The Roman Catholic traditions of the "Madonna and Child" began back in pagan Babylon with the stories of Nimrod, Semiramis and the baby Tammuz.
"The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead theirdough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger." Jeremiah 7:18 (KJV)
Until the age of 30, I was your typical product of the Roman Catholic system. I had been sprinkled as a baby, received "first holy communion", confessed my sins to a 'priest', and completed the Catholic sacrament of "Confirmation" all by the time I was in 5th grade. If anyone would have asked me who the "Queen of Heaven" was, I could answer them immediately and accurately. The "
Queen of Heaven" was the same Virgin Mary that I had been taught to to pray to and to seek salvation from all my life.
In order to attempt to staunch the flow of criticism Catholics receive about idol worship of mere humans like the biblical Mary, we were trained to tell people that "no, we do not worship Mary, we simply venerate her out of respect". But for those of us on the "inside", we knew different. We were taught to pray to Mary more than to anyone else, with prayers like this one:
“O Mother of Perpetual Help, grant me ever to be able to call upon thy powerful name, since thy name is the help of the living and the salvation of the dying. Ah, Mary most pure, Mary most sweet, grant that thy name from this day forth may be to me the very breath of life. Dear Lady, delay not to come to my assistance whenever I call upon thee; for in all the temptations that assail me, in all the necessities that befall me, I will never leave off calling upon thee, ever repeating: Mary, Mary. What comfort, what sweetness, what confidence, what tenderness fills my soul at the sound of thy name, at the very thought of thee! I give thanks to our Lord, who for my sake hath given thee a name so sweet, so lovable, so mighty. But I am not content merely to speak thy name; I would utter it for very love of thee; it is my desire that love should ever remind me to name thee, Mother of Perpetual Help.” source
If you think that saying something like that is not worship or prayer, you are highly deceived. That was just one of dozens of Vatican-approved prayers to Mary. Catholic schools and churches love to place statues of the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus in the classrooms and chapels. Everywhere you go, there the Madonna and Child appear before you like an apparition. But as I got older, I discovered statues like that did not have the beginnings with Mary and Jesus, not even close. The Roman Catholic traditions of the "Madonna and Child" began back in pagan Babylon with the stories of Nimrod, Semiramis and the baby Tammuz.
In his excellent book, Babylon Mystery Religion, author Ralph Woodrow shows us where the Roman Catholic "Mother and Child" worship came from.
Nimrod, the mighty hunter before (against) the Lord,
was the first to organize cities into a kingdom under human rule,
Genesis 10:8-10. This much we know from the Bible. The name Nimrod comes from the word,
marad, meaning “he rebelled.” Legend has it that Nimrod married his own mother, Semiramis. After Nimrod died, Semiramis claimed Nimrod was the sun-god. She later had a child, Tammuz, whom she claimed was Nimrod reborn, supernaturally conceived, the promised seed, the “savior.” Semiramis developed a religion of mother and child worship. Symbols were used to develop a “mystery” religion. Since Nimrod was believed to be the sun-god (Baal), fire was considered his earthly representation. In other forms, Nimrod was symbolized by sun images, fish, trees, pillars, and animals. Tammuz, son of the sun-god, was represented by the golden calf. And so it was, that mankind followed this religion of worshipping the creation (creature) rather than the Creator,
Romans 1:21-26.
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Rome, the greatest and longest-lived human world-ruling empire, assimilated religions from her many conquered territories. All these religions had commonalities, for they all came from Babylon. These practices infiltrated and overcame the professing Christian Church, which later came to be dominated by Rome itself. Many pagan religions had mother and child worship, whether Devaki and Krishna (India), Isis and Horus (Egypt), Venus or Fortuna and Jupiter (Rome), etc. Each nation gave different names to essentially the same god or goddess.
A mother goddess, or “queen of heaven,” was said to have given miraculous birth to a son. Ancient Israel sometimes followed this false religion, Judges 2:13, 10:6; I Samuel 7:3-4, 12:10; I Kings 11:5; II Kings 23:13; Jeremiah 44:17-19, with disastrous results. In Ephesus, Semiramis was worshipped as the great mother Diana, the many-breasted goddess. This form of mother-child worship was followed throughout all Asia and the world, Acts 19:27.
