A Universal Apologia for the Catholic Church

A matter which I cannot address in public without some disquiet has risen again, and courtesy asks I address it.

My reluctance in taking up my pen to discuss this hideous divorce between orthodoxy and its various deviations is partly from a natural dislike of voicing disagreement with beloved brothers. If my tone seems controversial, that is due to the nature of the controversy, not due to any pride on my part. It is simply a fact that I cannot say why I think I have found the right answer without implying that those who say otherwise have not.

My reluctance again is partly from a pragmatic dislike of exposing the weakness of disunity to our mutual foes, secularists, atheists, Leftists, cultists of Political Correctness, and other jeering and famished monstrosities circling with bloodshot eyes and lolling tongues the broken bulwarks and the fading fires of our dying citadel called civilization, assaulted from without as betrayed from within.

My reluctance finally is partly from, surprisingly enough, humility. It is rare emotion for me. Frankly, I am jovially proud of nearly everything else in my life, from my excellent education, to my natural skill at writing, to my happy family life, to my towering height, to my monstrous girth, to my fine-looking beard like a manly yet silent explosion of hair. But when it comes to divine questions, I was in this matter for so long and so deeply deceived, and so thoroughly sunk into the very Marianas Trench of folly and error, that I take no delight to disagree with another reaching conclusions other than mine. From age seven upward I was an atheist, and a skillful and zealous and successful proselyte of that false doctrine, and I grew from a youth too stupid to grasp the palpably obvious, into a man too arrogant to see the blindingly obvious. So I am reluctant to give voice to my vain imaginings lest wiser men and more learned come across them, and expose them to a just mockery.

On the other hand, my loyalty to Christ and my love of truth for its own sake bids me speak, and the hope that my words might aid some other in any struggle he might have with conundrums akin to mine.

I have elsewhere given an account of the visions and miracles and ecstatic experiences which overwhelmingly and unambiguously transformed me from a zealous atheist to a zealous Christian. It was a supernatural event, and it is not within my power to repeat it for the inspection of casual onlookers. Consequently, I do not expect to convert atheists to theism by power of reason alone, for I was not converted by reason alone, but by the Holy Spirit.

Unlike my supernatural transformation from atheist to theist, the decision which of the competing denominations to join was a natural one, and I relied upon my own unreliable nature and mother-wit to make it. It is that decision this essay is meant to recount and justify.

Reason alone makes a powerful argument that the Catholic Church is what she says she is, and contains the fullness of revelation that other denominations contain only in part. Even if that argument is not convincing to all, honesty asks me to recount why I found it convincing; and hope tells me any man approaching the question from the direction I approached it will likewise find it convincing.

For I approached the question from the outside. The mind of an atheist is so far from the mind of Christendom that it may well be another planet, and all the continents and mountains and seas of your world were like a bright dot to me, as the features of Earth seen from Mars. The differences between Greece and Italy are invisible even in outline to the Martian whose telescope distinguish features of Europe and Asia.

In particular, because an atheist has an equal disdain and contempt for all forms of religious thought, I had no preferences between you and your twin brothers.

I did not, for example, have any opinion whatsoever on the question of the two natures or one of Christ, nor whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father only versus from the Father and the Son, nor whether the Host is a memorial only or contains the real presence of the Son. I was neither attracted nor repelled by the painted statues of the Catholics nor the icons of the Orthodox, nor was I attracted nor repelled by the unornamented simplicity of the New England chapels nor by the splendor and intricacy of the Gothic cathedrals. And I was completely lacking in that odd and phobic revulsion many a Protestant has toward the Virgin Mary.

If I deviated from a the perfect objectivity of perfect indifference, it was only in this regard: What I did possess was the typical attitudes and opinions one might expect from someone raised in mid-Twentieth Century America, to whom classical liberalism of the Enlightenment is bred into his bones, and the idea of separation of Church and State is an automatic one. Also, my attitudes and judgment were remarkably and deeply marked by the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers and historians, particularly Epictetus, Lucretius, Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, but most of all Aristotle. I am and was a thoroughgoing Aristotelian. My intellect is congenitally cool and logical; I am unmoved by appeals to emotion, howsoever heartfelt.

No doubt my Nestorian or Monophysite or Russian or Greek Orthodox readers, or Protestants, or Puritans, or Mormons, or Moonies, or Arians, or Unitarians, or Albigensians, or Witches might wonder with a start of dismay how it comes to be that so wonderful and wise a person as myself could find himself freed the stench and clinging darkness of atheism only to be immediately snared in the filthy meshes of the Roman Catholic Church, so notorious in song and story as being a haunt of devils and pederasts and idolaters and cannibals.

The short answer is that I am neither so wonderful as the question supposes, nor is the Church so dark as she is painted.

When I looked into the matter, I found to my infinite shock that the songs and stories are wrong, and very nearly everything a non-Catholic says or believes about the Catholicism is either propaganda maliciously spread or propaganda unwittingly believed.

(I say ‘unwittingly’ rather than ‘gullibly’ for I myself am as skeptical as it is possible for a human being to be, and even I did not detect any gaps or clues or inconsistencies in the nearly perfect smokescreen of falsehood erected by her enemies that surrounds the towers and walls of the beleaguered Church and blots her from honest view. In nearly every case, I was not even aware that was any controversy, much less another side of the story.)

So if you, my dear Nestorian or Monophysite or Russian or Greek Orthodox reader, or Protestant, or Puritan, or Mormon, or Moonie, or Arian, or Unitarian, or Albigensian or Witch, had never heard the rumor that there was a Catholic rationale or apologetic or reason to support the Church, allow me to acquaint you.

Several things convinced me of the truth of the Catholic claims. I will tell them in chronological order rather than any argumentative order.

Authority: The first was the paradox of the claim by denominations accepting the Catholic teaching, such as the existence of a man called Christ, but rejecting the magisterium on whose sole authority those teaching are to be believed, or even known.

This paradox would be like hearing two messengers from a distant king, both of whom accuse the other of corrupting the message, but finding that the second messenger got his copy from the first, whom he also accuses of corrupting the message.

Canonicity: The second is the paradox of accepting the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity but rejecting the Catholic Church whose Ecumenical Councils on whose sole authority those doctrines rest.

Magisterium: The third is the paradox of asserting an infallible scripture was canonized by a fallible Church; or again that an authorized scripture was authorized by an unauthorized Church.

Scriptural Authority: The fourth is the paradox of claiming an independent, self-defining or self-authorizing authority for scripture.

