(Mk 8:27-35)

Mark 8:27 Then Jesus departed with his disciples to the villages around Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he questioned his disciples, saying, "Who do people say that I am?"

Mark 8:28 And they answered him, "John the Baptist, and others Elijah, and others one of the prophets."

Mark 8:29 But he replied, "And who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Christ."

Mark 8:30 And he sternly commanded them not to speak of him to anyone.

Mark 8:31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly, and be reproved by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and then be killed, and after three days rise again.

Mark 8:32 Jesus made this discourse openly. Then Peter took him aside, and began to reprove him.

Mark 8:33 But he turned around, and looking at the disciples, rebuked Peter, and said to him, "Far be it from me, Satan! For you do not think according to God, but according to men".

V. 27 creates the geographical context within which the account of the discovery of Jesus' identity is placed. It is on the road to Caesarea Philippi that Jesus prompts his disciples to question who he is. The understanding of who Jesus is, therefore, is here depicted by the 'road' where a journey of deepening and knowledge is taking place. That is, the beginning of a journey of knowledge of Jesus' true identity and nature.

The method Jesus adopts to stimulate his disciples to respond closely recalls that of maieutics, in which the teacher in dialogue with his disciples, through appropriate questions stimulates them to question themselves and find the answer. Jesus here first prompts his disciples to make up their own minds, summarising what they had heard about him from the people. But then Jesus' question becomes more pressing and directly questions his own: what did they think of him? The answer is simple, almost lapidary: 'You are the Christ'.

After this acknowledgement, a new phase opens in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples, that of a close teaching about his destiny of death and resurrection. Two realities that arouse bewilderment and incomprehension. Hence that "he began to teach" (v. 31), which suggests that from here a new path of catechesis is embarked upon, which will have as its central focus the theme of passion-death-resurrection. One is still on the road to Caesarea Philippi, a metaphor for a path of teaching and discovery.

If, therefore, Peter discovers the identity of Jesus as the Christ, that is, the Anointed One of God, consecrated and sent by the Father to fulfil a salvific mission, Jesus with the announcement of his passion reveals the nature of his messianism, founded on suffering and death, redeemed by his resurrection. This was shocking for Judaism, which dreamed of a revolutionary and victorious Messiah, so that Peter performs a counter-teaching towards Jesus: "Then Peter took him aside, and began to rebuke him".

Here Peter assumes the role of teacher and guide towards Jesus, who, according to his logic, seems to be completely lost or, at least, unaware of his role as Messiah. The verb that has been softly translated here as 'took him' actually means to draw towards him, to lead with him, to take hold of him. So Peter's attitude is quite determined, not without a hint of violence or at least aggression towards Jesus for this exit, which destroys his dreams and those of others. A determination that is accentuated by that "he began to rebuke him" which is contrasted with Jesus' "he began to teach". It is not, therefore, a question of a momentary outburst of anger, but of a decisive dissent on his part against Jesus. The verb 'epitiman', in fact, does not only mean to rebuke, but also to blame. There is, therefore, between Jesus and Peter a clear clash of views; a clear rejection of the messianism that Jesus envisaged.

Jesus' response is quite harsh and bordering on a break with his group of Twelve. V. 33 opens in an unusual way: "But he turned away". "He" is Jesus, who is here referred to only by the pronoun, to indicate Jesus' estrangement from the Twelve. If, for the ancients, the name expressed the very essence of the person, the obscuring of his name meant somehow erasing that person, who had become a stranger. Jesus' turning away, then, should not be read merely as a turning towards someone, in this case the other disciples. The verb "epistrapheìs" (to turn around), while undoubtedly meaning to turn towards someone, has also taken on in New Testament language the sense of retracing one's steps, of repenting. Jesus, therefore, on the road to Caesarea Philippi, stops his journey and turns back "looking" at his disciples, almost as if to retrace his steps, refusing to go any further with them, thus involving the Twelve in the harsh rebuke addressed to Peter: "Far be it from me, Satan! For you do not think according to God, but according to men".

The rebuke opens with a scathing "Ipage opísō mou" (get behind me), which in the language of the evangelists indicates following. But that 'ipage' says much more than just 'go': it also means 'submit to someone; put yourself in someone's power'. Jesus, therefore, orders Peter, and with him his own, to fall in line and submit to his teaching. But if we think that Peter is here apostrophised by Jesus as 'Satan', this is somewhat reminiscent of the orders Jesus gave to demons during exorcisms. A kind of exorcism, then, that Jesus performs against Peter, his satan, whose Hebrew root "śtn" means to oppose, to accuse. What this means is explained in the second part of the call to Peter: "because you do not think according to God, but according to men". The reason, then, is based on the God-man opposition, on God's plans that do not match those of men. Therefore, following Jesus means moving from the perspective of men to that of God. A path that is not easy, peaceful and obvious, since it must pass through the Cross.

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon) 

(Mk 7:31-37)

Mark 7:31 When he had returned from the region of Tyre, he passed through Sidon, heading toward the Sea of Galilee in the midst of the territory of Decapolis.

Mark 7:32 And they brought to him a deaf and dumb man, begging him to lay his hand upon him.

Mark 7:33 And bringing him aside away from the crowd, he put his fingers in his ears, and with his saliva touched his tongue;

Mark 7:34 Then looking up to heaven, he gave a sigh and said, "Effatá," that is, "Open up!"

Mark 7:35 And immediately his ears were opened, and the knot of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke correctly.

Mark 7:36 And he commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he commended it, the more they spoke of it

Mark 7:37 and, filled with astonishment, they said, "He has done all things well; he makes the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak!"

V. 31 opens with a geographical note that creates the context within which this tale of healing is placed, which becomes, precisely because of this context, emblematic. The environment in which we move is the pagan one, in this case that of the Decapolis, so called because it consisted of a sort of confederation of ten cities of Greco-Roman culture and customs. 

