There is a sense of desperation that has become obvious amongst some of the Reformed camp, as evidenced by their regular and ridiculous attacks on the Catholic Church. The irony of the phenomenon is that those men flailing their arms and making the most noise are the very ones who, having dared to somewhat loosen their ties to the Westminster Divines, appear horrified to realize that they are in a much closer theological orbit with the "Death Star" known as Rome than they ever dreamed they would be. Good news boys: The tractor beam has been engaged, resistance is futile, prepare to be beamed aboard the "Mother"ship. Yeah, I know I mixed Star Wars & Star Trek lingo... Sorry about that.
Kevin Branson
Dr. Kenneth Howell, former Presbyterian, offered this fine Catholic explanation of the process of salvation when discussing, amongst other things, the Feast of All Souls with Marcus Grodi on EWTN’s The Journey Home.
The best treatise on Purgatory that I have ever read was by Catherine of Genoa. It’s a small treatise. She is from the 15th century. Catherine of Genoa says in her treatise on Purgatory that the pain of Purgatory is that you see the light of God’s face in the beatific vision and you’re not quite there yet, and the pain is that you long for it so much. The Feast of All Souls, of course, is for us as Christians on earth to pray for the beloved departed, and to pray for them because we have a holy obligation for our ancestors that they might reach the joy of heaven. But you know Marcus, for me as a former Protestant, the thing that makes these days very special, is that it makes me realize what salvation is. I used to think that salvation was accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, praying a prayer, and then everything would be secure. Well then I should live out a Christian life, but nevertheless, it was that decision to follow Christ that I made for him. But in fact, what salvation is…is a transformation process. From the day of my baptism when I was a baby, to the day of my death, I will always be in the process of transformation, as long as I, and we all cooperate with the love of God, which is given to us in the form of grace. That grace is the merits of Christ on the Cross, given to us because of our faith and good works. And as we give our lives to him, we are transformed, as Paul says, from glory to glory. And as we are transformed, more and more, we come close (to God). Now my goal is that before I die, my Purgatory will be done, so that I can go right into the presence of God.
I have just established another blog called Catholic Links, as a companion blog to Journey to Rome. Of course, all are free to comment there, but if you have a (free) WordPress account, then you can also post your own original material to this new blog. The only requirements for posting to Catholic Links are that the post be suitable for anyone to read, and that the post be relevant to the Catholic Church and her mission to the world and dialogue with other Christian groups.
The blog is based on a newly revised WordPress theme that is designed for a free flow of information and easy “community” interaction…think Facebook Catholic, on a much smaller scale, of course. If you have news items, observations, links to share, or even if you would simply like to point to a post at your own blog, or just tell other Catholic readers what is on your mind, please feel free to use Catholic Links.
If you don’t already have a free WordPress account, then you can sign up for one easily and quickly, and once you have your WordPress account you will have the ability to post to Catholic Links.
“He sees angels in the architecture” – Paul Simon
Today the Catholic Church celebrates Saints Peter and Paul basilicas.
St. Peters basilica, the Vatican Church is the second patriarchal church at Rome. The body of St Peter was buried on the Vatican hill immediately after his martyrdom in the place where his basilica stands today. St Pauls remains were deposited on the Ostian Way, where his church now stands.
Pilgrims with extraordinary devotion visited their tombs from the beginning. In 210 Caius, priest of Rome, speaking with Proclus said:
“I can show you the trophies of the apostles. For, whether you go to the Vatican hill, or to the Ostian road, you will meet with the monuments of them who by their preaching and miracles founded this church.”
Constantine the Great, after he founded the mother church of all Catholics, he built the church of St. Peter on the Vatican hill, honoring the place were the prince of the apostles suffered martyrdom and of St. Paul, at his tomb on the Ostian road.
The churches are dedicated only to God, although often have a patron saint so that all faithful may implore the intercession of that saint.
We do not build churches or appoint priesthoods, sacred rites and sacrifices to the martyrs, because, not the martyrs, but the God of the martyrs, is our God. Who among the faithful ever heard a priest, standing at the altar set up over the body of a martyr to the honour and worship of God, say in praying: We offer up sacrifices to thee, Peter, or Paul, or Cyprian? When at their memories (or titular altars) it is offered to God, who made them both men and martyrs, and has associated them to his angels in heavenly honour. We do not build churches to martyrs as to gods, but as memorials to men departed this life, whose souls live with God. Nor do we make altars to sacrifice on them to the martyrs, but to their God and our God. – Saint Augustine
Source – The Catholic Encyclopedia
Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O Good Jesus, hear me.
Within Thy wounds hide me.
Suffer me not to be separated from thee.
From the malignant enemy defend me.
In the hour of my death call me.
And bid me come unto Thee,
That with all Thy saints,
I may praise thee
Forever and ever.
Amen.
“God’s name is Mercy”
From a Los Angeles millionaire, to drug addicted street person, to a Catholic Priest…Father John Corapi’s story is simply amazing. This is a simplified ten minute version of Fr. Corapi’s Conversion Story (otherwise known as his Personal Testimony). The statement of this 10 minute video is simple…”God’s Name is Mercy!”
Steve Jobs should not be worshiped. Venerated maybe, but not worshiped.
Having vowed not to buy into the iPhone craze and get tied down again with a cell phone contract, I am now confessing that I did recently, in fact, get an iPhone, and of course that also involved a new contract with AT&T. Lately, having finished up a contract with Sprint, I had been delighted to find the most affordable unlimited voice/data/text plan on the planet with Boost Mobile. No contract, $50 per month, and unlimited “everything”…that is, except for coverage, which left alot to be desired, especially for someone like me who works in about half a dozen parishes here in NE Louisiana.
Did I have enough reasons prior to jumping over to AT&T/iPhone to justify giving up my cheap “unlimited” (and no commitment) voice/data/text plan with Boost Mobile. Probably not, truth be told. Although my oldest son has been singing the praises of the iPhone for a year or so, I still considered the iPhone to be more fun/cool than utilitarian/necessary.