Unity: The fifth was the paradox of claim that Christ founded a single and unified Church against whose authority He wished His loyal followers to rebel, because His wish was for disunity.

Communion: The sixth was the paradox of the claim that His immediate followers misunderstood the meaning of the sacrament of the Eucharist instituted by Christ, but that visionaries or theologians hundreds or thousands of years after those followers, understood that meaning perfectly.

Continuity: The seventh was the paradox of the claim that Christ instituted eternal rules and disciplines for His followers which He also meant to evolve with the times, following the fickle fashions of the world.

Chastity: The eighth was the paradox of claiming to be Christian while scorning Christ’s own clear words forbidding divorce and other unchaste practices.

Historicity: the ninth was the difficulty of assigning a date at which the Church lost her authority. The date is either early or late. If late, it is a paradox to continue to accept, as canonical, her teachings after that date; and if early, it is a paradox to call yourself Christian while rejecting everything the Christians ever taught.

Ignorance: the tenth was the stunning realization that denominations other than the Catholic are naturally ahistorical.

Tradition: the eleventh was the realization that a lack of history implied a lack of universality.

Heresy: the twelfth was a realization which sprang from seeing the pattern of historical ignorance, liturgical paucity, a lack of seven sacraments or all of them, and so on. Heresies are always simplifications of a complex and interdependent organism of ideas into a single master idea, which, upon consideration, has no warrant for supremacy.

Another peculiarity of heretical opinions is that they are rarely novel opinions, but merely a repeat of an old error.

A thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth convincing point was on the questions of the nuanced nature of the balanced judgement of the Church, particularly in her approach to law, the crass and erroneous nature of the accusations against the Church, and the sacramental life within it.

Let me address each of these points in order.

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NOTE: in the passages that follow I intend to use words like ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ and ‘schismatic’ and ‘heretic’ even though these fall awkwardly on the modern ear, because these words are clear and precise. I am not going to use a phrase like “a faithful follower of Christ whose opinion is at variance with the lawful authority for determining the canonicity of Christian teaching, etc.” rather than a word like “heretic” because I am constitutionally unable to substitute a cumbersome phrase for a term of art admitting of no ambiguity.

If you don’t know the difference between a “heretic” and a “heathen” then I respectfully suggest you acquaint yourself with a dictionary. These are not swear-words nor ad copy nor meaningless emotion-noises as are the un-words used so adroitly by the Politically Correct.

Any reader for whom such words have some bad emotional connotation is asked to snap out of his silliness and cease paying heed to emotional connotations of words, which are subjective, but instead to the meaning of words, which is objective.

Or, contrariwise, I may suggest that if the word “heretic” like the word “traitor” or “pervert” has a bad connotation, I might suggest that the connotation exists because it is merited. While we all admire rebels against lawless tyrants who exceed and abuse their authority, we all condemn those who betray the trust entrusted to them, or who rebel against goodness, revolt against reason, or those whose lives are in insurrection against natural affection, and nature’s God.

* * *

Let me address the first question here:

ON AUTHORITY

I have several reasons for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is, and not what the various break-away denominations says she is.

The first was an argument I came across way back when I was an atheist. It was a theological argument presented as a dialog between the ghost Thomas Aquinas and the ghost of Martin Luther with an imaginary C.S. Lewis on the authority of Christian tradition.

I do not recall where I came across it, nor who wrote it. I thought it was written by some bright and slightly flippant college student with too much free time on his hands, but I also thought it singularly clear and persuasive.

[N.B.: in preparing this essay, I tried to find that article again, and discovered to my infinite surprise that it was written by the great Peter Kreeft, who is indeed bright and slightly flippant, and might as well also be the reincarnation of Socrates. So it is not to be taken as any surprise that the argument was clear and persuasive.]

It had no effect whatsoever on my belief at the time. I thought it was an argument between two people arguing about nonexistent things, much like hearing an argument about whether or not Wolverine’s claws could penetrate Captain America’s shield.

Nonetheless, such arguments can have a winner and a loser even from the point of view of a skeptical outsider, because if you grant the unreal premises, one man’s conclusions will follow and the opposite will not.

Within the logic and continuity of the comic book universe, if you can show how in Issue 301 of AMAZING MARVEL TEAM-UP where it was established that the admantium weapon of Ultron was shown to be able pierce the admantium-vibranium alloy of Captain America’s shield, and that Wolverine’s claws are admantium weapons, the conclusion follows logically, even concerning make-believe things, that the shield of the Red-White-and-Blue Avenger can be penetrated by the claws of the scrappy Canadian X-Man. Any continued argument on the other side must distinguish the cases (that is, say how Ultron’s feat is not proper precedent for Wolverine, or say why Issue 301 is not canonical).

In this case, the ghost of Luther argues that Christianity teaches that there is one scripture, one salvation, and one sovereign Lord; and that therefore the claim by the Catholic Church to have a magisterium, a teaching and interpreting authority in effect adds a second scripture to the first; next, that salvation is by faith alone and therefore the claim of the Catholic Church to require good works in effect adds a second means of salvation; and third, that divine grace alone saves man, not man’s cooperation in that grace, and therefore the claim of the Catholic Church that man has free will adds a second sovereign to the universe, and impugns the power of God.

On the other side, the ghost of Aquinas argues that sola scriptura, a doctrine not found in scripture, is a contradiction in terms, that it must lead to endless fissiparation not to mention that it undermines the Church authority by whose sole witness anyone knows the Bible to be authoritative; that man is indeed saved by faith alone, but that good works are a necessary outgrowth of that faith, if it be real faith; and that if sovereign God wills man to have free will, it does not impugn that will, no more than the freedom of Homer to pen Odysseus as a character who, in his tale, has free will and freely makes his character choices within that tale (as, for example the heroine in TRILBY does not when her will is robbed by the mesmerism of Svengali).

Now, without going into the details of that argument (which frankly I do not recall) this was the first time it was brought to my attention that the Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations are not making the same claims.

It is not like the old television gameshow TO TELL THE TRUTH where a man and two imposters all claim to be one and the same celebrity, and the panelists by cunning questions attempt to discover his identity before the master of ceremonies asks the real celebrity please to stand up. It is more like a law case where a mother and a daughter both claim to have the exclusive right to inherit the patrimony of an absent father, the mother basing her claim on widowhood, and the daughter asking the court to divest the mother and turn the property over to her on the grounds that the mother has mismanaged the estate.

