2A is an Unalienable Right

[Joshua Charles🇻🇦 @JoshuaTCharles]

J.R.R. TOLKIEN ON THE DEAD END OF PROTESTANTISM

I read this letter in the years leading up to my conversion. As I discovered, not only was Tolkien right about the mistaken search for “primitive” purity in the Church (read Scripture—it never existed), but the primitive church—to the extent we have artifacts of it in documents, archaeology, etc.—was very Catholic in its beliefs and practices. What I had been told my whole life were “medieval accretions” were widespread in the ancient Church, and defended from both Scripture, and the constant practice of the Church since the Apostolic age. The protestant claim to have restored the ancient Faith was, I discovered, completely false.

To this day, I have not yet found anything uniquely protestant in the ancient Catholic Church, except (I am sad to say) the heresies. All of them—no matter how different their doctrines from one another (and virtually none of them resembled protestantism)—ultimately relied on a novel/erroneous interpretation of Scripture (including subtracting or adding to its canon), coupled with a rejection of the authority of the Church. In this, each of them resembled protestantism. It was very sobering to realize that the Church Fathers’ descriptions of how heresy and heretics operated was disturbingly similar to how my native protestantism had operated since the 16th century.

TOLKIEN’S LETTER

The 'protestant' search backwards for 'simplicity' and directness—which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because 'primitive Christianity' is now and in spite of all 'research' will ever remain largely unknown; because 'primitiveness' is no guarantee of value, and is, and was in great a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian liturgical behavior from the beginning as now. (St Paul's strictures on Eucharistic behavior are sufficient to show this!)

Still more because 'my church' was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history—the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set.

There is no resemblance between the 'mustard-seed' and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth, the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred.

The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree…But they will certainly do harm if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to his son Michael (August 25, 1967)

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

Our Lord created the Sacrament of Penance.

You’re really flailing here.

John 20:23 “(IHS to Apostles) If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Matthew 16:19 (Jesus gives Apostles power to bind and loose sins)

Matthew 18:18 “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.”

2 Corinthians 5:18 “God . . . Reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

James 5:14-15 “Let (the elders of the Church) pray over him . . . he will be forgiven.”

(A) John 20

21 [n][Jesus] said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 [o]And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit. 23 [p]Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

Commentary: Jesus plainly gives His Apostles the Authority to forgive sins.

(B) Corinthians 5:

18 [l]”And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation”

Commentary: Paul, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, references the “Ministry of Reconciliation.”

(C) James 5

“Anointing of the Sick. 13 Is anyone among you suffering? He should pray. Is anyone in good spirits? He should sing praise. 14 Is anyone among you sick?[f] He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint [him] with oil in the name of the Lord, 15 and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven.[g]

Confession and Intercession. 16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.”

Commentary: Clearly a reference from the Epistle of James to the Power of the Catholic Sacraments of Extreme Unction/Anointing of the Sick and Confession.

(D) Matthew 18

15 “If your brother[l] sins [against you], go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. 16 [m]If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church.[n] If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. 18 [o]Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Commentary: Another clear reference to the Ecclesial Authority to forgive sins.

(E) Matthew 16

“I will build my church,[m] and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. 19 I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.[n] Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Commentary: Another unambiguous statement of the Power of Ecclesial Authority to bind in Heaven and on Earth.

#CatholicX

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

You should read Ephesians 2:10 also.

“Faith Alone” is a “reformer” error. It is anti-Scripture and anti-Church.

John 15:6 “ Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned.”

Matthew 16:24 “Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me”

James 2:17 (“So also Faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead”).

James 2:24 (“See how a person is justified by works and not faith alone”).

Matt 7:21-27 (Only those who do the Will of the Father will be saved).

Matthew 19:16-17 “ 16 Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”[l] 17 He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good.[m] If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

Romans 1:5 (“Apostleship to bring about the obedience to Faith”).

Romans 2:13 “For it is not those who hear the law who are just in the sight of God; rather, those who observe the law will be justified.”

Romans 16:26 (“the mystery . . . to bring about the obedience of faith”).

1 Corinthians 13:2 (If we have faith without love we have nothing).

1 Corinthians 13:13 (“Faith, hope, love abode . . . but the greatest of these is love”).

Galatians 5:6 (Only “Faith working through love” amounts to anything).

James 2:18-19 “Indeed someone may say, “You have faith and I have works.” Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works. You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble.”

James 2:20 (“Do you want to be shown . . . Faith apart from works is barren”).

1 John 3:10  “In this way, the children of God and the children of the devil are made plain; no one who fails to act in righteousness belongs to God, nor anyone who does not love his brother.”

1 John 3:24 “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit that he gave us.”

Romans 2:6 “render to every man according to his works.”

Jeremiah 17:10 “Giving to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their deeds.”

Matthew 16:27 “He will repay every man for what he has done.”

