Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Responding to Nicholas Bowling · somewhere else: Weaker Vessel and Stronger Vessel · Great Bishop of Geneva! Did Jesus Obey Leviticus 20:10?
Catholic Student Asks Why I LEFT the Catholic Church
Nicholas Bowling | 29 May 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ug-Y-MB7h0
Mr. Bowling, I think I have seen your problem and a hint at a solution.
All doctrine must be traceable to Jesus and his Apostles (one of them being Peter).
You pretend that Catholic doctrine that you don't find in the Bible isn't, and compare it to "later revelations" like Book of Mormon and Qoran.
The one doctrine you just might try to trace like that would be Purgatory. Prayers for the dead had already been a thing for as long as anyone could remember, but in the day of Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Great, souls from purgatory, one kind of ghosts, appeared to many, with witnesses, asked for prayers and disappeared after the prayers were said.
This doesn't mean Pope St. Gregory didn't already believe in Purgatory, though some Orthodox would say so, some of them believe in soul sleep, some pretend prayers for the dead work retroactively, like if you pray today that a granny who didn't live a very edifying life was sincere in her last moment repentance, you don't pray as a Church for people who died outside the Church or rejecting to get right with God before dying, God hearing that prayer now can answer it back when she was dying and make it so her repentance was sufficiently sincere. However, the most who take this route take this verse as denoting:
If any man's work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.
[1 Corinthians 3:15]
... "burn, suffer loss, as by fire" = damnation, Hell, "saved" = spared in existence, a denial of annihilationism of the damned. I take this as a wrong reading, since the damned have not built on Jesus, see the preceding verses:
For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus 12 Now if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble
[1 Corinthians 3:11-12]
Which is the enduring Scriptural support for verse 15 referring to people who are actually saved by Christ when they die. Therefore for some of the saved to have gone through a firelike purging when they will enter heaven.
Now, the solution is different.
There is a very clear verse in the Bible. At least if "every" means "every" ... or "all" means "all" ...
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world
[Matthew 28:20]
Christ promised to be with His Church without interruption, in the specific purpose of preserving it from teaching error. Or, more precisely: Christ gave a task, including that, namely teaching no error, and Christ promised to be with the Church so entasked. And a few verses earlier He had actually claimed Omnipotence for Himself.
If Christ is really God, and if Matthew 28 is really what happened, there needs to be a Church that has never universally taught error.
Is there anything that looks remotely promising with your Protestant theology? No. Ruckmanism would solve the theological problem at the expense of gross historic distortions. Some people record baptising adults because they are converting a people, obviously the adults need to be baptised before their children can be so, and obviously it is an event more worth recording in chronicles as historic events than simply baptising children, and Ruckmanism will pretend this proves they rejected child baptism. Not to mention pretending the actual real Church of Christ in some periods was locally known as Albigensians or as Paulicians. Or as Circumcellions.
So, I would say, try to find a Church with your theology that keeps showing up century after century. 1st C AD, 2nd C AD, 3rd C AD, 4th C AD, don't skip, 5th C AD, 6th C AD, 7th C AD, 8th C AD, keep going, 9th C AD, 10th C AD, 11th C AD, 12th C AD.
Don't be content with Albigensians and Waldensians showing up just barely at the turn of these two centuries, check backwards.
If you can't, go with a theology, where the Church keeps showing up, C after C.
10:59 Matthew 28:20 doesn't say "always being holy, and see I'm with you" but "teaching all things I've commanded, and see I'm with you" ....
11:39 Have you considered if Jesus gave His keys to a specific person or to a statement?
You know, the exact next verse?
When I visited the Vatican in 1986 (before Assisi prayer meeting by the way, and I don't count "John Paul II" as a Pope, though I was desensitised back then), I was a student of Latin in High School, and looked up.
"Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam" ... I had heard this Protestant explanation before, so, I read on "et dabo tibi claves regni coelorum" ... I can't recall the continuation where it says in the Vulgate "Et quodcumque ligaveris super terram, erit ligatum et in caelis : et quodcumque solveris super terram, erit solutum et in caelis." ... But I knew it was there.
Jesus was founding a visible Church, with an institutional kind of judge (whether for deciding doctrine or for forgiving sins or for both). That institutional judge was Peter.
