… for not understanding every last detail of someone else’s religion? That seems a bit harsh to me, but I do feel impelled to point out something odd about your choice of quotations.
The second, third and fourth passages (Matt 24/Mark 13/Luke 21) come from what is sometimes called the “olivet discourse” or “mini-apocalypse.” Jesus is speaking from the Mount of Olives across from the temple, and I think Jesus’s followers did think he was talking about the destruction of the temple because they had just specifically asked about it.
However, the first passage you quote (“There are some who will not taste death…”) comes from a different chapter and occurs in Caesarea Philippi. Some commentators link this quote to the Transfiguration that immediately follows it in Matt 17 (interestingly - or maybe not, I can’t see your eyes glaze over online - the parallel account in Mark 9 places the chapter break just before the comment in question, but I wouldn’t read too much into that since the chapter and verse labels weren’t added until much later), but catholics usually link it to Jesus’s declaration that “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” The idea is that Jesus is promising to establish the Church as his kingdom on earth, a promise that finds its fulfillment at the end of Matthew’s gospel when the risen Jesus tells his followers to “go forth making disciples of all nations and behold I am with you until the end of the age.” This would be the response to your question…
[QUOTE=Czarcasm quoting Damon Knight]
“We were here. Where were You?”
[/quote]
“where two or three are gathered in my name”
If you then want to argue that the two or three aren’t doing a good job making God present, you could find support in the catechism (paragraph 2125):
It’s been almost two decades since I was a good Mass-going Catholic boy, but I joined as an adult, and what I learned in OCIA* was that Hell is not a place, but a state of mind, the state of being separated from God; the class leader thought (though did not present this as anything but his own opinion) that one could be in Hell while alive on Earth.
Granted, this was a pretty liberal, Vatican-IIish parish.
*Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, the classes you have to take before you’re permitted to join the buffet line at Mass.
No, what I meant was, the priests attached to this parish were on the more mercy-slash-social justice-slash-preferential-option-for-the-poor end of the spectrum. There was the one firebrand priest who told us in a homily that if we disagreed with Catholic teaching, we needed to get to the confessionals in the back; but in general, the priests were more concerned with ministering to the congregation than upbraiding it. Hell, the pastor, a Methodist convert, wore jeans and a tee shirt while sitting in his office, when he heard my first Confession. So a lay OCIA leader who thought that Hell could be experienced on earth, and also told us that we didn’t actually know that any soul was in Hell, wasn’t out of the norm.