2 Corinthians 5:10 “receive good or evil according to what he has done.”

1 Peter 1:17 “Now if you invoke as Father him who judges impartially according to each one’s works, conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your sojourning,”

Apocalypse of Saint John 20:12 “I saw the dead, the great and the lowly, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened. Then another scroll was opened, the book of life.[j]The dead were judged according to their deeds,”

Apocalypse of Saint John 22:11-15 “Let the wicked still act wickedly, and the filthy still be filthy. The righteous must still do right, and the holy still be holy. Behold, I am coming soon. I bring with me the recompense I will give to each according to his deeds. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Blessed are they who wash their robes so as to have the right to the tree of life and enter the city through its gates. Outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the unchaste, the murderers, the idol-worshipers, and all who love and practice deceit.”

Matthew 12:36 “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will render an account for every careless word they speak.”

Matthew 7:21 ““Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,[j] but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

[2A is an Unalienable Right @2AisUnalienable]

@MelanieNicole06 I would pray that ALL would become Christians.

[☩ 𝕁𝕄𝕋 ☩ @SecretFire79]

𝗦𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗢𝗨𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗦 𝗢𝗡 𝗗𝗘𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗬

1. Devils are real…in that they are actual, existent spiritual entities. (Mt. 8:29, Rev. 12:9)

2. They are an army, and we are at war with them. A single person can be possessed by seven or a 'legion' of them. (Lk. 8:2,30, Mt. 12:45, Mk. 5:9, Eph. 6:12)

3. Devils are stronger, smarter, more strategic, and more knowledgeable than us, even when it comes to theology. (1 Tim. 4:1, Jas. 2:19)

4. They mean you harm as a human because you are made in the image of God. Double harm if you are a Christian, because you are conforming specifically to the image of the Son. (1 Pet. 5:8)

5. Satan likes it when we underestimate them. Satan likes it when we overestimate them. (2 Cor. 2:11)

6. They hate the Gospel. They tried to prevent Jesus from accomplishing His work. And when they realized they can't stop Christ from His mission, Satan committed a pathetic and failed kamikazee attack through Judas by making Christ's crucifixion as painful as possible. (Mk. 1:23-24, Lk. 4:34)

7. Devils cannot compel people to sin. Because that would defeat the idea of willfully sinning. But they still do possess people. Though far from the depiction of pop media, possessions are much more subtle and often does not follow convulsion-like effects. They do it through a person's unrepented of and living relationship with sin. When Satan possessed Judas, there was no noticeable change in the vessel. Only that their sinful desires were aggravated to an extreme degree. Devils do not force people to sin, but work to greatly heighten their cherishing of sin to the point of severe outward manifestations. (Jas. 1:14, Jn. 13:2,27)

8. Satan cannot create, but can only distort God's good creation. (Jn. 8:44)

9. Most anti-Christian ideologies can be traced back to demons. (1 Tim. 4:1, 2 Cor. 4:4)

10. We are instructed to resist them using God's Word. And Satan hates it when an individual is faithfully submitting to the Word. (Jas. 4:7, Eph. 6:11)

11. Satan hates it when Christians depend on God in prayer, instead of relying on their own willpower. (Eph. 6:18)

12. The fall of Satan and his army is inevitable. More than anyone, he is aware of the Triune God's unfailing sovereignty. He is already checkmated. Especially through the Cross. (Col. 2:15, Rev. 12:7-9)

13. Demons are so subject to God's sovereignty, that they are even unwillingly serving His purpose. To sanctify the elect. To serve as judgment for the reprobate. (Job 1:12, Rom. 8:28)

[Nancy Charles @cancelwok3]

Reflection: May 31, 2026

Getting cast out of the garden seems like less of a punishment and more of a repercussion for choosing to live outside reality itself.

As the serpent entered the words of scripture for the first time he began by manipulating Eve's sense of reality itself.

A direct attack on the relationship of trust between the Creator and His creation.

Notice how the serpent begins his dialogue with Eve as a question... "Did God really say...?"

It's a direct attack on her intellect.

The God given intellect that allows us to know who God is.

Then he uses the attack on the intellect to further manipulate the will.

Our other God given gift...the will....the one way in which we are able to choose God.

In a few short devastating lines of questioning, the serpent is able to produce a tinge of doubt in Eve.

Not just any doubt....a doubt between her and her understanding of God.
A doubt of reality itself.

The serpent is asserting in his line of questioning, that the created cannot trust the Creator.

Once Eve submits to this lie, she brings it to her loved one, Adam.

He eats.

The destruction of the family.

God doesn't cast them out of the Garden it seems in anger. He did it because he was honoring a choice that had been made.

The Garden represents reality itself. The place where Truth itself lives.

The mere repercussion in their failure to accept reality as it had been revealed by God, made it impossible for them to stay.

It's like oil and water.

They don't mix.

