The hawkers have arrived before him and prepared the way with all kinds of merchandise for the faithful–for a price. With a choice of 193 “official” items, you can choose a T-shirt with the Pope’s likeness; an “exclusive Pope Francis Bobblehead” for $19.95; an “I Love Pope Francis” mug for $14.95; a “Pope Francis Rosary Keychain” for $4.95; a 4-inch “Pope Francis Figurine” for $11.95; a “Pope Francis Plush Doll” for $24.95; a “Pope Francis Holy Bear” for $11.95; a pair of “Team Pope Boxer Shorts” for $12.95; and on and on and on.

This is similar to the religious junk sold in almost all Protestant, even Baptist, bookstores that sell nail clips with “I Love Jesus”; “Hand and Body Cream” with Scripture verse; hand soap with “God Bless Our Home”; a whole food Bible Bar; Bobble Heads of Mary and Jesus; a glass ash tray with a “picture” of Jesus; pens, jewelry, etc. ad nauseam. But all promote cheap Christianity. And I am not referring to the price.

I suppose in this day of materialism the above is to be expected; however, there are limits–lines many Catholics will not cross. If the Church pitches an all-natural breakfast “Pope-tart” then many Catholics will dispose of their rosaries  quicker than long underwear in a Texas heatwave.

At the Pope’s first meeting with the international press he said, “How I would like a church that is poor and for the poor.” Well, he can take care of that. He has had much to say about the poor (whom Christ said would always be with us) and the disadvantaged; however, I will believe Francis is really concerned with the poor when he announces, advertises, and accomplishes a massive yard sale of the Vatican’s vast assets in St. Peter’s Square–with the proceeds going to poor Catholics.

According to the International Business Times, Francis is raffling off his espresso machine, wallets, a panama hat and other personal items with the proceeds going to the poor. Posters are all over the Vatican announcing this gambling venture that will aid the poor. Nice gesture but it is just that, a gesture. Now he should get serious and sell off the priceless works of art, jewels, books, etc. After all, the Roman Catholic Church is the richest institution on earth. That’s far from its alleged founder who didn’t have a place to lay His head.

Francis quoted the great Fourth Century preacher John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople who died in 407: “Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs.” Well, if it’s theirs then give it back. After raising maybe a trillion dollars in the world’s biggest and richest yard sale Francis could pass the proceeds to the poor in various nations depending on the percentage of Roman Catholics in those nations.

The Apostle Peter, allegedly the first pope, although there is no historical evidence that he was ever in Rome, didn’t only talk about the poor, he did something about it. In Acts 3:6, he was asked by a poor, lame man for some money and Peter replied, “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have, give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” And he did! Pope Francis can’t say “Silver and gold have I none” because he sits on unknown wealth in the Vatican. Neither can he say, “Rise up and walk.” He has great possessions but no godly power.

St. Peter’s Square is an ideal place for a yard sale with plenty of room for two million books; 80,000 valuable hand-written manuscripts; paintings by Raphael; statuary and works by Leonardo de Vinci; artwork of Michelangelo with tools used in work on the Sistine Chapel; embroidered silk vestments, religious relics and a touchable cast of Pope John Paul II’s hand. Wow, a touchable cast. Right or left hand? Additionally, there are hundreds of mosaics, frescoes, and bone fragments of Peter and Paul. But then only a fool or fanatic would put any credibility in bone fragments. But many would and the price tag would be enormous. How many people can boast, “I own some of Peter’s bone fragments”?

The “Holy Towel of Jesus” on which Christ wiped His face, and bears His image is kept in the Pope’s private chapel and could demand a huge price from one of the faithful buyers. Many other relics of inestimable value would sell “like hotcakes.” Also there is a thorn from His crown of thorns, milk from the Virgin Mary, and an object that at one time contained Christ’s umbilical cord! Not the cord itself but the object that the cord was in at one time! Of course, there are some splinters from His cross although there are enough pieces of the “original” cross upon which Christ died to build a modern house! Hyperbole perhaps, but only slight.

The Church also has some “filings” from the chains of Peter that they permit the hoi polloi to see at times that would bring a huge sum. But since Peter was not in Rome either as pastor or prisoner, where did the “filings” come from? Just wondering.

