Miraculous Changes in the past 70 years - Part 4

"These are undoubtedly significant times, but we should not try to predict when Christ will come again. He said that. 'No one knows the day or the hour when He will come again.'

This is part four in a series of five blog posts in which James Wardroper, Senior Citizen, living in Ontario, a retired teacher, comments on the growth of the Christian church in the last 70 years.  He is the author of "The Light-Bearer's Saga", a set of eight books, recounting history from a Christian perspective from 427 AD to the present, with volumes beginning to appear in September 2020.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

"We live in days in which miracles still happen, and God is in the process of demolishing spiritual roadblocks that have resisted the gospel for centuries. I have witnessed the enormous changes that have taken place, so I will now relate my own experiences." 

"The next blockage to the gospel has been that of conservative elements of the Roman Catholic church.

"In AD 397, all the catholic bishops met at Carthage and declared their agreement on the apostolic authorship of the books which we still have in our modern Bible.  In a slow drift over the centuries, the church which called itself catholic (i.e. universal) slowly departed from the base of scripture.

"While agreeing that there have been many godly individuals over the centuries who never left the Roman Catholic church, great men like Wycliffe and Huss sounded the alarm, but were brutally silenced by the church authorities. It finally took the insights of Martin Luther, as professor of the Bible, to recognize how far the church had departed from its scriptural base and to raise the alarm.

"The church authorities tried to silence Luther, but the German princes came to his rescue and hid him While in hiding, he translated the Scriptures into German so that ordinary people would be able to understand the teaching of the apostles for themselves. From then on, the reformation spread to many countries.

"The Roman Catholic Church then had its own counter-reformation, which did much to reform the practice of the church, but that did not address the issue of the departure from the apostolic teaching. Moreover, Protestants were regarded as heretics and the centuries that followed were marred by hideous bloodshed in wars and intrigues between Catholics and Protestants.

"The hostility remained unchanged until in 1962, Pope John 23rd  summoned the Vatican2 council, where it was pronounced that Protestants were no longer heretics, but “separated brethren”. Immediately the walls seemed to come down, and many Catholics and Protestants began to have fellowship with each other. Much still remains to heal the historic division, but the process seems to be well underway."

(Note: In a later blog I will outline the tremendous growth of the Protestant church in South America as the Gospel has entered every level of society. - DKP).