The Father then, realizing His beloved has fallen outside the beauty of His splendor, lets them go.

We rarely allow ourselves to see how agonizingly painful that must have been for Our Lord.

Could you even imagine? The one thing that you love more than anything, chooses to leave you....

And He lets them...

Not because it's easy, or because it's even what He wants.... But because to force them to stay would be to violate the very thing that makes true love possible.

Choice.

We often see this story as an act of God's condemnation. Adam and Eve did wrong, therefore God sends them away as a punishment.

I don't see that reality in this story.

I see two children who made a choice to exist outside the scope of what had been revealed as True.

The Father in His infinite love, lets them go. Let them stumble. Let them choose.

Free will.

Because ultimately, real love is a choice.

We see the evidence of this cruciform choice in God’s return for us.

He came back for us.

A lesser love would have said, fine.... you've made your choice. I don't want you anymore. Go.

Not our Father.

He said, yes, you've made a choice.....But you don't know what choice you've made.

I will bear the astronomical price of what it is that you don't yet understand, so that one day you might finally be able to.

Let me show you by example, how to come back home again.

I lay myself down to give you the roadmap to come back home...

A love so total, so selfless, so cruciform, that it allows its own death so that you can finally see....

Come back home.

❤️‍🔥

[B.F @fishbrad1]

@sxhealth101 Only sleep with wife. If not married don't have sex. Best info you can ever receive.

[Harman @itsharmanjot]

A 32-year-old junior doctor in Australia walked into his hospital laboratory on a Tuesday morning in July 1984, picked up a small glass beaker containing one billion live bacteria suspended in beef broth, and drank it. He had told no one in advance. He had not asked his wife. He had not asked his ethics committee. He had not asked his hospital. He had a theory that the entire global medical establishment had been treating millions of patients incorrectly for almost a century, and he had run out of other ways to prove he was right.

Three days later his mother told him his breath smelled like a corpse. Five days later he started vomiting at six in the morning. Ten days later he was endoscoped and found to have severe inflammation across the entire lining of his stomach.

He had given himself the disease he was trying to cure, in order to prove that the cure was a single course of antibiotics.

It took the medical establishment another twenty-one years to admit he was right.

His name is Barry Marshall. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005.

I read his actual 1985 paper last night and could not stop thinking about it.

The textbook story of medicine treats stomach ulcers as a story that has always been understood. You have an ulcer, you take a course of antibiotics, you are cured. That story is true. It is also missing the part where, until almost the end of the twentieth century, this disease was considered chronic, incurable, and almost entirely caused by stress, spicy food, and personality flaws. Hundreds of millions of patients suffered with ulcers for years and decades. Tens of thousands died from complications. The entire global pharmaceutical industry built a multi-billion-dollar business selling acid-suppressing drugs that managed the symptoms while never touching the cause.

The cause was a bacterium. The cure was cheap. And one man drank the bacteria himself to prove it.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you.

In 1979, a quiet pathologist named J. Robin Warren was working at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia. He was looking at biopsy slides under a microscope when he noticed something that should not have been there. Spiral-shaped bacteria, alive and active, sitting on the lining of a human stomach.

The medical world at the time was unanimous on this point. Nothing lives in the stomach. The stomach is filled with hydrochloric acid strong enough to dissolve metal. Bacteria could not survive in that environment. Every textbook said so. Every professor said so. Every pathologist who had ever looked at a stomach slide and seen something strange had assumed it was contamination.

Warren kept looking. He kept seeing it. He started photographing it. He began to suspect that what he was looking at was not contamination at all. It was a living organism that had figured out how to survive somewhere life was not supposed to exist.

For three years he could find almost no one in the hospital who would listen to him.

In 1981, a 30-year-old internal medicine trainee named Barry Marshall rotated through Warren's department. He was assigned the routine task of helping investigate twenty difficult gastrointestinal cases. Warren showed him the bacteria. Marshall, unlike everyone else in the department, did not dismiss it. He found it interesting. The two of them began a collaboration that would consume the next four years of their lives.

They biopsied one hundred patients. They cultured the tissue. Every patient with a duodenal ulcer had the bacteria. Every single one.

Marshall was 32 years old when he stood up at the 1983 Royal Australian College of Physicians meeting in Perth and presented the findings. He proposed that the spiral bacteria, now provisionally classified as Campylobacter pyloridis and later renamed Helicobacter pylori, were the actual cause of most peptic ulcers. The disease the medical world had been treating as a stress disorder for decades was an infection. It could be cured with two weeks of antibiotics.

The room laughed at him.

The senior gastroenterologists who had built their careers on the stress theory of ulcers were not interested in being told they had been wrong for thirty years. The pharmaceutical industry had just rolled out a new generation of acid-suppressing drugs called H2 blockers, beginning with Tagamet, which was on its way to becoming the best-selling drug in the world. The combined revenue of acid-suppressant drugs would peak at roughly 6 billion US dollars per year. Telling that industry their products treated the symptoms of an infection that could be cured with thirty dollars of antibiotics was not a popular position.