The healing of the deaf-mute prefigures the conversion of the pagan world to the gospel. The Gentiles were deprived of God's revelation and therefore 'deaf' to his word. But through the preaching of the missionaries they would soon open their ears to hear the word of salvation and loosen their tongues to proclaim the praises of the Lord with their mouths.

The miracle, in Mark's perspective, is a 'sēmeion', a sign that conveys a theological truth; in this case it is an action that preludes the conversion of the Gentiles. The pagan world will finally open up to the message of salvation and worship the true God with a tongue loosed from sin.

But one could make a decidedly different interpretation. Mark contrasts the incomprehension of the disciples with the readiness for faith on the part of the Gentiles. Since Jesus is on a journey with the disciples (v. 31), the deafness may ultimately symbolise the dullness of the disciples. Yet, the two lines of interpretation, i.e. the missionary openness of the gospel and the disciples' incomprehension, are not mutually exclusive, indeed they complement each other. In fact, the disciples, once they had become aware of the Paschal faith of the crucified Messiah, would continue Jesus' mission, spreading the gospel among all nations.

The description of the miracle reflects the thaumaturgical practice of the Hellenistic milieu. What is interesting is that Jesus takes the deaf-mute aside away from the crowd. He does not want curious onlookers. The miracle for Jesus is an act of faith, never curiosity. The miracle is believed by seeing the miracle-worker, not by witnessing the act of its accomplishment. This truth is experienced by Jesus in the act of his resurrection. No one saw Jesus Christ in the act of his resurrection, that is, as he rose from the dead. The resurrection is believed because one has seen the risen Jesus. The resurrection is the foundation of the miracle of the resurrection. Jesus distances himself from all forms of spectacle, especially in our day and age and especially in certain evangelical circles, where excessive publicity is given to (alleged) miracles, performing them in stadiums, or in places packed with many people: the "Americanate".

The gestuality that follows, that putting one's fingers in one's ears and touching one's tongue with fingers soaked in Jesus' saliva, seems to want to hide the supernatural in the natural. It is as if Jesus wanted to hide in the natural things because of the extraordinary power at work in Him. Jesus does not expose the mystery to trivialisation.

V. 34 describes a kind of outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Father, who in that 'Effatha' produces what He says, opening up the deaf and dumb person's ability to hear and speak to God. Jesus' lifting up his eyes to heaven somehow suggests this, as if to create a sort of channel of communication and communion between God and him, through which, in that sigh, the divine healing and liberating power comes out, which works in Jesus and is attested by v. 35, which describes in that "immediately" the effects of the deaf-mute's salvific experience, so that "his ears were opened and the knot of his tongue was loosened and he spoke correctly".

Jesus commands that nothing be said to anyone about what happened to the deaf-mute. Silence is demanded by the mission that Jesus came to exercise on our earth. Jesus is not to be sought after as the healer of bodies. He is the healer of souls. Souls are only healed by the gift of grace and truth. Having healed the soul, the body too will receive the highest benefit. In the same way that when the soul is in death, in suffering, in grave illness, the body suffers great harm.

V. 37 comments on and celebrates the salvation accomplished in the Jesus event, which regenerates even the pagan world to God, making it capable of accepting the Word and celebrating the praises of God. "He has made all things good": it closely recalls Genesis, where God, at the end of creation, notes that all the things he had made were good, hinting at how in this regeneration of man a new creation has taken place.

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon) 

Ps 14 (15)

Psalms 14:1 Psalm. Of David. Lord, who shall dwell in your tent? Who shall dwell in thy holy mountain?

Psalms 14:2 He who walks blamelessly, acts justly, and speaks faithfully,

Psalms 14:3 He shall not speak slander with his tongue, nor harm his neighbour, nor cast insult upon his neighbour.

Psalms 14:4 In his eyes the wicked is despicable, but he honours those who fear the LORD. Even if he swears to his own detriment, he does not change;

Psalms 14:5 He lends money without usury, and does not accept gifts against the innocent. He who acts in this way will stand firm forever.

The psalm is from David. Through him the Holy Spirit expressed these words. This psalm lists eleven actions that make a man righteous.

From a cultic point of view, it is a liturgical psalm, a true "penitential act" because the pilgrim to enter the temple had to have 1 a purified soul. It is also a gesture performed at the beginning of the Mass ("I confess to Almighty God...") that precedes the actual celebration of the rite.

To enter the temple, the Torah required an outward purity, which was linked to the observance of certain practices. The psalmist goes further: God demands inner purity. God is interested in the purity of man's heart. David manifests that law written in hearts that will be brought to fulfilment by Jesus.

V. 1 expresses walking towards God, reaching the tent of the Lord. Here we pause. The pilgrim goes to the temple, but in the end he also dwells there - not in the sense of dwelling in the temple, but in the sense that he has met the Lord and has fellowship with Him. This is what we experience in the Eucharist.

In a broader sense - 'Who shall dwell in your tent? Who will dwell in your holy mountain?" - are questions that concern man's future. Man does not only live of the present or the historical future. He also lives of an eternal future, after his death. This future can be lived on the mountain of life that is of the Lord, or in the valley of perdition and death without the Lord.

Who will dwell with the Lord for eternity? Who will dwell in his house forever? This question must be answered. The psalm gives the answer very clearly.

"He who walks blamelessly, acts righteously, and speaks faithfully" (v. 2). This is the one who will ascend and dwell in the eternal dwellings of God. In order to live eternally with God, very specific laws must be observed: to walk blamelessly, to practise righteousness, and to speak loyally. The first requirement ("He who walks blamelessly") conditions all the others. The Hebrew word 'tāmîm' means 'righteously'. He walks blamelessly (righteously) and practices righteousness who keeps the word of God, lives in the observance of the commandments. He who is righteous speaks righteously, for only the righteous has God who is truth in his heart. If man puts God in his heart, he will always speak faithfully. If, however, God is not in the heart, or one even thinks that he does not exist, what truth can he utter with his mouth if he is absent from the heart?

