It sounds like mass hypnosis! They wanted it to be true even though it was in their own minds.
Monavis
So I forgot to include the 
. . .
I’m a Unitarian Universalist. My ambition is to head up the Unitarian Inquisition. “We have ways of making you think for yourself!”
I’ll give it a shot.
This is a concept that is confusing to anyone, and to someone of a Jewish background, maybe even more so, because on the face of it, it seems to deny the First Commandment. (“I am the Lord your God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.”). And Jewish prayers always recognize one, and only one, God: Baruch ata Adonai, Elohaynu melech ha-olam… “Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, Master of the Universe…”
So where do Catholics get off talking about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as though each were divine? There is, after all, only one God.
True. There is. And the best way I can think to explain it is to ask if you’d wear a swim trunks (or a bikini) to the office.
What I mean is that you may present a different appearance, and a different attitude and behavior, to the world depending on where you are and what you’re doing. Saturday night at the bar or Sunday afternoon at the football game, you’re probably dressing and acting differently than you are Tuesday morning at the staff meeting, and maybe there’s even a third “version” of you Friday evening for Grandma’s birthday party. I don’t mean to suggest you’re Sybil, possessed of different personalities – just that your actions and approach to people varies based on what you’re engaged in doing.
It’s even so with God. “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” God chose to send us His Son. What does that mean? It means that God became a man, and lived among us men. He cried, He pooped, He bled, He itched, He slept restlessly and had backaches – all the things that make our human experience true and real. This doesn’t mean He wasn’t God – it just means that He had a vastly different appearance and presentation to us, so much so that it’s useful and meaningful to say “Jesus” to distinguish this aspect of His presence.
Similarly, when God acts as an unseen spirit, motivating people, filling them with knowledge and gifts and grace, this too is different than the Jesus we picture, and different, too, than God in Heaven, who spoke to Moses, who delivered the tablets, who spoke to Abraham and Noah and the patriarchs.
So we refer to that facet of God as the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Ghost.
We’re not talking about different people. We’re talking about different facets of the same thing, just like we might discuss hard-boiled Detective Daniel Jones, caring Dad Dan Jones, and fantasy baseball manager Danny Jones. Same guy, doing different things, acting differently, and presenting a different face to the world.
Ok, that actually makes a decent bit of sense. So why bother with the division? Why not just call it all Dan Jones (to keep with the Dan Jones metaphore, which actually helps a lot)?
This may be getting a bit out of the scope of the thread, but if I opened up a new one it would more or less have to be in GD, and I don’t want the conversation to go in that direction.
I am so totally stealing that…
It’s very definitely three distinct people. “Three Persons in one God.”
I’m still puzzled about the “Edict of Worms”
I’m still slightly repulsed by the “Diet of Worms”…
So what was all the in fighting back in the 1600’s about then? I read historical fiction from that time and it seem as though the different orders all hated each other. (Assuming that the fighting isn’t all just made up for dramatic purposes, which is possible I suppose)
Sorry, this is almost total gibberish to me. 
Ah, I didn’t know that. So is it just the pope in Rome issue that seperates the Orthodox churches from the RCC? How do the Eastern Catholic churches fit into all of this? (That last question is because once again, the last sentence was almost total gibberish, less so than the one about the laity though 
.)
The only reason is that it’s a very useful distinction, because of the dramatically different roles each aspect of the Trinity plays. We don’t say “The Holy Spirit died for our sins,” because a spirit dying on a cross is not something that rings true for us. We can easily empathize with Jesus, the man, bleeding and painful, on the cross, and so that what we say when we discuss the Passion.
Similarly, we could, I suppose, say “Jesus descended upon the apostles, filling them with the gifts of wisdom, understanding, fortitude…” but it doesn’t quite fit the image. How much more meaningful and descriptive it is to say that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles! Now we can picture a wisp, a spirit, an unseen, powerful, loving presence suffusing them with these gifts and abilities.
It would be just as correct to say that God gave the apostles these gifts, and God died on the cross, and God gave Moses the tablets at Sinai. But it lacks a certain something that we can connect to.
Yes, it is, and that was a bad phrasing on my part. The “not talking about different people” refers to my analogy about Dan Jones, not about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s where we really get into the mysterious aspect of this: in the final analysis, as differently as Dan may act, he’s still one person. The Holy Spirit is a different person; but no more or no less God than Jesus is. The analogy I offered was not intended to be a definitive explanation; else those hundreds of scholars over the years could go home, because I would have authored the definitive, easy-to-understand explanation right here.
