In the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, a deliberate mistranslation of “Repent and Believe the Gospel” is perverted to read “Do Penance.” (Note: in the NASV, this has been correctly retranslated to “Repent and Believe the Gospel.” Interestingly, however, is the fact that the Catholic Church owns the publishing copyright for this Protestant Bible).

In the years leading up to the Reformation, Peter De Rosa in his book Vicars of Christ lists the following acts of abuses, which were commonly known within Catholicism:

“A deacon guilty of murder could be absolved for twenty crowns. A bishop who assassinated a foe could be absolved for three hundred livershalf. Half of the German wealth went straight to the Church. They were exempt from all taxes and all obligations. On a quite ordinary day, John XXII excommunicated one patriarch, five archbishops, thirty bishops and forty abbots. Their only crime – they were behind in paying the pope his taxes” (p. 160-165).

We also have the following shameful quote from Johann Tetzel, from 1564:

“I have saved more souls by my indulgences than the Apostle [Peter] by his sermons….at that very instant that the money rattles at the bottom of the chest the soul escapes from Purgatory and flies liberated to heaven” (Thesis 56, 99, 100; 101, in D’Aubignes’s, History of the Reformation, Vol. 1).

And one more account for the reader:

“The period of the Crusade marks a turning point in the history of indulgences for they were given more and more freely from that time onwards. In the first place, it was to be noted that indulgences were given for wars analogous to the Crusades. For example, at the Council of Siena in 1425, a plenary indulgence was offered to those who took arms against the Hussites; while war against the Waldenses, Albigenses, Moors and Turks were stimulated by the same means” (Catholic Dictionary, p. 442).

(Only a couple of years ago or so, the Archbishop of Southwark informed his diocese that if they wished to walk from a church in South London to another one, an indulgence [time off in purgatory] would be granted. Needless to say, many parishioners took him up on this offer (some even refusing to take the tram home).

This is the kind of madness and heresy that was and still is rampant within a corrupt and false church.

 

JGB

2004

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