- I can’t recall what Scripture passage speaks about not restricting diet at certain times, but I suspect that’s simply Protestant apologists reading something out of context or the like. I also can’t find the one on each church being its own governing authority. I highly doubt it’s worded like that, or I would have noticed it one of the several times I’ve read the Bible.
That’s because you’ve apparently never read 1 Timothy, or Acts for that matter.
I just quickly read through 1 Timothy (which I’ve read at least four times before), and I don’t see anything like what Possessed said. I’ve also read Acts four or five times and am really not sure what you’re referring to. If you’re referencing Peter’s vision, it simply removes dietary restrictions, it doesn’t say that one cannot ever place restrictions on diet. In fact, St. Paul writes that people should avoid meat sacrificed to idols if it is a cause of scandal to others.
“They will prohibit marriage and require abstinence from certain foods that God has created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.” - 1 Timothy 4, and it’s in reference to false teachers. The Catholic church also prohibits marriage for priests and nuns.
So you interpret “prohibit marriage” as meaning “requiring celibacy among certain people”? That’s a bit of a stretch. The passage is almost certainly referring to those in the Church who wanted to ban marriage altogethr because they thought the second coming was going to happen within their lifetime and thus thought marriage was pointless (according to some heresies, marriage was considered immoral).
The same deal with requiring abstinence from certain foods. The Church doesn’t do that. It has historically required abstinence on Fridays, but that’s not the same as outright banning certain foods, and it has nothing to do with us believing that meat is not to be received with thanksgiving and is somehow unclean. Quite the opposite in fact. Meat is something very good, and therefore a sacrifice to give up, which is the whole point. It’s something extra done to commemorate Christ’s Passion, and is a sacrifice precisely because it’s a normal part of people’s diet the rest of the time. Plus the point was that you would give up meat and give the money you saved to the poor.
Thanks for finding the relevant Scripture passages for me though.
- I have always been encouraged to read the Bible, as are most Catholics today. There are a number of historical reasons why this was not always the case:
a. Most people couldn’t read.That has nothing to do with forbidding people to read the Bible. They wouldn’t even allow people who could read to read it to people that couldn’t read in a language they could understand.
Interesting. Do you have evidence to back this up?
In mass, the Bible was read in Latin for centuries.
And then in his homily, the priest would typically read a translation of the readings to the people before speaking about them. Your point?
b. Most copies of the Bible were in Latin, and people couldn’t read Latin anyway.
That was the problem.
Do you realize how expensive and rare books were? There was basically no point in translating into the vernacular because most people who could afford books were educated enough to read Latin anyway.
c. Various translations into the vernacular were banned, but this was because they were bad translations, not because people were only allowed to read the Bible in Latin.
I find it kind of disturbing that you can’t just acknowledge that the Catholic Church of the Middle and Dark Ages was incredibly tyrannical. This last point reeks of “Well, it was banned for people’s own good.” Not to mention that it’s widely accepted by pretty much all historians that the Vulgate was a very inaccurate translation.
It was banned for people’s own good. When someone’s salvation is at stake, it’s important that they don’t fall into error and reject the Church. That’s not itself tyranny, although tyrannical people may have enforced it. It was a means of protecting the truth. Ideally, people should just have been catechized better, but that wasn’t always practicable. The Vulgate may unfortunately have been an inaccurate translation, but at least it didn’t contain doctrinal errors.
I think people can decide for themselves what books are “for their own good”. I’m sure you’d be less apologetic if Catholic doctrines were tyrannically banned.
History does not seem to support the concept that people are capable of correctly judging the truth on their own all the time. I think things that are true should be promulgated, and things that are untrue should be suppressed. Or do you think that Facebook taking strides to eliminate fake news is “tyrannical”? People have a right to the truth, and the Church’s intent was to protect that right.