One of the most toxic fruits of the Protestant Reformation is the concept of Sola Scriptura, the ahistorical belief that the sum of all religious knowledge exists within the (truncated) Bible, and that tradition and the wisdom of the Church Fathers can be categorically dismissed.
This, coupled with flawed translations, is how we get people insisting that the Blessed Virgin Mary was just an unremarkable woman who gave birth to Jesus and then a bunch of other kids.
A common form of “Bible study” is to go through scripture line by line, reading each one in isolating and seeking to tease out its deeper meaning. There is certainly value in studying scripture, but one must use the full context as well as consult the very many people with much larger brains who looked at it first, otherwise you end up as a Calvinist Nestorian Dispensationalist.
There is even a meme floating around of a smug young man saying “No, I don’t believe anything in the Bible, but if I quote from it, maybe I will convince you to do what I want.”
I bring this up because in a far-ranging discussion yesterday, my fallen-away (for the moment, I hope) daughter decided to bring scripture into the discussion and used her phone to pull up a passage that backed her up. I asked her for the citation, which was Leviticus. I then fetched a nearby Bible and proceeded to read the next passage, and noted that there are lots of things in Leviticus that I bet she wouldn’t agree with. One doesn’t get to simply pick and choose.
This is why I am so disappointed in the American bishops, who have strangely bestirred themselves regarding some social issues (like immigration) after years of twiddling their thumbs while the President of the United States – a nominal Catholic – pushed the most aggressive pro-abortion policy in American history without so much as a public rebuke.
This hypocrisy seems to be widespread. The Archbishop of the Diocese of the Military opined that invading Greenland would be an immoral order that should not be obeyed, but he was completely mute when the service members he was supposed to shepherd were being driven out of the military by illegal and immoral orders.
The bishops should know better, indeed they do know better, and its deeply disappointing to see them aping third-rate televangelists with selective scripture quotes.
Nowhere in the Bible are we instructed to take in people who refuse to learn our language, hate our religion, reject our culture and despise us as a people.
I see much concern in Catholic circles about the faith being co-opted by nationalists or right-wing factions, but they might want to pull the beam out of their own eyes before offering pastoral correction. Such behavior from Protestants is sadly to be expected, but from Church leadership, it is scandalous.
Chateau Lloyd 
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