Pope Francis Entrusts the World to the "Immaculate Heart of Mary":
Mary worship had no place in the early Christian Church. Even the
Catholic Encyclopedia (article, “Virgin Mary,” pp. 459-460) admits that in the first centuries, A.D., there are no traces of the worship of Mary. By the fourth century, the time of Emperor Constantine, worshipping Mary as a goddess and offering cakes at her shrine, began to come into the professing Church. In A.D. 431, the Council of Ephesus made Mary worship official. By mixing beliefs already being practiced (Diana of Ephesus worshipped as a goddess) with nominal Christianity, so-called Church “fathers” reasoned that they could gain more converts. It is the same old story. Apostates believe that lowering God’s standards results in a better form of religion, more acceptable and popular to the masses.
The Bible is clear that there is only one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus,
I Timothy 2:5. Yet Roman Catholicism teaches that Mary is also a “mediator.” Catholics offer prayers to Mary, burn candles to Mary, and have statues of Mary, which came directly from their pagan counterparts. Isis, the Egyptian goddess, was known as “mother of God,” just as Mary is titled by Catholics. Weigall, in
The Paganism in Our Christianity, page 129, says, “When Christianity triumphed, these paintings and figures became those of the madonna and child, without any break in continuity: no archaeologist, in fact, can now tell whether some of these objects represent the one or the other.”
In pagan religion, the mother was worshipped as much (or more) than her son! Noted Roman Catholic writer Alphonsus Liguori stressed that prayers addressed to Mary are much more effectual than to Christ. Mary is deified as the “queen of heaven,” born without sin (Immaculate Conception), the “mother of God,” exactly as pagan worshippers deified Isis, Venus, Ashtoreth, etc. Jesus did not teach that Mary was superior to other human beings. When someone mentioned His mother and brethren, Jesus asked, “Who is My mother? and who are My brethren?” Then, stretching forth His hand toward His disciples, He said, “Behold My mother and My brethren! For WHOSOEVER shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and MOTHER,”Matthew 12:46-50. Anyone who does the will of God is on the same level as Mary.
Closely associated with praying to Mary is the rosary, a chain of fifteen sets of small beads, marked off by one large bead. The ends of the chain are joined by a medal with an imprint of Mary, from which hangs a short chain with a crucifix at the end. The use of prayer-counters or rosary beads is an almost universal custom in pagan religion. From Nineveh to India to China, beads were used as a part of worship. The Phoenicians used a circle of beads resembling a rosary in the worship of Astarte, the mother goddess, as early as 800 B.C. Francis Xavier was astonished to see that rosaries were universally familiar to the Buddhists of Japan.
The main prayer of the rosary is the “Hail Mary.” The complete rosary repeats the Hail Mary 53 times, the Lord’s Prayer 6 times, and several other recitations. The Hail Mary combines the statement of the angel about Mary from the Bible with unscriptural blasphemy, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou among women Jesus [a loose translation of Luke 1:28], and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of death, Amen.” Mary was not the mother of God, she was not holy, she was a righteous woman who is dead in her grave, waiting for the resurrection to eternal life, with all the other dead in Christ.
The Catholic Encyclopedia says, “There is little or no trace of the Hail Mary as an accepted devotional formula before about 1050,” article “Hail Mary,” p. 111. Jesus instructs us not to use vain repetitions when we pray, Matthew 6:7-8. The so-called “Lord’s Prayer” verses 9-13, was a model prayer, not a prayer to be monotonously repeated. Jesus said in effect “pray thus” (after this manner therefore pray ye), not “pray this.” Prayer should be spontaneous, not rote memory with no heart-felt meaning.
Now you know where the idea of Mary worship comes from, because it certainly is not in the Bible.
There is not one verse of scripture in the entire Bible that would give any weight at all to praying to Mary, worshipping Mary, or placing Mary in any position of prominence at all. The book of Acts shows that Mary is in the Upper Room on the day of Pentecost, but merely as a silent witness. No one asks her anything, and she offers no comments of any kind. Rather strange, don't you think, considering the exalted position afforded her by the Catholic church?
"And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." Revelation 18:4 (KJV)
The Roman Catholic Church is the prophesied Whore of Babylon found in chapters 17 and 18 in the book of Revelation. It is a system that God hates, and will one day destroy during the time of Jacob's trouble. The Lord saved me back in 1990, and pulled me out of this false system. He will do the same for you if you desire to know the truth.
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32 (KJV)
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