The idea is no doubt familiar to religious believers, but this was the first time in my blissful atheist existence, that I came across the idea that the Protestant claim to speak authoritatively and magisterially on Church teachings logically presupposes the magisterial authority of the Church, that is, the Catholic Church, to establish Church teachings, such as the canon of the Bible.

Even though, as I said, to me this was as meaningless as an argument between two fanboys about the imaginary weapons made of imaginary metals wielded by imaginary superheroes, as a matter of logic, I thought the ghost of Aquinas scored a clear, perhaps even unanswerable, victory in the debate. As far as I could tell, the argument carried the day: Luther’s admantium claws could not penetrate Aquinas’s vibranium shield.

Now, let me emphasize that the reason why this argument lodged in my memory was due to sheer contrarian perversity. I had not known the Catholics (sad inmates as they were in that airless tower of superstitious darkness called the Church) could make logical arguments, much less make sound ones.

But, neither as an atheist with no dog in that brawl, nor as a Catholic vowed to live and die in the faith, to this day, do I see any error in the argument.

In effect, the Lutheran claim is a claim of the right to rebel against the teaching authority of the Church, on the grounds that the Church is apostate. Unfortunately, the sole witness for the apostasy of the Church is an alleged disagreement between Church teachings and the scriptures on which the Church relies for those teachings.

But the sole witness for the validity, canonicity, historicity, and divinity those selfsame scriptures is the authority of the Church whose members wrote them, gathered, sanctified, protected, promulgated and canonized them.

1.1 THE PARABLE OF THE MESSENGERS

The first of the several points on which my faith in the Catholic Church rests was brought to my attention back when I was an atheist, and had no concern one way or the other as to which side should prevail in an argument I dismissed as being on a completely imaginary topic.

Namely, one cannot argue that the books of the Bible are canonical and argue at the same time that neither the Church nor any one has the authority to canonize them.

Every baptized Christian is in the position of the servant of a king on the forefront of a battlefield. Two thousand leagues away stands the King, who issues both general and specific orders and also appoints his Supreme Allied Commander and eleven General officers, and establishes his chain of command. He leaves no written orders himself, but the Commander and the Generals hears his words and write some of them down. To prove that they work in his name and under his authority, the King grants them certain signs they can show to the doubtful.

The message contains a great commission for a general levy, that is, every man hearing the message is commanded to join the army in the name of the king, and become a messenger in turn, spreading the good news it contains as far and wide as possible.

At His Majesty’s command, these messengers set out toward you. Enemy spies continually attempt to change and corrupt the message, but the message itself contained repeated warnings of this.

For roughly the first 50 to 75 leagues or so, the message is verbal, and the messengers are repeating it the new messengers they recruit as they go. Even from the first step, there is dispute and debate as to how to interpret and enforce the message, or even what it means. Some of them write part of it down, or write down commentary about it, or write exhortations to each other to keep the message faithfully.

By the time the 100 league mark is run, the Supreme Allied Commander and ten of the eleven General officers have been killed after torture by the Enemy, and the final General officer recalled by the king. At the 200 league mark there are clearly generals (who are also messengers) of Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, of which the arch-messenger of Rome is preeminent in honor, and perhaps (this claim is open to dispute) in authority. All these claim to have received their authority from previous messengers who received it from the King. They base their claim of authenticity on this succession, which can be called a ‘chain of custody’ or ‘chain of evidence’ or ‘apostolic succession’.

Between the 300 and 400 league mark, finding that some of the abovementioned writings are fake, and some are real, the chief messengers gathers at what is called an Ecumenical Council, and, with the advice and consent of the Supreme Commander in Rome, decree certain of the writings together to be final and definitive. This is called scripture. But many the messengers before this point wrote down their thoughts about the message and its ramifications, and left a paper trail behind them older than the First Ecumenical Council. These are the Patristic writings.

Disputes are continuous, but all the messengers agree (or seem to) that a general council or a vote between them will settle disputes as they arise. That satisfies some but not others. From time to time other messengers break away, or spies for the enemies arise claiming to be messengers who are not, Arians and Donatists and Montanists and Gnostics, but these are pulled back into the ranks, either gently or roughly.

Before the 500 league mark, two the messengers break ranks and peal off, and go their own way, claiming their interpretation of the message alone is authoritative: these are the Monophysites and the Nestorians.

At the 700 league mark, one messenger throws away all previous written versions of the message, and discards most of the verbal version, and writes a new one which he says is based on secret communication with the King’s superior, the Emperor, whom the messenger saw in a dream. This new message he calls ‘The Recital’. He savagely and continually attacks the other messengers throughout the rest of the trip, pausing only momentary when he is beaten into semi-consciousness and cannot physically continue. He claims the king is not a king, but merely a messenger like himself, but that all the other messengers botched up the message maliciously, and are in the pay of the enemy. The king’s messengers all say he is in the pay of the enemy. Unlike the messengers during the first hundred leagues of the journey, this one produces none of the signs and wonders the king promises will accompany special prophetic messengers acting in His name. This one is called Mohammed.

At the 1000 league mark, the next major break happens, although this time there is no disagreement over the message, only over who has the final authority in case of any garbled messages to establish the authoritative version. These are the Orthodox, who later split into Greek and Russian.

At the 1500 league mark, one of the messengers is unhappy with that part of the message which says he cannot get a divorce, so he peals off. He makes not even a token attempt to pretend to be guarding the original version of the message. These are the Anglicans.

At about the same time, two others, Luther and Calvin break away, on the grounds that only the written version of the message can be trusted, only the written version is necessary. They say the later interpretations and arguments only confused matters. However, oddly enough, these two discard several parts out of the writing, particularly those that happen not to agree with their interpretation of the writing. There is another general council, just the same the ones which determined the contents of the messages and settled all previous disputes, but the new messengers will not accept this as the proper mechanism to settle the dispute. The dispute is so vehement, that they form a new army with new banners and a different chain of command, but they claim to be still loyal to the king, nay, they claim to be the only messengers loyal to the king. Unlike the messengers during the first hundred leagues of the journey, they produce none of the signs and wonders the king promises will accompany special prophetic messengers acting in His name.

When they break away, there is an explosion of many breakoffs from their group in turn, since their group holds, as part of the preamble of the oral message, that it is each man’s duty to break away when he suspects the chief messenger of adulterating the message.

All these messengers, the ones who ran straight as well as the ones who swerved, all reach you at once. They all have orders they say are based on the authority of the King and come from him, but the orders have either minor differences, or major.

On what is the claim based?

