Well, thanks to a winter storm hitting Chicago today and causing my flight to be cancelled, I get two more days out here in the beautiful Angelina National Forest of east Texas, basking in sunny 75-plus weather from my friend Trish’s backwoods estate!

I must say, my time here in the boonies (she’s 10 miles from the little pothole-in-the-road village of Zavalla) since mid-October has proven a real delight and very therapeutic as I continue to struggle with nerves/anxiety issues.

Just like in northeastern Alabama, where I lived last fall and winter, people in these parts are predominantly Christian and there are big and little churches everywhere—even down the one-lane dirt country roads, etc.

People in general are super, super-friendly, whether it’s the bank teller or gas station clerk or the supermarket baggers who carry your groceries out to your car.

My dentist (I arrived here with a killer huge toothache, resulting in a root canal and crown to the tune of $1700), found a way to carry on conversations with me about Chicago, New York City (where I lived until last year), my writings on the Bible, where I’m from in Ohio, presidential politics, Texas’ immigration problem, on and on. In his waiting room he had a copy of the Gideon Bible and Christian music was piped over the sound system.

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An ongoing story I’ve been reading about in the Houston Chronicle for the past month has to do with Houston’s Catholic archbishop, Daniel N. DiNardo, being made a cardinal by Pope Benedict in a Vatican ceremony that included 22 other men from around the world, most interestingly the “Patriarch of Babylon for the Chaldeans, Emmanuel III Delly of Iraq.”

Splashed across the cover of last Sunday’s paper was a huge photograph of DiNardo kneeling before the Pope. He wore a red hat and cape and the Pope was robed in gold.

At the “Mass of the Rings” ceremony, DiNardo received a ring that ‘symbolizes his connection to the Pope,’ and a red biretta, a sign that he was ‘officially a prince of the church.’

The Pope was quoted explaining that the hat is “red as a sign of the dignity of the office of a cardinal, signifying that you are ready to act with fortitude, even to the point of spilling your blood for the increase of the Christian faith.”

Of course, what’s meant by that is ‘spilling your blood for the increase of the Catholic faith.’ DiNardo, the first cardinal ever from the South, leads some 1.3 million Catholics from his Houston-Galveston archdiocese.

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In one reporter’s first-hand account of the Vatican ceremony, he said there were at least three lines of thousands awaiting entrance to St. Peter’s Square at about 7:30 a.m. for the 10:30 a.m. Mass.

“The crowd booked its way up the white steps, past the entry and into the basilica,” he wrote. “By the time they arrived, many were panting. Few had stopped to admire much of anything.

“The seasoned visitor at a papal Mass knows to head for a chair on the aisle, to be close to the procession of Pope Benedict XVI and other clergy as it makes its way from the back of the basilica to the altar. That's a race worthy of a spot in the Olympics. I was sitting in the middle of a row. But not that far back. Actually, it's all far back. The basilica is massive. And the first half is reserved for clergy.

“By 8:30 a.m., the place was packed and anyone who was getting a chair had one. That was the time the doors were supposed to open. Then, it's on to the waiting. Luckily it was an interesting crowd. The languages in my area included Italian, German, English, Spanish and Chaldean, the language spoken by the Iraqi Christians who had come to cheer for their new cardinal.”

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Catholicism, as I’ve written about before, is patterned after the Baal worship system of the Old Testament—an organized, world-evangelizing religious church with robed priests called Fathers who worship idols and have their patrons do the same, even bowing down and kissing their priests as well as their idols.

They sacrifice to their idols drink offerings of blood and flesh and worship in connection with the Queen of Heaven. They corrupt the Word of God and change the worship of God with their own traditions.

Jordan says, “Through assimilation and adjustment, this religious system has done an ingenious thing—when God Almighty set aside Israel’s kingdom program, they had their counterfeit program.

“In other words, when God set aside the nation Israel—and the gospel of the kingdom, and the post-resurrection commission, and the ministry of Peter and the 12—and introduced the mystery of the dispensation of grace, you know what this religious system did?

“Well, in Kings, they reached over and just picked up a counterfeit Levitical system and put it on them. They reached over there and, just as slick as you please, picked up Pete and the 12 and the so-called Great Commission—the gospel of the kingdom—and they go out today professing to be the embodiment of that kingdom program.

“I’m not trying to be hard, unkind, mean, vilifying, nasty or any of the rest of that stuff but I know what people say when you say some of these things—‘Well, you’re a Hitler!’ and all that kind of business.

“I guarantee you, though, your grandparents knew these things! You live in one of the most ignorant generations that’s ever graced the face of the earth. You live in a generation that is so out of touch with reality that the truth sounds like error to them.

“That Book’s the truth and it’s the only scientific textbook that can authoritatively explain to you what’s going on around you in the world. There isn’t any other, and you don’t need to sit around and look at what’s happening and try to figure out God’s truth that way. You get in that Book and that Book will explain it for you.

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As Bible scholar C. R. Stam writes in his 1981 book The Lord’s Supper, “Nowhere in Scripture—even in the Roman Catholic translation—is it indicated that the Catholic priest ‘succeeds . . . the Jewish priest.’ This is pure invention of the apostate ‘Church’ which does not recognize the all-sufficiency of our Lord’s accomplished redemption or the final authority of the Word of God.

Pointing out that the Catholic Dictionary (MacMillan Co.) even states, ‘The words ‘priest,’ ‘priesthood’ are never applied in the New Testament to the office of the Christian ministry,’ Stam argues, “On what basis does Rome operate her elaborate priesthood? Certainly not on the authority of the Word of God.

“If a priesthood is in God’s plan for the Church of this dispensation, why is the word ‘priest’ never applied either to the twelve apostles or to Paul and his associates in the ministry, Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Titus, et al?

“This surely does involve a denial of any special priesthood today. The priests of the Old Testament times were so called, and the mere fact that there was an organized priesthood then by no means proves that there should be an organized priesthood now.”

In another great passage, Stam writes, “The greatest heresy of the Church of Rome is doubtless her doctrine of the ‘perpetual sacrifice,’ the offering of the body and blood of our Lord on altars in endless repetition by her priests . . .

“Rome teaches that in each Mass our Lord Jesus Christ is brought down from heaven by the priest and that, ‘subjecting Himself’ to the ‘jurisdiction’ of the priest as a ‘victim,’ He is ‘immolated,’ or slain, the priest offering Him to God in sacrifice for sins.

“The Maryknoll Missal (P.J. Kennedy and Sons, N.Y.) states: ‘The Sacrifice of the altar is no more commemoration of the Sacrifice of the Cross. It is one and the same Victim . . . our divine Redeemer in His human nature with his true body and blood . . . Thus the Sacrifice of Calvary is repeated in every sacrifice of the altar (P. XVII).

“Cardinal H. E. Manning, in writing of the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass, declared: ‘In this divine manner He subjects Himself to the jurisdiction of His priests . . .’ ”

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Stam continues, “We should thank God for opening Martin Luther’s eyes to see the basic fallacies in Rome’s ‘Sacrifice of the Mass’ and for his boldness in holding this idolatrous practice up to the light of Scripture . . .

“Luther had come far enough out of Roman superstition to know that his statements about eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood had to be qualified.

“Physical eating and drinking—even of Christ’s flesh and blood—could not save a soul, nor would God have us entertain so repugnant and blasphemous a thought as that of actually eating and drinking the flesh and blood of His holy and beloved Son. Furthermore, how could millions, down through the ages, all eat and drink Christ’s physical flesh and blood?”