The Mass is believed to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ made present on an altar of sacrifice o be offered for the living and the dead.
Selling Masses would be a sin called Simony.
Simony is named after
Simon Magus who tried to purchase the gift of God with money from Peter.
Catholics might like to have Masses offered for the dead and the priests love offering them far more because they are paid for them. The fee is usually £9.00. It is called a stipend.
The custom these days is, is to have a Mass
offered about a month after the person dies and then on every anniversary. The Catholics hold that some people have to
go to a place of punishment as severe as Hell, Purgatory, to be purified of sin
before they can go to Heaven so the Masses soften God’s anger so that they will
get out of Purgatory quicker. See the
emotional blackmail in this?
When a person dies and is laid out in the house, Mass cards are bought for a small sum each and these are given to the relatives by those who visit them to see the corpse. They are laid on the coffin and cover the corpse as reminders that the merits won by the sacrifice of the Mass cover the deceased’s lack of merit.
The priestly practice of selling pre-signed Mass cards takes the biscuit altogether. They are sold for something like £1.50 each and are mainly for the dead though they can be obtained for almost any occasion. In the case of the dead, the cards are taken by people to the house where the dead person lived and where he is being waked and given to the relatives. The signature of the celebrant is printed on them. You have to write the name of the dead person on them and the priest gets a jotter with names of people the Masses were purchased for which he certainly will not look at for thousands of cards are sold every week.
The priest could make a fortune out of a single Mass and of course he cannot say one Mass for every card. He could get £500 for a Mass for one person. He could get £50 for a Mass for ten people. It all depends on how many people buy the cards. None of this is fair. He will probably say the one mass for all these people.
These masses are simply making money out of the dead.
The priests who tolerate the Mass cards are no better than those who sell them. If the Church stops the scandalous practice it will be too late. It would still be a mistake to trust her after her behaviour. The damage is done forever for Jesus said what cannot be trusted in small cannot be trusted in anything else and the Church would be trusting the Church of the past to some extent. Mary in her apparitions says nothing about these scandals in the Church which makes us question if the apparitions are real.
Is the pope sincere when he claims that there is far too much merit to atone for sin and he can use the surplus to cancel the punishment of the souls in Purgatory through giving out indulgences? This contradicts the doctrine that serious sin is endlessly bad for if it is endlessly bad it needs an endless atonement. It insults the Bible doctrine that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin which is in the First Epistle of John. The Church contradicts John the apostle so it can hardly deserve to be called the apostolic Church.
Is the pope sincere when he has people paying for Masses to atone for the souls in Purgatory to help pay the debt of punishment the souls owe to to God so that they may be released sooner when through his power of indulgences he could release them all at a stroke? This is simply the Church using the dead to make money. It is prostituting the dead. It is the sin of Simony for which Peter invoked great evil on Simon Magus for committing. The priests are consenting to this this evil. Where are their protests?
The pope says that the worst evil is being unable to enter the presence of God. So he inflicts a great evil on the souls in Purgatory by helping to keep them there. He might say that is punishment they deserve. But it does them no good. Going to God keeps you perfect and makes you enjoy the happiness of being good. Good punishment tries to help you see the happiness of being good. The pope is just vindictive. Those who say he is lovely and sweet are just turning a blind eye to the evidence that he is fake. They demean themselves by what they say.
Annual cemetery Masses for
the dead are very popular today. They
are held in the summer time and in many places the inevitable plastic bucket is
passed from person to person to make it the most profitable local religious
money spinner of the year.
Interestingly, the Church
says that it does not charge for Masses but only accepts the offerings that
people make in gratitude for the great service rendered to their loved
ones. The favour is getting the departed
out of, or closer to it, Purgatory. Purgatory is
a place of purification and suffering where you have to go after death if you
are not fit to enter the presence of God but not sinful enough to go to Hell
forever. If
all this is true then the smaller the stipend the lesser the gratitude. To throw the priest an old tenner is to let down those who are liberated from
Purgatory by his Masses.
Priests claim that they
don’t force anybody to pay them and will say Masses without it. There is social pressure put on the people to
pay. People would be too embarrassed to
go to the priest empty-handed. Friends
would ask them how much the Mass cost so they would pay to avoid lying. The priest is grateful for the fact that
people are forced to pay and takes advantage of that while boasting that he is
so selfless that he doesn’t mind doing Mass for nothing. His insincerity is evidenced by the fact that
he takes the money and keeps the coercive tradition up when one sentence could
halt it and suppress it in his parish.
