If anyone is in doubt about the Watchtower's connection to the Catholic Church one has to look no further than the terminology the Watchtower is using to describe certain groups of ministers and pioneers.
The title The Order of Special Full-Time Servants is first mentioned in the 1995 Yearbook pages 5-6.
"Among the full-time workers were 15,145 members of the global Bethel family. They help to provide literature, supervision, and other beneficial services in support of the worldwide work of Bible education. Of these, 5,082 serve at the world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and at nearby facilities. All of them are members of the Order of Special Full-Time Servants, a religious order that is devoted exclusively to the ministry."
It is of great interest that the terms "congregations" and "orders" are terms the Catholic Church has used for centuries.
Under the article "Religious Order" on Wikipedia in the subsection "Christianity" we read the following:
"A Catholic religious institute is a society whose members (referred to as "religious") pronounce vows that are accepted by a superior in the name of the Catholic Church,[1] who wear a religious habit and who live a life of brothers or sisters in common.[2] Catholic religious orders and congregations are their two historical categories. Religious institutes are distinct from secular institutes, another kind of institute of consecrated life, and from lay ecclesial movements.
Several religious orders evolved during the Crusades to incorporate a military mission became "religious military orders", such as the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, the Knights of the Order of the Temple and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre.
Non-monastic religious institutes(=Jehovah's
Witnesses live a non monastic life)
typically have a motherhouse(=like Bethel) or generalate with jurisdiction over any number of dependent religious communities(=like jw congregations), whose members may be moved by their superior general to its other communities as the institute's needs require."
It is not that difficult to see that both the terminology and structure of modern Jehovah's Witnesses has been designed from the same people that create the Catholic orders that go all the way back to the Crusades and the Catholic hierarchy and structure. Talking about not being part of Babylon the Great!
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