He was not telling each faithful they should tell each other "we all read the Bible, I judge my heart, you judge your heart" ...
Eliacim doesn't mean Jesus Christ, it means Papacy:
Et erit in die illa : vocabo servum meum Eliacim, filium Helciae et induam illum tunica tua, et cingulo tuo confortabo eum, et potestatem tuam dabo in manu ejus; et erit quasi pater habitantibus Jerusalem et domui Juda Et dabo clavem domus David super humerum ejus; et aperiet, et non erit qui claudat; et claudet, et non erit qui aperiat
[Isaias (Isaiah) 22:20-22]
Even the title "Pope" is prophecied: "et erit quasi pater" ...
So much a better reason to care if Eliacim today has taken the name Michael II and was elected in Vienna in 2023, or Leo XIV and was elected this month.
13:01 Catholicism has always allowed Eastern Rite priests to marry, and long this was also the case in the Western or Latin Rite, up to Gregory IX.
Michael I, if a true Pope, reversed the Gregorian reform in response to getting rid of certain people in the clergy.
13:23 You have a translation there which is not correct.
It speaks of "forbidding to marry and to abstain from foods" while you have a translation translating the same verb twice, namely the verb that often means precisely "forbidding" but can also mean "commanding" ...
If you forbid a man to marry in the sense of making it impossible for him to for instance get money for his work (like mine as a writer) and an appartment for his money and at the same time also make it impossible for him to fast even when the Church commands, you are basically making Christian chastity impossible for him, you are tripping him up.
I would say Protestants have been among those doing this to me for years, though they have some backup in unfaithful Catholics.
Voluntary celibacy, even if a requirement for priesthood, isn't what St. Paul was talking about.
See 1st Cor 7, where he both speaks of how marriage is necessary for some, and where he says he wished people were like himself (i e celibate).
13:42 Being celibate in a chaste way is a very clear way of keeping one's house in order. The own body is also a house.
St. Paul says a candidate for episcopacy can't be a man of more than one wife, can't be a father of unruly children. If actually having one wife were a requirement, St. Paul would be disqualifying himself and according to tradition also the man he wrote to.
14:31 Is your interpretation "Israel" based on anything beside the twelve stars?
Because Jacob had twelve sons, but the Church of Mary's Son had twelve apostles.
15:24 "she never sinned"
Genesis 3:15, Judges 5, Luke 1:28, 31, 42.
Judges 5 explains the conventional meaning of "blessed among women" ... Luke 1:28 repeats that phrase, and obviously Mary is puzzled, because she has killed no man, let alone anyone as important as Sisera. Whatever it means, it's mysterious. It also applies to her herself, not only because she becomes the mother of God, because verse 31 speaks of her pregnancy as upcoming.
Luke 1:42, the greeting is repeated with a twist "blessed among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb" ... a very clear reference to "woman and her seed" in Genesis 3:15.
She hadn't defeated a man by physical death, she had defeated something other as utterly. Stepping on a snake is not a sin, it's a glory. And stepping on that snake, well, it implies sinlessness.
He that committeth sin is of the devil: for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose, the Son of God appeared, that he might destroy the works of the devil [1 John 3:8]
Dealing a deadly blow to Satan doesn't sound like being of the devil. So, in that way, Elisabeth told Mary She had never sinned. And Mary proceeded to thank God for saving Her from ever sinning.
But seriously, there is a huge giveaway that Apocalypse 12 is about Mary. In Apocalypse 11, Heaven is called or has a Temple and the Temple has an Ark.
In the old Covenant, an Ark had two stone tablets, meaning God's commandments, some mannah, meaning God feeds His people, and Aaron's staff that went green again, meaning God provides resurrection. The one who was in Mary's womb for nine months is the commandment, the bread of life, and the firstborn of resurrection. Making Her the Ark, making the great sign about her rather than Israel.
16:31 If you actually look up some verses about Mary, that greater blessing definitely applies to her.
16:45 You are missing that "x is more blessed than y" doesn't always imply a difference of persons.
The same person can be more blessed on one criterium than on another.
16:51 Doesn't say Jesus was "bringing her down" that's eisegesis.
17:37 Wait, you mean Ukraine, Belarus and Russia?
That consecration was not the one asked for in Fatima.