The Roman messenger says his authority is paramount and always has been, that he was appointed by the king to settle any disputes and correct any corruptions of the message. The two Orthodox messengers says not so, that the chief messengers of Antioch and Constantinople, Jerusalem and Alexandria were equal, and Rome not greater than they; but the Orthodox accept everything Rome also accepts, at least up to whatever the first seven General Councils agreed.

Luther and Calvin say that the King never granted any messenger authority to interpret the message, only to carry it. The fact that the message was not written down until around the 75 league mark and not finalized into an authoritative version until the 500 league mark is one they do not address. Based on some (rather technical) reasoning about the intentions of the king which is not reflected anywhere in the written message, they both discarded certain parts of their message, including Tobit and Maccabeus and Wisdom. At the same time both claim the other messengers were never granted by the king any authority to carry any oral message. Indeed, Luther and Calvin and Rome all claim each other to be spies in the pay of the enemy, and fall into the most grotesque and deadly combat before your eyes, tearing with tooth and nail, biting ears, gouging eyes, crushing gonads. It is appalling.

At the same time, more messengers appear as if from nowhere. Joseph Smith claims that the king spoke to him personally and gave him a pair of gold tablets written in Reformed Egyptian, a language no one else has ever heard of. He does not have them ready to hand, but he is willing to tell you what is on them. Mary Baker Eddy claims each and every messenger of the king misunderstood the kings message entirely, for he was not the king at all, merely a physician, but she has at her command the same signs and wonders used by the early messengers to confirm that they acted in the king’s authority. Again there is the reverend Sun Myung Moon, whose interpretation of the message is irreconcilable with anything of the previous versions or dispute about the message, and seems to be mingled with elements of Taoism or syncretism, and not even pretending to be part of the original message.

And then there is Mohammed, who shoots your five-year-old daughter in the head, and dances when she dies, and then whines that you are oppressing him, and calls you a racist.

All messengers claim the authority to give the message and the interpretation of the message.

Again, these are not groups of Madison Avenue advertisers attempted to sell you a product. Their message is not an advertisement, which you have the right to ignore, but a command, which you have not. All claim to represent the king whom you are bound and avowed to obey. So disregarding all the messages is not an option, nor is accepting them all an option, since they disagree either in minor or major points, nor is it an option to grant all of them equal credence, since you were warned repeatedly that some messages would indeed be lies from the enemy.

Logically, the only option is to examine their warrant, whatever it may be, on which they rest their claim of authority. If each one claims to be orthodox, the only option is to examine on what grounds each claims the others to be heterodox. It is a partly an historical and partly a legal claim.

The first warrant examined is that of the Protestants. The claim that they make is that the orally transmitted parts of the message were corrupted by the malignancy of the Roman messenger, and cannot be trusted; and moreover that only the written parts of the message are needed to carry out the king’s will. However, even a cursory glance at their practices, since they are Trinitarians and monogamists, shows that they themselves both heed and follow as if by the king’s own command certain things delivered only in the oral parts of the message.

The claim they make that only the written part of the message is to be trusted in not in the written part of the message. Instead, the written part of the message contains quite clear warnings against false messengers, and curses against anyone who alters or contaminates the message.

And the written part of the message is lacking several books. The Protestants claim that they rejected parts of the message which they thought were added by the Romans.

A cursory inquiry as to where and from whom and when each man got the message he carried will reveal the following:

WHICH MESSENGER WHERE FROM WHOM WHEN Catholic Church Jerusalem Jesus Christ 33 Anabaptists Germany Nicolas Stork 1521 Lutheran Germany Martin Luther 1524 Episcopalian England Henry VIII 1534 Unita’n Congregationalists Germany Celarius 1540 Presbyterian (Old School) Scotland General Assembly 1560 Congregationalists England Robert Browne 1583 Baptists Rhode Island Roger Williams 1639 Quakers England George Fox 1647 Quakers America William Penn 1681 Methodist Episcopal England John Wesley 1739 Free-Will Baptists New Hampshire Benj. Randall 1780 Free Communion Baptists New York Benijah Corp ~1790 Campbellites, or Christians Virginia Alex. Campbell 1813 Reformed Methodist Vermont Branch of the Meth. Episcopal Church 1814 Methodist Society New York Branch of the Meth. Episcopal Church 1820 Methodist Protestant Baltimore Branch of the Meth. Episcopal Church 1830 Seventh-Day Baptists United States General Conference 1833 Presbyterian (New School) Philadelphia General Assembly 1840 True Wesleyan Methodist New York Delegates from Methodist denominations 1843

However, at this point, the Protestant messengers say that a strict line of succession of messengers is not necessary to establish to show the authority of the message. There are two witnesses which provide confirmation of the authenticity.

The first witness is a Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit whom the king has sent to guard the authority and continuity of the message. Each messenger makes a claim of inerrancy or infallibility, either express or implied, for to claim otherwise is to claim that the king has no power to send the message.

The second is the written message itself, which can be examined such that it proves itself by its own authority to be authentic and authoritative.

However, it is soon clear that the Roman messenger holds as part of the oral message that the Chief messenger has final authority to rule on what is part of the message and what is not. The Roman makes a clear and formal statement claiming infallibility.

The Protestants make a similar claim for the body of the congregation, or for the written message, or for each individual reading it. No matter how unbelievable the claim is that the king sent an invisible spirit to protect the messengers from error, while it is logically possible that one messenger has this authority, is not logically possible, from the simple fact that all the messengers disagree, that they all possess it.

Also, the redacted sections of the written message provide a logically insurmountable paradox for the Protestant messengers. If their sole authority for the authenticity of their message is the written part of the message, then they have no authority to redact or remove parts of the message on any grounds. They cannot throw away the Book of the Maccabeus or Tobit or the Letters of James or anything else because they claim that neither they nor anyone has the authority to define the cannon.

Finally, when you ask the Protestant messengers, since not one of them saw with his own eyes the king himself give the original copy of the message, written or oral, how they know the king exists at all, their only answer is to say that they take the word for it of the early Roman messenger.

You ask them how they know they written part of the message is the only valid part? Their only answer again is to say they take the word for it of the early Roman messenger.

The Protestants respond that there was a time before the message become corrupted, and the Roman messenger from that time could be trusted, but the later messengers could not. You ask them how they know the early message existed at all? Their only answer yet again is to say they take the word for it of the early Roman messenger.

As far as I am concerned, the argument is definitively over at that point: if the one has no authority and no source of information aside from the other, then the one cannot logically be in a position to overrule the other, or claim his information is better, or his authority higher. It is logically impossible.

