christendom… The western Church saw nothing wrong with this conduct… The new Latin Emperor (installed by the crusaders), Baldwin, wrote to the Pope about the sack of the city as ‘a miracle that God wrought’. Pope Innocent III rejoiced in the Lord and gave his approval without reserve.”
So, how is it that today Pope Innocent III is considered one of the greatest popes? One might make a case that nowadays things are different with the Catholics. But when you dig deeper and research their views in their own encyclopedias, you find rationalization after rationalization for their evil actions. And if you then look at the recent sex scandals among Catholic Priests and Bishops, you see once again that the Catholic Church does not really care about their parishioners as much as it cares for keeping their Church “pure” and unsullied by controversy, sending the same unregenerate clergy to a new church where they were free to prey upon the young and innocent. All this should be proof enough that the entire Christian denominational structure, based as it is on the appearance of an unbroken Apostolic Succession, a pedigree lineage that includes the Catholic Church, is built upon the foundation of man’s teachings and man’s church, not the teachings of Jesus Christ.
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