It will die out soon enough, like the Shakers

 

The Assisted Suicide Movement is Gaining Momentum

Mariya Manzhos, Deseret 

 

"I joined a suicide cult but we just couldn't grow our membership for some reason." 😏

The celibate Shakers are down to just three members.

American United Methodists scramble to exit the denomination over same sex marriage by the December 2023 deadline

The United Methodist Church—America’s third-largest religious body, with over 6.2 million members—is in the thick of its own [schism] over its teachings on sexuality. Hundreds of congregations have voted to leave the denomination, which had 13 million members world-wide as of 2020, and thousands more likely will. On Aug. 7, United Methodism’s second- and seventh-largest churches by attendance, both in the Houston area, voted to quit the denomination. 

What brought United Methodism to this divide was its decision-making body’s 2019 “Traditional Plan”—a document that affirmed its ban on same-sex marriage and mandated that all clergy be celibate if single and monogamous if married. That sets the church apart from nearly every other mainline Protestant denomination. The traditionalists won thanks to votes from conservative African delegates, whose churches have grown by millions even as the U.S. has declined by nearly the same magnitude.

... United Methodism has lost five million members in the U.S. since 1968 and will lose millions more. Mainline Protestantism has been sidelined—and it will take years for United Methodism’s schism to resolve.

More.

Frequent or daily reception of the Eucharist is a complete novelty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As with priestly celibacy from 1139, the Immaculate Conception of Mary from 1854, papal infallibility from 1870, the Assumption of Mary from 1950, frequent reception of the Eucharist is a complete novelty.

Lutheran practice among conservative German-Americans in the United States in the early 20th Century was quarterly, and you had to register in advance AND meet with the pastor beforehand as if going to confession.  

The Roman Catholic Decree on Frequent & Daily Reception of Holy Communion dates merely from 1905.

It was designed to address a recent perceived historical development of religious decline, not some defect or missing element of revealed religion. The Eucharist was being ginned up to gin up flagging faith. And perhaps the decree's most ridiculous claim is that "Give us this day our daily bread" from the Lord's Prayer refers to daily reception of the Eucharist, when everything we know about early Christian practice is that the Eucharist was celebrated when Christians gathered together, at most on the first day of the week, not "often" but "as oft", i.e. "when":

Moreover, we are bidden in the Lord's Prayer to ask for "our daily bread" by which words, the holy Fathers of the Church all but unanimously teach, must be understood not so much that material bread which is the support of the body as the Eucharistic bread which ought to be our daily food. 

What's more, the Catholic conception from 1905 is completely upside down. The point of the Eucharist isn't that it is "pleasing to God", as if human beings do something, but rather that God does something. In the Eucharist, God serves up salvation, as in "Divine Service" or Gottesdienst.

Needless to say, none of this bears any relation to the historical Jesus, who to begin with never imagined a church would come into being, let alone where sacraments would be offered. The history of the church is a farce wherein the players have majored in the minors, or shall we say, in mere trifles and extra-curricular activities which are completely beside the point and often amount to nothing but superstition and idolatry.

. . . so that this practice, so salutary and so pleasing to God, not only might suffer no decrease among the faithful, but rather that it increase and everywhere be promoted, especially in these days when religion and the Catholic faith are attacked on all sides, and the true love of God and piety are so frequently lacking. ...

6. But since it is plain that by the frequent or daily reception of the Holy Eucharist union with Christ is strengthened, the spiritual life more abundantly sustained, the soul more richly endowed with virtues, and the pledge of everlasting happiness more securely bestowed on the recipient, therefore, parish priests, confessors and preachers, according to the approved teaching of the Roman Catechism should exhort the faithful frequently and with great zeal to this devout and salutary practice.

Father Hans Küng of Tübingen was right about at least one thing

Swiss-born Father Hans Küng, theologian, dies at 93 :

Father Küng said, “The Roman Catholic Church survived for the first thousand years without celibacy.” He remained strongly in favor of allowing priests and bishops to marry.

Catholic apologist for the faith Dave Armstrong tries to wriggle out of renunciation as the essence of discipleship

  Who Must Renounce All Possessions to Follow Jesus?:

To start with, it’s very important to consider to whom Jesus’ words apply in this instance. I deny that it is required of every Christian to leave their families, or to be single and celibate. That is the higher calling of what Catholics call the “evangelical counsels.” Some are called to that; most of us are not. St. Paul makes these distinctions very clear in 1 Corinthians 7.

I contend that what is being referred to in the passages above is the “above and beyond” discipleship of those who are apostles: a select group of individuals that were present and required only during the period of the very early Church. Not all disciples are apostles. In fact, 99.99% are not. The Bible repeatedly refers to the initial group of the disciples of Jesus, as “the twelve.”