The Church teaches that it would be a sin to risk offending the priest
in case he sins over it and to make a priest sin is worse than making an
ordinary person sin for the priest is consecrated to God. If priests are going to say the Mass anyway
what do they accept payment for?
The priests do not
make sure that the person who feels they have no choice but to pay for Masses
are shown the alleged truth that they are wrong. You will search a long time before you find anybody
who was told that they didn't have to feel forced.
Some say that Masses have
to be paid for because financially supporting the Church is an act of charity
and can be offered to God to vicariously help the souls just like any other
good deed. This means that the more you
give the priest the better. Not giving
all you can is making little of your friends in Purgatory for if you loved them
you would spend anything to free them.
Giving until it hurts increases the power of the Mass to help the souls.
Priests who don’t charge
are no better than those who do for they don’t kick up a fuss to try and stop
the practice.
Priests can say the Masses
for nothing therefore they should. There
are other ways to raise funds and make money.
It is disgraceful how some priests like Fr D. Crasso,
S.J. (who wrote a book called Why Does God…?, St Paul Publications, Bucks, 1970 in which he told this
big lie) claim that priests have the right to charge for Masses because it is
their only means of subsistence. A person
would need to have no thinking capacity to believe that! Even knocking door to door looking for
donations would be better. The Church is
wealthy enough so no priest should need to sell Jesus.
Sometimes, priests claim that they are not selling Masses for the Mass belongs to God. If they are not then the employee is not selling her or his services. It is theft to sell what is not theirs and that is what the priests are doing. They are selling God for the whole point of Mass is communion so they are selling God under the form of bread. They are prostituting God.
You need as much evidence for the existence of the sun as you do to say that God is a wafer for the priest might not have been validly ordained or might have chosen to fake the consecration of the wafer. Or perhaps the Church is wrong that the wafer turns into the body of God. Jesus could refuse to enter the communion wafer under some circumstances but the Church says he always becomes the wafer. He must be forced then when he goes that far! The Church has no evidence that it is not knowingly or unknowingly forcing God into a wafer for sale. But it still sells the wafer God.
The Mass proclaims the
priest to be superior to God. The Mass treats God like a trinket.
They are putting God up for sale.
Catholics will be upset when they hear that a rich man who committed a lot of Purgatory-sins will go to Heaven quicker than the poor almost saintly man just because he had more money to leave the priests to have Masses celebrated for the repose of his soul. Catholics reply that though the priests will offer a lot more Masses for the rich man, we have no way of knowing what God will do with the sacrifices offered in them. God might accept them as atonement for the sins of the poor man rather than the rich man who paid for them. If God distributes his blessings as he sees fit then he will help those who need his help most.
The Church is
deliberately overlooking one thing: the Masses are meant to help the rich man
and might help him and not the poor man especially when the rich man is the one
who needs the most shielding from God’s anger and who needs the most help. And again you will search a lot before you
find a Catholic who has heard of this doctrine that God does what he pleases
with the Masses. The practice of saying
masses for specific individuals proves that the Masses are for those
individuals. And why can’t the Mass be offered in general and instead of one person
specifically? It would be if God really could do
what he likes with the merits in the Mass. There is no need to give
the impression that it is for one person if it is not so the Church does intend
it to be for one person and is telling God to forget about whoever
needs the most help and to give it to the person the Mass was offered for just
because the priest was paid.
Suppose the poor man paid for a Mass for himself after his death while the Rich man paid for hundreds for the repose of his soul. Catholics claim that since the rich man gave out of his abundance that his Masses won’t be as powerful as the poor man’s Mass for it hurt the poor man a lot to purchase his Mass. No, for neither made a great sacrifice for how can leaving money to anyone be a sacrifice when you are dead?
You can say the rich man finds it harder because of his avarice to leave money for Masses than the poor man making the rich man's the bigger sacrifice. It would be harder to part your wealth than to give away what little money you have when you are used to poverty. Or you can say the poor man didn't pay for his Mass in a spirit of sacrifice but to avoid the pains of Purgatory that he feared. The argument that the Rich Man's sacrifice must be lesser than the poor man's doesn't work at all.
And
besides the Church teaches that the most important good work we can do is to go
to Mass and so the rich man is superior to the poor man when he pays for
Masses.
Some say that “It is a mistake to say that the rich man did more good than the poor man because he could get more Masses said and Masses are the most important things and good works in the world. God will regard the poor man as just as good because he would have done the same if he could have.” But actions speak louder than words and Jesus agreed for he said that people coming before him calling him Lord and reminding him of the miracles they did wouldn't be enough for him and he wanted action from them. So the rich man because he pays for more Masses is regarded as better and more worthy than the poor man. The poor man would do anything, if he was good, to pay for Masses and even fast or starve three days a week to manage it. If he failed then the rich man was better.
