What does the Catholic church think of JW?

by Halcon 71 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  LongHairGal

  KALEB OUT WEST & BIAHI:

  You are both certainly correct that the Catholics and just about everybody else — do Not think about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  When I was new in the JWs, I was positively baffled when they would say that ‘everybody thinks about OR notices them’. Only when I indicated an interest to my relatives and friends was I told they were ‘nuts’. Other than that, nobody actively notices JWs - or cares.

  Their belief is untrue as I never heard a whisper about them anywhere in the world. It’s all wishful thinking on their part.
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  blondie

  In the long ago past in the day of Russell prior to 1918, he did have some strong words to say about the Catholic Church saying it was the biggest part of the religions Russell said were not part of the true religion, had been rejected by god; and this was put in print in many places. Rutherford continued this in his books. By the time of Nathan Knorr, then they started toning that down quite a bit. There was some response by the Catholic Church but was only emphasized by the Watchtower themselves to say that proved the Watchtower were the only true religion. The Church did warn its members from reading Watchtower material. There were only about 50,000 Bible Students (jws in 1931) at that time.
• 

  slimboyfat

  It’s certainly true that JWs imagine other people think about them a lot more than they do, and this phenomenon is probably true of humans in general. On these lines I enjoy and try to remember the quote I heard one time: you’ll stop worrying so much what other people think about you when you realise how seldom they think about you.

  It’s a great story above from the Catholic priest and underlines the fact that JWs talk a lot more about the Catholic Church than the reverse. This was particularly true in the 1960s when the literature was full of caricatures and attacks on the Catholic Church, the thick red book Babylon the Great Has Fallen! presumably written by Fred Franz being a prime example. At the same time the priest had apparently thought enough about JWs in order to make the judgment that they weren’t worth engaging and to come up with a witty response on the spot. If this happened in the 1960s it’s perhaps worth remembering there were ten times fewer JWs back then and that the Catholic Church has since shrunk in the west. Nevertheless a busy priest indeed probably still has little time or inclination to think about or engage JWs.

  JWs are both small enough and numerous enough that it’s not surprising to meet strangers who are either familiar with JWs or who don’t know anything about them, although I don’t remember anyone saying they had never heard of JWs at all, which is commonly the case if I mention the Christadelphians, for example.
• 

  KalebOutWest

  I think Fr. Eugene told a lot of stories to us boys back then. But I do think there was some truth in his tale.

  His witty comeback actually comes from a very old joke about Americans and Canadians. Since Witnesses are generally politically neutral I gather the publishers just walked into that one. You should never ask another person what their group thinks of your group if they're old enough to recall the joke.

  Americans are generally confused about Canada--it's part of the UK, a territory of the British, but wants to speak French, so that boggles a lot of American minds. (A South Park song, for example, was once nominated for "Best Song" at the Oscars entitled Blame Canada with the line: "They're not even a real country anyway!") So the Canadian people's pride has always been a subject of humor to some in the US (if not unfortunate disdain from others).

  The famous joke was that a Canadian at a diner asked an American: "What do you Americans really think of us Canadians, eh?"

  The reply was: "We don't."

  Being one of Jehovah's Witnesses, the fella stepped into that one, and Fr. Eugene couldn't resist.
• 

  slimboyfat

  Did the priest know your JW connection or did he just tell the story in general?

  I came across this old Awake! article from 1987 …

  Why Are So Many Becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses?

  IN MANY lands people are doing just that. For example, at Bologna, Italy, church authorities, with the pope’s approval, held a congress to study how to combat the success of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Catholic Church raised a “cry of alarm,” according to La Repubblica, because every year ten thousand Catholics become Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  The Jesuit Giusseppe De Rosa said that “from a religious point of view the most dangerous are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They come fully trained; they always have the Bible in their hand.”

  In an editorial dealing specifically with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jesuit magazine La Civiltá Cattolica of February 18, 1984, wrote:

  “The first reason for the spread of the movement lies in the propaganda techniques [that is, in the preaching work]. The work on the one hand is painstaking, carried out from door to door by people who are scrupulously trained in this work and strongly convinced.

  “The second reason for the success of the JWs is in the attractive force of the jehovist message, in being able to cater to the needs, demands, and expectations of the people of our times. …
  

  https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101987202#h=5
  
• 

  TTWSYF

  Worth mentioning that the Catholic Church does recognize most other protestant denominations baptisms, but they do not accept the JW baptism as legitimate.

  Not only because of the deviation away from the scriptural norm but also because of the rejection of Jesus Christ divinity.

  TTWSYF
• 

  Jeffro

  We can't be certain the photo in the newspaper was real

  This is irrelevant misdirection. the fact that a lady exists is entirely mundane. It adds nothing to the veracity of her tenuous story about the pope ringing a ‘cousin’ he hadn’t seen in decades to talk to her about JWs. 🤨

  whether the Catholic church thinks much about JWs

  Even if we assume the lady’s story is true, without any verifiable evidence, it only establishes that Ratzinger thought about his ‘cousin’, not that he thought a lot specifically of JWs (shifting the goal posts) or that his alleged understanding of JWs (based only on the lady’s version of an alleged private conversation) meant anything about the Catholic Church’s position on JWs (a false equivalence). It also wouldn’t be without precedent for a JW to embellish a story to make someone sound more interested in their religion than was actually the case.
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  Earnest

  The newspaper account "Pope remembers Steffie" by Markus Mannheim in the Canberra Times of August 21, 2005, was discussed on this board at the time here. There is no doubt there was such a newspaper report.
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  Jeffro

  People’s standards of evidence are truly abysmal, I’m sorry that some people can’t make the distinction between the existence of a story and whether the story is actually true (though it’s not surprising to find a higher proportion of such people on a forum related to religion). There’s no evidence that the lady’s story is actually true. There is no verified record of the phone call, no transcript of the conversation, no established relationship between the two people, it’s just a story a lady told. And even if she really was his cousin and that he phoned her (tracking her down to a small town on the other side of the planet after decades without contact), it only means Ratzinger thought about his cousin, not that he thought much about JWs..

  As the initial GPT response correctly indicated, there is no indication that this anecdote was widely reported, and the story that was reported contains no verifiable details.
• 

  Halcon

  TTWSYF -Worth mentioning that the Catholic Church does recognize most other protestant denominations baptisms, but they do not accept the JW baptism as legitimate.

  Wondering if this means that the catholic church doesn't believe JWs can attain salvation?