Here again is what one must do to ascend and dwell on the mountain of the Lord: One must always have a pure, holy tongue. One must never spread slander, falsehood, defamation with it. One must not do one's neighbour any harm. One must not hurl insults at one's neighbour. To ascend and dwell in the holy mountain of the Lord, one must observe the law of the Lord in all our relations with man.

He who wants to ascend the mountain of the Lord must not have any connivance with the wicked, while he must associate with those who fear the Lord. Another necessary thing that must be done: he must observe the oaths. The righteous, for he shall dwell in the kingdom of light, his shall be a path of light. How distant the conception of many Christians today is from this of the psalmist. It is as if we have destroyed in a few years a heritage of truth built up over millennia.

"Lend money without usury, and do not accept gifts against the innocent. He who acts in this way shall stand firm forever" (v. 5).  Usury is a sin severely condemned by the Church, which has always been against usurers, so much so that in the Middle Ages this type of loan was only practised by Jews. The verse seems to be written today. For usurers there is no place on the holy mountain of the Lord. They have fed, like thirsty vampires, on the blood of their fellow men, and for them there can be no place with God, because in their hearts there has been no place for the needy.

Neither will those who allow themselves to be corrupted by gifts and presents against the innocent ascend the holy mountain of God. This verse also seems to be written today. The problem of corruption was also topical in the Bible. The righteous, on the other hand, embraces the cause of the innocent without monetary incentives.

If the Christian had the courage to proclaim these old truths, the world would breathe a different light. Unfortunately, the Christian preaches salvation at a low price, indeed without any price; even at the price of sin, and the world is falling into chaos for lack of truth and morality. Without truth there can be no morality. Without morality the world plunges into the darkness of evil, and that is what is happening in our day. It is urgent to react with firmness and power of the Spirit - on pain of failure of the Church's mission.

Only with this total fidelity and integrity can one enjoy God's presence, participate in his worship (ascend his holy mountain), and intimacy with him (dwell in his tent).

The psalm, with all its very concrete demands, emphasises that liturgy and life, prayer and existence must never be separated. A Christian who limits himself only to going to Mass on Sunday is not a good Christian, because the practice of worship cannot be separated from works. There would be a huge gap between his prayer (liturgy) and his life (existence).

The psalm induces us not to have a magical vision of liturgy and prayer; the psalmist wants to inculcate the concept that liturgy-prayer without consistency of life is an empty thing. The acts indicated in these verses are not to be performed upon entering the temple; rather, they are behaviours that must characterise the believer's life. Moreover, ours cannot be an intimist faith ('me and my God'): our relationship with God is valid precisely insofar as there are others. If one does not live in a community dimension, one cannot even love the Lord. The Christian's faith must not simply be intimistic, but communitarian.

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon) 

(Jn 6:60-69)

John 6:60 Many of his disciples, having heard, said, "This language is harsh; who can understand it?"

John 6:61 Jesus, knowing within himself that his disciples were murmuring about this very thing, said to them, "Does this shock you?

John 6:62 What if you saw the Son of Man ascending where he was before?

"This language (logos) is hard; who can understand it?" This is a judgement that the disciples pass on Jesus' speech and emphasise all its harshness, which makes it impossible for them not only to understand, but also any other possibility of dialogue with Jesus. Their speech is not a request for clarification, but a judgement without appeal, which ends the relationship with their Master. It is no longer possible to continue listening.

The Jewish religion is par excellence the religion of the word, which underlies the relationship between Israel and Yahweh. Listening had its founding precept in Deut 6:4: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one". The refusal to listen indicates a decisive break with the incarnate Logos, who precisely through the word made himself manifest to his people. What the disciples call hard and reject, in fact, is not only the "language" (logos) of Jesus, but also the presence of another Logos, whom John contemplates at the opening of his Gospel and of whom he testifies that "He came among his people, but his own did not receive him" (John 1:11).

"After having listened", aorist verbal tense ("akousantes"), we pass to the present indicative, which hints at the negative evolution of a part of Jesus' discipleship, which from the initial welcoming listening (aorist) passed to the refusal to listen (present indicative). In fact, the disciples are referred to as the "akousantes", i.e. "those who listened". It is precisely these "akousantes" who now question the continuity of their listening: "who can hear him?". The question, clearly rhetorical, implies a negative answer. Faced with the harsh manifestation of the Logos, which demands the overcoming of human reasoning and cognitive schemes, the initial welcoming willingness is no longer there.

Vv. 61-62 give an initial framing to the problem of the disciples, whose protest was neither clamorous nor open, but was meant to worm its way into their souls. Jesus in fact learns of the matter 'within himself'. An emphasis, the latter, that highlights Jesus' superior knowledge, from which his messianicity and even earlier his divinity shines through. What emerges is an image of Jesus as the ruler and not the victim of events. It is in fact he who takes the initiative and puts his disciples up against the wall: "Does this scandal you?". The question Jesus asks his disciples here is an "aut, aut" and will ultimately result in their defection. Jesus asks his disciples whether he, his person, his mission, his preaching and his work are a cause of scandal for them.

In v. 62 Jesus goes further in his offensive against the unbelief of his disciples: "What if you saw the Son of Man ascending where he was before?" A somewhat obscure phrase, a phrase that is certainly unexpected, but one that must be understood in the context in which it is placed. Jesus is confronted by disciples who are challenging him for the harshness of his discourse; they are disoriented, they do not want to abandon their own mental schemes to access a mystery that is only to be believed and not reasoned about, as it is out of human reach. Jesus, therefore, tells them that if they are scandalised by his discourse on bread, his body, how could they hold up when they are called to investigate other, higher mysteries, such as his divinity - signified in that "going up where he was before", by which is indicated his co-eternity with the Father, from where he came forth and descended from heaven, proposing himself as the Bread of Life for men. It becomes an impossible task to access difficult things if the simplest things scandalise them. 