Politics. Remember that back then power in the Church was real political, temporal power. And money. Don’t forget that several of the popes were Borgias…just because somone holds a sacred office doesn’t mean they’re personally holy.
Not JUST Papal Supremacy, actually. Many reasons for the split sound silly but were deadly serious at the time:
In addition, the issues of language (East spoke Greek, West spoke Latin) and the separation of the Eastern and Western Empires contributed to the split.
And for my needs it (coupled with the follow up post) was a good enough explination. Everything else falls out of the realm of my interest and becomes a matter of your faith vs. my faith, and that isn’t really where I wanted to go. I just wanted to have a basic understanding of what is being talked about, and I think I got that.
So to T_C, as a person raised with a background similar to mine, is/was the concept of the trinity as much a mindblowingly radical shift in perspective for you as it is for me? Bricker’s explination allowed me to wrap my head around it, but at first blush it is a fairly substantially different way of thinking about God.
Traditional Catholic outside of Catholicism, what are some of your interests?
Do you think you might branch out in your posts soon, or do you think you might mostly lurk for a bit? Checks posts per day on own account… Not that I have much room to talk.
There’s a lot going on in church history that deals with the split between Catholic and Orthodox churches. Here’s how the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America explains it, and here’s the Orthodox Church in America’s explanation of the Russian Orthodox faith. These might help to explain some of the differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Christian faiths. There appear to be fewer differences between the two than either of them and many Protestant Christian sects, and many of the differences appear to be cultural or doctrinal in nature. There’s also the concept that neither faith accepts the other as being a full part of Christianity. I’m still learning a bit about it myself, as my future in-laws are practicing Orthodox Christians and some of the aspects of church life is foreign to me as a child raised in a Scandinavian Lutheran household.
:smack: I am sorry that I missed your question earlier.
Being culturally Jewish but religiously Catholic is certainly possible. However, despite the fact that my ethnic background is primarily Jewish, I was not raised as such, so for me observe Jewish cultural practices would make little sense. I do not feel like I am betraying Jewish culture because I think that Catholicism is the fulfillment of Judaism.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever accused me of being a self-hating Jew, but on a traditional Catholic forum that I no longer post on, one poster said “Congratulations on converting, if your conversion is sincere” when he found out that I am of Jewish descent. The poster in question also called people of African descent “Nigerians who worship MLK ultra” and thought that they were not fully human.
It’s essential because Christ said “do this in remembrance of me”. He’s in our world in front of us as a sacrifice and that’s a sacrament and not just eating what He ate at the Last Supper. From the Catechism, bolding mine:
1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”
The bread is always consecrated but there isn’t always wine (our church doesn’t use wine during flu season). Either wine or bread will suffice as receiving the Sacrament, but you’re not required to take the wine even if it’s available.
About Catholic religious orders…religious orders are groups of men or women who gather together in a religious community that’s based around a certain set of rules of living. When you’re talking about the Franciscans, the Jesuits, the Maryknolls, etc., all of these are religious orders, founded by a religious leader, whose members seek to live in conformity with the rules that the founder of the order set up.
Most laity aren’t members of religious orders. That means that if you just grab a Catholic off the street, he or she probably won’t be a Franciscan or a Jesuit, or whatever. He or she will just be an ordinary Catholic, not associated with any such group.
Ah ha! Ok, gottcha. So the orders are, at least mostly, just for the clergy?
They’re for the clergy, and for consecrated life. “Clergy” refers to deacons, priests, and bishops. Nuns and monks, for example, are not clergy, but almost certainly belong to a religious order.
Oh, and while I’m at it: there are only three “levels,” if you will, of Holy Orders - deacons, priests, and bishops. Archbishops are simply bishops with more administrative responsibility. Cardinals are simply men (almost always bishops, but it’s not required) that belong to the voting body that will select the next Pope. The Pope himself has complete and immediate executive and legislative power over the Church, but that too is administrative. In terms of the fullness of Holy Orders, the newest auxiliary bishop is ordained identically to the Supreme Pontiff.
An archbishop is so named when he is given responsibility for an archdiocese – a diocese that has administrative oversight over not only itself, but one or more “suffragan” dioceses. Some larger dioceses have more than one bishop assigned to them - one bishop alone is always the Ordinary of the diocese – the man who has legislative and spirtual teaching authority over the diocese. Assistant bishops in a diocese are called “auxiliary” bishops. Sometimes, an assistant bishop may be appointed to a diocese with the automatic understanding that when the see becomes vacant (that is, when the Ordinary dies, retires, or accepts canonical possession of a new diocese) he will automatically become the new Ordinary. Such a bishop is known as a “coadjutor” bishop.