It seemed when European Roman Catholic Churches got short of funds during later Middle Ages, they “discovered” more relics to dazzle, deceive, and draw the naïve. And such actions always filled the offering plate just as the sale of indulgences built St. Peter’s starting in 1506 and completed in 1626. The Pope’s very public avarice in the sale of indulgences to simple-minded peasants, who were promised perpetual happiness in this world and eternal glory in the next, precipitated the Reformation. Future Popes refused to learn from their sorry, sinful, and sordid history and continued to sell indulgences to get people out of purgatory.

In my opinion, the Pope should stop selling indulgences and start selling the Church’s opulent holdings, including all the relics. Indulgences are toxic according to history. Francis should keep in mind that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. When does the yard sale begin?

I haven’t been to Rome in a while but I’ll be one of his customers. Maybe I can afford to purchase a splinter from the “true” cross!

http://bit.ly/1iMLVfY Watch these 8 minute videos of my lecture at the University of North Dakota: “A Christian Challenges New Atheists to Put Up or Shut Up!”

Catholics tell us that veneration of relics, especially bones, is justified because the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit! So any bones or property of a “saint” or the Savior had miracle-working powers. In about A.D. 400, Augustine condemned the excesses and outright scam of the relic business, ridiculing “hypocrites in the garb of monks for hawking about the limbs of martyrs,” adding cynically, “if indeed of martyrs.”

Why the props? Isn’t the Scripture sufficient? The reason Catholics and others refuse to base what they believe on the Bible is because what they believe conflicts with Bible teaching. Hence, a need for props.

The New York Times published an article on Jan. 16, 1881 in which they condemned “the silly worship of relics” and recounted an amusing anecdote of two rival French monasteries. They each possessed a head of John the Baptist! The monks, with amazing mental gymnastics, explained this uncomfortable detail by saying that the first skull belonged to John as a man while the smaller skull was from “when he was a boy.” I have seen the adult skull of John in a Damascus mosque.

One expert whose work was financed by National Geographic said, “There are about eight or nine skulls of John the Baptist out there. He added with a massive understatement, “They can’t be all John the Baptist.” Even this Baptist preacher can understand that! Various monasteries proclaim that they have the right hand of John the Baptist while another church displays the left arm of John. If some enterprising monk got to work, he might be able to put John back together again.

In Bethlehem they claim to have a drop of Mary’s milk and a 17th century painting shows a statue of Mary holding baby Jesus as she squirts milk into the mouth of a male worshipper standing below! Great shot!

Calvin suggested that “if we were to collect all these pieces of the True Cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship’s cargo.” He also said that there were more relics of the “true cross” than three hundred men could carry! He wrote of His Holy Blood that was “exhibited in more than a hundred places.” That is not only relic-worship but blasphemy.

During the mid-fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 315-386) wrote that “already the whole world is filled with fragments of the wood of the Cross.” More than forty shrouds of Jesus exist, so the story goes.

Late at night, astute Catholics wonder about all those nails from the original cross that could shoe every horse in Kentucky and enough wood from the original cross to supply fuel for every fireplace in Alaska for a hundred years. Well, almost.

Exeter Cathedral displayed parts of the candle that the angel of the Lord used to light the tomb of Jesus and fragments of the bush from which God spoke to Moses! I must not forget the sop of bread given to Judas, also some hairs from the Lord’s beard. Astounding!

These relics are a “cash cow” for each church that has one and for many years, it was required that each church or monastery had to possess at least one relic. That kept ye old relic scam working. It was common for a monastery to “find” a relic when they needed to raise money from the faithful. Since each relic contained special powers, distraught, disabled, and diseased people showed their generosity when praying before such a relic. Historian Durant tells of relic mongers who sold to eager believers “some of that very bread which our Lord pressed with His own teeth.” Does any sane person believe such things?

However, the relic of all relics is the foreskin of Jesus that was allegedly preserved; however, a dozen monasteries’ claim to have the relic! I think not! Such a system is worthy of criticism, correction, and contempt by sincere, thinking people.

Is anyone surprised that the Reformation happened? Protestants are not doing much protesting in our day! Is it time for another Reformation among Catholics and Protestants?

http://bit.ly/1iMLVfY Eight minute videos of my lecture at the University of North Dakota on “A Christian Challenges New Atheists to Put Up or Shut Up!”

Copyright 2014, Don Boys, Ph.D.

First of all, there is no way to support the silly possibility that the bones are the remains of Peter. That is simply wishful thinking by the Catholic hierarchy as they add to their dubious list of relics. The Church has thousands of bogus relics that help prop up its weak, wavering, wondering, wandering, and wobbly adherents.