Our Lady asked for the consecration of Russia. As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine is heir to Kievan Rus, which was consecrated to Her by a prince of that nation, but with Russia, Tatars and the refounding of the nation from Paganism annulled that, Putin is not likely to consecrate Russia, and the only guy who has more authority over Russia than, currently Putin, is the Pope, that's why the Pope has to do it.
Nicolas II would perhaps have done it, but he probably never heard of Fatima, or he asked an Orthodox priest who told him not to heed it. None after Nicolas II, from Lenin to Putin, have been likely to consecrate Russia, and so the Pope has to do it instead.
17:45 Thank you very much for proving you misread Exodus 20 by starting a separate commandment in verse 4.
We don't do that.
Graven images are forbidden insofar as they are strange gods. Friends of the true God aren't.
18:24 It certainly goes against your reading of Scripture.
Can you trace that one back to when Jesus spoke Matthew 28:20? If you can't, you are contradicting Scripture.
22:30 Antioch is where the disciples of Jesus Christ were first called Christians.
Antioch is also a few decades later where St. Ignatius of Antioch first calls them Catholic.
Were they something else before they were called Christians? Then they were also not something else before they were called Catholics.
22:37 Interesting that your text of Galatians 2:11 features "Peter" whereas the Greek has "Cephas" and not "Petros" ...
Seems possible someone now would miss this was Peter the first of the Apostles if one said Cephas ... well, if it was Peter the first of the Apostles, why did St. Paul write Cephas?
You have no definite Scriptural proof that St. Paul ever withstood the First Pope, but even if he did, the manner was such as to bear only on one current issue and not put in question the overall papacy. Some have noted that it could well be someone else named Cephas. Matthew 16 didn't invent the name, and a Jewish High Priest was actually similarily named that year.
24:06 When exactly did Luther claim that the Holy Spirit taught him to defy certain Catholic dogmas and practises?
Now, the problem with your claim isn't that the Holy Spirit absolutely couldn't or wouldn't do that.
The problem is, you are comparing the fact of being in a Church that for all practical purposes was seemingly identic to the one Jesus founded, to being in prison without a Bible.
You are also denigrating the "natural mind" as if normal reason were part of what St. Paul meant with "the flesh" .... more like motivations are.
The Holy Spirit would normally use the Church for someone already in it (that's what Jesus founded it for!) and reason for anything the person wasn't cleared up through the Church about.
24:15 Tyndale's situation in England, with only a Latin translation, is part of the quirks of the English Inquisition, which didn't catch and burn him.
In Belgium, back then Holy Roman Empire, Tyndale was caught on suspicion of heresy.
He and his inquisitor James Latomus had polite back and forth about Romans 3. Tyndale was burned for Free Grace, while Latomus believed in Lordship Salvation (though certainly not in what some have now pretended it involves, like total abstinence from alcohol).
24:23 No, the English Inquisitors who forbade Bibles other than Latin didn't burn him, and the ones who burned him burned him for something totally different, namely how he viewed Romans 3.
One can sum up Tyndale's position by citing Ephesians 2, verses 8 and 9.
One can sum up Latomus' position by citing Ephesians 2, verses 8 to 10.
Both agreed no prior good works were necessary at justification (faith not being a good work per se, but a gift from God). But Latomus insisted, genuinely accepting it involves accepting ensuing good works.
This was before the Council of Trent, so, both could imagine "works of the law" (Romans 3:28) meaning "of the moral law" ... Trent says it means works "of the Mosaic ritual law" ....
24:37 Can you give any specific and not simply local decision (Southern France or England) from the Catholic Church that says the "average Joe" isn't fit to understand the Scriptures?
By the way, the Bible itself says that this is at least true for some Scripture.
Acts 8, 30 and 31. 2 Peter 3:16.
25:05 The Protestant Bible came through revisionism.
66 Books = Catholic NT canon, Jewish Antichristian restrictions as to OT canon.
When it comes to Jesus being truly God, Nicaea wasn't Wittenberg, Worms or Wartburg and Catholics and Orthodox have a dispute about which of them are heirs of the participants, but Luther came so much later, that Protestants don't have a semblance of such a claim.
Among Protestants, famously Luther accepted Nicaea, famously Charles Taze Russell didn't.
