Compendium of Truth

Traditional Catholicism Explained in English

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101 Reasons Why I'm A Traditional Roman Catholic and So Should You

Photographs show what appears to be the Virgin Mary atop a church marking the resting stop of the Most Holy Family's Flight to Egypt appeared in front of large and varied crowds between 1968 and 1971. Official government investigations reportedly confirmed the extramundane nature of the apparitions of these clear and bright luminous bodies, as testified by thousands of witnesses.

The Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Christ, whose anatomically precise image is imprinted as an irreplicable photographic negative with three-dimensional data. Dating has been inconclusive, but its pollen grains match those of the region, the blood flow and scourge marks match the Passion narratives, and the outline of lepton coins minted by Pontius Pilate can be seen reflected in the eyes.

An usually durable maguey cactus fiber has remained intact since 1531, surviving earthquakes, a 1785 nitric acid spill, and a 1921 bombing. Magnified, thirteen individuals can be identified in both eyes, showing her perspective at the very unfurling of the tilma before Bishop Zumárraga. The stars depicted on the mantle correspond to the constellations of the winter sky on 12 December 1531.

Gemma di Giorgi, a girl born in 1939 with eyes that had no aperture in the middle of the iris, so the iris did not contract or expand, visited Padre Pio hoping to be cured. He made the sign of the cross over her eyes and for the rest of her life, her eyes seemingly remained the same, with no opening in the middle of them, yet she could see as if she had pupils, deemed anatomically impossible.

Over 70 such episodes are reported for St. Joseph Cupertino, who rose to the ceiling when visiting Pope Urban VIII. On 4 October 1630, he “suddenly soared into the sky where he remained hovering over the crowd.” Various Catholic clerics are recorded to have entered into moments of religious ecstasy with no natural stimulants: levitating ones include Alphonsus Liguori and Francis of Assisi.

After consecration at Mass in a church in Lanciano (c. 740 AD), the host visually transubstantiated, giving physical credence to the Catholic dogma. The specimen has remained fresh. Studies in 1970 and 1981 showed that the Flesh consists of the muscular tissue of the heart with arterioles, veins, and nerve fiber. The blood specimen, as with the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, is of the type AB.

On 9 May 1291, the house where Mary (the mother of Jesus) lived broke from its foundations and miraculously took flight once to Trsat, Croatia and again in 1296, landing near Mount Prodo, where it remains to date. Testimony of witnesses describing such a building moving in the sky does survive. Its extant foundations in Nazareth match the edifice currently enshrined in Loreto, Italy.

An apparition of Mary, to three shepherd children near Fátima, Portugal on 13 May 1917, promised to show a miracle on 13 October: there, the crowd that gathered despite the rain had their clothes instantly dried and witnessed extraordinary celestial phenomena. The sun moved erratically in the sky, and appeared to fall towards the earth, only for it to return to its place, causing many to convert. 

Many anecdotes attribute supernatural power to the name of Jesus: indeed the II Council of Lyon and Pope Gregory X in 1274 proclaimed its invocation as a solution to manifest evils, alongside other sacramentals. In 1432, for example, bishop Dias of Lisbon presided over the sprinkling of holy water over the people, which abruptly ended the plague with a swift alleviation of the sick populace. 

On 14 August 1730, thieves entered the Church of St. Francis in Siena, and stole a golden ciborium containing consecrated hosts. Two days later, the missing hosts were found inside an offering box, in cobwebs. After being cleaned, the hosts were placed in a new ciborium. Since the hosts were dirty, the priests decided to let them simply deteriorate, but they have remained fresh ever since.

Besides the resurrections by Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels, Nicholas of Tolentino (1245-1305) revived a child who had died before baptism, a large group of children who had drowned and a group of partridge birds; Francis Xavier (1506-1552) presided over the revival of a young woman at Cangoxima; Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419) brought back more than thirty people from the dead.

The bodies of some strong Catholic adherents, such as Zita of Lucca (1218-72), Ubald of Gubbio (1084-1160) and Rita of Cascia (1381-1457), have remained intact and flexible, with little or no decay over time. When exhumed, the bodies of visionaries Bernadette of Lourdes  (1844-79) and Jacinta Marto (1910-20) of Fátima were found intact, some with a particular odor of sanctity.

In contrast to rites of other religions including Metzitzah b’peh (Jewish direct oral suctioning after circumcision),  Angapradakshinam (Hindu rolling), and Wudu (Islamic ritual ablution), Catholic ones are never the direct cause of microbial infection. There have been no documented cases of infection due to Communion, even if distributed to many congregants with the same spoon.

