I Want to Understand Catholicism

Not a catholic, but I'd like to be. That said, don't take me as a catholic giving catholic answers; take me as a disillusioned protestant instead:

why is the Roman Catholic Church the one holy apostolic church? Why not the Eastern Orthodox Church?

Byzantine doctrines were influenced (especially their elevation of the pentarchy and denouncement of the pope that follows from that) by caesaropapism. Their authority is ultimately the emperor, not the church, god, nor scripture. Their bishops may be valid, but they're very obviously in error because of how long they've been bending their knees to kings who need to be excommunicated instead.

The existence of clergy makes sense, but I don't understand the priesthood. Why does a Christian need a mediator between them and God if the Holy Spirit lives in them? Churches need overseers no doubt, but why is the priesthood indwelled with more significant power (per se)? Aren't we all priest in God's kingdom?

If you get the need for clergy, then I won't bother going over the practical things about why they're good for order...

aside from practical things:

The apostles are conferred with various types of special authority in scripture, and their successors are the bishops. If you think the apostolic authority is not unique to them, then why would simon magus need to offer to buy it in order to use it?

Subquestion, why can't priests marry? Some of the apostles were married.

Celibate priests are a matter of discipline, not doctrine. Eastern catholic priests can marry iirc.

It's a good idea, though. A married man is concerned about his family. A priest's concern should be his congregation. Holy Orders is basically (and biblically) the other side of the coin of marriage. Should a man have two wives?

If the Pope is Jesus's representation on this Earth, how do you justify some of the horrifying things Popes have done in the past?

Peter himself cut off a man's ear in a fit of violence and was a 3-time christ denier, and the whole group of aspostles were so dumb that jesus often face palmed at how incompetent they were at understanding him. People are imperfect.

Even a horrible pope like rodrigo borgia had his moments, though, granting asylum to displaced jews, reforming the curia, founding universities and funding the arts.

It really boils down to "people aren't perfect". Take a look at Luther's more reviling works and table talks, and you can see both sides of the coin.

Why is there a single Pope instead of a council like the Orthodox Church has and like the board of apostles we see in the NT?

The catholic church does have councils, though. Trent, the 2 Vatican councils, florence, constance. There've been plenty of councils in the western church.

If you mean council as in a set of bishops who do things together, think about bishop's councils like the US Council of Catholic Bishops, and other such organizations.

The orthodox aren't nearly as united as you'd think either. They don't have "a council"...they have a bunch of autocephalus churches that more often than not have argued with each other about jurisdiction and various matters of ethnophyletism than anything. Just look at the debacle between the patriarch of moscow and the church of ukraine to get a taste of the "one", holy, apostolic and catholic ethnophyletist orthodox church. If anything, they explicitly demonstrate the need for a pope and a see with universal jurisdiction.

Do you need the sacraments to be saved?

That's the normal way, but with god nothing is impossible. John 6 straight away tells you that the eucharist is necessary in order to "have life in you", various things indicate that baptism saves, etc etc. If you actually do have faith in what's said in the bible by jesus, then yes, you believe the sacraments are for salvation.

Do Catholics really not believe in salvation by faith?

Sola fide amounts to 1 of 2 things:

either it's a dumb and pretty useless mental game that doesn't mean anything, or else it's antinomianism. Any harmonization with James nullifies the sola in sola fide, even if you use mental gymnastics to jump around that fact. The OG protestants even articulated this fact, saying that real saving faith produces works and mortal sin is incompatible with such faith -- if that's faith "alone", then the definition of "alone" here is wholly specious and you might as well drop it and move to either catholicism, or retain sola fide and fall into antinomianism.

Why is the Apocrypha accepted?

the real question: why is it not accepted? because the jews don't use it? because there's no hebrew autograph? because jerome raised these points, but was shot down by the church? or because luther didn't like that maccabees contained prayers to the dead?

further: why not drop the antilegomena? Hell, with modern textual criticism, why not drop the pseudo paulines, the gospels, and literally anything other than the jewish old testament and the authentic paulines? That would be the most "accurate" canon if we wanted to start shaving with luther's razor.

The NT seems to describe that all Christians are saints, and praying to saints looks rather odd.

Regardless of how odd it looks for you, it's historically attested possibly as early as the 3rd generation of christians, during the mid 100s AD during the times of St. Irenaeus. Regardless of how odd it looks, it's either an acceptable practice, or else you're admitting that grave, condemning error cropped up basically as soon as the apostles were dead.

If you take the position that intercession is heresy, since it developed so early, 90% of the religion as we know it might very well be heresy or lies, and you don't get to fall back on sola scriptura here since the same guys who wrote the table of contents for the bible were people who practiced intercessory prayer; if they're heretics, we can't trust that the canon itself isn't a bunch of lies and heresy.

If we want to get nitty-gritty about things, we can look at the 1st century jewish practices concerning the cult of the angels and the tzadikim if we're looking for precedent for the practice.

There's no evidence at all that someone's soul goes to be with God between their death and the return of Jesus.

Revelation talks about the saints in heaven conveying the prayers of the faithful to god. Christ's speech with the penitent thief implies the dead can indeed go to heaven to be with god. To deny the latter is to deny that christ is god, or it denies that he sits at the right hand of god which is attested as christ's location in colossians 3:1. So the dead can be with christ, christ is god, and christ sits at the right hand of god. If the dead can be with christ, then they are certainly with god.

why pray to Mary?

ecce mater tua. and that's all I have to say about vietnam mariology.

To expand a bit: mary's pretty important. If you can accept intercessory prayer, but not asking mary to intercede, then why would you ask St. Augustine or St. Benedict for anything? If not mary, then why anyone else basically?

What evidence is there for the immaculate conception?

If christ was born, could he be born in iniquity, inheriting the stain of adam's sin? By no means. This would imply christ was born with the stain of original sin and was just as damned as the rest of us. Either mary was immaculate, christ was a sinner, or all of post-augustinian harmatology is incorrect.

The only non-augustinian scheme for understanding the fall of man is orthodox, and as we've established, they're compromised as a church at large, so their opinion can't be taken seriously without wondering if a bishop said it, or if the emperor said it through a bishop's mouth. In short, they're wrong, so the correct harmatology is certainly augustinian in character.

Protestantism holds an extreme augustinian harmatology, so it actually necessitates the immaculate conception as well, and you can see in Luther that it's not anti-protestant to hold such a view. Hell, with a lutheran view that concupiscence is true sin in and of itself, the immaculate conception is almost more necessary in Protestantism than in catholicism.

Either way, you're left with the original conundrum: either mary was immaculate, or christ was infected with sin and thus useless. Most of protestantism denies that mary was immaculate, so most of protestantism, following its own doctrines, damns christ as a sinner, which is illogical and blasphemous, and thus shows the protestant position to be wrong.

Ergo: the immaculate conception is necessary and the catholic church is correct over and against both the protestants and the orthodox.

The Bible makes it look like Jesus had brothers and sisters, so Mary wasn't always a virgin

The bible's completely ambiguous in this regard when you read it in greek, since it uses a word that can mean anything from cousin to close associate for "brother". Disgracing mary's perpetual virginity isn't even a historically protestant position -- Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and all the other merry men held it as an acceptable adiaphora, specifically because the text of the bible isn't clear about it -- you can't arrive at the position that mary certainly had sex from sola scriptura. It's not a protestant position at all, merely an anti-catholic one that, while acceptable in protestantism, isn't a necessary doctrine.

/r/Catholicism Thread