A question that closely recalls the dialogue with Nicodemus, where to his resistance Jesus replies: "If I have spoken to you about things on earth and you do not believe, how will you believe if I speak to you about things in heaven?" (John 3:12). In other words, Jesus, there as here, is speaking to men through a human symbolism ("things of the earth"), easily understood by them: water, wind, being born, reborn, in Nicodemus' account; living water in that of the Samaritan woman; bread, flesh and blood, eating and drinking here in ch. 6. Symbols to which Jesus links divine realities otherwise unreachable by men; realities that only need to be believed in order to overcome human limitation. But Jesus at the same time also offers his credentials attesting to his divinity, and therefore his credibility. In Nicodemus, he states that "no one has ever ascended into heaven except the Son of Man who came down from heaven" (Jn 3:13); in the account of the Samaritan woman he allows himself to be grasped as "the Messiah" (Jn 4:25) and "saviour of the world" (Jn 4:42); while here he suggests his divinity from eternity ("where he was before"). Only faith therefore makes it possible to reach the mystery that lives in Jesus, revealed in him and knowable only through his word believed and accepted, since the flesh is totally inadequate. 

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon) 

(Pr 9:1-6)

Proverbs 9:1 Wisdom has built her house,

he has carved his seven pillars.

Proverbs 9:2 He killed the animals, prepared the wine

and set the table.

Proverbs 9:3 He sent his handmaids to proclaim

On the highest points of the city:

Proverbs 9:4 "Let him who is inexperienced flock here!"

To the senseless she says:

Proverbs 9:5 "Come, eat my bread,

drink the wine that I have prepared.

Chapter 9 of the Book of Proverbs describes the house of wisdom. The Hebrew term for 'wisdom' is 'ḥoḵmāh', but here the plural form 'ḥoḵmôṯ' (wisdom) appears to indicate the fullness of wisdom, which rests on seven pillars.

The pillars are a symbol of stability, of security. The fact that these columns are seven indicates that the house of wisdom is unshakable, capable of guaranteeing absolute stability. Moreover, the columns do not refer to an ordinary house; they characterised the structure of temples and the palaces of kings. The house of wisdom is actually a temple, a solemn and regal dwelling. This image is intended to emphasise the preciousness of the gift of wisdom, which communicates to man a regal character, because it enables him to pass through even the most difficult situations with a superior spirit, without ever losing control of himself.

Think also of the seven sacraments of salvation, the seven virtues that are the foundation of the Christian life, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Apostle James (Jas 3:17) describes Wisdom from above as: 1-pure; 2-pacific; 3-mild; 4- forgiving; 5-full of mercy and good fruits; 6-unbiased; 7-unhypocritical. Nothing is lacking in the perfection of the house of wisdom.

A rich and abundant banquet is imagined in the house of wisdom (v. 2). Wisdom did not build the house for herself, but to give men a place of refuge from the bewilderments of life, to those of course who are willing to accept her invitation. Without her, the human mind would go astray, would be overwhelmed by a flood of ideas, concepts, hypotheses, theories, none of which would be able to pacify the need for truth that everyone carries within. The image of the banquet is also particularly apt as a description of the joy, communion and satisfaction it brings to its guests.

The place chosen by Wisdom to make her voice resound is an open place (v. 3), a space in which her voice spreads widely. No one is excluded from the invitation; it is addressed to all. Everyone must be able to hear it. No one is to say: no invitation has come to me. Before Wisdom there can be no excuses. The task entrusted to "his handmaids" should remind us that we have come to know the Wisdom of God, that is, the Lord Jesus, and that we must share this Wisdom with others, inviting them to benefit from it.

In order to put oneself in the school of Wisdom, one fundamental characteristic is required: to feel the need to be taught (v. 4), not to have the illusion of being self-sufficient. Many fall into this trap, many trust in their own ability to get by in life. The conviction that one does not need to increase one's knowledge causes the decay of the spirit, as happens to an overconfident athlete who tends to take it easy in training, only to experience in the test of the competition that he has overestimated himself. On the contrary, the dynamism of growth towards a full life is given by the awareness of not having yet learnt everything, of still being inexperienced.

What wisdom offers its guests is bread and wine (v. 5), a simple food. This signifies that wisdom bestows the most precious riches through humble appearances, to such an extent that it will be necessary to overcome the poverty of appearances in order to attain the authentic substance bestowed by wisdom. Wisdom communicates to man a quality of life full of values, but through gifts that do not attract the attention of those who hunt for the extraordinary. One must have a penetrating gaze, to grasp the hidden preciousness of wisdom. It is often much easier to be gripped by the proposals of the world, by everything that is pleasing in appearance, but lacking in content.

Wisdom wanted to prepare a banquet by turning the terms of the world's proposals upside down, offering the most precious things behind a poor and simple mantle, which does not attract. That is why it will be necessary to put all the forces of one's will, one's perseverance and one's faith into motion, in order to come to taste that food that heals and communicates true life. This is God's way. If his gifts had an attractive outward appearance, there would be no merit in seeking them. The Lord wanted to set a test at the threshold of the house of wisdom, so that those who are used to stopping at appearances, those who judge things summarily, without deep investigation, cannot enter it.

The bread and wine are elements that Christ will take as constituent foods of his banquet, giving wisdom under the Eucharistic species, which is the real presence of the Body. Even the Eucharistic banquet, in its external figure, is apparently disappointing; a sober and essential rite. If God were manifested in all his glory, all humanity would fall on its knees before his majesty; but this act of adoration would not be free. Here then, human freedom can only be fully exercised if the wonders of God are presented to man in a humble and humble appearance.

For it is all too easy to side with the strongest when he clearly demonstrates that he is. It was all too easy to rally around Christ who multiplied the loaves and healed the sick, it was easy even to want to elect him king, since he solved man's secular problems so cheaply; but when he is arrested and crucified, there is no one left with him. Everyone takes cover, fleeing. This means that as long as the Lord clearly manifests His power, no one is really free to seek Him or love Him, because they are attracted by the seduction of power and glory. Even in the experience of the Church, kneeling before the Eucharist is a truly free and worthy act, because in it the majesty of Christ is perfectly hidden.

