Submitted by Lemuel
Recently, Pope Francis sent a video to a conference of Protestant Conservative Evangelicals. In the video, Pope Francis extols them to embrace a healing of the protestations enacted by Martin Luther’s 90 theses when he nailed them to the church door in his native Germany. Pope Francis contends in his video that the Lutheran Church has buried the hatch and returned to the mother church, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) or the Papacy and that the children of protestation now have no more reason not to be reunited with the RCC. I must admit that given what has been said about the current Pope, only he could have made this video. For he has truly been a model of the real Francis, whose name he took.
The video with the conference has gone viral on YouTube (Kenneth Copeland and Pope Francis), and the Evangelicals are now planning a number of visits to Rome to set the criteria for their return to Rome. On the surface, this should be a time for all religious sects and affiliates to rejoice and clamor to the door of the nearest Roman Catholic Church to render their confessions and partake in Communion and Mass. But what exactly was Martin Luther protesting against and what are the implications for this return to the mother church of Rome.
Luther’s protest emanated from his reading of a Latin Bible which he found at his monastery; in it he discovered that indulgences (payments to secure one’s loved ones from the torment of Hell) were bogus and not founded on the Scriptures.
Confessions to a Priest went totally against the Scripture’s mandate to take/ confess your sins to God and God alone, for man has no power to forgive sin. The Pope’s infallible nature was a figment of the Papacy’s imagination. For at that time, even Kings were expected to crawl on their knees in abeyance when approaching the Pontiff (the Vicar of Christ, Christ Representative on Earth). Luther’s contention was that the Pope, as a man, was as sinful as every one of us who parade across this Earth. And these are only a few of Luther’s observations.
The important aspect of Luther’s protestation was that he was absolutely sure that the RC was the true church until he visited Rome. When he first arrived with deep emotion, he prostrated himself on the ground and cried, “Holy Rome, I salute thee”. Later having experienced Rome, he said, “No one can imagine what sins and infamous actions are committed in Rome; they must be seen and heard to be believed. Thus, they are in the habit of saying, if there is Hell, Rome is built over it: it is an abyss whence issues every kind of sin.”
The RC at that time and still today contends that she is the one with the key to Heaven and Hell and no one enters either without her permission. True to her form, the Pope prepared a papal bull and Martin Luther was excommunicated for not recanting the above sordid truths that were launched against the RC. He was denounced as accursed of Heaven.
To this day, Rome has not changed any of her doctrines in relation to any of her false or preposterous positions. She has yet to apologize to Martin Luther or withdrawn that papal bull which denounced him. Yet, by passing all of the above, Pope Francis is holding out a hand of healing to the protestant churches which in return are galloping in the direction of Rome.
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