Against the Adventists

The following is a (slightly edited) copy of a letter I sent to a friend who just started attending a Seventh Day Adventist church:

Howdy,

I hear you're looking for a new church, and that you're currently attending a Seventh Day Adventist church.

I want to at least put out the invitation to join me in the Catholic Church, the Church I believe history shows to be the original Christian Church, the one most likely founded by Jesus Christ himself. Trust me, I know such claims sound arrogant and frankly obnoxious. They sounded that way to me when I heard people say them in the past. But I gradually came to believe the claims were true, and I can provide historical and Biblical citations to back them up.

Invitation concluded, I don't expect you to actually take me up on the offer... for a few reasons:

1. I was married to a Catholic girl for about 5 years before I even considered that her centuries old church might have something valid to say in its defense.

2. Catholic parishes don't tend to have the sense of community common to Protestant churches. This is for a variety of reasons, primarily though it is because they are large and because they don't have adult Sunday School.

3. Americans are thoroughly educated in a mixed secular/Protestant culture, and taught secular/Protestant versions of history, in which the Catholic Church has an exaggerated role as "bad guy."

4. Following from #3, the media, while generally having a liberal slant, also has a strong history of having an anti-Catholic anti-hierarchical slant (consider the absurd number of stories on 20-year-passed accounts of priests involved in sexual abuse compared to the number of stories about school teachers involved in similar situations, despite the fact that public schools are far more dangerous for children than Catholic churches).

These things make it hard for most people to really even give a thought to the Catholic Church. But just pause for a moment and wonder if there might be something to the Church which produced the monks who hand-copied the Bible for over a thousand years before the printing press. If there might be something to the Church that evangelized Europe, much of Asia, and the Americas. There is hardly a Christian country in the world which was not first evangelized by the Catholic Church. Just something to think about.

That said, I still expect you to end up in a Protestant church, if only for the ever-important support of the community.

So, I just ask that you look for a more orthodox branch of Protestantism. I am sure your Adventist church is full of loving and wonderful people. But you should try to find a group of wonderful people who are backed by a better history, better worldview, and better theology. Seventh Day Adventism (SDA) is characterized by a sort of paranoid conspiracy theory, and it was founded during the Prophesy craze of the 1800s that also brought us the Mormons and Christian Science.

They believe that the Catholic Church is the "Whore of Babylon," and that the Pope is the Antichrist. These ideas are not uncommon in Protestantism, but SDA takes it a step further. Some believe that every secret society from the Masons to the KKK is really controlled by the Catholic Church (which is funny since both those organizations are virulently anti-Catholic). Their official teaching even goes further in believing that all the other Protestant denominations are really just pawns of the Catholic Church, bearing the "Mark of the Beast." What is this great evil that Catholics and Protestants are all conspiring together on? Eating babies? No, gathering for worship on Sunday! The horror. We dare to fulfill God's commandment to "honor the Sabbath" on the day of the resurrection instead of on the Jewish sabbath (Please note that these are not just accusations, most of my info on SDA is based on direct quotes from the religion's founder Ellen G. White and from SDA books I own).

I would like to add that Christ gave his apostles the power to "bind and loose," and using this authority the Church began Sunday worship before the New Testament was finished (see Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:2, Colossians 2:16-17, and Revelation 1:10). You can read more about the Sabbath vs. Sunday controversy here:

http://www.catholic.com/library/Sabbath_or_Sunday.asp

Read a Catholic overview of Seventh Day Adventism here:

http://www.catholic.com/library/Seventh_Day_Adventism.asp

In the end, you have to consider the two very different views of salvation history which the Catholic Church and the Adventists present.

Catholic View: Jesus established His Church as a "pillar of Truth"(1 Tim. 3:15), and though it has faced many difficulties from within (bad laity, bad Bishops, bad Popes) and persecutions from without (Nero, Stalin, etc.), it has persisted in preserving the truth and sharing the Gospel throughout the ages.

Adventist View: Christ's original Church was overcome by Satan and more-or-less disappeared, leaving behind a false Church (which for some reason persisted in spreading the Gospel, and reproducing the Bible). After 1,800 years of darkness, God sent Prophet E. G. White to lead his people back into the light.

Honestly, I cannot see the Adventist view as corresponding at all with a God who wants his people to know him, nor can I see Jesus as being so abysmal at establishing a Church.

I hope to hear from you. Please ask me any questions about Catholicism that you might have. I will be more than happy to answer you. I can give you citations for any claims I have made. And I would delight in telling you about the Early Church Fathers, successors of the Apostles, who as early as 100 AD were teaching clearly Catholic doctrines.

I have always viewed you as a part of my extended family, and it would be great if you would join my Church family, but I'd be happy to hear from you either way.

God Bless,

Nathan Cushman

Communist Conspiracies & Pope Pius XII

Many of us have heard the accusation that Pope Pius XII was in league with the Nazis, siding with them in their attempts to exterminate the Jews, or the less severe accusation that the Pope was more concerned with protecting Vatican property than with defending the Jews, leading him to remain mostly neutral.

The book, Pope Fiction: Answers to 30 Myths and Misconceptions About the Papacy, has a chapter on this accusation, which quotes the 1941 New York Times, saying, "the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism," and again in 1942 The New York Times reported that, "he assails violent occupation of territory, the exile and persecution of human beings for no reason other than race or political opinion." It also explains that at the end of the war, the Jews praised Pius XII for his help. I'll note that the full quotes, and the rest of the chapter give far more evidence, but this suffices to show that there has been some serious historical revisionism going on.

Then where did this accusation come from? The first time anyone heard this charge it was in a play called The Deputy. This play's supposed author, Rolf Hochhuth, cites an unnamed bishop along with various unconvincing documents (like some which just quote anti-Catholic Nazi officers) as proof of the play's claims.

What I just learned about this matter recently, though, is that the entire charge, and the play that brought it into public knowledge, may have originated as a communist plot.

Former KGB "Romanian point man," Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who helped perpetrate the plot wrote, "In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe."

He continues, in a 2007 article, to write, "Eugenio Pacelli, by then Pope Pius XII, was selected as the KGB’s main target, its incarnation of evil, because he had departed this world in 1958. 'Dead men cannot defend themselves' was the KGB’s latest slogan."

Pacepa worked to help "in pilfering hundreds of documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII out of the Vatican Archives and the Apostolic Library."

Though, "no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up," his superior in the KGB, General Ivan Agayants, still went ahead to create a "play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy, an oblique reference to the pope as Christ’s representative on earth. Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, and he told us that it had voluminous appendices of background documents put together by his experts with help from the documents we had purloined from the Vatican."

He goes on to write that, despite the fact that by 1974 "newly released information show[ed] that Hitler, far from being friendly with Pius XII, had in fact been plotting against him. [...]Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them."

For an even more detailed account of the whole controversy you can read The Myth of Hitler's Pope, by Rabbi David G. Dalin.