Jesus Christ taught His flesh is meat and His blood is drink indeed. The biographies of Saints Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, and others demonstrate the supernatural nature of the consecrated bread, as they survived eating only Eucharistic bread for extended periods of time, as did Alexandrina Maria da Costa (1904-1955) and Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth (1896-1962).

Besides miracles such as that of Santarem, Portugal in 1247, other historical events testify its power. In 1722, the spread of the plague in Marseilles ended following its consecration to the Sacred Heart and a Eucharistic procession. In 1906, the city of Tumaco, Colombia was spared after a tsunami wave unexpectedly receded, reportedly due to a Eucharistic procession done in its direction.

Being decapitated under Diocletian in AD 305, the bishop’s blood was collected by a woman who placed it in a container, and his blood still often liquifies three times a year, on the first Saturday of May, September 19, and December 16; when it has failed to liquefy, it foreshadowed disasters for Naples. Spectrographic tests on the vial in 1902 and 1989 confirmed the presence of hemoglobin.

There have been more than seven thousand inexplicable cures since the Virgin appeared in Lourdes in 1858, according to the Italian Doctors Association. In 1905, Pope Pius X asked that all cases of alleged miracles or cures recorded in Lourdes be analyzed scientifically. Patients and their medical history are examined by doctors of the medical commission to determine the veracity of the cures.

The Hebrew prophecies of the Messiah, alongside the narrations of the Old Testament, can be proven to have been written before Christ. The Ketef Hinnom Scrolls (c.600 BC) from Numbers, For example, Sennacherib's Annals describes the Assyrian king Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC during the reign of king Hezekiah, matching the texts of Paralipomenon and Isaias.

Opponents of biblical chronology engage in circular reasoning by using fossils and rocks to date each part of a geologic column, yet many rock layers have extensive, tight folds and fossilized remains of animals crossing multiple strata, indicating a singular cataclysmic event, such as a world flood, and putting into question the idea that these strata were laid down gradually over millions of years.

While the Turkish government has not permitted an expedition to explore the site, US Air Force reconnaissance photos from 1949 show what appears to be a part of the Ark. In 2008, reportedly, seven wooden compartments were found buried near the peak and radiocarbon-dated wood from the otherwise barren site is dated to about 4,800 years old, the time of the deluge.

Like the Old Testament, the cylinders of Nabonidus (550 BC) refer to Baltasar as Nabonidus' eldest son and the personal seal impression of King Ezekias of Juda (c. 700 BC) calls him the son of Achaz; likewise, the Mesha Stele (c. 850 BC) describes the victories of Moabite king Mesha over the House of Omri of the kingdom of Israel, and the Tel Dan Stele refers to King David in Phoenician.

Among other artifacts, a relief portrays the siege of Lachish (701 BC) by Assyrian King Sennacherib, the Nabuchodonosor Chronicle describes his siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC, a copy of the Nabonidus Chronicle describes the conquest of Babylon by the Persian king Cyrus the Great, and the Cylinder of Cyrus from 530 BC coincides with accounts from Paralipomenon, Esdras and Nehemias.

In 1859, Sister Teresa Gesta of the Franciscan Tertiaries in Foligno appeared to Sister Anna Felicia exclaiming that she was being tormented in purgatory and planted her hand on the door, leaving a handprint brunt in the wood. Her crypt was opened and the handprint was matched to the hand of her corpse. Many such proofs are exhibited at the Chiesa del Sacro Cuore del Suffragio in Rome.

The miraculous snowfall in Rome on 5 August 358 showed to Pope Liberius I the site of the future basilica of Santa Maria Magiorre. Floodwaters from the Sorgue and Rhône rivers parted in 1433 for the Eucharist exposed in a monstrance on the altar of a Franciscan church near Avignon. Exorcisms and the use of relics such as the Agnus Dei wax disc have been shown to divert the course of storms.

Whether a network of plenipotentiary deities or a collection of admittedly fictional avatars of natural elements, polytheism cannot explain how the actions of deities could have been coordinated without an almighty force to establish and maintain order. A single, omnipotent and impassible God must exist to account for the origin and sustenance of the evident corpus of natural and supernatural laws.

Besides now-debunked hoax findings such as the “Piltdown Man,” there is a lack of evidence for any transitional species between primates and humans (which would have contradicted the biblical story of the origin of mankind and of its origin sin), rendering human macro-evolution mere speculation. Evolutionists fail to explain the reason or manner in which many human cognitive skills developed.

Modern cosmologists affirm that the geocentric model of Tycho Brahe remains viable: naturalistic observations of the revolutions of moons, planets and stars can be explained in models with the earth being motionless, as the Psalms of David teach. Non-Catholic flat-earth theories have been refuted in favor of the spherical globe doctrinally and iconographically taught by the Catholic Church.

