The Catholic "church" has been a power broker behind governments for at least a thousand years and has either helped start wars to disempower those who would not get in line or advance the Catholic empire by exploration (read: exploitation) of new worlds. There are no new worlds now and due to recent uncovering of some of the abuse of power - monetary, sexual, etc. - the "church" has fallen more and more into disfavour, although they remain the wealthiest organization in the world.
So now they have decided to further the ambitions of the UN and invite all the disputers back into the fold? To promote a universal religion under their guidance?
That is worrisome. Although everyone's experience of life is different. Here I will insert why this is a topic that hits home with me and why I am blogging about it. I was raised in a Catholic home. I am not really prepared to share the details of how dysfunctional my early life was, it was long ago and is now far away from who I have become, BUT we always looked good in "church". One minute before we arrived and one minute after we arrived back home it was open season for cruelty and pain but while we were on display at "church" everything was absolutely PERFECT. I watched and learned about what TRUTH was and how little it had to do with the Catholic organization - it is a religious business. You pay your money to the "church" for the privilege of losing your Sunday mornings and any other time as ordained to their rituals.
My parents were heavily involved in this organization so the priest used to occasionally come to our house and swill beer. He took two vacations a year in Hawaii. When I questioned him on how this lined up with his vow of poverty, he got angry. Do you really think that that is okay, I dared to ask him, when there are people in your parish that can't feed their families? He still kept going to Hawaii and his parishioners, rich and poor, kept subsidizing him. But a greater power than his must have heard the question and it answered because soon after that priest was transferred to a much poorer parish where he could no longer take those vacations. Karma?
I have also spent time in a fundamentalist Baptist denomination. That pastor absconded with the funds. Just so you know that it is not all roses in the other denominations either. Ultimately I left religion in favour of spirituality. I truly believe that abdicating your spirituality to some organization and letting someone else tell you what to believe is no longer, if it ever was, resonating with people. It is time and past time for us to stand up individually and collectively to fulfill Jesus' prophecy of us - "Greater things than these shall ye also do, if ye believe." He was speaking of the "miracles " he did and he did not mean to believe in him but rather to understand and believe that we are capable of emulating him in every way. But that is another blog for another day.
Please understand that I believe there are well meaning people in all denominations - they are not what I am questioning here. And I have no problem whatsoever with Jeshua Ben Hur's message ( most people call him Jesus Christ but that is not his real name) in fact I believe that his message is timely and something that we as a species need to adopt but it is not and has never been, except in name embodied by the organization known as the Catholic or more properly, the Roman Catholic "Church".
Check out the verifiable facts in the video at the end of the post, put out by one of the non-Catholic denominations involving Biblical prophecy of "the Beast" and its corollation with the Roman Catholic organization. It is interesting. Watch and you decide. I am not telling anyone what to believe only bringing up things here which have come to my attention and which I have been moved to share to bring others to an awareness of what is being said and done. As always you need to process it and see if it rings true (or false) for you.
The Catholic "church" usurped some of the teachings of Jesus Christ when the movement became so popular as to threaten the Roman government. The story goes that Constantine "saw the light" and converted to Christianity. This is blatantly not true. It was a smart political move. It was a way of bringing back into the fold all of the slaves and others so essential to the Roman way of life, who were converting to Christianity and leaving their masters. You see, the followers of Jesus promoted far more than Sunday worship, most of which was conveniently discarded by the Romans in favour of their existing religious structure. The hybrid of the Christian and Roman churches is what we have today. They simply changed out the statues that the Romans had been worshipping, renamed their holidays and retooled some of the prayers and songs and carried on. The Bible was adopted with all of the books which taught about reincarnation, community, equality of the sexes, equal worth of every human being, unity consciousness and compassion, among other things torn out. In their place the Jewish Old Testament was inserted, giving license for "an eye for an eye" and other such brutality, which Jesus never condoned. The Jewish section was far more about a "jealous" god who would kill those that did not believe or those that sinned. Jesus never preached that. In fact the great irony that the Jewish readins would be side by side with Jesus' must have been a great joke among those Romans in the know - the rabbis who presided over the Old Testament were the very ones who wanted to kill Jesus! What a slap in the face! And these Catholics think he's coming back for them? They have no idea who Jesus was nor do they care. They do what is expedient for their own organization. Nor do they care about their members. And they especially have shown no compassion to any outliers. Unless you have been baptised you are a sinner and sinners can be killed unless they repent. Think of all the people through history who were killed for not recanting the truth!
Jesus said "For ye shall know the TRUTH, and the TRUTH shall set you free." He did not say - The Catholic Truth or the convenient "truth".
And it is not the person Jesus Christ that is coming back at the end of the age but the Christ Consciousness. Christ Consciousness is about compassion and unity - unity with Source (God) but not through a mediator . The Catholic organization set itself up as a mediator between God and man. This is part of why Luther and his thousands of original followers, fed up with the lies, taxes and exploitation of the Catholic church broke with them. Others followed in rapid succession. They were persecuted and murdered without merch until the outcry became so great that the Cathoic "church" had to stop. This Catholic "church" has never embodied the qualities of Christ consciousness.
Father Tony is an interesting guy though isn't he? "Come home, prodigal sons! Come home ot the father! We will receive you with joy and richness!" Slick. I think he could sell igloos to eskimos. And maybe in today's climate change they would go for it. Maybe these guys will too. After all, all that persecution stuff was so long ago. They wouldn't still do those things, would they?
I don't really subscribe to fear. But I watch this with some trepidation, cognizant of what a polarized righteous "church" did to so many for so long. Let's not let that happen anymore.