But there are a few other questions whose answer lends additional weight to the Roman side of the question.

If you have a legalistic mind, you ask Luther and Calvin to point to the part of the message, or the general standing orders, or the specific field order, which tells them they have the right to disobey their superior officers and create a new chain of command based on different forms than the old chain of command. The Roman messenger claims the chain of command was established from the outset by the King; the Protestants say their authority to rebel comes from the natural reasoning that if the chain of command is disloyal to the king, loyalty to the king demands disobedience to the officers the king placed over you. And the Protestants say that at the time when the messengers all set out, there was no official chain of command. But this is not reflected in the written part of the message, so by the Protestant logic, they cannot rely on any tradition as to what conditions obtained in the early days.

Turning to the other messengers, you discover another astonishing thing. The Greek and Russian and Syriac and Coptic and Malabar messengers, while severed from the authority of the Roman messenger, all reject the specific interpretation of the message maintained by Luther and Calvin. All have priestly hierarchy. All claim apostolic succession. All believe in the Real Presence. None affirm sola scriptura.

The only other breakaway group agreeing with the Protestants on these points is Mohammed. He also believes that the written message was corrupt, so he throws out not one or two, but all the books of the Bible, while keeping the gist of the stories of Genesis, Exodus, and the Virgin Birth. He also denies the sacraments. He also abolishes the priesthood and preaches a simplified version of the message.

Logically, if apostolic succession and so on are corruptions in the message, then the corruption happened independently to all branches, or happened at a point before the rather early point when they split. And if they split for reasons other than the reasons given by the Protestants, then the authority of the Protestants to split is fallacious: if the Protestants accept the authority of the first seven or so Ecumenical Councils, and take the council decisions to be authorized, then they cannot reject the decision of the Council of Trent.

More to the point, if the Lutherans and Calvinists accept the authority of the first seven Ecumenical Councils, then they accept, as a constitutional matter, that the proper way to define Church teachings is by a vote of priests and bishops and archbishops, or, in other words, by the authority of ministerial offices whose authority they reject. The constitution of the various Lutheran denominations does not allow them to call a general council or a synod of bishops, since they have no bishops.

This means they hold themselves bound by the decisions of an office they themselves have abolished.

As a purely legal or constitutional matter, if the Church for thousands of years in both eastern and western branches has accepted the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils and Synods as authoritative, and if there is no scriptural authority or traditional practice of disobeying or overruling them, Luther, an Augustinian monk, does not have the authority to declare himself superior to the Council of Trent, and able to overrule its findings.

Americans hold it as self-evident that governments are instituted among men to protect their rights, and when the government is harmful to those rights, the people have the authority and duty to overthrow the government and erect a new one. This is because Americans hold our rights to come from God Almighty, and the government is merely a human institution derived from human wisdom to attempt to safeguard these mighty gifts. But until the time of Luther, no Christian held that the Church was instituted of men by the wisdom of men, but was rather a divine and mystical body, instituted by Christ.

Whatever the other denominations may say must be decided on its own merit. The claims of the Mormons or Moonies or the Christians of Syria or Malabar has to be decided based on the content of those claims to authenticity. But just the nature of the message we call Christian teaching logically requires that the Protestant claim to be the sole and rightful messengers, based on books whose authenticity is attested to by a Church whose authority they reject, is illogical and impossible.

I have spoken only of Luther, but to my knowledge, all Protestant denominations accept sola scriptura and Luther’s redaction of the books of Tobit and Maccabeus and so on from the canon. All accept the claims that Christian tradition must and should be rejected as unchristian and unauthoritative if not supported by the Bible. However, the Bible itself does not anywhere authoritatively list which books are canonical, which are deutero-canonical, which are apocryphal, and which are heretical, nor does any book in the Bible give any measure or standard by which this determination is to be made.

But more oddly, the Protestants all agree with each other about which books to exclude. No version of the Bible among the Protestants accepts the Shepherd of Hermas, for example, or the Gospel of Thomas or the Apocalypse of Peter, albeit they all accept the Apocalypse of John and the Book of Esther.

The argument, if it were ever made, that Luther and Calvin and Wesley and Henry VIII and Ebion and Marcion (and whoever else) each one independently had the authority to determine which books were in the Bible, and each one went through a separate and independent procedure of determination, and each one came to the same conclusions and included the same books and epistles is simply ridiculous.

Historically speaking, what happened is that there were two canons of the Old Testament proposed by Jewish scholars and authorities. One was the Alexandrian canon, which predates the Incarnation, and is the one quoted by Christ. The other was compiled by the Pharisees a century or two after the Crucifixion. The Pharisees were scrupulous to exclude any books of the canon which they could not find in Hebraic (or Aramaic). So if there were only versions of, say, the Book of Maccabeus in Koinic, the Pharisees excluded it. This was the state of the best Jewish scholarship both when Jerome translated the scriptures into Latin, and, later, when Luther inquired of the Jews as to the authenticity of disputed book of the Old Testament. However, in the 1950’s the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals copies of at least some of the disputed books in their original Aramaic. And the Catholic and Orthodox churches have always accepted the Alexandrian canon.

The Lutherans were not being completely arbitrary, but neither was the argument being made in good faith, since one of the points of dispute between Luther and the Catholic Church was the legitimacy of prayers for the dead, which logically implies a purgatory or other intermediate condition aside from heaven or hell. The Book of Maccabeus contains references to Jews praying for the dead. The theologian who argues that scripture is the sole and sufficient source of all learning needed for salvation conveniently leaves out the scriptures that disagree with his pet theories.

Historically again, the final canon of the Bible was not established shortly after the messengers set out, but somewhere around the 500 A.D., after those first few Ecumenical Councils whose decision the Protestants accept, but whose authority they do not accept. And yet everything which the Protestants reject as corruptions, from the anointment of bishops to the consecration of the host to the adoration of Mary to prayers for the dead, are between one to four centuries older than that date, and there is no surviving record of any Christian ever doing things any other way.

ON CANONICITY

So much for the first point. The second is the paradox of accepting on authority the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity but rejecting authority defining those doctrines.

I did not back when I was an atheist (and do not now that I am a faithful Christian) see how anyone can reject the Church without rejecting the writings of the Church. If the Church is not sacred, how can her writings be sacred? And if her writings are sacred, how can the Church not also be?