This is the reason why Wisdom invites us to a banquet where we receive the substantial food, the only one that guarantees life, but with an apparently disappointing menu: so that in the face of this invitation, men exercising their freedom have the merit to sit at the banquet of Wisdom without being attracted by the extraordinary.

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon) 

(Jn 6:41-51)

John 6:41 Meanwhile the Jews murmured about him because he had said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven."

John 6:42 And they said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph? Of him we know the father and the mother. How then can he say, I am come down from heaven?"

John 6:43 Jesus answered, "Do not murmur among yourselves.

John 6:44 No one can come to me, except the Father who sent me draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:45 It is written in the prophets, And all shall be taught of God. Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.

V. 41 ends with the object of contention between Jews and Jesus: "I am the bread that came down from heaven". At stake here is not the identity of Jesus as the expression "I am the bread" might suggest, but rather the origin of Jesus, who affirms his divine origin ("from heaven"); while the Jews seek his origin among men, betraying their inability to transcend the appearance of things: "Of him we know his father and mother. How then can he say: I am come down from heaven?". Man cannot arrive at the divinity of Jesus by investigating within human parameters, with logics that do not allow him to transcend the human dimension. Jesus' divinity, as well as his being the bread of eternal life, can only be reached through believing, which is never the conclusion of a fine human reasoning, but only a gift from the Father, who generates the believer. It will be the following pericope (vv. 44-47) that will illustrate the generative dynamic of the believer by the Father.

But first Jesus invites the Jews to lower the tone of their polemic: "Do not murmur among yourselves" (v. 43), to cease their revolt against the world of the divine that is about to manifest itself to them and is completely incomprehensible to them. Only through inner readiness to accept revelation can one gain access to the Mystery, which is otherwise unreachable, since the instrumentation man possesses is totally insufficient and inadequate.

Vv. 44-47 emphasise that believing does not depend on human effort or ability, but possesses a complex dynamic, and finds its origin in the Father: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. The determining action of the Father that draws the believer to Jesus is underlined by the sentence with which v. 44 opens: "No one can". In other words, man is not endowed with a power of his own that enables him to enter into the Mystery with which Jesus is imbued. The final resurrection, by which the believer is definitively united to the very life of God, therefore depends on the action of the Father, which is accomplished here and now, as if to say that it is the existential orientation that is fulfilled in my today that determines the final outcome of my salvation, which does not depend on man ("No one can"), but on the saving plan of the Father, who manifests himself and works in his Son.

It is now a question of understanding the meaning of that "draws", and it will be the task of v. 45 to specify its meaning, which opens with a scriptural reference, calling into question the authority of the prophets: "and all will be taught by God". This is almost certainly Is 54:13: "All your children shall be disciples of the Lord, great shall be the prosperity of your children". Jesus gives the prophecy of Isaiah a strong universalistic valence, which characterises the last times, in which God, according to expectation, will no longer speak through mediators, but everyone will be his direct interlocutor and disciple. Now God teaches and instructs his people directly in his Son: "Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me". The drawing of the Father to Jesus does not happen through miracles or portentous signs; it does not happen through spells that bewitch, but through his Word. It is that eternal Word of the Father that John sings in his Prologue and of which he contemplates the glory of the Father's only-begotten Son incarnate. And it is precisely the welcoming listening of this Word that draws the believer to Jesus. Everything therefore stems from the welcoming listening to the Word, which John significantly places at the beginning of his Gospel, as the principle of everything, from which everything descends and depends.

Beyond these theological aspects, v. 45 also gives room for a different interpretation, which however does not exclude the previous one. It is addressing Israel, defined as the one who has been instructed by God through the Torah, the Covenant and the Prophets; to the authentic Israel, which has known how to listen, as a faithful disciple of Yahweh, waiting for the redemption announced by the Scriptures, and which is defined here as the one who "has heard from the Father and has learned"; for this reason it has known how to "go to Jesus". But this praise of faithful Israel also contains within itself an implicit accusation against unbelieving Judaism. Jesus is in fact here addressing the Jews, who in vv. 41-42, with their murmuring and their considerations, have demonstrated their invincible unbelief. Now with vv. 44-47, he gives the reasons for their being so obstinately unbelieving before the Mystery that is being revealed in Christ; reasons that are at the same time an indictment against their inability to understand the Scriptures and to believe correctly in them. For if they had rightly understood the Scriptures, they would now come to him and would not so stubbornly oppose him, precisely because the Scriptures testify of him.

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon)

(Ex 16:2-4.12-15)

Exodus 16:2 In the wilderness the whole community of the Israelites murmured against Moses and against Aaron.

Exodus 16:3 The Israelites said to them, "Had we died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we were sitting by the pot of meat, eating bread to our fill! Instead you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve all this multitude."

Exodus 16:4 Then the Lord said to Moses, "Behold, I am about to rain down bread from heaven for you: the people shall go out to gather a day's ration every day, that I may test them, to see whether they walk according to my law or not.

God's people on the march stop in the middle of the wilderness, for the specification between Elim and Sinai (Ex 16:1). And it is precisely when we find ourselves in the middle of the desert, far from the two opposite ends, when we see no way out, that faith begins to waver. We do not know what future awaits us, where we will end up and how we will get out. Easily, one's thoughts run back to past lives, which, even in slavery, offered something to look forward to.

The provisions they had brought from Egypt are beginning to run out, and the desert is not a source of food. They have left Egypt, the land of material abundance, but have not yet reached the land they thought of as the region where milk and honey flows. Difficulties are strong temptations for every man. Was it really worth abandoning the safe, the certain, to begin a journey of uncertainty and insecurity?

The temptation arises from the loss of faith. One no longer sees God. One no longer understands his will. One is no longer able to see behind history the wise hand of God who desires only one thing: that one has faith in Him, the only source of life and blessing for man. Once faith is lost, murmuring begins. Murmuring is a deadly poison. It is enough for one to start murmuring for a thousand others to become defiled and then the camp of the Israelites becomes a source of discouragement and further loss of faith. Murmuring is the renunciation of faith in God.