Having had a couple of weeks to put the iPhone to use, and customize it to my business and life interests, and my business and life interests to it, I will now say….WOW! Why did I wait so long to get my hands on the ultimate “Swiss Army Knife” for business and entertainment…just life in general.
Oh, it is as fun/cool as I thought, but the productivity benefits that the iPhone and the myriad of apps provided me was unexpected. For instance, the iPhone has allowed me to finally make the transition to a paperless office, and that is just the beginning of the business benefits I have realized.
In addition to the business productivity benefits, there are an awful lot of great resources for Catholics in the App Store. Most iPhone apps range in price from $0 (free) to $3 or $4 dollars, and there are quite a few useful Catholic apps in that range (including free ones). I did spring bigtime though ($24 I believe) for Universalis’ Liturgy of the Hours, but I promise that it is worth every penny. I have given up, for now, trying to figure out the Liturgy of the Hours in book form, because it is so easy and convenient to use the iPhone version by Universalis. If you have an iPhone and are Catholic, or even if you aren’t Catholic, I highly recommend the Universalis Liturgy of the Hours app. Absolutely! Spend the $24. It’s cheaper than buying even the single volume in book form, and unless you will be praying the Liturgy of the Hours with others, you will probably find the iPhone version preferable, at least in the beginning and while learning the prayers.
Another app that I heartily recommend is Dropbox. This is actually a backup service that you can install for free on your Desktop (2 gigs free storage, 50 gigs available for $10/month). Dropbox will keep your important files backed up (off site on Dropbox servers) behind the scenes while you work. Once you install the companion Dropbox app on your iPhone, then you will be able to access your Dropbox computer files from your iPhone no matter where you happen to be, even if your computer at home or work is not turned on. This was the final element that allowed me to go to a paperless office system. It is a huge benefit to be able to pull up all my important files when I am out in the “field” working. As long as I keep them stored, and backed up, in my Dropbox folder on my computer, then they are within reach of my iPhone.
Finally, another neat app that I don’t have installed on my iPhone yet, because it is still probably a week or two from being approved by Apple, is the app developed by Lala.com. If you have an iPod, or iPhone, and use iTunes to manage your music library, get over to Lala.com and sign up for a free account to use on your desktop. Once your are set up with a Lala account, find and download the Lala Music Mover program onto your computer where you keep your iTunes library. Music Mover will then sync all your iTunes music with the Lala.com servers, essentially reproducing your entire music library online in your Lala.com account, thereby allowing you to access and play your entire iTunes library from any computer through a web browser. You can share your playlists with others if you wish, as I have here on the Journey to Rome sidebar. But here’s the greatest benefit to getting a Lala.com account: you can legally purchase songs for only 10 cents each to keep in your online music library and play through a web browser. Once the Lala iPhone app is released (hopefully later this month), Lala users will be able to play their entire online music library through their iPhone by way of a wireless or AT&T data stream (or iPod Touch by wireless connection). You can still keep your tunes on your iPhone if you want, or you might want to delete all but your favorite tunes to free up significant space on your iPhone, while still having access to your complete music library through your Lala.com account. And by the way, if you want you can upgrade your 10 cent web song purchase to an MP3 download version for an extra 79 cents, which is less than iTunes charges for a song on average.
You just know a guy with a hat like that has to be smart
The five part series of Michael Spencer’s interview of Bryan Cross at Internet Monk is highly recommended.
Catholic Philosopher and Blogger Bryan Cross Interview (Part 1)
Unity, Reformation and Tensions in Catholicism (Part 2)
Anglicans, Evangelicals, Convert Apologetics and Books (Part 3)
What Should Protestants Know About Vatican II? (Part 4)
Mary, Purgatory and the Eucharist (Part 5)
These were posted over the course of several days recently, and although I heard about them last week, only today have I had the opportunity to read through them. This is a very edifying interview, and should be read by any and all who have a heart for ecumenism.
Here is an excerpt from the third interview in the series Anglicans, Evangelicals, Convert Apologetics and Books:
Imagine that a large evangelical church brought you in to speak to the entire church on Protestant-Catholic relations/unity. What would be the main points you would cover?
I would first talk about the importance of unity as a constitutive element of the gospel itself, as I did to your earlier question. Then I would talk about the tragedy of the separation of Protestants and Catholics at the Reformation, and why love for Christ requires that Protestants and Catholics should be striving with all our effort to be reconciled in true unity and unity in the truth. Then I would talk about what I see as the fundamental reasons for the present division, first by laying out the two paradigms with respect to ecclesiology, ecclesial authority, ecclesial unity, and soteriology. These things cannot rightly be compared piecemeal; they have to be compared within their respective paradigms, and especially in view of the writings of the early Church Fathers. That’s why I think Protestants and Catholics need to understand both paradigms, in order effectively to reason together about them.
Here’s an example. In the Catholic paradigm, apostolic succession is a crucial component, because it is the basis for ecclesial authority, and thus for determining how other questions should be answered. Protestants do not accept apostolic succession, primarily because they do not find it in Scripture. So when Protestants find apostolic succession in the early Church Fathers, Protestants tend to view that as an accretion of some sort, not as an essential part of the deposit of faith. But from the Catholic point of view, the very stance of the Protestant who requires that something be clearly taught in Scripture in order to believe it, is already a departure from what has been the Church’s belief and practice since the beginning, that is, the practice of understanding Scripture as informed by those shepherds having apostolic succession. For this reason we can see that each side appears, from the point of view of the other side, to be begging the question, i.e. assuming precisely what is in question. In that sort of situation, cannot simply throw verses at each other; we have to step back and compare paradigms. I recently did something similar to that regarding the subject of justification, in my reply to “All the Romery People.”
Thank you to Michael Spencer at Internet Monk for providing the forum and developing the line of questions for Bryan. Thank you to Bryan for being, as always, a calm and sane voice in the maelstrom that is 21st century Christianity.
By the way, Bryan Cross has a personal blog at Principium Unitatis, and he is also one of the contributors at Called to Communion. Both are among my favorite sites and are also highly recommended.
