Some good material, some bad material

Roman Catholicism & the Coming World Religion
By Pastor Billy Crone
Get A Life Media, 2019, 349 pp.

I’m always pleased to see new books published that critically examine Roman Catholicism, so I ordered “Roman Catholicism & the Coming World Religion” by Billy Crone as soon as I stumbled across it while browsing at Amazon.com. Billy Crone? He’s the pastor of an independent Baptist church in Las Vegas, NV and he has a slew of self-published book titles, most having to do with end-times eschatology, not my forte. The illustrations of the alien and UFO on the cover of this book had me a little worried because some eschatologists do get carried away.

This was an “interesting” book. It reads exactly like an extemporaneous Sunday School lecture and is chock full of colloquialisms. I strongly suspect Crone’s sermons/talks on various topics are transcribed almost directly into book form with very little editing.

There’s A LOT of really good information in this book for which Crone is to be commended, especially in regards to the evangelical church’s growing ecumenism with Rome. However, the author is also sometimes prone to overstatement, misstatement, exaggeration, and hyperbole. Catholic doctrine is not always presented as precisely as the RCC teaches it, allowing Catholic apologists to dismiss an otherwise decent effort. Some examples:

• In regards to the dogma of papal infallibility, Crone writes, “They (Catholics) would have you believe their popes are always right 100% of the time” (p.190). The Roman church actually teaches its pope are infallible only when they declare a doctrine ex cathedra, i.e., from the chair of Peter, with the full authority of their alleged papal office. Catholic theologians are often at odds as to which papal declarations are actually infallible, but that’s another topic.
• Crone chides pope Francis for criticizing president Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. He states that Vatican City has a wall around it, so Francis is a hypocrite for reprimanding Trump (p. 262). Well, the Vatican’s walls were erected in the ninth-century to protect it from the Saracen pirates, but the ancient walls are certainly not what they used to be. Of the six entrances into Vatican City, three are wide open to the public.
• In the section on Purgatory, Crone states, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the RCC kept Mother Teresa (d. 1997) waiting in Purgatory for nineteen years until they finally got around to canonizing her in 2016 (p. 301). A Catholic apologist would reply that canonization doesn’t send anyone to Heaven, it’s only a supposed confirmation that they’re already there.
• Crone errs most egregiously by including and referencing the bogus “Jesuit Extreme Oath of Induction” (p.96-97). The alleged “secret oath” was first published in 1689 by Protestant, Robert Ware, in his book, “Foxes and Firebrands,” and has been repeated by careless Protestant polemicists and conspiracy theorists (e.g., Jack Chick Publications, Tony Alamo, etc.) for four centuries.

There are many other similar exaggerations and careless errors in this book. Catholicism has more than enough problems to answer for with its verifiable history and its doctrines as it presents them. Critics don’t need to exaggerate or misstate the facts to show the anti-Biblical teachings and history of Catholicism.

There are many more reliable rebuttals of Roman Catholicism available. One of the best is James G. McCarthy’s, “The Gospel According to Rome,” which I re-reviewed only yesterday. See here.

Postscript: Pastor Crone thankfully does not mention aliens or UFOs within the text.