There are only two possible answers: one is to say that the Church had her authority, legitimately exercised, up through the period where the New Testament writings were written, collected, and canonized, and lost that authority thereafter. The answer depends for its probative value on the date assigned as the point of last legitimate authority, after which the Church’s apostasy was irrevocable. Any doctrines promoted before that date are presumptively valid, as being given by a legitimate authority.

The other answer is to say that the Church never possessed magisterial authority, that is, the authority to define Christian teaching, and that this power lodges either in the individual, or nowhere.

The logical fallacy involved in this second answer is obvious: if the Church never possessed the authority to define doctrine, then nothing in the Christian canon, not even the fact that Christ existed at all, has any authoritative support.

It is not as if there are independent non-Christian written records testifying to the events in the Gospel or the visions of St Paul or St John aside from the apostles and disciples themselves. Aside from the testimony of Peter and Paul and the other saints and apostles and martyrs, there is no record that Jesus of Nazareth lived at all, much less that He was the Christ, much less that He was divine, and said the things He said.

There is nothing in the Bible listing the canon of scripture. There is not even a rule or standard mentioned explaining how to compile such a list, or to establish what books belong and what do not.

But let us suppose for the sake of argument that there were a book in the Bible, let us call it The Book of Solascripture, which clearly and plainly set out that scripture and not tradition is the sole authority for determining canonicity, that is, giving the standard of what constitutes orthodox teaching. Let us further suppose that the Book of Solascripture lists all books which are orthodox and authoritative, from the Book of Genesis through to the Apocalypse of John. Does the Book of Solascripture list itself in the list? Either it does or it does not.

If it does not, that is a self-contradiction, for then the book by whose authority we know which books are authoritative lacks the authority to make that determination.

If it does, that is a circular argument, for then the book by whose authority we know which books are authoritative is the only witness to support its own authority. It would be like a judge in a court of law declaring himself king on the grounds that, as king, he has the authority to grant this one judge, himself, the right to declare who should be king.

Let us suppose again that the Book of Solascripture was written anywhere from 30 years to 120 after the Crucifixion, as late as 150 A.D. Consider the apostle, let us call him Protoluther, who penned the Epistle of Solascripture. Was everything he taught before that date invalid? Was everything every apostle taught before that date invalid? To them, scripture meant only the Old Testament.

What was his basis for Protoluther’s authority to write this scripture and teach this doctrine that authority comes from scripture alone? That authority must be based on something Christ or one of the other apostles taught to him orally. But if so, by it own definition of authority, this doctrine has no authority to be taught, nor to enter the canon of scripture.

If Protoluther has no authority to proclaim Sola Scritpura as authentic Church teaching, how much less has Luther over a thousand years after. And by what authority does Luther decree that all canonizations from the past thousand years were invalid? How does he get the right to strip the sainthood not from one nor two, but from all the saints back to Saint Mary?

But in fact there is no Book of Solascripture, and in fact there is no passage in the Bible supporting Sola Scriptura. (There is a passage saying scripture is useful for instruction and reproof, however, but this is hardly that same thing). There are also passages indicating that the early Church Fathers spread tradition orally, and relied on oral tradition, and expected it to be spread orally, from one generation to the next.

There is no passage in the Bible indicating that this reliance on tradition was, or was meant to be, temporary or limited to a certain early period. (It may be so that Christ intended or command such a limitation, and that we as Christian should obey His intent or command for the sake of salvation, but, if so, the doctrine of Sola Scriptura is false, for then there is at least one commandment or divine intention, necessary for salvation, which is not in the scripture.)

So, logically, the answer that the Church never possessed teaching authority must be rejected by any Christian. No man determines the nature and content of the Christian teaching for himself on his own authority, because no man living is an eyewitness to Christ.

That leaves the other answer: that the Church at one time possessed teaching authority and lost it on the grounds of her apostasy. This rests on the question of teaching authority. This is turn rests on the question of whether the Church is or is not one, true, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Hence to support this answer logically, the Protestants have to make four claims: first, that the early Christians in doctrine and practice and to all practical effect were Protestant and not Catholic, on the grounds that the Church suffered an apostasy, slowly or suddenly, at some specific date between the First Century and the Sixteenth; and, second, that this apostasy was final and irrevocable, such that the Church could never reform, repent, nor regain her lost authority; and third that this apostasy grants each Protestant individual the legal authority to rebel in order to return to the original forms of the Church.

Note that this third claim logically gives each individual baptized Christian an authority no Pope nor General Church Council ever claimed, which is the ability to overrule or ignore the findings of any or all previous Church Councils.

This third claim has no support whatever in the constitution of the Church, nor in canon law, nor in the writings of any Church Father, nor in Scripture, nor any basis in logic. Nothing Christ says said that each man can invent his own Church to suit himself.

The fourth and final claim is that each man has the right and authority to interpret scripture for himself. If a ten o’clock scholar reads a passage where, for example, Jesus says none is good but God alone, and he interprets that to mean that Christ was a human prophet and not the Second Person of the Trilogy, his reading is as authoritative as if Saint Peter had said it.

For that matter, if the same scholar decides that the resurrection scenes are meant to be allegorical or poetical, and that Christ never rose from the dead, or never existed to begin with, that is spoken with Peter’s authority also.

Or if he decides that Christ declaring the Eucharist to be His body is allegorical, then Peter’s authority can dismiss the Lord’s Supper as something Christians need not keep; or if he decides that baptism is a spiritual act which is marred or blockaded by the performance of a sacrament using material water, then Peter’s authority teaches Christians must not perform baptisms; or if he decides the serpent in the garden of Eden was the true God seeking to grant men knowledge and divinity whereas the creator was an evil demiurge and the enslaver of man; then by this logic these are all valid readings, all equally Christian, all equally authoritative.

ON THE MAGISTERIUM

The third point that convinced me of the truth of the Catholic claims is the paradox of accepting the canon of scripture while rejecting the teaching authority, that is to say, the Magesterium, of the Church. This is asserting an infallible scripture was canonized by a fallible Church; or again that an authorized scripture was authorized by an unauthorized Church.

But if not from the Church, from where would this Magisterial authority come?

Does Christ grant to each several and separate believer the right and authority to define the canon of scripture each man for himself? Do some men have the authority and not others? If so, whence comes this authority? If not through apostolic succession, then from where?

Now, a sensitive modern reader will already notice a whiff a moral atmosphere utterly alien to all modern thought has entered this essay. Why are we discussing authority?