Nobody likes a party pooper.
I am probably the last Catholic blogger today to post the following sermon delivered by Stanley Hauerwas on Reformation Sunday in 1995. I noticed that Bryan Cross had posted this sermon at Called to Communion earlier today, and since this morning I have seen it reposted on several other Catholic sites. So if you happen to drop in here after having already read all the other Catholic blogs in the blogosphere today, well, here it is…again.
Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. He makes some good points in the sermon reprinted here (there, and everywhere). Hauerwas comes out of the gate admitting that he doesn’t like the fact that the Protestant celebration of the Reformation is a perpetual event, because it is a celebration of failure on a cosmic scale. I’m not endorsing Hauerwas as a theologian, but I do believe he honestly, and bravely, steps out from the crowd in this sermon and boldly goes where not many Protestants are willing, or able, to go.
These are not his words, but it occurs to me that celebrating the Reformation annually (and I used to do so in a big way) is like celebrating the day you divorced your wife each year when the date rolls around. And no matter how lousy you might believe your wife was, wouldn’t it be twisted to annually whoop it up and celebrate the tragic event! Very strange. What was I thinking as a Protestant when I annually celebrated schism in the Body of Christ? Sometimes we have the opportunity to look back at ourselves and just shake our heads at our thoughtlessness. Thank you Lord!
What is so gloriously wonderful about division in the body of Christ? Really! Oh yeah, now I remember: Doctrinal purity (according to your own interpretation or that of your pet theologian) trumps Christian unity. Sorry, I forgot.
Stanley Hauerwas
Sermon originally delivered on October 29, 1995
References: Joel 2:23-32 – 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 – Luke 18:9-14
I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period. I do not understand why it is part of the church year. Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the Church Catholic; on the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure, or at least horror, as part of our church year. We do, after all, go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly if the Reformation is to be narrated rightly, it is to be narrated as part of those dark days.
Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success. But when we make Reformation a success, it only ends up killing us. After all, the very name ‘Protestantism’ is meant to denote a reform movement of protest within the Church Catholic. When Protestantism becomes an end in itself, which it certainly has through the mainstream denominations in America, it becomes anathema. If we no longer have broken hearts at the church’s division, then we cannot help but unfaithfully celebrate Reformation Sunday.
For example, note what the Reformation has done for our reading texts like that which we hear from Luke this morning. We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God’s free grace. And therefore we are better than the Catholics because we know they are sinners. What an odd irony that the Reformation made such readings possible. As Protestants we now take pride in the acknowledgement of our sinfulness in order to distinguish ourselves from Catholics who allegedly believe in works-righteousness.
Unfortunately, the Catholics are right. Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of-or perhaps better, because of-the world’s fragmentation and divisions. Unity, after all, is what God has given us through Christ’s death and resurrection. For in that death and resurrection we have been made part of God’s salvation for the world so that the world may know it has been freed from the powers that would compel us to kill one another in the name of false loyalties. All that is about the works necessary to save us.
For example, I often point out that at least Catholics have the magisterial office of the Bishop of Rome to remind them that disunity is a sin. You should not overlook the significance that in several important documents of late, John Paul II has confessed the Catholic sin for the Reformation. Where are the Protestants capable of doing likewise? We Protestants feel no sin for the disunity of the Reformation. We would not know how to confess our sin for the continuing disunity of the Reformation. We would not know how to do that because we have no experience of unity.
The magisterial office-we Protestants often forget-is not a matter of constraining or limiting diversity in the name of unity. The office of the Bishop of Rome is to ensure that when Christians move from Durham, North Carolina to Syracuse, New York, they have some confidence when they go to church that they will be worshipping the same God. Because Catholics have an office of unity, they do not need to restrain the gifts of the Spirit. As I oftentimes point out, it is extraordinary that Catholicism is able to keep the Irish and the Italians in the same church. What an achievement! Perhaps equally amazing is their ability to keep within the same church Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans.
I think Catholics are able to do that because they know that their unity does not depend opon everyone agreeing. Indeed, they can celebrate their disagreements because they understand that our unity is founded upon the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that makes the Eucharist possible. They do not presume, therefore, that unity requires that we all read Scripture the same way.
This creates a quite different attitude among Catholics about their relation to Christian tradition and the wider world. Protestants look over to Christian tradition and say, ‘How much of this do we have to believe in order to remain identifiably Christian?’ That’s the reason why Protestants are always tempted to rationalism: we think that Christianity is to be identified with sets of beliefs more than with the unity of the Spirit occasioned through sacrament.
Moreover, once Christianity becomes reduced to a matter of belief, as it clearly has for Protestants, we cannot resist questions of whether those beliefs are as true or useful as other beliefs we also entertain. Once such questions are raised, it does not matter what the answer turns out in a given case. As James Edwards observes, “Once religious beliefs start to compete with other beliefs, then religious believers are – and will know themselves to be -mongerers of values. They too are denizens of the mall, selling and shopping and buying along with the rest of us.”
In contrast, Catholics do not begin with the question of “How much do we need to believe?” but with the attitude “Look at all the wonderful stuff we get to believe!” Isn’t it wonderful to know that Mary was immaculately conceived in order to be the faithful servant of God’s new creation in Jesus Christ! She therefore becomes the firstborn of God’s new creation, our mother, the first member of God’s new community we call church. Isn’t it wonderful that God continued to act in the world through the appearances of Mary at Guadalupe! Mary must know something because she seems to always appear to peasants and, in particular, to peasant women who have the ability to see her. Most of us would not have the ability to see Mary because we’d be far too embarrassed by our vision.
Therefore Catholics understand the church’s unity as grounded in reality more determinative than our good feelings for one another. The office of Rome matters. For at least that office is a judgement on the church for our disunity. Surely it is the clear indication of the sin of the Reformation that we Protestants have not been able to resist nationalistic identifications. So we become German Lutherans, American Lutherans, Norwegian Lutherans. You are Dutch Calvinist, American Presbyterians, Church of Scotland. I am an American Methodist, which has precious little to do with my sisters and brothers in English Methodism. And so we Protestant Christians go to war killing one another in the name of being American, German, Japanese, and so on.
