First of all, please be assured of my prayers. And I beseech you to give yourself over to earnest and persevering prayer and acts of penance, imploring Our Lord to give you the light necessary for you to walk the path of His commandments, that is, to be a devout child of Holy Mother Church.

Secondly, the paucity of time and the limitations of present circuмstances cannot permit me to address all of your queries. I will, however, direct you to a tome, regarding your question about the Apocalypse of St. John, chapter xii.



There is a great book which you ought to read, written by Rev. Fr. Thomas Livius, C.Ss.R., (please click on the title to link you to the PDF file) Mary in the Epistles, or, The Implicit Teaching of the Apostles Concerning the Blessed Virgin Contained in Their Writings, Illustrated from the Fathers and Other Authors with Introductory Chapters (London: Burns & Oates, Ltd., 1891).

In that book, Rev. Fr. Livius explains the vision recorded by St. John in the twelth chapter of his Apocalypse:[/size]

Fr. Kramer's "Book of Destiny" explains the Apocalypse in detail.

The woman in labour represents the Church in his opinion - I think, not totally sure on that one.

This is a more concise and singular version of my confusion. To make it easier for everybody and so I don't come off as a troll.

Don't worry, I don’t think anyone thought you were a troll, just that there was a better way of doing things. Thanks for putting everything in one thread. When more questions occur to you, I think you should update this thread with them.

I’m going to try to answer some of your questions. Hopefully my responses are of help and don't just raise further questions.

Fourth: if you sell your soul to the devil and you get what you want, can you come back to God?

Yes, you can, and we have it from scripture that he and his hosts will rejoice more at your return than if you’d never strayed.

And if you do repent, is it a sin to use what you were given?

I’m not sure, but I think that one’s compunction would not allow one to use resources acquired through sin, except for purely charitable purposes.

Fifth: I keep reading everything involving Christianity and it seems Catholicism makes the most sense, but I’m skeptical of joining it. I’ve been raised Catholic, but the claims of Fundies bug me. What do I do?

You should receive catachesis at the foot of a traditional priest, and pester him with your questions!

Since you have trouble coming to grips with Catholic veneration for Mary, for the Saints, and for the sacrament of confession, you should spend time meditating on them and perhaps seeking their company. You should feel your way forward inch by inch, testing whether the hold is solid before you place your full weight on it. I don’t mean you should think about things, I mean you should pray and meditate on them to determine their reality and their true force. As for confession, you could spend some time imagining, in emotional and sensory detail, what it might be like to make a confession, render satisfaction, and be absolved of your sins. Go to mass early and watch people in line for confession; and see for yourself the disencuмbered and transformed soul as it emerges from the dark recess of the confessional.

Speaking as a convert myself, I am always slightly boggled by the protestant mistrust of Mary, the Saints, and confession. They are such wonderful, beautiful, obvious truths that, if one’s heart is open, one practically has only to hear of them to believe in them.

Sixth: Idolatry. If the Jєωs believed in the Ten Commandments in Jesus' days as Protestants do today, then why do we make statues? Or such? Ik of the Bronze Serpent, the Ark, and Solomon's Temple, but why do we rearrange it?

The pagans used to imbue their statues with the actual presence of different gods, demons, and ancestors in rites we know of as ‘thaumaturgy’. These thaumaturgical statues formed, for example, the ritual keystone of the ancient Egyptian and Sumerian religions, among others, and were worshipped in fact as gods.

Now, there are undeniably some similarities between the ancient practice of thaumaturgy and – most notably – the consecration and adoration of the host, in which a material support is infused with the real presence, not just of some demon or ancestor, but of the very Lord. The all-important differences lie, of course, in just that – that rather than bowing to murky beings low in the spiritual hierarchy, or perhaps even of the hierarchy of evil, beings conjured perhaps through black magic, in the Eucharist we worship the one true God, in a ritual devised and empowered personally by Christ.

Pious Catholic belief holds that the concrete depiction of the spiritual being, whether saint or angel, somehow contains that being’s localized presence to a certain degree. But this is not idolatry in the pagan sense, since the being is not worshipped but appealed to for intercession. The ancient pagans, for example, went so far as to make animal and vegetable sacrifices to their thaumaturgical statues, which should highlight for you the distance between their doctrines and ours.

How do we know that it was Mary in Revelation 12? Many have suggested that it was not Mary and it was Israel or the Church. One objection I heard was that John did not assert she was Mary, as he would have done if he were truly in contact with her, since he took care of her. However, he speaks of a child who will rule with an iron rod: obviously Jesus. Yet he does not assert his name, but he implies it.

I think the woman in Revelation 12 represents both the Church and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

St. Quodvultdeus, Bishop of Carthage, Sermo III de Symbolo (Third Homily On the Symbol):

"In the Apocalypse of the apostle John it is written that the dragon stood in full view of the woman about to give birth, in order that when she gave birth, he would eat the child born [of her]. We all know that the Dragon is the devil and that the woman signifies Mary, who, remaining intact, brought forth our chaste head. She who also showed forth in herself a figure of holy Church, so that as she in bringing forth a Son remained a virgin, so the Church also should during all times be bringing forth his members, and yet not lose her virgin estate."

St. Quodvultdeus was a friend and and a disciple of St. Augustine and this sermon was once attributed to St. Augustine.