In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In this video we want to clarify some fundamental truths of our Catholic faith.
Many times, our separated brothers or protestants have disturbed us, and perhaps confused us,
with their ideas contrary to our faith.
Therefore, it is important to know our faith in order to love it, live it and thank God
for it.
We are Catholics, we belong to the Catholic Church and we want to live our faith fully
and we are proud of it.
In this one and only Church of God some divisions appeared from the beginning.
There have always been people who have separated from the Church because they do not agree
with some of its fundamental truths.
From the first Nicolaitans referred to in the book of Revelation chapter 2 verse 15,
to the modern followers of Bishop Lefevre, who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church
for consecrating four bishops against the express prohibition of Pope Saint John Paul
II, passing through the Protestant reformer Martin Luther.
The Protestant reformer Martin Luther was the one who started a great separation movement
in the 16th century.
He began by rejecting indulgences, then he rejected the authority of the Pope, and finally,
he put the total foundation of faith in the Bible alone and in the free examination of it.
For him salvation is achieved by faith in Christ, without works.
For this reason, he was able to write in latin: "peca fortiter, sed crede fortius"
meaning sins strongly, but believes even more strongly.
That is, your sins do not matter, the important thing is to believe that Jesus will destroy
your sins and save you.
However, there are modern sects that are fundamentally anti-Catholic such as Jehovah's Witnesses,
Mormons or Adventists.
Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe that Jesus Christ is God, in the Holy Trinity, or in
the soul or in the eternity of hell.
They do not accept blood transfusions or the army or the national flag.
Adventists claim that the Pope is the antichrist, that the dead are asleep until the final judgment,
they celebrate Saturday as a holy day and do not agree to eat certain foods.
Mormons have the word of God in the books: The Book of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants,
and Pearl of Great Price.
They believe that good Mormons will become gods, theoretically accept polygamy, its founder
had at least 27 wives, believe that the Church of Christ disappeared in 420 and was restored
with its founder Joseph Smith in the 19th century.
There are other sects of an oriental type, which teach truths contrary to the Christian
faith such as reincarnation, and other Christian churches of a fundamentalist type, which insist
a lot on individual salvation and freedom, apart from a true Church.
They promise salvation and are sure that they are the only ones chosen.
They insist a lot that we are in the end times and that in order to be saved, it is enough
only to accept Christ as personal Savior.
They quote a lot from the text: "He who believes in the Son has eternal life" (John 3:36).
For them, the Bible is the only source of faith and they only accept the literal interpretation
of the Bible, since they believe in the absolute infallibility of the biblical words alone.
This religion, based exclusively on the Bible, excludes any reference to the Church, as if
the complete Bible had existed before the Church itself.
Therefore before the Church determined, in the fourth century, what were the books of
the Bible, the Church existed and provided salvation, as it did since Pentecost, before
there was any book of the New Testament.
These churches, despite the fact that they have a moral rigor that leads them to exaggerated
attitudes such as prohibiting watching television or movies, women from using makeup, and even
drinking coffee and alcoholic beverages, in other matters of morality, in that the Bible
does not say anything, they are rather liberal.
For example, there are groups of these people who accept abortion in certain extraordinary
circumstances, or divorce or the use of contraceptives.
In Pentecostal-type groups, the use of prophecies can be a way to manage the g roup for its
leader and impose his point of view, since it can make him believe that he has the gift
of prophecy and that God speaks through him in everything that he says.
This is dangerous, as has happened several times, when the leader is extremist or immoral.
However, the Church as Mother wants to welcome them all and fosters the unity of all Christians.
Pope Saint John XXIII, in 1960, created the "Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity"
and since the Second Vatican Council published the decree on Ecumenism, steps forward are
being taken in the traditional Churches such as Anglican, Lutheran, Orthodox and some evangelical groups.
There are many who, when they want to discredit the Church, bring up the issue of the Inquisition.
For them, the Inquisition was nothing short of diabolical.