At least it becomes the sin of Rome when Italian Catholics think they can kill Irish Catholics in the name of being Italian. Such divisions distort the unity of the Gospel found in the Eucharist and, thus, become judgements against the church of Rome. Of course, the Papacy has often been unfaithful and corrupt, but at least Catholics preserved an office God can use to remind us that we have been and may yet prove unfaithful. In contrast, Protestants don’t even know we’re being judged for our disunity.
I realize that this perspective on Reformation Sunday is not the usual perspective. The usual perspective is to tell us what a wonderful thing happened at the Reformation. The Reformation struck a blow for freedom. No longer would we be held in medieval captivity to law and arbitrary authority. The Reformation was the beginning of enlightenment, of progressive civilizations, of democracy, that have come to fruition in this wonderful country called America. What a destructive story.
You can tell the destructive character of that narrative by what it has done to the Jews. The way we Protestants read history, and in particular our Bible, has been nothing but disastrous for the Jews. For we turned the Jews into Catholics by suggesting that the Jews had sunk into legalistic and sacramental religion after the prophets and had therefore become moribund and dead. In order to make Jesus explicable (in order to make Jesus look like Luther – at least the Luther of our democratic projections), we had to make Judaism look like our characterization of Catholicism. Yet Jesus did not free us from Israel; rather, he engrafted us into the promise of Israel so that we might be a people called to the same holiness of the law.
I realize that the suggestion that salvation is to be part of a holy people constitued by the law seems to deny the Reformation principle of justification by faith through grace. I do not believe that to be the case, particularly as Calvin understood that Reformation theme. After all, Calvin (and Luther) assumed that justification by faith through grace is a claim about God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth. So justification by faith through grace is not some general truth about our need for acceptance; but rather justification by faith through grace is a claim about the salvation wrought by God through Jesus to make us a holy people capable of remembering that God’s salvation comes through the Jews. When the church loses that memory, we lose the source of our unity. For unity is finally a matter of memory, of how we tell the story of the Reformation. How can we tell this story of the church truthfully as Protestants and Catholics so that we might look forward to being in union with one another and thus share a common story of our mutual failure?
We know, after all, that the prophecy of Joel has been fulfilled. The portents of heaven, the blood and fire, the darkness of the sun, the bloody moon have come to pass in the cross of our Savior Jesus Christ. Now all who call on that name will be saved. We believe that we who stand in the Reformation churches are survivors. But to survive we need to recover the unity that God has given us as survivors. So on this Reformation Sunday long for, pray for, our ability to remember the Reformation – not as a celebratory moment, not as a blow for freedom, but as the sin of the church. Pray for God to heal our disunity, not the disunity simply between Protestant and Catholic, but the disunity in our midst between classes, between races, between nations. Pray that on Reformation Sunday we may as tax collectors confess our sin and ask God to make us a new people joined together in one might prayer that the world may be saved from its divisions.
“The history of human existence is the story of dour combat with the forces of evil. Don’t fail in the mission at this point. You better pray like your children’s lives are at stake.”
A few short months after Pope Paul VI promulgated his encyclical “Humanae Vitae – On the Regulation of Birth” in July 1968, the Canadian Bishops came forth with the Winnipeg Statement. Theirs was an attempt to quell the firestorm of parishioners, especially in the West, who were incensed that the Pope, in Human Vitae, had clearly condemned all forms of artificial contraception. By pleading the case of the freedom of conscience of the individual believer, the Canadian Bishops essentially gave Catholics who could not in good conscience accept the Church’s teaching a “pass” as regards artificial contraception.
The most gracious assessment of the Catholic Bishops’ actions in issuing the Winnipeg Statement is that they were seeking to save the Catholic Church from an inevitable crisis of abandonment by her weakest members. On the other hand, the harshest critics of the Catholic Bishops would say that they actually caused a crisis of de facto abandonment of the weakest members of the Catholic Church, for though they were able to remain in communion while ignoring the Church’s teaching on contraception, in truth, they were only under an illusion of communion.
The ramifications of Humanae Vitae, and the resulting Winnipeg Statement, extended beyond the Catholic Church, to all of society. Forty years later, we have a clearer vision than ever of those ramifications.
Fr. John Corapi’s video interview which follows is fascinating, and thought provoking. Fr. John maintains that the dissolution of civilization in the West, and in particular as demonstrated in the increasing culture of death, is a direct result of the selective obedience (i.e. disobedience) to the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception…a disobedience that was endorsed, or at the very least enabled, by the Catholic Bishops’ Winnipeg Statement.
In the face of this culture of death, hell on earth, Fr. Corapi calls for action and prayer on the part of Catholics, now! His message is this: Don’t wait for the Bishops to mandate action. Organize now, act now. Stand up and fight now. Fight like it is a life and death struggle, because it truly is. Embrace suffering. Offer it up. Pray. Do penance.
Assume your “unique, precious, unrepeatable place in the battle line.”
Heeeeeeeere’s Jesus!
I didn’t know what to expect when I watched this on somebody’s Facebook profile today, but I liked it. I hope y’all like it too.
Today’s Gospel reading from Mark 9 included this passage:
“At that time, John said to Jesus,
“Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name,
and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.”
Jesus replied, “Do not prevent him.
There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name
who can at the same time speak ill of me.
For whoever is not against us is for us.”
Our priest Fr. Joe is a dear saint from India. In his homily Fr. Joe reminded us that although Protestants are not in full communion with the Catholic Church, we are all working together as brothers and sisters in Christ to advance the Kingdom of God as fellow Christians.
Later in his homily Fr. Joe shared a story with the congregation that caused me, well, most of us, to laugh out loud. Now, Fr. Joe is a decidedly funny, but also a very humble and pastoral priest. As a faithful priest, I am sure that he could “clean house” if needed, but the image of him doing so is too much for my mind to imagine. That is a little bit of context for this story.