Marshall spent the next year trying to prove the theory with an animal model. He could not get the bacteria to infect rats. He could not get them to infect pigs. The bacteria was so well adapted to the human stomach that it apparently refused to live anywhere else. Without an animal model, the medical establishment had a perfect reason to keep dismissing him. He had no way to prove cause and effect.

In July 1984, he made a decision he later described in his Nobel lecture in language so understated it almost vanished off the page.

He decided to use himself.

The detail that should disturb every reader is what he did before he drank the bacteria.

He had himself endoscoped first. A camera went down his throat and into his stomach. The biopsy confirmed his stomach was healthy. No bacteria. No inflammation. No ulcers. He was a perfectly normal stomach in a perfectly normal 32-year-old body.

He pretreated with a single 600 milligram dose of cimetidine. This was an acid-suppressing drug intended to give the bacteria a fighting chance against his stomach's natural defenses. He did not want the experiment to fail because his acid killed the bug before it could colonize.

He took a culture from a patient with chronic dyspepsia. The patient's bacteria had been confirmed sensitive to standard antibiotics, so Marshall would be able to cure himself afterward if needed. He mixed the bacteria into about half a cup of warm beef broth. The concentration was roughly one billion live organisms per dose.

On Tuesday morning, July 12, 1984, at 10 AM, in the hospital laboratory at Fremantle Hospital in Western Australia, he drank it.

He told nobody.

He went home that evening and ate dinner with his wife and four young children. He did not tell his wife either.

For three days nothing happened. Then on the fourth day, he started to feel bloated. His appetite collapsed. He noticed that food felt strange in his stomach. His mother visited and recoiled. She told him his breath was so bad it smelled like something had died inside him. He brushed his teeth. The smell did not go away.

On day five he started vomiting. Clear watery liquid, every morning, around six AM, with no acid in it at all. The acid was missing because his stomach acid production had collapsed. The bacteria had colonized so successfully that they had shut down the very acid environment they had supposedly been incapable of surviving in.

He went back to the endoscopy lab on day ten and had another camera sent down his throat.

The footage was unmistakable. His stomach lining was inflamed across its entire surface. The biopsies showed Helicobacter pylori everywhere. Severe active gastritis. The exact pattern he had seen in hundreds of patient samples over the previous three years.

He had given himself, in ten days, the early stage of the disease the entire medical establishment had been telling him for years could not possibly be caused by a bacterium.

He still did not tell his wife.

She found out when he came home and told her over dinner. According to multiple later interviews, her response was something close to "you idiot." She made him take antibiotics immediately.

The paper appeared in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1985. It was three short paragraphs. It is now one of the most cited articles in the journal's history. It described, in dry clinical prose, a single subject who had ingested a known bacterial culture and developed the predicted clinical syndrome within the predicted timeline. The case study was one person. There was no control group. The methodology was strictly speaking against every modern principle of clinical research. The data was undeniable.

The medical world remained skeptical for another decade.

The most uncomfortable line in the entire historical record is what happened during those ten years. Senior gastroenterologists publicly mocked Marshall at conferences. He was passed over for academic positions. His career stalled. Patients across the world continued to be told their ulcers were caused by stress, spicy food, or character flaws. They continued to be prescribed acid-suppressing drugs for indefinite periods. Many of them progressed from ulcers to stomach cancer because no one was treating the underlying infection.

H. pylori is now understood to be one of the most common bacterial infections in human history. It currently colonizes roughly half of the entire global population. In countries with weaker sanitation it colonizes well over 80 percent. It is the leading cause of stomach cancer in the world, which is itself the fifth most common cancer in humans. Every case of stomach cancer that has occurred in the twenty years between Marshall's discovery and the medical establishment's acceptance of it could potentially have been prevented by a two-week course of antibiotics that already existed.

The estimate of how many lives have been saved since the treatment finally became standard is in the hundreds of millions.

By the late 1990s, large clinical trials in the United States, Europe, and Asia had replicated his findings beyond any reasonable dispute. The National Institutes of Health convened a consensus panel in 1994 and officially endorsed H. pylori as the cause of most peptic ulcers. Treatment guidelines began to change. By the early 2000s, eradication therapy with antibiotics had become the global standard of care.

On October 3, 2005, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine had been awarded jointly to J. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall.

Marshall was 54 years old. Twenty-one years had passed since the morning he drank the bacteria.

In his Nobel lecture he showed a slide that has since become famous in medical history circles. It was a comic he had drawn of himself standing in the laboratory holding the beaker, with his colleague Neil Noakes saying "Dr. Marshall you're crazy."

He included it because by the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had been called crazy professionally for so long that he had decided to make peace with it.

