misconceptions

I have zero reason to believe Pope Joan to be anything other than a mud-slinging attempt.

As to your point 5., I agree that many people do not bother to do their own research. However, this goes back much further than you might think, and is hardly in any way specific to Catholics. I used to see guys "preaching" on college campuses who would pretty much make stuff up. For instance, we had a guy who insisted any man with long hair would go *straight* to Hell if he still had long hair when he died, because men should never have long hair. My guess is that, so far as he knew, "Samson" was a guy who developed a material for making suitcases.

I am not surprised at all to find that Catholics, like everyone else, are misinformed about various aspects of their religion. The *reason* we have clergy is, in no small part, that we've got two thousand years of accumulated theology here, and it's way too much for anyone to know.

While you are correct that there are a lot of Church documents going back a long way, this is just as true of every branch of Christianity. We all trace our roots back to twelve guys who knew this one guy we like to think was very important. Everything we know, we know because they told other people their story, or because Moses and his friends used to write stuff down. It goes back all that way, and of *course* it's a lot of stuff.

Luckily, we can get it down to bare essentials: Jesus is Lord, and guess what, *He likes us*. That's probably enough to get you into Heaven, where you can follow up on all the other stuff.

1. There are and have been in the past MANY, MANY Catholics. All of them are human, and each has their own spiritual path. They theoretically each could have a slightly different opinion of what the Catholic faith is... and they share this with others.

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Theoretically. But in practice, Catholics have been more likely to adhere to the viewpoints of the Holy See than to strike out on their own with novel ideas. When a Catholic does get novel ideas, he usually becomes a Protestant, a la' Martin Luther.

2. The Catholic religion has existed 2000 years. This is a long time for rumors to spread.

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And most of them rumors was started by good ol' boys like little Jackie Chick.

3. There have been many Councils and Popes, each of which has written statements of the faith. There are thousands of pages of documents which are considered the official documents of the Church. (Some of these are in Latin (the meaning of which can be obscure when it is translated.))

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Si hoc signum legere potes, operis boni in rebus Latinus alacribus et fructuosis potiri potes!

4. Some Catholics do not know the history of their own religion, even though they may know the catechism.

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I can say the same for many Protestants.

For example, some may say that priests were never allowed to marry. This is not true. Priests in the Early Church were allowed to marry until as late as the 1400's.

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Incorrect; you're about 300 years off. Clerical celibacy was made mandatory for all Latin-rite clergy at the 2nd Lateran Council in 1139.

Another possible myth is that the Roman Catholic Church would never have a woman priest. If you will look at the papal history of the Roman Catholic Church carefully, you will find that one of the POPES was alledged to be a woman!!!!! Pope John VIII was the POPE in question, some call her Pope Joan. (Legend has it that all thought she was a man until she stopped by the side of the road and delivered a baby!!!! (Then the crowd stoned her, because this was heresey.) Perhaps it was heresey, but it still may have happened! Catholics have denied this since the Reformation, but there are several writings that acknowledge her existence that were written before that time. This is interesting stuff.

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Pope Joan is a legend, nothing more. For more information, I highly recommend the appendix in J.N.D. Kelly's Oxford Dictionary of Popes.

5. There is a disturbing trend in the Catholic faith (and many other faiths as well) to NOT study the Bible or catechism at all. Instead, these people (who say they have no time to study) take other people's ideas as fact without consulting the Bible or their catechism. This results in a faith that is distorted by the human element of rumor and the human nature to twist beliefs so that they favor their own position instead of the position of the Church.

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Reading Scripture is highly recommended by the Church, and in fact, every Catholic convert is given a Bible by the Church. Another interesting fact is that the Catholic Church uses a rotating three-year cycle of Scripture readings at Mass, which cover the entire Bible, including the Deuterocanonical books; the priest must base his homilies on the readings of the day, whereas a Protestant pastor is free to choose his own texts and to discuss them at length for however long he chooses, even for weeks sometimes. As a result, at the end of three years, the average Catholic sitting in the pew has been exposed to more Scripture than the average Protestant has, provided that neither of them study it on their own but simply depend on what they hear on Sunday morning. Ironic, eh?

Many Catholics, even in this age of the internet and practically instant information, are misinformed about the tennets of their own religion.

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Very true. Blame it on the nosedive that Catholic catechesis took in this country during the Sickening Sixties. That situation, however, is starting to turn around ever so slowly.

To prove my point, I will tell you that one of the people on this forum even told me that Mary was not considered to be a mediatrix, and challenged me to find a statement to prove that she is called a mediatrix in the catechism. By the way, it's in paragraph 969 of the Chatechism of the Catholic Church!

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This is why you never consult lay Catholics. If you want to know what the Vatican says, consult the Vatican. If a lay Catholic tells you something, double-check it with what the Vatican says. If there is a discrepancy, the Vatican is right and the lay Catholic is wrong. If a priest tells you something that is in discrepancy with the Vatican, the Vatican is still right and the priest is wrong.

The scary thing is, I could figure out what the Latin said, although I didn't get all the words. I could tell it was a variant on "if you can read this, you can get a good job", and something about how good the job was, and that it involved Latin.

"If you can read this sign, you can get a good job in the high-paying, fast-paced world of Latin!"