Well, the story Fr. Joe told us this morning went like this: Some time in recent past a lady “evangelist” asked Fr. Joe if he would allow her to come into St. Matthew Catholic Church and see the church building. Fr. Joe was happy to oblige her.
It was just after Christmas, and the church was still decorated to the hilt for the Christmas celebration. Besides the seasonal decorations, St. Matthew, being the oldest parish in our diocese, and also a very traditional church, is decorated with the statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a large crucifix, and statues of other various saints and angels, as well as gorgeous old stained glass windows depicting even more saints. For a protestant visitor, it can be breathtaking, and not in the positive sense of the word.
Fr. Joe said that he turned on all the lights in the building, so that all was visible in its grandeur and beauty. He walked with the visiting lady evangelist down the aisle to the front of the church, and stood beside her as she soaked it all in. After a time of silent observation, Fr. Joe said that the visiting evangelist began to pray, loudly so that Fr. Joe and God could both hear, and she said:
“Lord, please forgive me for coming into this place, where people worship idols. I promise that I will never go into such a place again for as long as I live.”
Fr. Joe turned his head and in his distinctive Indian accent said. “OK, Honey. Time’s up.”
I laughed louder than I have ever laughed in Church, and I’m still laughing.
What reason could I possibly have for posting this audio disaster?
Hey Jesus: If Peter’s not our shepherd, how’d I missed that memo!
The following comment was posted as part of the discussion ongoing here under Christ’s Body, the Church: Have it Your Way!:
“Christ is the solid foundation we are to build our house on. Not any one Church. How can you know that what the ‘gates of Hades not prevailing’ actually looks like? Might it be the Protestant reformation, wherein the blessing of Christ is removed from a group that is not faithful to the teachings of the founder Jesus Christ Himself?”
My response follows:
Christ gave us “one Church”. There was, and is, and must be “one Church”. It is not a trivial thing, and not a concept safely subjected to the “what if” exercises that emanate from human minds.
Protestantism depends upon the premise that Jesus somehow approved of, and even commanded an upheaval, a changing of the guard, a passing of the keys of the Kingdom from Peter and the Apostles to…to whom. Anyone and everyone? Who is the new apostolic lineage if not the apostles and their successors? Who exactly is the shepherd? And what would that new kind of flock look like, or would it be so fractured, so scattered as to be unrecognizable?
However, Jesus has nowhere in Scripture anticipated and commanded such a revolution and departure from the historic Apostolic and Catholic Church in favor of a new model. Rather, He has in Scripture prayed for the Apostles and those who would believe through their teaching, that they would be one. Evil men and heresies would pass through the Church, but the Church would endure. That was his promise. There is no scenario where Christ’s promise fails such that the Church fails.
So Protestantism must answer a question, and it really is a life and death kind of question. In fact, I can think of no more weighty question than this: Where has Christ given His command, or even a lame endorsement, for so drastic a thing as the revolution and schism of the Protestant Reformation? What a dangerous and ambitious assumption, to think that in hindsight, we can improve upon the Body of Christ by hacking it into several thousand pieces? That is not to say we do not recognize and repent of sin in the Church. Certainly we do! But we do so within the Church. Always within the Church. There is never a just reason to leave the Church.
Reformation must happen within the Church, and it did, and it does, and the Church lives on, thanks be to God!
So why don’t y’all get on back over here where it’s safe? Honestly!
“There is nothing more serious than the sacrilege of schism because there is no just cause for severing the unity of the Church.” – St. Augustine
Saint Augustine! Cheers! High Five! Wait a minute…he said what!
I am all for ecumenism (but I especially encourage conversion to the Catholic Church), and I am all for honoring the Saints, but I honestly don’t know why anyone, or any congregation outside of the Catholic Church would celebrate Saint Augustine by a feast, or even a tip of the hat, knowing his Catholicity.
It is true that the Great Doctor is the recipient of love and admiration from Christians all across the ecclesial spectrum, and yippee for that. But isn’t it somewhat embarrassing to Protestants to know what the man believed and taught! And doesn’t it make them at least somewhat curious about what the rest of the Fathers believed and taught! And aren’t they at least somewhat incredulous that the recent innovation known as Protestantism is squarely at odds with this great Saint whom they are right to honor!
Augustine on primacy of the See of Rome (that means Pope) & apostolic succession -
“In the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly keep me in her bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep (Jn 21:15-19), down to the present episcopate.”
Augustine on appropriating the name Catholic by those outside of the Catholic Church -
“”And so, lastly, does the very name of “Catholic”, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house.”
Augustine on the authority of the Catholic Church -
“”Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church, as it is right they should … With you, where there is none of these things to attract or keep me… No one shall move me from the faith which binds my mind with ties so many and so strong to the Christian religion… For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.”
— St. Augustine (354–430): Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, chapter 4: Proofs of the Catholic Faith
“The Church Is Here, In All Of Her Antiquity, Judging Me.”
I realized that, one way or another, I had to come to terms with the Church in all of her antiquity, her authority, her unity, her liturgy, and her sacraments. These five marks, or aspects, of the Church were matters that all of us non-Catholics would find to be eluding us. First, the antiquity of the Church confronts me.
As a Fundamentalist I had discovered while I was in college that it is possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about A.D. 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than did old Ignatius of Antioch or Clement of Rome, who had been taught by the very apostles themselves, just what the Church is and what it should look like. Never mind that our worship services would have been unrecognizable to them, or that our govenance would have been equally unrecognizable; we were right, and the Fathers were wrong (about bishops, and about the Eucharist). That settled the matter.
The trouble here, for me, was that what these wrong-headed men wrote – about God, about our Lord Jesus Christ, about his Church, about the Christian’s walk and warfare – was so titanic, and so rich and so luminous, that their error seemed infinitely truer and more glorious than my truth. I gradually felt that it was I who was under surveillance, not they. The “glorious company of the apostles, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world” judge me, not I them. Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement, Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Cyril, Basil, the Gregorys, Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Benedict – it is under the gaze of this senate that I find myself standing. Alas. How tawdry, how otiose, how flimsy, how embarrassing seem the arguments that I had been prepared so blithely to put forward against the crushing radiance of these men’s confessions.
The Church is here, in all of her antiquity, judging me.
Lead Kindly Light – My Journey to Rome
John 17
19And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.
20Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;
21That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
Come together, right now, over….Augustine?
Perhaps one day a great movement of reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics, or better yet mass conversion to the Catholic Church 
, will flow from the love and esteem that we all share for the greatest of the Fathers, the Doctor of Hippo, St. Augustine.
Despite the praise that Protestants give Augustine, the fact of the matter is, as Dr. Francis Beckwith has said: “St. Augustine, whose genius helped rid the Church of the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian heresies, would not be welcomed…as a faculty member at virtually any evangelical seminary, because the Bishop of Hippo accepted the deuterocanonical (apocryphal) books as part of the Old Testament canon, the deposit of sacred tradition, apostolic succession, the gracious efficacy of the Sacraments, the Real Presence of the Eucharist, baptismal regeneration,and the infusion of God’s grace for justification.”
Lord, have mercy on your children, and reconcile us all to one another, and your Catholic Church.
Teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo
It is first of all a remarkable fact that the great critics, Protestant as well as Catholic, are almost unanimous in placing St. Augustine in the foremost rank of Doctors and proclaiming him to be the greatest of the Fathers. Such, indeed, was also the opinion of his contemporaries, judging from their expressions of enthusiasm gathered by the Bollandists. The popes attributed such exceptional authority to the Doctor of Hippo that, even of late years, it has given rise to lively theological controversies. Peter the Venerable accurately summarized the general sentiment of the Middle Ages when he ranked Augustine immediately after the Apostles; and in modern times Bossuet, whose genius was most like that of Augustine, assigns him the first place among the Doctors, nor does he simply call him the incomparable Augustine,” but “the Eagle of Doctors,” “the Doctor of Doctors.” If the Jansenistic abuse of his works and perhaps the exaggerations of certain Catholics, as well as the attack of Richard Simon, seem to have alarmed some minds, the general opinion has not varied. In the nineteenth century Stöckl expressed the thought of all when he said, “Augustine has justly been called the greatest Doctor of the Catholic world.”
And the admiration of Protestant critics is not less enthusiastic. More than this, it would seem as if they had in these latter days been quite specially fascinated by the great figure ofAugustine, so deeply and so assiduously have they studied him (Bindemann, Schaff, Dorner, Reuter, A. Harnack, Eucken, Scheel, and so on) and all of them agree more or less with Harnack when he says: “Where, in the history of the West, is there to be found a man who, in point of influence, can be compared with him?” Luther and Calvin were content to treat Augustine with a little less irreverence than they did the other Fathers, but their descendants do him full justice, although recognizing him as the Father of Roman Catholicism. According to Bindemann, “Augustine is a star of extraordinary brilliancy in the firmament of the Church. Since the apostles he has been unsurpassed.” In his “History of the Church” Dr. Kurtz calls Augustine “the greatest, the most powerful of all the Fathers, him from whom proceeds all the doctrinal and ecclesiastical development of the West, and to whom each recurring crisis, each new orientation of thought brings it back.” Schaff himself (Saint Augustine, Melanchthon and Neander, p. 98) is of the same opinion: “While most of the great men in the history of the Church are claimed either by the Catholic or by the Protestant confession, and their influence is therefore confined to one or the other, he enjoys from both a respect equally profound and enduring.” RudolfEucken is bolder still, when he says: “On the ground of Christianity proper a single philosopher has appeared and that is Augustine.” The English Miter, W. Cunningham, is no less appreciative of the extent and perpetuity of this extraordinary influence: “The whole life of the medieval Church was framed on lines which he has suggested: its religious orders claimed him as their patron; its mystics found a sympathetic tone in his teaching; its polity was to some extent the actualization of his picture of the Christian Church; it was in its various parts a carrying out of ideas which he cherished and diffused. Nor does his influence end with the decline of medievalism: we shall see presently how closely his language was akin to that of Descartes, who gave the first impulse to and defined the special character of modern philosophy.” And after having established that the doctrine of St. Augustine was at the bottom of all the struggles between Jansenists and Catholics in the Church of France, between Arminians and Calvinists on the side of the Reformers, he adds: “And once more in our own land when a reaction arose against rationalism and Erastinianism it was to the African Doctor that men turned with enthusiasm: Dr. Pusey’s edition of the Confessions was among the first-fruits of the Oxford Movement.”
But Adolf Harnack is the one who has oftenest emphasized the unique rôle of the Doctor of Hippo. He has studied Augustine’s place in the history of the world as reformer of Christian piety and his influence as Doctor of the Church. In his study of the “Confessions” he comes back to it: “No man since Paul is comparable to him” — with the exception of Luther, he adds. — “Even today we live by Augustine, by his thought and his spirit; it is said that we are the sons of the Renaissance and the Reformation, but both one and the other depend upon him.”
“Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it”.
Don’t get your pants in a wad, that’s Flannery O’Connor’s quote, not mine….but I have to admit, I do love it.
I have decided that Reformed theologians (and “armchair” theologians) have become experts in the practice of interpreting Scripture with Scripture so “masterfully” that they can complicate (or sanitize, or neuter) Biblical truth that is fundamental, hard-hitting and straight forward, albeit rich and complex, into something else entirely, to the degree that when they are done, their Scriptural by-product would be totally unrecognizable to the people actually involved in the original discourses and historical events found in the Scriptures the Reformed seek to “unravel”. Is it any wonder that their version of “Faith 2.0″ (or any of it’s thousands of derivatives) betrays a staggering disconnect with the first 1500 years of Christian belief and practice.
One example is the Reformed renovation of our Lord’s deliberate and mandated establishment of a visible Church authenticated by affiliation with and allegiance to Peter and the Apostles.
A second example is the Reformed sterilization of the Lord’s hard teaching on the life which comes to those who eat his body and drink his blood in the Eucharist.
“Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ “( Jn 6:52). And “on hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’ ” (Jn 6:60)
The Eucharistic Mystery concerns the Word of life. Indeed, St. John records that , when Jesus had finished his discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum, he said to his astounded listeners, “the words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life.” Such they were, but he had expressed them – perhaps intentionally so – in such a provocative way that they scandalized not only the Jews in general but the Jews who were his disciples as well. To a Jew the notion of eating flesh and drinking blood was a horror. Indeed, through the prophet Ezekiel, God had used the imagery of having their flesh and blood eaten as the ultimate disgrace to be visited upon sinners.
“Call out to every bird and all the wild animals: “Assemble and come together from all around to the sacrifice I am preparing for you, the great sacrifice on the mountains of Israel. There you will eat flesh and drink blood. You will eat the flesh of mighty men and drink the blood of the princes of the earth as if they were rams and lambs, goats and bulls…At the sacrifice I am preparing for you, you will eat fat till you are glutted and drink blood till you are drunk” (Ez 39:17-19).
Now at Capernaum the Eternal One who had inspired those words was telling them that, at his sacrifice, they and not animals would indeed eat the Flesh of the Mighty and drink the Blood of the Prince of the princes of the earth. Knowing the shock created by the very thought, Jesus added immediately “Yet there are some of you who do not believe” (Jn 6:63-64).
The scandal of the Mystery has never gone away; it is for many just too much to accept. Flannery O’Connor, in one of her letters, recalls a visit she made to another well-known author and former Catholic. This latter “said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, he being the ‘most portable’ Person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of, but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
It is surely true that the Mystery of the Eucharist can be propounded in such a way that all of the “shock value” contained in the words of Jesus is removed by anticipation. Such a form of pedagogy or catechesis, however, departs from the approach taken by the Lord himself. It can happen that, by removing the shock, one will remove as well an accurate appreciation of the Eucharist, thereby obviating the response in faith that is necessary to accept Christ’s words. Jesus may have intended to shock. Indeed, on the occasion of his synagogue talk at Capernaum, he let the words stand by themselves, refusing to give any explanation that would soften their impact. What he taught was beyond human nature’s ability to comprehend. (“That is called Flesh which flesh does not understand, and because it is called Flesh, so much the more does flesh not understand”, Augustine would say.) The Lord, however, was looking for faith, faith in himself and faith in his words, well aware, as he himself said, that no one could offer such faith “unless the Father draw him” (Jn6:44). And so many found the saying too much to take. They went away.
Through the centuries the Church has consistently refused to mitigate the shock contained in the words of the Lord at Capernaum. Her pedagogy is like her Master’s. Recognize in all its fullness what it is you are expected to believe and pray that the Father will lead you to accept. Let him accept it who can. Dissent to the Church’s teaching is not only a phenomenon of the twentieth century; it has always existed. And this dissent has touched upon not merely secondary issues but frequently upon those most central to the Catholic understanding of Jesus’ message. None more so than the Eucharist. Many have not been able to accept the Mystery as the Church meditated upon it and expounded it more adequately, but their very unwillingness or inability has been the occasion used by the Spirit to deepen the Church’s appreciation for what Jesus meant.
The Hidden Manna – Pg 95-97
Martin Luther on the honor due to the Mother of God
She became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man’s understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a Child…. Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God…. None can say of her nor announce to her greater things, even though he had as many tongues as the earth possesses flowers and blades of grass: the sky, stars; and the sea, grains of sand. It needs to be pondered in the heart what it means to be the Mother of God.
Luther’s Works, 21:326, cf. 21:346
Revelation 11:19,12:1-6,10
The sanctuary of God in heaven opened and the ark of the covenant could be seen inside it. Then came flashes of lightning, peals of thunder and an earthquake, and violent hail.
Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown. She was pregnant, and in labour, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth. Then a second sign appeared in the sky, a huge red dragon which had seven heads and ten horns, and each of the seven heads crowned with a coronet. Its tail dragged a third of the stars from the sky and dropped them to the earth, and the dragon stopped in front of the woman as she was having the child, so that he could eat it as soon as it was born from its mother. The woman brought a male child into the world, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre, and the child was taken straight up to God and to his throne, while the woman escaped into the desert, where God had made a place of safety ready, for her to be looked after in the twelve hundred and sixty days.
Then I heard a voice shout from heaven, ‘Victory and power and empire for ever have been won by our God, and all authority for his Christ, now that the persecutor, who accused our brothers day and night before our God, has been brought down.’
Psalm 45:10-12,16
Hear, O daughter, consider, and incline your ear; forget your people and your father’s house; and the king will desire your beauty. Since he is your lord, bow to him; the people of Tyre will sue your favor with gifts, the richest of the people, Instead of your fathers shall be your sons; you will make them princes in all the earth.
1 Corinthians 15:20-26
Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of all who have fallen asleep. Death came through one man and in the same way the resurrection of the dead has come through one man. Just as all men die in Adam, so all men will be brought to life in Christ; but all of them in their proper order: Christ as the first-fruits and then, after the coming of Christ, those who belong to him. After that will come the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, having done away with every sovereignty, authority and power. For he must be king until he has put all his enemies under his feet and the last of the enemies to be destroyed is death, for everything is to be put under his feet.
Luke 1:39-56
Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country of Judah. She went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth. Now as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said, ‘Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? For the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy. Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.’
And Mary said:
‘My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
and my spirit exults in God my saviour;
because he has looked upon his lowly handmaid.
Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me blessed,
for the Almighty has done great things for me.
Holy is his name,
and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him.
He has shown the power of his arm,
he has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.
He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his mercy
– according to the promise he made to our ancestors –
of his mercy to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’
Mary stayed with Elizabeth about three months and then went back home.