The most uncomfortable line in the entire historical record is the one Marshall himself has repeated in interviews many times since.

He said the medical establishment did not reject his theory because the evidence was weak. They rejected it because accepting it required admitting that they had been treating a generation of patients incorrectly, and that an entire pharmaceutical industry had been profiting from the management of a curable infection. The financial and reputational cost of being wrong was high enough that they preferred to assume the data was somehow wrong instead.

The Semmelweis reflex applies to the highest levels of modern medicine in exactly the same way it applied to nineteenth-century obstetrics.

Walk into any gastroenterology clinic today. Ask the doctors what causes most peptic ulcers.

All of them will say H. pylori.

Then ask them who proved it.

A surprising number will say his name.

Some of them will tell you the story. The 32-year-old junior doctor in Australia who could not get a senior committee to take him seriously. The Tuesday morning in July 1984. The beaker of beef broth in his hand. The mother who recoiled at his breath. The wife who called him an idiot. The decade of ridicule. The Nobel Prize.

The detail almost nobody hears in those retellings is the part of the story that should be carved into every medical school wall.

Marshall has been asked many times whether he was scared the morning he drank the bacteria. He has always said the same thing. He was not scared of dying. He was scared of being right. He knew, walking into the lab that Tuesday morning, that if his theory was correct, then the medical establishment had spent the previous half century misdiagnosing one of the most common diseases on earth. The implication was so embarrassing that the easier outcome, professionally, was for his experiment to fail.

He was hoping it would fail.

He thought he might survive being wrong.

He was not sure how the world would survive him being right.

He was 32 years old, with a wife and four children at home. He drank a billion bacteria anyway.

The thing he proved is now in every textbook.

The medicine he made obsolete is still on every pharmacy shelf, sold mostly to people who do not need it.

The infection he identified is still inside roughly half the human beings alive.

Most of them have never been tested.

Walk into the kitchen tomorrow morning. Make yourself a cup of coffee. Notice the shelf above your sink. Notice the bottle of antacids your parents kept on it. Notice that nobody ever told them that the symptom they were medicating was almost certainly an infection, and that the infection had a treatment that took two weeks and was almost always permanent.

He drank the bacteria so they would not have to.

Most of them never thanked him.

Most of them still do not know his name.

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

Not Scriptural.

Oof.

Wanna’ do Purgatory next?

(1) Christ teaches it in John 6

“The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat?  Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.  He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.  For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed.  He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.  As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me.  This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead. He that eateth this bread, shall live for ever.”

(2) Christ teaches it in Mark 14

“And whilst they were eating, Jesus took bread; and blessing, broke, and gave to them, and said: Take ye. This is my body.  23 And having taken the chalice, giving thanks, he gave it to them. And they all drank of it.  24 And he said to them: This is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many.”

(3) Christ teaches it in Luke 22

“19 And taking bread, he gave thanks, and brake; and gave to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of me.  20 In like manner the chalice also, after he had supped, saying: This is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which shall be shed for you.”

(4) Christ teaches it in Matthew 26

“26 And whilst they were at supper, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke: and gave to his disciples, and said: Take ye, and eat. This is my body.  27 And taking the chalice, he gave thanks, and gave to them, saying: Drink ye all of this.  28 For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.”

(5) Saint Paul taught it in 1 Corinthians 10

“16 The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord?  17 For we, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread.”

(6) Saint Paul taught it in 1 Corinthians 11

 “26 For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you shall shew the death of the Lord, until he come.  27 Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord.  28 But let a man prove himself: and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice.  29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord.”

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

Another “I used to be Catholic” who read the KJV Catechism and decided to save people from Jesus Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

Folks - you cannot accept Christ by rejecting His Church.

1 Corinthians 11:22 “Do you not have houses in which you can eat and drink? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and make those who have nothing feel ashamed? What can I say to you? Shall I praise you? In this matter I do not praise you.”

Luke 10:16 “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” (Christ to Disciples).

Acts 9:31 The church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria was at peace. It was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord, and with the consolation of the holy Spirit it grew in numbers (Ekklesia Kata Holos).

1 Timothy 3:15 “Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the Truth.”

Matt 10:40 “who receives you received me, and receives Him who sent me.”

Matt 16:18-19 (Jesus gives Peter keys to the Kingdom)

Matt 18:17 “if he refuses to listen to them let him be as a . . . tax collector”

Matt 18:18-20 (binding and loosing; authority given to Apostles).

John 20:23 (Jesus gives Apostles the authority to forgive sins)

2 Thessalonians 3:14-15 “if anyone refuses to obey what we say . . . warn him as a brother”

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

Nonsense Rick - you deny the Bishop of Rome and the Lawful Successors to the Apostles.

Here’s what it means to be “in Communion” with the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

From the Catechism of Pope Saint Pius X:

Q: WHAT IS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?