About this, the enemies of the Church created a black legend, which even many Catholics
still believe.
Therefore, we must clarify things, locating ourselves in the time in which things happened
and not judge things with the ideas and mentality of this 21st century, because we would commit
a tremendous injustice.
As would the one who judged God or Moses, because in the book of the Law, adulterers
are ordered to be stoned, as is still the case today in some Arab countries.
Let's go back to the 12th century, in France, heretics were considered as enemies of the
country, as if they were terrorists and as such they were judged.
Their property was taken from them, they were banished, and in many cases, they were killed;
but the kings and the lay judges themselves committed abuses and did not give guarantees
of honesty.
For this reason, some French bishops, to avoid these abuses, created an ecclesiastical court
to determine with more impartiality who were really heretics.
The intention was to avoid abuse or revenge to appropriate their property.
At that time, the death penalty was something normal and it was believed that heretics deserved
it, because it was believed that they were going to hell and worst of all was that they
spread their ideas to others so that they too could go to hell.
In addition, they broke the political and religious unity of the country.
In Spain this was considered especially serious, since they were seen as allies of their Protestant
enemies, who even attacked Spain and its colonies with pirates.
Obviously, abuses and torture were committed to discover the culprits, as today they still
exist to discover the criminals, terrorists or spies, although it cannot be justified.
The same thing happened in that time.
The authorities of the church were guilty of relying more on the power of arms than
on the power of God.
But it was the country, through its servants, who applied torture or the death penalty.
And this not only for cases of heresy, but also for other cases of witchcraft, sorcery,
sodomy, incest, sacrileges.
In the year 1231, the papal inquisition began,
when for many years the kings of France and Germany burned heretics on their own.
The Pope commissioned the Dominicans as papal inquisitors.
They determined who were heretics and handed them over to the civil power to punish them
according to the penalties of that time, if they did not recant.
But, according to all scholars, the courts of the inquisition were the most benign of
those times, producing beneficial progress in criminal law.
In Spain the Inquisition was established in 1478 and lasted until 1812.
In Mexico and Peru, it was established in 1569, and the Indians were expressly excluded
from it because they were new to the faith.
It ended gradually from 1813 in the different countries.
In the first 100 years of the 16th century, in the region of Latin America only 17 people died.
On the other hand, sad to say, Protestant heretics did the same or more to Catholics
from the 16th century on.
In England many Catholics died at the hands of the Anabaptists and many others in the
massacres of Henry VIII and his successors.
The same happened in Ireland, which was oppressed for three centuries by English Anglicans and
many died defending their faith.
They imposed their own priests and bishops on them and Catholics could not access public
jobs, if they did not swear that the Mass and the invocation of the Virgin Mary were
impious and idolatrous things.
Until the 19th century, Catholics in England were also unable to hold public jobs, and
it was only in 1850 that the first Catholic bishops were established in England, when
the Inquisition had been suppressed many years ago.
In 1780 John Wesley and the Methodists persecuted and killed many Catholics in England.
In 1698 a law had been given that Catholic priests had to leave the country under penalty
of death.
In Holland, Calvinists persecuted Catholics to death and destroyed their churches and images.
Jean Calvin, the protestant reformer, burned the famous Spanish physician Michael Servetus.
Zwingli died fighting the Catholics.
In Denmark, Norway and Sweden Protestantism was imposed by force.
Martin Luther himself accepted the death penalty as normal and incited the princes in the massacre
of the peasants, in the peasant war.
The religious struggles are a very sad chapter in history, as many innocents on both sides
were killed and tortured, but, on both sides, there were mistakes.
The Protestant princes of Germany did not have the Inquisition, but they themselves
acted as inquisitors, personally or through their servants, and gave the last word of
life and death on the people of their country.
Now, the important thing is that, leaving behind grudges over the mistakes of the past,
we walk together towards the unity desired by Christ, because as Pope Saint John XXIII said:
"What unites us is much stronger than what divides us."
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.