O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary,
mother of your incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have
been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory
of your eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the
Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever
Book of Common Prayer – 1979
A fresh, new take on Fate, and human sacrifice to an angry God
There is a great deal of theological baggage for a lifelong Calvinist turned Catholic to unpack after conversion (so rich and systematic is Calvinist theology, therefore it is so voluminous). The temptation, however, is to ignore the unpacking, because Calvinism has but one competitor when it comes to a rich, expansive theological raiment, that being Catholic theology. The Catholic convert is inclined to dive into that glorious pile of ancient (yet fresh) Catholic theological laundry and joyously roll around in it, while the weighty bags of Calvinism sit in the corner, waiting to be sorted through and put away. The problem is not that the Calvinist baggage contains anything so nostalgic or needful as to cause one to miss those days or question one’s conversion. Rather, the bags, when opened, bring a whiff of theological wrappings that can prompt a wave of soul-sucking, dark sadness, and that cannot compete with the joyous light of the Catholic Church and her theology. Granted, we remember that there are some good things in those old bags sitting in the corner, but those good things are to be found, and more (but minus the dark mustiness) in the rich Catholic theological wardrobe we now wrap ourselves in.
In the passage quoted below, Hilaire Belloc gives a glimpse of something unsettling that I believe hides in Calvinist baggage, and something I occasionally catch a whiff of, but haven’t desired to really unpack.
In that same year (1536), when Henry of England, at Thomas Cromwell’s suggestion, began the dissolution of the monasteries, there appeared a book which was destined to make all the difference to the fortunes of the Reformation, and to give consistency and form, and therefore endurance, to the fatal cleavage of Christendom.
This book was the “Institute” written by a Frenchman of Noyon: one Jean Cauvin.
Men sometimes talk of a book as having changed the world. The talk is usually exaggerated, and even off the mark. More often a book of great effect is but the exposition, the putting into clear form, of ideas already widely received. Often, again, a gook gets great historical standing as a cause, when it is no more than the registration of some institution already founded and bound to continue with equal vigor whether the book had been compiled or no.
But in the case of this book of John Calvin’s (to use the English form of the name) we come as near as we can anywhere in history to a piece of writing which was itself an agent, and a single agent.
Even here we must not exaggerate. The effect of the book was principally due to its coming when it did: it exactly supplied what was needed; it cast the Reformation into a mold at a moment when the movement was still fluid, while the crucible was still boiling. The same book produced today would have no such effect. The same book produced in the thirteenth century would have had a great effect, but not the same effect.
Nevertheless, it is true that the “Institute” of John Calvin did far more to stamp, mold and render permanent the thing which we have known for more than three hundred years as “Protestantism” (the ethical mood which has been of such powerful effect upon the history of our race) than any other factors of the Reformation; and that truth is an excellent proof that the mind of man lives by doctrine, and that clear thought is the master of mere emotion. Until that book appeared the Reformation had, for now twenty years, lived upon Protest against, and indignation with, the later abuses of the Church. Its doctrines had been various and confused, its course devious; an eddy.
What Calvin did was to produce a church, a creed, a discipline, which could be set over against what had been for all these centuries (and what still is) the native church, creed, and discipline of Christian civilization. For John Calvin it was who produced, down to its details with the rapidity of genius, and with the tenacity of genius, a new thing.
True, great bodies of Europeans broke away permanently from unity, yet would not wholly follow Calvin. Such was the Lutheran mass; such, of course, were the bulk of English Protestants to be; and even among those who were profoundly influenced by the “fundamental brain-work” of this man, whole groups — such as the Independents of the seventeenth century — refused to conform to the rigid framework he had established.
Yet it remains true that Calvinism is the core of Protestantism to this day; that the effects on character which the Protestant culture continues to admire are essentially the effects of Calvinism; that the whole world of anti-Catholic thought, even today when it has lost the doctrines of Calvinism, is in its most intimate ideals molded on the Calvinistic model.
What Calvin did was this. He took what is one of the oldest and most perilous directives of mankind, the sense of Fate. He isolated it, and he made it supreme, by fitting it, with the kneading of a powerful mind, into the scheme which Christian men still traditionally associated with the holiness and authority of their ancestral religion.
God had become Man, and God had become Man to redeem mankind. That was no part of the old idea of Inevitable Fate. On the contrary, it was a relief from that pagan nightmare. We of the Faith say that the Incarnation was intended to release us from such a pagan nightmare. Well, Calvin accepted the Incarnation, but he forced it to fit in with the old pagan horror of compulsion: “Ananke.”
He reintroduced the Inexorable.
Yes, God had become Man and had died to save mankind; but only mankind in such numbers and persons as He had chosen to act for. The idea of the Inexorable remained. The merits of Christ were imputed, and no more. God was Causation, and Causation is one immutable whole. A man was damned or saved; and it was not of his doing. The recognition of evil as equal with good, which rapidly becomes the worship of evil (the great Manichean heresy, which has roots as old as mankind; the permanent motive of Fear) was put forward by Calvin in a strange new form. He did not indeed oppose, as had the Manichean, two equal principles of Good and of Evil. He put forward only one principle, God. But to that One Principle he ascribed all our suffering, and, for most of us, necessary and eternal suffering.
Again, the Catholic Church had called the soul of man immortal. Calvin accepted that doctrine; but under his hands it becomes an immortality of doom, and for the few who shall have doom to beatitude, doom it yet is, as doom is is to the myriads for whom it shall mean despair.
From this great man, I say, proceeds a whole web of ideas which still live, though the doctrines which were so living to him and his followers, the strict dogmas upon which they evolved their mighty system of warped theology, have faded from the modern mind. If today your non-Catholic conceives of the material, and, more latterly, the spiritual processes as inevitable, if he inclines to despair, if he is tempted by the latest fad of the “subconscious” which man fights in vain, the savor of Calvin is in it all.
You may find today in unexpected regions of thought the influence of the man. He it was, for instance, who said that the ministry must proceed from election, but that ministers once elected had authority over the electors. What better parallel for the Parliamentary fallacy, the falsity of which Europe is only now perceiving? He it was who in a fashion not general, like that of the old humanist scholars, but direct and dogmatic, pitted document, however fragmentary, against the living voice of tradition. He it was who rendered humility futile and the appetite for wealth a virtue. He it was who began the war against Joy. He it was who set up in so definite a fashion the wall which separates the Catholic mind in Europe from its opponents; he it was who put up a new positive force directed against the positive force of the Catholic Church.