Dying to die, it was better to die in Egypt. There is death in the abundance of food and there is death in scarcity. The Lord could have chosen to let us die in Egypt rather than end our days in the desert. What future remains for those in the desert but a miserable, slow death by starvation? So the life that Satan offers us can also appear beautiful and fulfilling when one compares it with the desert in which the Lord places us to lead us to eternal life. Everything has been forgotten, everything forgotten, everything now removed by the Israelites. Thirty days in the desert were enough to forget all the great wonders performed by the Lord in the land of Egypt and at the Red Sea.

Which present is better, the one in which one dies of hunger or the other in which, although one must die, one dies in abundance? Better to die in abundance than in destitution. This is the choice of those who have lost their faith. He, on the other hand, who preserves faith, knows that the present is not one of death but of life, because it is governed by the Lord. Man, however, does not see God's government and thinks that everything is in his own hands. Seeing our hands full, when they are empty, can only be done by faith. This faith is absent in God's people today. It takes all of God's wisdom and patience to stabilise his people in faith. The whole of history is this untiring work of the Lord.

There is no direct relationship between God and his people: everything goes through Moses. Israel complains to Moses, God speaks to Moses. Without Moses nothing from heaven comes down to earth and nothing from earth goes up to heaven. Moses is a figure par excellence of Christ. No one can claim a direct relationship with God the Father, bypassing the Son. The Son sees the Father face to face, and we do not know the Father except through the Son and insofar as the Son makes him known to us. Without the word of Christ it is impossible for us to know the will of God, nor would we know how to begin our journey of salvation, and on what food we must feed in order to have eternal life.

Israel complains about the lack of meat and bread. The Lord will send a food from heaven that not only keeps us alive, but makes us grow into another life. It is a food that is not the work of our hands, but a gift from God. It comes from heaven and not from the earth. It cannot be stored in man-made warehouses, nor can it be kept for the next day. It is given every day and every day must be lived in prayerful expectation of this food.

Here is the first rule of the bread from heaven: everyone must trust God, must believe that tomorrow He will give bread again. The bread from heaven requires daily faith. I only gather today's bread because tomorrow the Lord will give it to me. If I gather today's bread also for tomorrow, it is a sign that I have already lost faith in my Lord. I do not believe that He will give it to me again tomorrow. Jesus also gave us this test of faith. We too in the Our Father ask for this day's bread. Today for today. Tomorrow for tomorrow. Every day for every day, in its everydayness. This is our great difficulty: living by faith in the everyday.

"That I may test him, to see if he walks in my law or not". The food that is freely given from heaven is not an easy way out or an easy solution to get to eternal life without difficulty. It is a test for us: not simply because we have to wait for it every day, but because we are not given to see beyond the appearances of bread. It is the gift of the Lord, but how can we see in this different bread, the food that is given for eternal life and even more the flesh of Christ that is given for the salvation of the world? In our relationship with God, faith is indispensable, and faith is given by hearing the Word as it comes from the mouth of His Son and by eating the Word who is the Son Himself, offered as a sacrifice in atonement for our sins. Just as God trusts and relies on Moses alone, so the Lord's people must place their faith in Christ alone. 

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon) 

(Jn 6:1-15)

John 6:3 Jesus went up the mountain and there sat down with his disciples.

John 6:4 The Passover, the feast of the Jews, was near.

John 6:5 When Jesus had lifted up his eyes, he saw that a great crowd was coming to him, and he said to Philip, "Where can we buy bread so that these people may have something to eat?"

John 6:6 He said this to test him; for he knew well what he was about to do.

John 6:7 Philip answered him, "Two hundred denarii of bread is not enough even for each one to receive a piece."

John 6:8 Then one of the disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him:

John 6:9 "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what is this to so many people?"

John 6:10 Jesus answered, "Let them sit down." There was much grass in the place. So they sat down, and there were about five thousand men.

John 6:11 Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who sat down, and the same he did with the fish, as long as they wanted.

John 6:12 And when they were full, he said to the disciples, 'Gather up the leftover pieces, that nothing may be lost.

"Jesus went up the mountain. The mountain in ancient times was considered the abode of divinity and the manifestation of its glory. Jesus therefore 'ascending' the mountain indicates his having ascended to divine glory. But Jesus ascending the mountain is caught in a particular position: "and there he sat down with his disciples". The sitting down with the disciples indicates the proper attitude of the teacher imparting his teachings. This scene also closely recalls another scene, that of Mount Sinai where Yahweh dwelt in his terrifying and glorious presence, imparting his teachings to Moses and the people (Ex 19:16-21). V. 3 then presents a glorified Jesus teaching his disciples from the mountain of his glory.

V. 4 introduces the miracle of the loaves and fishes by framing it within the Passover, which serves as the key to reading not only this miracle, but also the whole of ch. 6. Within this frame, the ancient Passover experience of Israel is reread and reinterpreted, which here becomes the figure of a new Passover. But when speaking of feasts, John never fails to make his disqualifying polemical note: the Passover is defined as "the feast of the Jews", an expression that recurs every time a feast appears in which the activity of Jesus is placed, underlining the extraneousness of the ancient cult, from which the new Christian one was to be definitively detached. The tone here is not only one of detachment, but at the same time also disqualifying. The name "Jews", in fact, in John's Gospel always acquires a strongly negative connotation, becoming synonymous with closure and unbelief.

V. 5 is divided into two parts: in the first Jesus, looking up, sees a large crowd coming towards him; in the second he asks Philip a question. Jesus is attracted by the crowd that 'came to him'; but his is a perplexed seeing, expressing doubts. In fact, the Greek verb used to indicate Jesus' seeing is "theasámenos", which expresses a seeing that reflects and questions, a doubtful seeing. This uncertainty of Jesus will find its confirmation in vv. 14-15, where the crowd understands Jesus as the messianic prophet come to raise the fortunes of Israel - and therefore they want to make him king. An interest completely unrelated to what Jesus meant by that miracle. Right from the start, therefore, John indicates how the miracle of the loaves moves within a framework of distrust (that of Jesus), and of distorted interpretation (that of the crowd).