A: The Catholic Church is the Union or Congregation of all the baptized who, still living on earth, profess the same Faith and the same Law of Jesus Christ, participate in the same Sacraments, and obey their lawful Pastors, particularly the Roman Pontiff.

Q: STATE DISTINCTLY WHAT IS NECESSARY TO BE A MEMBER OF THE CHURCH?

A: To be a member of the Church it is necessary to be baptized, to believe and profess the teaching of Jesus Christ, to participate in the same Sacraments, and to acknowledge the Pope and the other lawful pastors of the Church.

Q: CAN THERE NOT BE SEVERAL CHURCHES?

A: No, there cannot be more than one Church; for as there is but one God, one Faith and one Baptism, there is and can be but one true Church.

Q: WHY DO YOU SAY THAT THE ROMAN PONTIFF IS SUPREME PASTOR OF THE CHURCH?

A: Because Jesus Christ said to St. Peter, the first Pope: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and I will give to thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatsoever thee shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in Heaven, and whatsoever the shallot loose on earth shall be loosed also in Heaven.” And again: “Feed My lambs, feed My sheep.”

Q: THE MANY SOCIETIES OF PERSONS WHO ARE BAPTIZED BUT WHO DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THE ROMAN PONTIFF AS THEIR HEAD DO NOT, THEN, BELONG TO THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST?

A: No, those who do not acknowledge the Roman Pontiff as their Head do not belong to the Church of Jesus Christ.

Q: HOW CAN THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST BE DISTINGUISHED FROM THE NUMEROUS SOCIETIES OR SECTS FOUNDED BY MEN, AND CALLING THEMSELVES CHRISTIAN?

A: From the numerous societies or sects founded by men and calling themselves Christian, the Church of Jesus Christ is easily distinguished by four marks: She is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

Q: WHY IS THE CHURCH CALLED ONE?

A: The true Church is called One, because her children of all ages and places are united together in the same faith, in the same worship, in the same law; and in participation of the same Sacraments, under the same visible Head, the Roman Pontiff.

Q: WHY IS THE TRUE CHURCH CALLED HOLY?

A: The true church is called Holy because holy is her Invisible Head, Jesus Christ; holy are many of her members; holy are her faith, her laws, her Sacraments; and outside of her there is not and cannot be true holiness.

Q: WHY IS THE CHURCH CALLED CATHOLIC?

A: The true Church is called Catholic, or Universal, because she embraces the faithful of all times, of all places, of all ages and conditions; and all peoples are called to belong to her.

Q: WHY IS THE CHURCH ALSO CALLED APOSTOLIC?

A: The true Church is also called Apostolic because she goes back without a break to the Apostles; because she believes and teaches all that the Apostles believed and taught; and because she is guided and governed by their lawful successors.

Q: AND WHY IS THE TRUE CHURCH CALLED ROMAN?

A: The true Church is called Roman, because the four marks of Unity, Sanctity, Catholicity and Apostolicity are found in that Church alone which acknowledges as Head the Bishop of Rome, the Successor of St. Peter.

Q: CAN ONE BE SAVED OUTSIDE THE CATHOLIC, APOSTOLIC AND ROMAN CHURCH?

A: No, no one can be saved outside the Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church, just as no one could be saved from the flood outside the Ark of Noah, which was a figure of the Church.

https://t.co/8995MUInWH

[Shahriq Khan @RealShahriqKhan]

When I was Muslim, I would argue & say we had the same prophets as Christians.

But this one broke me:

Surah 17:101: Allah gave Moses 9 clear signs.

I knew the list. The staff. The shining hand. The drought. The flood. The locusts. The lice. The frogs. The blood.

I held onto those 9 signs like proof I had the real story.

But bro, you know what shook me?

There’s a night missing.

After all nine signs, right before Israel walks out of Egypt, something happens that the Quran goes completely silent on.

A lamb is slaughtered.

Its blood painted on the doorposts.

And death passes over every house covered by that blood.

The Passover.

I grew up hearing the whole Exodus story. But nobody ever told me about the blood on the door.

Islam just skips it.

And here’s what wrecked me.

The Bible, the book I was taught was corrupted, mentions the Passover over 70 times.

Exodus. Leviticus. Numbers. Deuteronomy. The Psalms. The Prophets. The Gospels. Paul.

70 times.

So I had to ask myself the honest question:

If men corrupted this book, why would they obsess over the same story for 1500 years? Across dozens of authors who never met?

You don’t forge a document 70 times.

That’s just not corruption.

That to me is preservation.

And then I read the line that finished me off.

1 Corinthians 5:7.

“Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed.”

That’s when it hit me.

The whole story was never just about Moses.

It was always pointing to a King.

The final lamb. Whose blood, when applied to your life, makes death pass over you.

Forever.

The Quran gave me 9 signs but hid the one night that explains why any of them happened.

Because the moment a Muslim understands the Passover…

he’s one step away from the cross.