The message is, the more
money you give to the Church the holier you are and the greater the chance that
your stay in Purgatory will be short. It
would be a sin to let yourself go to Purgatory or to be kept in it.
It is theft to play on the
grief of the bereaved to obtain money.
Parting people and their money by blackmail is theft. It is no help to say that the graces won may
help departed people you don’t even know instead of your loved ones. We have to help strangers so we are still
being blackmailed.
Clearly, priests are
saying, “Hand over your cash or we will roast your loved ones in Purgatory if
they are still there”. With this caring
attitude, their prayers for the dead can’t be of any value or much avail for
there is no love in them and real love is a prayer. The Masses would offend the dead for this
reason.
A mortal sinner deserves
and is going to Hell forever. A venial sinner deserves not Hell but
Purgatory. The priests’ Masses are
devoid of value to God for their prayers are unacceptable to him if he really is
a being who accepts
only pure love. They tell sinners that
they can do good while harbouring evil in their hearts
which is a barefaced lie. When the priests believe that a mortal sinner cannot
do real good for he is attached to sin, they know that
it is the same with a venial sinner. The
principle that condemns the mortal sinner’s goodness condemns the venial
sinner’s. Many feel that they are in it
for the money and by taking your fiver or whatever they are telling you that
that is all your loved one is worth if she or he is in
agony in Purgatory.
Priests get their income
from the people. Then they have to get
money to say Masses for their benefactors.
There is just no gratitude in them.
They have no respect or love for the deceased. They are just flatterers when they pray.
If we love our dead we
will not mock and insult them by having anything to do with any Catholic
religious rites which are allegedly held on their behalf for they are not marks
of respect at all. Some of us will be
attacked by our families for staying away from
It is even worse that
You know that if you live
on in this body you are more likely to live than you are if you die. Then for a priest and a Church to come along
and tell you that God should be praised for taking lives and to “comfort” you
with this astonishing attitude is something that he should be corrected
for. God has no right to take lives and
expect praise for it and the comforts of the Church cannot work and are really
insults and will bring more pain in the long run.
Humanism offers a way to
be free from fear and bad inclinations and to become happy without drawing upon
alleged forces from another world to do it.
The system works by using your own earthly resources and is
non-spiritual for that reason. For a
religion to offer benefits through sacraments is to offer a distraction from
the system and give false hope when there is a better way. The sacraments are therefore anti-virtue and
anti-happiness and deserve no reverence and priests need to realise that. The Eucharist being the chief sacrament is
naturally the most offensive.
The Bible said that those who preached the gospel could get paid for it. It is hard to believe that it would be permitted to make a profit from religion. The Bible does not say that preachers may have more than they need to do their work. There is no evidence that preachers were paid at all except with food and shelter. There is something vulgar about any religion making a profit. It shows that it is making money from the gift of God which is no better than trying to sell it.
The rule that you will burn in
Hell forever if you miss Mass on Sunday despite going every Sunday is just a
threat that is useful for getting people to attend and drop money onto the
collection plate. The rule is so harsh
it can’t be anything else but mercenary.
The Catholic Church should thoroughly research if the Mass really does
what it claims – makes people more like Christ.
It would return money paid for Masses and gathered at collections if it
does not or if the benefits have an alternative explanation.
The God of the Bible says that where sin is plentiful there grace abounds for those who are most sinful need the most help. The Catholic Church denies this because in its sacraments including the Mass, those who love the Lord the most get the most graces (page 9, CEC Journal, Bill Jackson, Indiana, September 1998)
Conclusion
The Catholic Church prostitutes its God and makes money from religion.
Apologetics and Catholic
Doctrine, Book 2, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, MH Gill
& Son,
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Pulpit, Aloysius Roche, Burns Oates & Washbourne
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Geoffrey Chapman, London-Melbourne, 1969
Martin Luther, Richard
Marius, Belknap Press of
Radio Replies, Vol 2, Frs
Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press,
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Charles Gore, MA, Longmans, Green & Co,
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Truth,
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Joseph Zaccello, Loizeaux
Brothers,
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Chadwick, Pelican, Middlesex, 1987
The Mass, Sacrifice and
Sacrament, William F Dunphy, CSSR,
Liguori Publications,
The Primitive Faith and
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Faith,
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The Web
Transubstantiation, Is it
a True Doctrine?
http://www.geocities.com/christian_apologist2001/
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible
2 Sept 08