I'm not Roman Catholic but Orthodox Christian. Some of these are pretty easy to explain though.
Vain repetitions would be more like the Buddhists etc who say "ommmmm". The words have no other purpose than to induce ones self into a trance, they also commonly used drum beats for this. If you're saying repeating a prayer is somehow evil then how do you explain the "our father"?
We don't believe in a Pope so no qualms there.
"Praying" is commonly conflated with "worshipping" to protestants, but this is not and never has been the meaning historically. It's a little strange because protestants create this definition of prayer being synonymous with worship, then use it against traditional Christians, when none of our prayers equate to worshipping saints but rather asking for help the same way you might ask a family member to ask God for mercy on your behalf.
In the Orthodox Church we don't believe the Church excommunicates people but rather, by joining the Church and then violating it's core tenants you have effectively excommunicated yourself. People who aren't part of the Church can't be excommunicated. It's more of a formal declaration that this person is no longer with the faith than the Church causing someone to go to hell. Like if a priest says Christ is Satan, he's already excommunicated regardless of what the Church does or doesn't say.
The Lord's Day isn't the same as the Sabbath. Those are two separate things. Even in the Bible if you look for the symbolism of breaking bread, you'll see it occurs in reference to Jesus specifically and occurs on the first day of the week, like Acts 20:7.
When Christ spoke about vain repetitions he was speaking about and to the Pharisees and Sadducees. He was also speaking of their habit of going into the synagogue and making a public display of their faith. Christ directed his people to do their prayers in secret and to not engage in vain repetition. As for the "Our Father," that prayer is meant to be a model for how to pray. We can use it but we should also remember that God wants a relationship with us and relationships require more than repetitive ritual. They require us to talk to God about our problems, give thanks to Him for our blessings, and ask Him for help when we need something.
Praying IS worship. Singing and all that other stuff is nice and worshipful but praying is sort of a big one. Another big one that is often overlooked is STUDYING His word. Christ said in the NT that where two or more are gathered in His name, there He is. He intended for us to gather and discuss, talk about faith, His word, worship, and come together to do the works we are meant to do. Let me ask you this, how many Christians have never actually read the Bible to any meaningful extent? How many only believe or even know what their pastor told them? How many can't even recall the sermon? Faith takes effort.
That's fine for your Orthodox church. That isn't what the Catholic church claimed for centuries.
Act's 20:7 notes that they were coming together on the first day of the week, eating together and talking to each other about the Gospel. They did this ALL THE TIME. The point of that passage was to establish the circumstances under which Paul fell to his death but DIDN'T DIE, which is covered just a few verses later. Furthermore, the Catholic Church, in the catechism I linked to, claimed that as a matter of its authority it transferred the solemnity of the Sabbath to the lord's day. It did this a bit over 500 years after Christ's death so go figure.
As for the prayer thing, we don't consider prayer to explicitly be worship. It's just spiritual communion (communication). So there you go. That's why we pray to Saints. To us saying "you only pray to God" is like saying "you only talk to God" like you literally don't talk to any other human beings, your mom, your sister, your brothers. But trying to portray it as if we believe in worshipping people is disingenuous.
The Roman Catholic Church is essentially a malformed version of the Orthodox Church. Literally, if you go back you will see changes here, a few edicts there, over time it becomes what it is now. Strip away all of that and you'll have the Orthodox Church. Much of it is still similar, I think they would agree with my statements on excommunication.
The breaking of bread all throughout the Bible is always in reference to Jesus or something quite similar to our Sunday worship. Even explicitly stated in Luke 24
30 And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.
31 And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. . .
35 And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.
Jesus was literally identified by the breaking of bread. That was their moment of realization. I think that says a lot that it's not just about eating. The entire divine liturgy is centered around breaking bread. It's what we go to Church every Sunday for.
It also wasn't 500 years after his death, it's found in patristic writings throughout the 2nd century, and officially declared at the council of Nicaea, 325 ad. When you're talking about second century writings that's pretty close to when the Apostles walked the Earth, many of these patristic figures had either direct or secondhand experience with the Apostles.
I think this is the chasm in Protestant theology, where it involves throwing out tradition and writings from people who learned and preached directly under the Apostles, the people who are the most likely to have the correct beliefs on the matter, since they learned directly or a few generations removed from the people who wrote the Bible. The New Testament is pretty short (80% of the Bible is the old testament) and a lot of it is basically just eavesdropping on conversations the Apostles had. It's not like they wrote entire volumes about theology. It's still useful but trying to extract entire ideological belief systems from one or two sentences is not the most pragmatic way of going about things.
I see New Agers quote John 10:34 to support the idea of "Christ Consciousness". How do protestants debunk it? By adding historical context. Tradition. Just that fact alone is proof that it isn't enough to just pick out a random sentence and call it dogma.
Catholicism is debunked. Scripture is clear that RCC is the prostitute in Revelation and the mother ("Holy Mother Church") of prostitutes, the Protestant branches. Sabbath is Saturday plain and clear. The mark of the beast is Sunday worship and the other counterfeit holy days (Christmas, Easter, etc.) pushed by the Catholic church with Satan's authority (Rev 17).
“Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?" -You, in this thread
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