What Dogface said. (And, by the way, neither of us is Roman Catholic.)
However, this board is for the fighting of ignorance. So, rather than compel you to wade through some rather deep prose, let’s look at the lies you were told:
Nope, what your pastor and leaders thought the Catholic church taught. And those myths tend to be self-perpetuating.
I’ve never seen nor heard of an idol in a Catholic church. The new cathedral in Los Angeles has doors done in a Mexican motif that some have falsely claimed incorporates pagan idols, but that’s within the past year.
If they meant statuary, it is purely and simply artwork of a religious nature, meant to remind the faithful of things like the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Birth of Christ, and of the saints whose lives following Christ serve as examples of how to follow Him for the rest of us – like my patron and namesake, who taught and pastored wisely until a ripe old age, then was burned to death after following Christ for 86 years for refusing to deny Christ.
A total canard. Catholic teaching is that worship and adoration (latria) belong to God the Holy Trinity alone. Catholics have the option of devotion to a saint whose life speaks to their particular spirit, and serves as an ideal on how to follow Christ. My wife, for example, is especially moved by Francis of Assisi, who took the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience literally. Catholics “pray” to saints in the sense that they request their prayers of intercession, the presumption being that God in His mercy lets them in Heaven hear those requests – and that other than being done in a prayerful mode, they are no different than you or I asking our fellow Christians to pray for us.
Well, sir, it’s my understanding that it’s good Protestant doctrine, including among fundamentalists, that if you confess your sins to God, He is faithful to forgive them. Now look at John 20:22-23:
In order to forgive a sin of which somene repents, you must know about it. Hence Catholics can confess their sins (to God) before a priest, who then, by the authority transmitted to him by the apostles, and bestowed on them by Christ Himself, pronounces God’s forgiveness and absolves them of their sin. No priest has ever forgiven a sin, except perhaps one committed against him personally in the same way as you or I would. But he is given the authority to hear a confession of sin and proclaim with authority God’s forgiveness of that sin. For someone sorely troubled by thoughts of God’s wrath, that action of confession and specific forgiveness is often psychologically necessary.
Ah, that question. Pull up a chair; this takes a while. The Jews who returned from exile recognized a collection of books including the Torah, the first five books of the Law; the Prophets (which includes Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel, and I and II Kings, histories that focus on the prophets of the day such as Samuel, Nathan, Eliujah, and Elisha, along with the sixteen books written by prophets); and the Writings. Exactly which books were in the Writings was a bit nebulous, and they did not carry quite the authority of the Law or the Prophets.
The list was formalized for the first time when the Hebrew Bible’s books were translated into Greek, to form the collection we call the Septuagint, from the legendary 72 scholars who supposedly did the translation. This was done by order of Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, who reigned between 285 and 246 BC.
After the coming of Christ, as the apostles and other eyewitnesses were beginning to die off, what they had taught of Him was reduced to writing, and letters of counsel to churches, individuals, and the church as a whole were combined with it to form our New Testament. Spurious books abounded, and various people made lists of what was accurate in their opinion. This culminated in the fourth century with adoption of a definite list of canonical New Testament books by a church council.
Meanwhile, after the fall of Jerusalem in the Jewish Revolt, the surviving rabbis gathered at Jamnia and determined rules based on the teachings of the Pharisees for the Jewish faith. One of these was to limit the canon of their Bible, the Tanakh, to the contents of the Protestant Old Testament.
Some years later, Jerome, a remarkable Bible scholar, translated the Bible into Latin (as in King James’s day, there were previous translations of questionable value and sometinmes not complete). This was the Vulgate. For several reasons, Jerome himself decided to go with the Jamnia list rather than the longer one used by the Septuagint. The remaining books found in the Septuagint were later translated and added to the Vulgate.
The church as a whole spoke Greek for the most part in the East, and used the Septuagint plus the New Testament in the original Greek. The Latin-speaking West used the Vulgate. Both versions included Judith, Baruch, and the other “deuterocanonical” scriptures, and lessons in church were sometimes taken from them.
This continued, with the evolution of modern languages, until the Reformation. Luther and Calvin, seeing Catholic doctrine of which they disapproved founded in the deuterocanonical books, and influenced by the rabbinical decisions at Jamnia and by Jerome, eliminated all the deuterocanonical books from the Bible on their own authority. In response, the Catholic Council of Trent decreed that all but three of those books (I and II Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh) did in fact belong in the Old Testament, and they would use them. The Orthodox continued using the Septuagint as they always had. Influenced by both Orthodox and Reformers, the Church of England (followed 200 years later by the Methodists when they splintered off) said that the deuterocanonical books, which were termed Apocrypha (an inaccurate but historically standard name), were a sort of second-class Scripture, valuable to read but not to be used to prove out doctrine.
So the Catholics did not add any books – rather, they and the founders of Protestantism dropped books from the complete Bible, which is still preserved by Orthodox and Anglicans. And of course the Reformers dropped far more books (15) than the Catholics (3).
[Fixed quote tag. – MEB]