There is nothing in Christianity’s founding figure that is not in line with all of the writings about the Messias, who the Hebrew prophets wrote would be a descendant of King David of the tribe of Juda born of a virgin in Bethlehem, entering Jerusalem riding on the foal of an ass, being tortured to death for the iniquities of others, buried in a rich man’s tomb, and rising alive from the dead.

The prophet Daniel wrote that Christ would be slain before the destruction of the Second Temple and city of Jerusalem— which indeed occurred 37 years after the Crucifixion of Jesus, and that the people that shall deny him would be cast off. Indeed, the scattering of the Jewish people, as Moses had warned, occurred by order of Roman Emperor Hadrian in AD 132 after the Bar Kokhba revolt.

The Bible nowhere claims to be the only source of divine truth; rather, the Catholic Church chose the Scriptures which form part of its canon, and uniformly holds the Latin Vulgate to be divinely inspired Scriptures. Protestants lack reasonable arguments in favor of the inspiration of any such Scripture other than subjective experiences and interpretations from the very books in question.

Muhammad claimed no miracles during his life-time except victory in battle and the dictation of the Koran. In contrast, the Koran asserts that prophet Isa, born of a Virgin, could heal ailments and raise the dead to life. It was many years after his death that the first suggestion of outright miracles was made by his followers: the first biography of Muhammad was written 150 years after his death.

Both Sahih Al-Bukhari and Jami` at-Tirmidhi describe seven stacked flat earths, and the Koran says that the earth is spread out like a bed or carpet, with the sun setting in a muddy spring. Muslims accept the flat-earth theory in practice when they pray in the direction of the Qibla, for they do not account for the curvature of a spherical earth when determining the direction of the Kaaba.

The Koran teaches that sperm proceeds from between the sulb (backbone) and the tara’ib (ribs). In contrast to science, Muhammad teaches that a child will inherit the gender of that parent which discharges first during sexual intercourse and that the embryo spends forty days as a drop of sperm without gender, forty as a clot, and forty as a piece of flesh, according to Sahih Al-Bukhari hadiths.

The Sunnis’ top hadith compilation assert that the Nile and Euphrates rivers flow from heaven and that the plague will never enter Medina, yet both assertions have since been proven false; fallaciously, Muhammad endorses drinking camel urine and applying a housefly as medicine, using black cumin as a cure for all diseases except death, and eating seven dates to thwart the effects of any poison.

The Koran orders Muslim husbands to strike wives from whom disloyalty and ill-conduct are feared. Islam condones contractual prostitution (in the form of Shia-endorsed nikah mut'ah) and the sexual exploitation of children: Sunni sources agree that the man Muhammad, being a universal model of conduct, married a six-year-old doll-playing girl and had sex with her when she was nine years old.

Contravening Muhammad’s affirmations of the Torah and Gospel, Muslims claim these scriptures have since been corrupted, yet copies of each, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls (III c. BC) and Codex Sinaiticus (IV c. AD), have been incontrovertibly dated to before Muhammad’s time, and largely match the Masoretic text of the Jews and the official 1590 Latin Vulgate of the Catholic Church.

Mecca cannot be shown to have been an important trading center, nor was it on any significant trade route, nor was it charted in ancient maps. There is no mention of “Muhammad” in Arab literature until AD 692. Geographical studies suggest that primitive Islamic qiblas pointed towards Petra until AD 706. With such gaps in fundamental historicity, it can be argued that Islam was a later invention.

Despite the burning of different versions by Uthman and Al-Hajjaj, the Koran had so many textual variants that its text was standardized only in AD 1924. Even so, there are many contradictions in the facts it purports to teach. For example, it claims that the only food inmates in hell will have is dari, a thorny bush growing in hellfire, then it states that the discharge of wounds will be their only food.

Its Bridge of Sirat, reference to Ezra’s divinity, inclusion of Mary in the Trinity and ignorance of the decalogue betray non-Abrahamic origins. Islam condemns associating partners with Allah, yet its Shahadah has the prophethood of Muhammad alongside the godhood of Allah. Strict monotheism is undermined at the Kaaba, with its black stone that “will testify in favor of those who touched it.”

In AD 627, Muhammad presided over the Banu Qurayzah massacre of hundreds of men and boys showing signs of puberty. The Koran explicitly calls for all non-Muslims to be instilled with terror, slain and persecuted wherever they are found: offensive jihad has been persistently used against Zoroastrians, Copts, Hindus, and other kafir, such as in the 1310 massacre of Christians in Erbil.