The chest in which the bones were cased is more interesting than the bone fragments. The bones rested on an ivory bed in a bronze chest. The chest was decorated with a carving of Peter “who was a fisherman before becoming the Church’s first pope, casting his nets into the sea.” But then no one on earth knows what Peter looked like and, for sure, he was not the first pope, or second pope. He may have been executed in Rome but there is no proof for that. The church in Rome existed before Peter or Paul got there so neither was the church founder. The Catholic Church is built upon a shaky, sandy, spurious foundation and is held together by wishful thinking.

The affable Pope has recently confused many people with some public statements dealing with homosexuality and atheists going to Heaven. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church has insisted very strongly for hundreds of years that only Catholics were going to Heaven! So Francis is rocking the church-boat. It may be that the Pope does not know what he believes. Anyway, his handlers must be in panic about what he may say next.

Honest historians, even Catholic historians, admit that Peter was not the first pope. Eusebius was Bishop of Caesarea about 314 A.D. and suggests in his classic and ground-breaking Church History that Paul and Peter were founders of the church in Rome. However, a footnote corrects the record: “Neither Paul nor Peter founded the Roman Church in the strict sense for there was a congregation of believers there even before Paul came to Rome, as his Epistle to the Romans shows, and Peter cannot have reached there until some time after Paul. It was, however, a very early fiction that Paul and Peter together founded the church in that city.” The possibility of Peter founding the church in Rome and serving as its pastor is a fiction, fib, fable, falsehood, and fraud.

Rome would rather discuss whether Peter was a founder (with Paul) of the church in Rome instead of supporting their assertion that he was the first pope exercising central control of all churches. No one was the pope for hundreds of years although each succeeding Bishop of Rome gradually grabbed power for his office. During those hundreds of years all priests in small villages were called, “papa” or pope.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Peter’s successors to the papacy were Linus (A.D. 67 to 79), Cletus (A.D. 79 to 91) and Clement I (from A.D. 91 to 100), all three of whom were bishop of Rome during the time that the Apostle John was still alive. In other words, each of the three pastors at Rome would have had a higher pecking order than the Apostle John who was still alive! Does anyone, not blinded by fanatical religion, believe that is possible?

When the Apostle Paul wrote his church epistles giving the offices and duties and qualifications for various church offices, he never mentions a pope! Not one New Testament author refers to the Pope or one-man rule or papal succession. Paul greeted 26 people in his epistle to the Romans without mentioning the alleged top honcho, Peter! Paul wrote four letters from his Roman prison without mentioning that Peter came by to visit him. In fact, Paul said that he was “alone.” If Peter was in Rome, he had cowardly abandoned his friend and Apostle who was Nero’s prisoner! I believe Christ said something about visiting those in prison.

It seems that the first definite report that Peter and Paul founded the Roman Church was made by Dionysius of Corinth about 170 A.D. Historians Shotwell and Loomis declared, “That is a long way from contemporary evidence. We have no lists of the early bishops of Rome until about the same period, and those we have do not quite agree.”

Gibbon clearly disposed of the Roman Catholic’s position as to the founders of the Roman Church: “It is quite clear that, strictly speaking, the Church of Rome was not founded by either of these apostles. St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans proves undeniably the flourishing state of the Church before his visit to the city; and many Roman Catholic writers have given up the impracticable task of reconciling with chronology any visit of St. Peter to Rome before the end of the reign of Claudius or the beginning of that of Nero.” Peter was definitely in Israel during the time Catholics teach that he was in Rome. Even Peter couldn’t be in two places at the same time no matter how much “holy” water he had.

Knowing of the prestige of Peter, some people in Rome began giving him credit for being the first bishop at Rome and others picked up on that and continued to circulate that fabrication until the fable became a fact. Since then, Roman Catholics have taught the fiction rather than the fact since it plays better in Peoria and Pisa.

No bones about it: Peter’s bones have not been found and he was not the first pope. My critics will no doubt smell anti-Catholic bigotry as they read this, but facts are the facts: the Pope is wrong. Peter was not the first Pope and it was the Roman Catholic Church that broke away from the Church that Christ built.

http://bit.ly/1iMLVfY Eight minute videos of my lecture at the University of North Dakota.

Copyright 2013, Don Boys, Ph.D.