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

News for you - the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Aeiparthenos/Ever-Virgin and every Christian has recognized this to the Full Assent of their Faith since the Second Council of Constantinople in A.D. 553.

Yes, this means you separate yourself from the Body of Christ by denying the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Perpetual Virginity.

The level of heresy observed on this platform from accounts that putatively identify as “Christian” is wild.

Please also note that in Luke 1:34 that the Blessed Virgin Mary affirms her Vow of Virginity AFTER she was betrothed to Joseph. Many of the Church Fathers believed that one reason God willed her to stay in a “marriage” with Joseph is so the diabolical fallen would not recognize Christ as the Prophesied Emmanuel of the Old Testament (Isaiah 7, Inter Alia).

Saint Jerome roundly pilloried your predecessor heretic Helvidius in the 4th Century.

And, after having been pronounced as Infallible Dogma at the Second Council of Constantinople in A.D. 553.

Let’s cover all the reasons you’re wrong and on point with a blasphemous heresy.

(1) Mary is the Spouse of the Holy Ghost

-Isaiah 7:14 “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son”

⁃Isaiah 54:5 “For your husband is your Maker; the Lord of hosts is his name, Your redeemer,[d] the Holy One of Israel, called God of all the earth.

⁃Isaiah 62:5 “For as a young man marries a virgin; your Builder shall marry you; And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride; so shall your God rejoice in you.

⁃Isaiah 31:32 “It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke my covenant, though I was their master—oracle of the Lord.”

⁃2 Corinthians 11 “If only you would put up with a little foolishness from me![b]Please put up with me. 2 [c]For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God, since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.”

⁃Luke 1:34-35 “And Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?  35 And the angel answering, said to her: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

(2) Second Council of Constantinople

“If anyone will not confess that the Word of God has two nativities, that which is before all ages from the Father, outside time and without a body, and secondly that nativity of these latter days when the Word of God came down from the heavens and was made flesh of holy and glorious Mary, mother of God and ever-virgin, and was born from her: let him be anathema.”

“If anyone declares that it can be only inexactly and not truly said that the holy and glorious ever-virgin Mary is the mother of God, or says that she is so only in some relative way, considering that she bore a mere man and that God the Word was not made into human flesh in her, holding rather that the nativity of a man from her was referred, as they say, to God the Word as he was with the man who came into being; if anyone misrepresents the holy synod of Chalcedon, alleging that it claimed that the virgin was the mother of God only according to that heretical understanding which the blasphemous Theodore put forward; or if anyone says that she is the mother of a man or the Christ-bearer, that is the mother of Christ, suggesting that Christ is not God; and does not formally confess that she is properly and truly the mother of God, because he who before all ages was born of the Father, God the Word, has been made into human flesh in these latter days and has been born to her, and it was in this religious understanding that the holy synod of Chalcedon formally stated its belief that she was the mother of God: let him be anathema.”

A.D. 553
#CatholicX

[Robert W Malone, MD @RWMaloneMD]

Federal prosecutors just charged an NIH virologist with smuggling biological materials into the United States.

His name is Vincent Munster. He's not a minor scientist. He runs the Virus Ecology Section at one of the government's premier BSL-4 labs.

This is bigger than a customs charge. Thread 🧵

[Nancy Charles @cancelwok3]

@Sachinettiyil ❤️‍🔥

[louis Mathew @louisMathew19]

No one other than Jesus is named as a son or daughter of Mary in scripture. It is so odd that people see what is not there. The proofs of her perpetual virginity are plain to see to those who take the time to understand the culture and the languages that the scriptures were written in. In Jewish tradition when her eldest Son dies and his Mother is a widow the Mother moves into the home of the second son, and if there are no other children the son designates a care taker for her. At the foot of the Cross Jesus did just that by entrusting her to John. All the others that are called the brothers of the Lord have different parents.

[Andrew Zywiec, M.D. @AndrewZywiecMD]

But take note, many like Machiavelli miss the point. They focus on how the world views you, and how to accomplish something external. The true goal is to look inside and accomplish something internal.

Machiavelli would have you change yourself to ensure the world treats you a certain way. The actual goal is know yourself so well that how the world treats you becomes insignificant.

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

Petrine Primacy and Universal Jurisdiction is abundantly clear from Scripture and Patristics

Thank you for the opportunity to demonstrate.

(1) Petrine Primacy in Scripture

* Three Popes are mentioned in the Bible (Saint Peter in Matthew 16:16, Saint Linus in 2 Timothy 4:21, and Saint Clement in Philippians 4:3).

**There is only one Pope as there was only one Israeli High Priest. Compare Psalm 110:4 with Hebrews 5:6.

***Saint Peter is mentioned in more instances in the Apostles than all of the other Apostles combined.

Matthew 16:18 (Rock of the Church)

Matthew 10:2 (Peter first among Apostles)

Matthew 18:21 (Peter speaks for Apostles)

Matthew 23:3 (Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice.)

