The reason why Catholics are constantly hearing ridiculous nonsense about their faith....

...is that some Protestant pastors actually teach that ridiculous nonsense.

I previously mentioned Apologetics 315's link to a series of lectures by John MacArthur on the "Heresies of Catholicism."  For the record, I appreciate Apologetics 315 as a useful resource for Christian apologetics.  I particularly like it as a source of debates on various theological/philosophical issues.

I also appreciate the fact that the blog-owner has permitted me to post comments that are critical of MacArthur's lectures.

With that disclaimer, here's a comment I posted:

A last point, I think, from one of the lectures I missed on so-called Marian doctrines:


MacArthur argues:

That’s why when you go into a Catholic Church you see all the candles everywhere, certain people praying for certain people. As long as the candle burns, the prayer goes on. And as long as the prayer goes on, the merit in the prayer is accumulating on the benefit of the person in Purgatory and the merit is being drawn out of the treasury of merit which merit essentially belongs to Christ, belongs to the saints who have excess merit and to Mary.

I've been a Catholic for over 50 years and I have never heard such nonsense about the reason for lighting candles. The reason is that it is total nonsense. All of that part about "as long as the candle goes on, the prayer goes on" and "as long as the prayer goes on, the merit in the prayer is accumulating" is apparently such a secret Catholic doctrine that Catholics have never heard it. I do pray the souls of the dead and I have lit candles - with a donation to the poor - in their memory, but my inchoate reason for doing so was, as the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on "candles" says, to express solidarity with person I am praying for and in some way offer a token of my desire to extend my prayers for that person, not because I have some kind of mechanistic desire to "maximize my return on investment" by having a really, really slow burning candle.

This passage - and others - reminded me of the passage in Brideshead Revisited where the priest trying to catechize Rex Mottram despairs that someone has taught Mottram that there are "sacred monkeys in the Vatican" and that "if you put a pound note with someone's name on it in the poorbox, they go to hell." The point of that passage was that Cordelia was "screwing with" Mottram by playing on his deep ignorance of Catholicism, and, thereby, showing what a doofus he was.

I'm not saying that MacArthur is a doofus, but Protestants listening to these lectures might want exercise some skepticism about his description of Catholic doctrine and practice.