The scene, almost suddenly, changes completely; Jesus' attention shifts from the crowd to the disciples: "he said to Philip: Where can we buy bread so that they may have something to eat?". The question posed here is fundamental: "WHERE can we buy bread so that these people may have something to eat?"; in fact, the question arises as to the origin of bread, the purpose of which is to feed the crowds. V. 5 then introduces the reader into the drama that is being played out: amidst mistrust, doubts, uncertainties, the great mystery of the divine origin of a bread destined to feed the crowds of people is set.

V. 7 reports Philip's obvious answer: "Two hundred denarii of bread are not enough even for everyone to receive a piece". It is a logical response, prompted by Jesus' "Where can we buy bread". It is he, therefore, who suggested the answer to Philip, he misled him in some way by pointing him to the commercial route, that of money as the solution to the problem. But the reader knows, because he is informed by v. 6, that this is a test to which Jesus subjects his disciples. Two hundred denarii is not enough. It is therefore a matter of bread that cannot be bought.

Vv. 8-9 widen the round of proposals to resolve Jesus' question, and Andrew intervenes alongside Philip. The latter comes up with the proposal of five barley loaves and two fish. It is already clear that this idea is not a solution. On their own they are insufficient to give an adequate response to the multitude of crowds.

Vv. 10-11, constitute the heart of the story. The two verses present two scenes, one (v. 10) preparatory to the other (v. 11) which together create the context of a convivial banquet. Jesus gives the command to the disciples to make men lie down; the command carries within itself a kind of implicit mission: that of making men sit down around the banquet of the bread of life. Jesus therefore in some way entrusts the disciples with the mystery of this banquet, around which a large crowd, indicated as five thousand men, is seated, highlighting the enormous and unbridgeable disproportion with the five loaves. The bread of man is therefore not able to feed the crowds that Jesus entrusted to his own.

But it is significant how between the command for the crowd to sit down and their sitting down, John points out that 'there was much grass in that place'. Tying Jesus' command to a grassy place closely recalls Ps 22:1-2: 'The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want; on grassy pastures he maketh me to lie down...'. The reference to grass thus alludes to Jesus as the shepherd of the new believing community, who makes them sit in grassy pastures. The "much grass" is a reference to the abundance proper to messianic times.

V. 11 is characterised by three movements of Jesus: "he took the loaves", "he gave thanks", "he distributed them"; three movements that we find in all the synoptic accounts of the Last Supper.

V. 12 opens by emphasising the theme of abundance: "And when they were full, he said to the disciples". Jesus, before addressing his disciples, waits until everyone has had their fill. For he came that all might have life and have it in abundance. But once this mission of his has been accomplished, it becomes necessary for others to seize the inheritance: 'Gather up the leftovers, that nothing may be lost'. The meaning of the Greek verb 'synagágete' (gather) is very dense. It means to gather, but also to gather, to put together, to convene. All meanings that pertain to the mission proper to the nascent Church, which consists in gathering the nations around the one Word, summoning them to the one table of the true Bread come down from heaven. The disciples' task, therefore, is to gather "the leftovers". It is not a matter of collecting the leftovers of food, but of receiving and welcoming the inheritance left by Jesus: the superabundance of his divine life, which became Bread for the nations, and which he now bequeaths to his own so that they may continue to offer this gift to the nations. A mission therefore aimed at the nations, but one that is subtended by a single purpose: "so that nothing may be lost".

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon)

1Th 5:16-24

1Thessalonians 5:16 Be joyful always,

1Thessalonians 5:17 pray unceasingly,

1Tessalonians 5:18 in all things give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus toward you.

1Thessalonians 5:19 quench not the Spirit,

"Be joyful always". The theme of joy is the spiritual climate of the Christian community. Christianity is joy, spiritual gladness, joy of the heart, serenity of the mind. 'Always' means in all circumstances. From an outward point of view, there was little for which believers in those days could rejoice. But joy is a fruit of the Spirit, not something the Christian can procure from his own resources.

The Christian is called to always be joyful. This quality of his new being is only possible on one condition: that there is such a strong faith in his heart that he thinks at all times that everything that happens, happens for a greater good for us. Whoever does not possess this faith is lost, because tribulation, without faith, does not generate hope, but disappointment, sadness, tears and every other kind of bitterness.

Gladness ripens only on the tree of faith, and he who falls from faith also falls from gladness and falls into sadness. Knowing that physical or moral evil permitted by God must generate sanctification in us, the Christian accepts it in faith and lives it in prayer.

In fact, the apostle adds: 'pray unceasingly'. In this very brief exhortation is hidden the secret of the Christian's life. Prayer must punctuate the life of the community and of individuals; a continuous attitude. It is not the little prayer done every now and then, but a regular prayer, done according to a constant rhythm. If we do this we can go even further, and that is to live in a spirit of prayer, aware of God's presence with us wherever we are.

The moment is lost that is without prayer. It is a moment entrusted only to our will, rationality, it is a moment lost because it is not done according to God's will but according to our own. Lost is that moment lived but not entrusted to God in prayer. Lost is that moment made by ourselves, but not made as a gift of God for us and for others. This is the truth of our life.

Because today we no longer pray, or we only pray for some personal interest, so much of our life is wasted, it is lost, it is not lived either for our own good or for the good of our brothers. Learning to pray is the most necessary thing for a man. Teaching how to do so is the primary work of the priest, or of those who lead the community.

"In everything give thanks" is the way to live in a joyful and prayerful atmosphere. We have the verb eucharistein ('to give thanks'). In every situation give thanks, because even in our difficulties and trials God teaches us valuable lessons. It is not easy to see the positive side of a trial, but if God is above all things, then He is sovereign even in the trial.