All the authorities of the modern thought teach that authority is radically and innately evil, and is meant only to be rebelled against in the in the name of individualism, or equality, or nihilism or communism, and never to be obeyed or heeded. The paradox of authorities authoritatively declaring all authority to be unauthoritative need not delay us, except to note that it is of a like form to all other modern paradoxes of gibberish.

Rare indeed is the modern reader believes that there is such a thing as a teaching authority, or that statements made by authority of the teacher or pastor have any obligation to be accepted on authority by a student or celebrant under his discipline. The idea sounds old-fashioned and old-worldly if not positively oriental, as if an eastern sage or guru expects his students to bow and vow lifelong fidelity to his teaching.

Nonetheless, we are not discussing an issue where, like the Michelson-Morley experiment, or the Millikan experiment, each man has an equal chance as any other to see the matter in dispute and be an eyewitness. If you doubt the findings of Aristarchus of Samos concerning the diameter of the Earth you, yourself, without any equipment aside from two yardsticks can confirm it. You can thrust the sticks into two spots at different latitudes, pace off the distance with your own legs, measure the shadows cast at a given date and hour, and using math no more complicated than a first year geometry student knows, derive the correct figure. If you doubt whether Galileo was correct about the existence of the moons of Jupiter, you can spot them yourself on a clear night with a pair of field glasses.

This issue is not like that. Until someone invents Irwin Allen’s Time Tunnel, or Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine, no additional eyewitnesses to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are ever going to appear.

You have to rely on the report of Mary Magdalene, out of whom seven devils were cast, who apparently cannot tell the difference between her master and the gardener, or on the disciples walking the road from Emmaus, who also did not recognize Him, or on the testimony of Saul of Tarsus, who not only had a seizure and went blind, he seems to forget whether the other people with him heard the voices in his head or not. These are not very reliable witnesses, and, frankly, the written record in the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles in some of these cases is not written by the witness himself, making it hearsay.

In any case, you, dear reader, were not there. You did not see it. You were not standing next to Thomas, and, when offered the chance, shoved Tom roughly aside and thrust your plastic ruler into the wound in Christ’s abdomen to measure precisely how deeply the spear of Longinus bit.

Outside the Church, there is no visible firsthand evidence available to confirm that Christ was resurrected, nor crucified, nor what He said and did, what He taught and what He commanded His followers to do, nor even, indeed, that He lived at all.

The pagan or Jewish historians who mention the life of Jesus of Nazareth, Tacitus and Josephus, are not giving firsthand accounts, and most likely heard the name only because it was on the lips of the Jewish breakaway sect which was already beginning to call itself Christian, and which already had the unique character of an ecclesiastical body, a Church.

If you hold Christ rose from the dead, the only reason why you think so is that Mary Magdalene, and Peter and Thomas saw Him; and, later, Paul. The only reason you know Mary and Peter and Paul exist at all is the surviving documentary witness of those scriptures which were canonized into the Bible; and the only reason any man has to believe those scriptures are authentic and authoritative is that the Church vouches for them. So if you are a Christian, and you believe Christ rose, you believe the Church in this. Therefore it cannot be maintained by any Christian that the Church never had any authority. The only logical argument is to say she had the authority and lost it.

So there is no one who saw Jesus or even knows He existed, outside the Church. If you want to find out what He said and did, you have to ask the Church. There is no one else to ask, no other source of information.

The difference is, if Galileo says he saw satellites orbiting Jupiter, those satellites are still there, and any supermarket or hardware store can equip you with the telescope you need to prove the point to yourself. You do not have to rely on Galileo’s authority. You don’t have to believe him. You can prove it to yourself for yourself. All you have to believe is your eyes.

But if Boswell says Johnson uttered a witty epigram, or Plato says Socrates asked a witty question, your eyes do you no good, since you cannot put them into the position to observe the event. Either the eyewitness is trusted, or he is not.

In this specific case, we are not dealing with an epigram nor a question, but a command, a gospel, and a great commission. If Christ is real, and He says what the eyewitnesses say He says, then His various parables, examples, and teaching are necessary for our understanding to comprehend, and His various injunctions, exhortations, and commandments are necessary for our wills to obey. If Christ is what His disciples wrote and taught He is, then His word is not just law, but divine law, which means His word is life.

If that is so, it is crucial to understand whether the command to memorialize the Last Supper in the Eucharist is literal or parable, or command to preach to all living creatures; and whether the command to baptize extends to children; and what it meant when Peter was given the keys to heaven, and so on.

In other words, Luther did not read the King James’ Bible. He read the Roman Bible, with the books in it he later removed. Luther did not hear what Jesus said, only what the Romans say Jesus said.

In sum, the Protestant argument suffers from a crucial and fatal defect: You cannot take Christian Bible as the sole authority from which to judge what Christians should and should not believe, and then argue that the Christians have no authority to interpret the Bible, no authority to write the Bible, no authority to say which books are authoritative and which are not. The stark fact is that the Bible has no authority outside the authority the Church, acting on her own authority, grants to the Bible.

The Bible cannot witness to its own truth. The only logical reason to accept the Bible as true is to accept it on the witness of the Church that wrote, compiled and sanctified it. If you think the Church is filled with liars and idolaters and that the Pope is the Antichrist, then you have no grounds to think that any documents produced by the Church are not the documents of liars and idolaters and antichrists.

But suppose it were not so. Suppose Luther had the authority to rewrite and re-edit the Bible. In that case, the Bible cannot be the sole and final authority on matters of Christian doctrine: Luther himself is. But Luther did not heal the sick and raise the dead and do the other mighty works which prophets routinely perform in order to show a divine sanction supports their words. He can simply give no warrant for such a claim of authority.

ON SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY

Since the time, back when I was an atheist, when I first came across the controversy over Church authority to define canon, I have since only heard two additional arguments which support the Protestant side. Both arguments claim an independent, self-defining or self-authorizing authority for scripture.

One was from a Protestant theologian who is so wise and learned, and so clear and logical in his thinking that I tremble to disagree with him. He made this statement: “It is wrong to say that the Church formed the canon of scripture; the scripture formed the Church!”

The nakedness of the paradox, which I assume is offered more for the cleverness of its word play than as a sober argument, defeats its point. The scripture simply did not fall out of the sky on golden tablets written in Reformed Egyptian and clonk a man named Peter on the head, at which point he declared himself Pope, went to Rome, and was martyred for his faith in a man he had never met. Peter wrote the epistle of Peter.

