A Living Text

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Rod Dreher (Orthodox via the Catholic Church) comments on this:

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer’s apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can’t discern the justice of Gopnik’s judgment re: Chesterton’s writing, because I’ve never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don’t have and never had that convert’s glow about Orthodoxy. I didn’t believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I’m glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

Forbes has an article discussing how relics are still sold today in a way that sound Medieval. This is a pagan practice, pure and simple, that was imported into the church. It is sad that it still persists.

Rushdoony has an insight that I had never thought of before regarding the Ecumenical Councils:

It was this hatred of Biblical certainty that the early councils had to war against. The ecumenical councils of the early church were in their purpose and nature very different from the modern councils and ecumenical efforts of the church. First, the early councils had as their primary purpose the defense and establishment of truth, not unity. Unity had to be established on the foundation of truth, not truth as a product of unity. The councils came together for the purpose of conflict, the battle of truth against error, and any unity on other than the whole truth of Scripture was anathema. Second, the concern of the councils was primarily the faith, not the church. Institutionally, the church suffered because of the conflict, but theologically it flourished and ensured its survival and growth. The modern ecumenical movement, and modern councils, are thus in purpose and work in direct contrast to the early councils: their concern is with unity, and with the institution, not the faith primarily.

This probably puts me firmly into the fundamentalist camp, but I don’t mind. An article says that yoga can lead to demonic possession, and I tend to agree. All kinds of non-Christian practices that were anathema when I was a kid (not that long ago) are now widely embraced, including horoscope reading, acupuncture, and yoga. Many of these eastern practices have their roots in the idol worship of false religions, and open the mind by making it blank.

LDS professor Richard Sherlock offers a provocative thesis regarding the nature of the LDS Church. He writes:

These remarks are a prelude to a far-reaching claim I wish to make about Mormonism. Mormonism represents a hierarchical ecclesiastical order that holds special powers of priesthood and leadership combined with an emphasis on personal obedience and righteous works as having merit before God, which is at least Annabaptist in its flavor and background. In more traditional terms theological terms, Mormonism combines an authoritative magisterium with an emphasis on righteous works characteristic in Christian theology and history with its exact opposite.

In other words, the LDS Church has a Catholic hierarchy, with an Annabaptist, radically Pelagian theology and practice. In fact, Sherlock offers great honesty when he says:

These [Book of Mormon] passages and others do not articulate a strong theology of grace as clearly as Luther or Calvin may have wished. There is a Pelagian (or semi-Pelagian) ring to a number of the passages, and individuals who have claimed that Mormonism is essentially a modern Pelagianism are not entirely mistaken in such an assessment.

In the latest issue of First Things is a long letter from N.T. Wright to the magazine responding to some comments made by Fr. Neuhaus. Within this long letter, Wright makes some very telling observations on two churches. First, on Rome, Wright says:

…the “centering authority” in the most ancient church was of course Jerusalem; and then the five great sees, working together; and only gradually, and for a long time controversially, Rome.

Then, discussing the new heavens and new earth that will come when Jesus returns, and Neuhaus’ knock on Wright as sounding like Joseph Smith, Wright says:

I suspect that one of the reasons the Mormons were able to gain credence for their very concrete eschatalogical expectation was that the Western Protestant church, precisely at that period, was eliminating the ancient concrete eschatalogical expectation.

Writing about Richard Hooker and his conception of the Church of England, C.S. Lewis says:

The prince as ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church is, in fact, the bottle-neck through which the decisions of the local Church-Nation pass in order to become law. And that Nation-Church owes an allegiance to the universal Church: yet the universal Church might swerve from scripture and we should then have to disobey her. (That is, all parts of her, except ourselves, might conceivably become ‘unsound’.) Where then does ultimate sovereignty lie? I think Hooker would answer, ‘Nowhere except in Heaven’. He allows no unambiguous sovereignty on earth either civil or ecclesiastical. Judged by the standards of Austin and of modern Catholicism, the church and state which Hooker welds together are both headless. And I do not think this is an oversight. Hooker felt no need either for omnicompetent prince or for infallible Pope. He was much more afraid of tyrannies and idolatries than of ambiguities and deadlocks.

Many of Calvin’s polemics against the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) are directed at the accumulation and misuse of money. This was a problem in his time that I don’t think we would accuse the modern RCC of. In his commentary on Jeremiah 5:30-31, he says:

The same thing is to be seen at this day under the Papacy: the monks flatter the people and prop up the whole system of Popery; and hence these unprincipled men call themselves the chariots of the Pope; for the Pope is carried as it were on four wheels - the four mendicant orders. And this they boast, when they wish to shew what adepts they are in lying. The Pope then is carried by the four wheels of the mendicants. We see how he had honoured and daily honours these mendicants with privileges, and why? Because they prop up his tyranny. Such was at that time the state of the people; the priests took their prey, and the false prophets snatched also a part of it, like these hungry dogs at this day; who yet do not act so oppressively as the Pope: they lick as it were his seat, like dogs; while he and his mitred bishops devour the fattest spoils.

The Protestant and Orthodox worlds responded rabidly to the seeming red meat thrown our way this week by the Bishop of Rome. In essence, the statement really said nothing new, i.e. there is one church, the Roman Catholic church, and that the rest of us are Christians but not churches because we lack apostolic succession and other permanent elements of the one Church. It’s just a restatement of Catholic doctrine by the Catholic Church…big deal.

The Catholic Catechism tells us that “All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church” and that’s all I need to know.

I love Pope Benedict and I believe that the Church is one. Whether you realize it or not, ALL the baptized are in one body. That means Benedict is your Bishop and mine, and so are all other rightfully ordained Bishops. It’s not “their problem” because we are all one. There are barriers to this oneness, but they will be worked out over time by the Holy Spirit. I am fine with being considered a separated brother by Catholics, we have much in common.

Turning to Pope Benedict, here is a look at his endorsement of the Latin Mass from First Things. I love the Latin Mass. I’ve only been part of it once, but it was very moving. Kudos to him for allowing the ancient practice of the church to flourish. And look at this interesting statement that he made at the start of his Papacy about the Magisterium of the Church and the infallibility of the Pope:

This power of teaching frightens many people in and outside the Church. They wonder whether freedom of conscience is threatened or whether it is a presumption opposed to freedom of thought. It is not like this. The power that Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors is, in an absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.

Benedict sees his role as binding himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word – period. That’s a pretty cool statement, almost Protestant in emphasis. Of course we disagree about what God’s Word says, but I probably disagree more with Baptists than with him, and it will get worked out. I don’t want to hear about idolatry from people who put the flag of our secular Empire proudly on the stage of their church and don’t think twice about it.

I’m glad that the Catholic Church is standing up with clarity for what it believes, on abortion, homosexuality, women’s ordination, the Trinity, and so much more. Praise God for honesty in the Church.

If you are interested in the technical aspects of electing the next Pope and how the Roman church functions in the interim read:

UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS