Pope Benedict XVI has declared the Roman Catholic Church is the only “true” church.

I reject this and I am offended by it.

For the second time in a week, Pope Benedict XVI has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, reasserting the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church and saying other Christian communities were either defective or not true churches.

Benedict approved a document released Tuesday from his old office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which repeated church teaching on Catholic relations with other Christians.

I would only say to the Pope he is a fallible human being, and when Christ referred to the Church He wasn’t referring to any denomination but to the believers as a whole.

Go to Revelation or any part of the New Testament where you will see letters to the church in Ephesus, Corinth etc.

Revelation talks of seven churches. One in Asia, Ephesus, Smyrna, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.

Funny I don’t see Rome mentioned in Revelation Chapter 1 where Jesus Himself directs John to write to the various churches and John was exiled to the Isle of Patmos by those in Rome who were not Christians so there certainly existed a church in Rome at the time.

The new document — formulated as five questions and answers — restates key sections of a 2000 text the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, “Dominus Iesus,” which riled Protestant, Lutheran and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the “means of salvation.”

“Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one Church,” said the document released as the pope vacations at a villa in Lorenzago di Cadore, in Italy’s Dolomite mountains.

The document said Orthodox churches were indeed “churches” because they have apostolic succession and that they enjoyed “many elements of sanctification and of truth.” But it said they lack something because they do not recognize the primacy of the pope — a defect, or a “wound” that harmed them, it said.

“This is obviously not compatible with the doctrine of Primacy which, according to the Catholic faith, is an ‘internal constitutive principle’ of the very existence of a particular Church,” said a commentary from the congregation which accompanied the text.

The Church is the Body of Christ in that it is the believers in Christ.

No Christian denomination can claim to be the only “true” church no matter how much they would like to and no matter how much the leader of that church, who is a man after all, would instruct his followers in that false teaching.

I have no quarrel with Catholics but I do have a strong disagreement with the statement by the present Pope who will one day die just as the rest have and will not be bodily resurrected on the third day as our Savior was. Then someone else will come in and explain it and go back to the new old teachings again. This shows man’s fallibility.

I have my salvation and I have never been a Catholic.

With all due respect to the Pope, there will not be only Roman Catholics or Orthodox Catholics in heaven. I already know of a lot of Protestants of different denominations who are there. Not for a fact that I have seen myself, but because I know what they believed, lived and taught.