For thanksgiving to be made of everything, the heart must be clothed in humility. It is proper to humility to recognise what the Lord has done and is doing for us. But it is proper to prayer to raise to the Lord the hymn of thanksgiving, of blessing, of glorifying his name that is mighty on earth and in heaven.

He who does not give thanks is an idolater. He thinks that everything is from him, from his abilities, and therefore he attributes to himself what is simply and purely a gift from the Lord. An example of how one thanks the Lord, blesses Him, exalts and magnifies Him is the Virgin Mary. Her Magnificat is recited daily by the Church. It must not only be recited, but also imitated, prayed, made one's own life.

At the end of this triad of imperatives on the spiritual life, a motivation is given that encompasses all three exhortations: 'for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus towards you'. In this context, the expression 'will of God' implies a way of life that corresponds to the plan of salvation revealed in Jesus Christ. God's will is made known in Christ, and in Christ we are given the motivation and strength to do that will.

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books

- Revelation - exegetical commentary

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

(Buyable on Amazon)                                                                          

1Ts 5,16-24

1Tessalonicesi 5:16 State sempre lieti,

1Tessalonicesi 5:17 pregate incessantemente,

1Tessalonicesi 5:18 in ogni cosa rendete grazie; questa è infatti la volontà di Dio in Cristo Gesù verso di voi.

1Tessalonicesi 5:19 Non spegnete lo Spirito,

«State sempre lieti». Il tema della gioia è il clima spirituale della comunità cristiana. Il cristianesimo è gioia, letizia spirituale, gaudio del cuore, serenità della mente. «Sempre» significa in ogni circostanza. Da un punto di vista esteriore c’era ben poco per cui i credenti a quei tempi potessero rallegrarsi. Ma la gioia è un frutto dello Spirito, non è qualcosa che il cristiano possa procurarsi traendola fuori dalle proprie risorse.

Il cristiano è chiamato ad essere sempre lieto. Questa qualità del suo nuovo essere è possibile ad una sola condizione: che vi sia nel cuore una fede così forte da pensare in ogni momento che tutto ciò che avviene, avviene per un bene più grande per noi. Chi non possiede questa fede, si perde, perché la tribolazione, senza la fede, non genera speranza, ma delusione, tristezza, lacrime e ogni altra sorta di amarezza.

La letizia matura solo sull’albero della fede e chi cade dalla fede cade anche dalla letizia e precipita nella tristezza. Sapendo che il male fisico o morale permesso da Dio deve generare in noi la santificazione, il cristiano lo accoglie nella fede e lo vive nella preghiera.

Infatti l'apostolo aggiunge: «pregate incessantemente». In questa brevissima esortazione è nascosto il segreto della vita del cristiano. La preghiera deve scandire la vita della comunità e dei singoli; un’attitudine continua. Non è la preghierina fatta ogni tanto, ma è una preghiera regolare, fatta secondo un ritmo costante. Se si fa questo possiamo andare anche oltre, e cioè vivere in uno spirito di preghiera, consci della presenza di Dio con noi ovunque siamo.

È perso quel momento che è senza preghiera. È un momento affidato solo alla nostra volontà, razionalità, è un momento perso perché non fatto secondo la volontà di Dio ma secondo la nostra. È perso quell’attimo vissuto, ma non affidato a Dio nella preghiera. È perso quel momento fatto da noi stessi, ma non fatto come un dono di Dio per noi e per gli altri. Questa è la verità della nostra vita.

Poiché oggi non si prega più, o si prega solo per alcuni interessi personali, tanta parte della nostra vita viene sciupata, è persa, non è vissuta né per il nostro bene, né per il bene dei nostri fratelli. Imparare a pregare è la cosa più necessaria per un uomo. Insegnare a farlo è l’opera primaria del sacerdote, o di chi guida la comunità.

«In ogni cosa rendete grazie», è il modo di vivere in un clima gioioso e orante. Abbiamo il verbo eucharistein («rendere grazie»). In ogni situazione rendere grazie, perché anche nelle nostre difficoltà e nelle nostre prove Dio ci insegna lezioni preziose. Non è facile vedere il lato positivo di una prova, ma se Dio è sopra ogni cosa, allora è sovrano anche nella prova.

Perché di tutto si faccia un rendimento di grazie, occorre che il cuore si rivesta di umiltà. È proprio dell’umiltà riconoscere quanto il Signore ha fatto e fa per noi. Ma è proprio della preghiera innalzare al Signore l’inno per il rendimento di grazie, per la benedizione, per la glorificazione del suo nome che è potente sulla terra e nei cieli.

Chi non rende grazie è un idolatra. Pensa che tutto sia da lui, dalle sue capacità, e quindi si attribuisce ciò che è semplicemente e puramente un dono del Signore. Esempio di come si ringrazi il Signore, lo si benedica, lo si esalti e lo si magnifichi è la Vergine Maria. Il suo Magnificat è quotidianamente recitato dalla Chiesa. Bisogna che non solo venga recitato, quanto imitato, pregato, fatto propria vita.

A chiusura di questa triade di imperativi sulla vita spirituale, si dà una motivazione che abbraccia tutte e tre le esortazioni: «questa è infatti la volontà di Dio in Cristo Gesù verso di voi». In questo contesto l’espressione «volontà di Dio» implica uno stile di vita corrispondente al progetto di salvezza rivelato in Gesù Cristo. La volontà di Dio viene fatta conoscere in Cristo, e in Cristo ci viene data la motivazione e la forza per cui ci è possibile fare quella volontà.

 Argentino Quintavalle, autore dei libri 

- Apocalisse – commento esegetico 

- L'Apostolo Paolo e i giudaizzanti – Legge o Vangelo?

• Gesù Cristo vero Dio e vero Uomo nel mistero trinitario
• Il discorso profetico di Gesù (Matteo 24-25)
• Tutte le generazioni mi chiameranno beata

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