Armstrong of course avoids Luke 14:33 altogether, which is part of the discourse addressed to the "great multitudes" beginning in vs. 25 (which includes "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple"):

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

There is no idea of a "higher calling" here. The Twelve already exist, yet the "great multitudes" are called just as they were. There is only one standard of discipleship, and it applies to all equally, from high to low, from the rich young ruler to the lowly fisherman and every one in between.

Armstrong's other arguments tend to fall in the "is is ought" category of fallacy. Just because the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane despite Jesus' request that they watch and pray with him doesn't make it right! The disciples', not to mention Paul's, many instances of bad behavior making them bad disciples isn't proof that Jesus' retreated from his conceptions. How silly.

The guy argues like a proof-texter with nary a hint of subtlety.

Perhaps he was a former fundamentalist. The idea that certain things "were present and required only during the period of the very early Church" sounds like he had been a Baptist dispensationalist before he became a Catholic.

On a final note, apocalyptic eschatology, which is the sine qua non for understanding this and all of the New Testament, is, well, you guessed it, not in view.

Former Protestant and convert to Catholicism advocates clerical celibacy while completely ignoring that Peter and the apostles all were married

One John Bergsma, here, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH, omitting from his discussion this:

Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

-- I Corinthians 9:5;

And this:

CANON 21 of the First Council of the Lateran, Rome, A.D. 1122-1123, which is so emphatic against clerical marriage because it was still so common:

We absolutely forbid priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks to have concubines or to contract marriage. We decree in accordance with the definitions of the sacred canons, that marriages already contracted by such persons must be dissolved, and that the persons be condemned to do penance.

Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia praises pope's anti-fanaticism and Athanasius all in the same breath

Charles Chaput, here.

It's always amusing to listen to fanatics have their cake and eat it too.

The pope can travel to Egypt and "speak eloquently against religious fanaticism" while these priests never consider that their own vows of celibacy just might be a sign of an extreme obsession of their own. Muslims who kill in the name of their religion are fanatics, they say, but Christian clergy who won't be fruitful, multiply and contribute new lives like normal people do somehow get a pass. There is active killing, but apparently not passive. Mortal and venial anyone?

Anyway, to the mind of Chaput the pope visiting Egypt suggests Athanasius, 4th century bishop of Alexandria, whom Chaput without the slightest whiff of embarrassment holds up as someone who zealously lived his faith, believed deeply, and courageously stood against the whole blasted heretical world. His name became attached to a creed which anathematized Arians, etc., condemning them to "everlasting fire". Wow. Nothing to see in the way of fanatical there, no sir. Move along. 

Religious founders are by definition fanatics. They have to be in order to be successful at founding something. That's why we remember them and follow them. Some are worse than others (I'm talking about you, Muhammad), which is to say some are better than others (your choices are any, except Muhammad). The also-rans in the competition don't found whole new world religions. Typically they become "saints" or their equivalents. Like the rest of us, they have mixed human natures, with some admirable qualities and frankly, some not so admirable, either in their own lives or because the law of unintended consequences yielded something awful from what they taught or from an understandable misunderstanding of what they taught. You know, like jihad, or pacifism, communism or apocalypticism.

Generally speaking, the more fundamental they are, the more kinda mental they are.

So a Paul of Tarsus tamed the wild beast who was Jesus, and a Martin Luther tamed the wild beast that was Paul. And now the Western world, at least, is a sort of circus of tamers.

But there's no one yet to tame Muhammad.

Christianity obliges one to be a communist

SOAMES.  "My advice to you all is to do your duty by taking the Christian vows of celibacy and poverty. The Church was founded to put an end to marriage and to put an end to property." ...

SOAMES.  "I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist."

-- George Bernard Shaw, "Getting Married" (1908)

For Most Protestants, It's Mary's Perpetual Virginity Which Is The Problem

Philip Jenkins, here, who notes the Feast of the Nativity of Mary on September 8th:

As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that “we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” ... [F]or most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense. ... [T]hat response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.

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That's right. The perpetual virginity of Mary is no more outrageous than the virgin birth of Christ, except that for Protestants it conflicts with the evidence that Jesus had brothers during his lifetime. To them the Romanists engage in special pleading when they say that the plain sense of these texts isn't the plain sense and should be understood in the light of the much later "apocryphal" evidence which maintained Mary's perpetual virginity and that his "brothers" must have been only his nephews or cousins.

More to the point, however, missed by most commentators, is that Jesus' rejection of normal family relationships is paramount in the Synoptic narratives mentioning his brothers and mother, and is rooted in his apocalyptic worldview of an imminent end of the world. Being tied down by a wife and children or a mother and a father and siblings, or a job or possessions or the cares of this life generally, all will hold you back and keep you from escaping from the wrath which is to come, and come soon. To repent is to turn your back on all this. The historical development is that when this Apocalypse he preached failed to materialize, this part of the teaching was transformed into an idealization of celibacy and virginity.