Whatever.

Atheists & liberals don’t get to lecture anyone on religion, let alone what the Catholic Church teaches or what the faithful find relevant.

As for liberalism:
.Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.
CARITAS IN VERITATE
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
BENEDICT XVI

As for lectures – I am simply citing Catholic teachings to you. If you have alternate Church sanctioned and approved teachings you would like to cite, I welcome them. But you do not have the right to tell Catholics how they believe – that is for the Church to say, and the Church has spoken quite clearly on the matter. You are accusing millions of Catholics of apostacy by your ignorance, and that is offensive.

Catholics certainly venerate statues and relics. They do not worship them. Period.

I love this line: “balcones … (I) think it’s clear you have less class than a monthly meeting of the velvetta chefs at a trailer park in new jersey. (Y)ou might want to brush up on those saul alinsky debate techniques before trying again to one-up someone who is your intellectual superior”.

Brilliant. Witty. Dead on accurate.

I do enjoy how you all have to have a label for everything, rather than discussing issues on merits. You don’t see me accusing every crackpot idea you have of coming from William Krystol, do you?

That said, this is a very simple matter. The Catholic Church expressly considers worship of any physical object to be heresy. In addition, the Church considers worship of Saints to be heresy.

I am defending the dogma of the Catholic Church – MI-GOPer is basically saying that the teachings of the leaders of the Catholic Church are irrelevant, given his own personal opinions of what he’s seen Catholics doing.

And yet, somehow I’m the one here who is not properly respectful of religion?

Once again, the correct response here would be “thank you for not accusing me of being anti-Catholic” for alleging that Catholics regularly engage in heretical beliefs.

Your ability to pervert other people’s theology seems to only be exceeded by your lack of class.

That couldn’t happen; it would break your normal practice here.

Then, contends, “But I’m really just aware that this is simply ignorance, and a manifestation of your willingness to believe and argue vociferously for things that you are clueless about.”

Nice try at the usual far Left double dust up: discredit your opponent & marginalize them. It a chapter straight out of “Saul Alinsky Tactics for Dummies”.

Nope, BlankHead, the real irony here is that as some trollish atheist, you’re trying to tell anyone of faith what their faith is about. Sorry to say, you lose. As do the Church elders who want to enforce theological authority but often fail. Catholics around the world still worship the saints, their holy relics, paintings and statutes and many do it right alongside the local bishop and parish priest.

Ignorance on the issues of faith is your province, BlankHead. It’s why you can’t see anything wrong with Larry David making fun of a well known miracle by splashing urine on an image of Christ.

Get back under the bridge, daylight is coming my trollish friend.

Were I out to score cheap political points, I’d accuse you of anti-Catholic bigotry for ascribing to Catholics beliefs that the Church would declare heretical.

But I’m really just aware that this is simply ignorance, and a manifestation of your willingness to believe and argue vociferously for things that you are clueless about.

The Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) taught that idolatry is committed “by worshipping idols and images as God, or believing that they possess any divinity or virtue entitling them to our worship, by praying to, or reposing confidence in them” (374).

“Idolatry is a perversion of man’s innate religious sense. An idolater is someone who ‘transfers his indestructible notion of God to anything other than God’” (CCC 2114).

The Church absolutely recognizes and condemns the sin of idolatry. What anti-Catholics fail to recognize is the distinction between thinking a piece of stone or plaster is a god and desiring to visually remember Christ and the saints in heaven by making statues in their honor.

First off, BlankHead, many Catholics do, indeed, worship relics of saints and the saints themselves with the hope that touching the holy relic or praying to the saint will cure them of their illness. It is not, as you incorrectly point out, “intercession” with God through the medium of a saint.

In fact, last summer we took a family vacation, in part, to San Giovanni Rotondo & watched thousands of people worship the remains of Padre Pio, drink the water from the spring well in the village and rub the land’s dirt on their skins for physical and spiritual healings. We learned, at a high point in his life, Padre Pio was denounced by the Church and forbidden to teach because he was a “noxious cancer, a Socrates”. The Church might not have tolerated Padre Pio through most of his life, but as he said to his flock –his real work comes after his death. The ordinary people we met were worshiping the priest’s remains.

Stand in line sometime with the pilgrims at Lourdes, or at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, or talk with the priests and bishops in line at the basillica at Ars, France. It’s a lot more than just veneration; it’s worship of the saint.

No need for an apology.

If there is some glimmer of truth in that analogy, it is buried by the fact that while in American history there is no legacy of devout Christians being lynched by athiests or liberal Jews … there most certainly is a legacy of blacks being lynched by Duke’s KKK.

In fact, to the extent that there have been any killings of Christians on theological grounds in America (outside, say, Native Americans offing the particularly persistent missionary from time to time) those have largely been intramural – consider the New York-Newark riots of 1853-54, the Orange riots of 1870-71, the “little red school-house riot” in Boston in 1895, the particularly heinous Ursuline Convent Riots in Boston in 1834, the Philadephia riots of 1844. There are quite a few more, and we haven’t even considered the Klan’s reign of terror – and not just in the South – for example, Klansmen were burning crosses in front of Catholic homes in Colorado in the 1920s.

Atheists, obnoxious as they are, simply “discriminate” against Christians by using the law to keep from having Christianity shoved on them at all times. Perhaps there are some Atheist riots out there I’ve missed, but I’d be surprised.