Well can the practitioners of yoga and other forms of sorcery prove the preternatural efficacy of their rituals and incantations, but likewise can the Church use these phenomena to confirm its doctrine that evil spirits can grant to willing human participants the power to successfully break the laws of nature with the ulterior motive of seizing the immaterial souls of more people in the afterlife.

Masonic doctrine teaches initiates that all religions are good, despite being self-contradictory— and even with the silencing of detractors with explicit blood oaths, it has been revealed to culminate in devil-worship. This deliberate worship of evil explains why masonic groups orchestrated many elements of the French Revolution, culminating in the “Reign of Terror” and Vendée genocide.

Bahaism claims to be peaceful, yet seeks to impose a world dictatorship from Haifa; it supports contradictory manifestations of the divine, and has no way to differentiate false manifestations from true ones. Bahais claim that manifestations of the divine occur hundreds of years apart, yet Bábism’s founder died and was superseded by Bahá'u'lláh nine years after the beginning of his dispensation.

Catholicism foments social order independent of the will of self-interested tyrants, mobs, or cabals with its beliefs in a perfectly just God who manifestly promises to never cease to punish the wicked and reward the good, in thoroughly delianted gradations of sin each with corresponding temporal or eternal punishments, in hell with its manifold torments, and in the various heavenly degrees of glory.

The Holy Office prevented the bloodshed that accompanies religious upheaval and infighting by securing public order and preventing the development of cults contrary to the common good. Barred by ancient law from shedding blood, Catholic priests do not kill humans, but hand convicts to laic authorities: secular regimes encourage depraved vices by forsaking traditional punishments.

Popes repeatedly forbade slavery and theologians denounced its evils; Church law has upheld it only as a punishment for explicit crimes. While non-Catholic masters often treated slaves cruelly, forcing marriage, family separations, illiteracy and castration at will, Catholic clerics such as Acacius of Amida, Eligius of Noyon and Peter Claver were dedicated to manumit or alleviate the enslaved.

By reasonably limiting the age and consanguinity of marriage couples, the Church grants freedom for people to marry in a manner that is biologically expedient. Forbidding the evils of divorce and adultery, the Church teaches that a valid marriage is indissoluble until death, logically encouraging an anterior period of courtship when couples can confirm their mutual compatibility for marriage.

Contemporary science agrees that growing up in an intact family with one's married biological parents confers the greatest benefit to children: indeed, Catholic social order protect children’s rights by outlawing adultery and divorce, forbidding the killing, maiming, and freezing of developing children, and allowing minors to choose the right religion even against the parents’ will.

Jeanne Jugan founded the Little Sisters of the Poor to care for the aged, as did many other monks and nuns who ran hospitals for the sick. Fr. Damien of Molokai and St. Aloysius Gonzaga gave their lives to take care of the sick. Such hospitality is rooted in Christian principles. The Catholic Church nominally remains the largest non-government provider of health care services in the world.

While Luther reportedly advocated killing retarded children, saints such as Dymphna of Ireland dedicated their lives to their care. Even in 1927, Catholic Justice P. Butler was the sole dissenter in the US Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell upholding the sterilization of the feeble-minded. The Church, thankfully, upholds the value of each individual soul, from conception to natural death.

The Church acknowledges the reality of racial distinctions, e.g. praying that the curse of Cham may be removed from the Central Africans, while advocating for the just treatment of all peoples. Pope Paul III in 1537 forbade the enslavement of the Native Americans, and in 1591, Pope Gregory XIV ordered reparations to be made by Catholics in the Philippines to the natives that had been enslaved.

No Roman pontiff may err when defining doctrine regarding faith or morals, as such definitions must conform to existing rules, in contrast to a cult leader who could exercise unbridled control over the rules for his believers. Under pain of excommunication and loss of office, all Church leaders are forced to operate under a narrow set of immutable tenets and principles agreed to by all believers.

While other religions change their doctrine due to external factors, only Catholicism claims to be the sole true religion irrespective of the time and place: such devotion to unchanging principles has been shown by the believers’ willingness to forfeit wealth, reputation and life rather than betray that faith in missionary endeavors around the world and in anti-Catholic persecutions throughout history.

In direct contradiction to defined dogmas of the Church, the false council of 1962-1965 accepts the God of the Muslims, condones non-Catholics receiving Catholic sacraments, promotes regulating the number of children, favors laicism and displays of religious indifferentism, prescribes radical liturgical changes and considers man, not God, as the center and summit of all things on earth.

Its chief prerogative being the Salvation of souls, the laws and practices of the Church include noted exceptions for grave incommodities while remaining internally consistent, not presenting undue burdens on believers. Baptism is no burden in water scarcity, prayer at fixed intervals is not required, Confessions are confidential, and unchanging human rights are enshrined, including self-defense.