Luke 5:1-10 (Peter’s boat chosen)

Luke 22:32 (To Peter “Strengthen your brethren”)

John 21:17 (To Peter “Feed my Sheep”

Acts 2:14 (Peter leads Apostles)

Acts 3:6-7 (Peter performs first Pentecostal Miracle)

Acts 15:7 (Council of Jerusalem)

Galatians 1:18-20 (Paul travels TO Peter the Pope)

Matthew 16

And Jesus answering, said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven.  18 And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 19 And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.

Matthew 10

2 The names of the twelve apostles[c] are these: first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John; 3 Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus; 4 Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him

John 1

“42 Then he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John;[a] you will be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).”

Matthew 4

“18 As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen.”

Luke 6

“14 Simon, whom he named Peter,[f] and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew . . . “

Galatians 1

 Then, after three years, I went to Jerusalem, to see Peter, and I tarried with him fifteen days.

John 21

15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter,[i] “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”[j] He said to him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 He then said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17 He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was distressed that he had said to him a third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” [Jesus] said to him, “Feed my sheep.”

(2) Patristics

(A) Saint Clement of Alexandria

“[T]he blessed Peter, the chosen, the preeminent, the first among the disciples, for whom alone with himself the Savior paid the tribute [Matt. 17:27], quickly grasped and understood their meaning. And what does he say? ‘Behold, we have left all and have followed you’ [Matt. 19:27; Mark 10:28]” (Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved? 21:3–5 [A.D. 200]).

#CatholicX

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

One of the biggest myths propagated hereon is that e-vangelicals read Scripture.

They don’t and this guy is a ringer.

After Saint Paul’s persecution in Jerusalem Our Lord tells him that his destination is in Rome, not Jerusalem.

Acts 23:11

The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage. For just as you have borne witness to my cause in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness in Rome.”

Of course, the overwhelming record of Sacred Tradition and Scripture establishes Rome as the center of the Ekklesia Kata Holos of Acts 9:31.

I’ll be glad to provide receipts if anyone needs them but, remember, when you run into these anons be sure to test them.

#CatholicX

[Brian Burgess @Burgess7281975]

(1) Saint Peter died the Bishop of Rome and the Roman Episcopacy is inseparable from Petrine Primacy. Saint Paul was martyred in Rome as well.

(2) It is De Fide that the Roman Pontiff is the Successor to Saint Peter and the “holy, catholic, apostolic, and Roman church (is) the mother and mistress of all the churches.” (First Vatican Council).

(3) From the 1908 Catechism of Pope Saint Pius X:

Q: AND WHY IS THE TRUE CHURCH CALLED ROMAN?

A: The true Church is called Roman, because the four marks of Unity, Sanctity, Catholicity and Apostolicity are found in that Church alone which acknowledges as Head the Bishop of Rome, the Successor of St. Peter.

(4) Patristics on Saint Peter and Paul’s Roman Residency:

(A) Saint Ignatius of Antioch

“Not as Peter and Paul did, do I command you [Romans]. They were apostles, and I am a convict” (Letter to the Romans 4:3 [A.D. 110]).

(B) Saint Dionysius of Corinth

“You [Pope Soter] have also, by your very admonition, brought together the planting that was made by Peter and Paul at Rome and at Corinth; for both of them alike planted in our Corinth and taught us; and both alike, teaching similarly in Italy, suffered martyrdom at the same time” (Letter to Pope Soter [A.D. 170], in Eusebius, History of the Church 2:25:8).

(C) Saint Irenaeus of Lyon

“Matthew also issued among the Hebrews a written Gospel in their own language, while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church” (Against Heresies, 3, 1:1 [A.D. 189]).
“But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the succession of all the churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the succession of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, that church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles. With that church [of Rome], because of its superior origin, all the churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world, and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition” (ibid., 3, 3, 2).

“The blessed apostles [Peter and Paul], having founded and built up the church [of Rome], they handed over the office of the episcopate to Linus. Paul makes mention of this Linus in the letter to Timothy [2 Tim. 4:21]. To him succeeded Anacletus, and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was chosen for the episcopate. He had seen the blessed apostles and was acquainted with them. It might be said that he still heard the echoes of the preaching of the apostles and had their traditions before his eyes. And not only he, for there were many still remaining who had been instructed by the apostles. In the time of Clement, no small dissension having arisen among the brethren in Corinth, the church in Rome sent a very strong letter to the Corinthians, exhorting them to peace and renewing their faith. . . . To this Clement, Evaristus succeeded . . . and now, in the twelfth place after the apostles, the lot of the episcopate [of Rome] has fallen to Eleutherius. In this order, and by the teaching of the apostles handed down in the Church, the preaching of the truth has come down to us” (ibid., 3, 3, 3).