And if the scriptures did indeed form the Church, then by that same logic, they formed a hierarchical church with apostolic succession, bishops and archbishops, Eucharist and sacrament, reverence for Mary and adoration of Saints and all the other characteristics that the Coptics, Nestorians, Greek and Russian Orthodox share in common with Rome.

If the scriptures formed the Church, the scriptures could not form a Church that contains defects which lasted 1600 years, and then suddenly declare the head of the Church to be the King of England when His Majesty needs a divorce.

In other words, this argument was that the scriptures have an authority independent of the men who wrote them, and of their disciples who preserved, collected, protected, and sanctified them.

How the book could be sacred and infallible but the men who wrote and canonized the book could be not only fallible, but scoundrels bent on corrupting the book and its message is an impossible paradox. Any argument for the independent, non-clerical, and non-apostolic authority of scripture fails.

The other additional argument was from a crackpot whom to quote is to refute. He said that Catholics did not write the New Testament, or in other words, that Peter, Paul, John and all the others were not Catholics.

Now, at the time, four centuries before the break between the Monophysites and the Melkites, and a thousand years, before the schism between the Byzantines and the Romans, the Catholics and the Christians were one and the same. The two words were interchangeable. In other words, the crackpots argument was that the immediate disciples and followers of Christ were somehow, at the same sense and the same time, Protestant and non-Christian.

The question then is at what point they became Catholics, and stopped being Jews. Even a casual inspection of the Acts of the Apostles shows that the Catholics had been baptizing people without reference to Jewish authority, and defying the Jewish authority, ever since Pentecost, and that Saul of Tarsis was persecuting them. They were an identifiable separate group at that time.

In other words, again, the claim is that Peter was the first Pope, but was not Catholic. The Catholics cannot claim the leaders and founders of the Catholic Church wrote the New Testament, or perhaps Catholics cannot claim that these men lead or founded the Church or any Church. Or they were not members of the Church they founded because they were not baptized. Or the Early Church was different in some fundamental way from the Church later called Catholic. Or something. I am reminded of how pro-abortionists claim that unborn humans are not human on the grounds that membership is the species is optional.

I can only assume the crackpot meant that the organizational structure of the Church did not exist in the earliest days. If so, one wonders into what communion or community the men baptized at Pentacost were baptized into. Nor can it be claimed that the apostles and disciples never had a leader or never were supposed to have a leader, because the apostles were arguing about it even before Jesus died, and Protestants as well as every other denomination has a leader of some sort, even if they reject an Episcopal hierarchy as a form of leadership.

Whatever did or did not exist in the first months after Pentacost, since the epistles, the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation of Saint John already make reference to a Church containing certain uniquely non-Protestant features, such as deacons and bishops, as do the writings of the Antenicene Fathers, and since all this dates from before the New Testament writings were canonized, then the Early Church whatever its nature cannot be said to be Protestant, or anything like it.

Logically, Protestantism cannot be authoritative if Catholicism authoritative is not because Protestants take their basic teachings about the life and death of Christ, the nature of the Incarnation and the Trinity and so on, on the authority of the Catholic Church and from nowhere else.

Such was my first introduction to the Catholic position from back when I was an atheist. To be sure, I thought both Catholic and Protestant were wrong, but I additionally thought the Protestant claim to be self-refuting.

After my conversion, I engaged in a search and a meditation for over two years before deciding which denomination to join. But this article has grown too long: my report on my later and more Christian thoughts will have to wait for another day.

ON UNITY

The fifth argument in favor of Catholicism was first point that impressed itself upon me after my conversion. It was the question of unity.

Upon receiving the heartrending beauty and dazzling truth of the Christian faith with as loud a wail of surprise as a baby being born, but much more joyful, I felt as if I were an foundling raised in some terrible gray-walled dystopia where all the children are orphans were born in Petrie dishes, and no rumor of fatherly or motherly love existed, of a sudden finding that both his parents were alive and loved him and sent for him to come home.

Rushing to his magnificent ancestral mansion, the foundling discovers the great house has been torn asunder so that only the Eastern and Western wings still stand, and between them, where the main nave once rose, is now a cratered and lifeless no-man’s-land. At two opposite doors on opposite ends of the majestic ruin, his parents stand. They suffered a messy and vindictive divorce, and each now crossly demands of the foundling that he choose which one to love and which to hate.

That mansion is the Church.

It is no fault of mine that you weak-minded and hate-addicted Christians could not maintain the unity Christ bestowed upon His followers, and I resent to this day that this choice has been forced upon me.

And there is not merely a father and mother demanding exclusive loyalty and love from the discovered foundling, but dozens of major and thousands of minor brethren.

The Eastern wing of the mansion has been further torn into a Greek section and a Russian section, and a race of cannibal troglodytes, either of the communist or Czarist or Mohammedan bent, has been feasting on the flesh of their wretched slaves for decades or for centuries.

The Western wing was torn in sunder between a Catholic and a Protestant section and the brothers and sisters living there tore at each other’s flesh with their teeth so viciously and for so many years, that only the most drastic compromise—namely, that the mother church would have no authority over secular matters—could create a ceasefire. The Protestant rooms and chambers are all walled off each from his next neighbor, with new divisions created each week: Nicolas Stork is in one, and Martin Luther in another, then Henry VIII, Celarius, Robert Browne, Roger Williams, George Fox, William Penn, John Wesley, and on and on.

And there is an often overlooked Southern wing of the mansion, inhabited by Copts and Nestorians and Syriac and Cypriot Christians from North Africa to the Middle East to India, who even now are suffering genocidal extinction at the hands of the Troglodytes, and the larger and stronger members of the broken castle in other wings lift neither arms to help nor voices to protest.

Other buildings also occupy the grounds, either claiming to be the original mansion restored, or an improvement of what the original architect intended, or claiming no affiliation with the main mansion at all, and the builders here are named Reverend Moon or Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy.

Now my overwhelming reaction to beholding this splendid ruin was so primal as to be an intuition, practically an axiom: the shipwreck of the Church was a disaster. In nowise could I accept the principle that God is Love, and also accept that Love loves disunity. No bridegroom ever thought the best expression of true and perfect love for his bride was divorce.

More than one Protestant friend of mine urged me that God desired and condoned this separation of the denominations, on the grounds that each denomination has specific characteristics needed to allure back to the faith the many lost souls whose various needs and longings differ sharply from each other.

The argument is illogical in the abstract: those for whom the truth is an insufficient warrant to select whom to serve are moved by fad or fancy or some trivial external detail, like a man who selects a bride based on the brightness of her clothing rather than the rightness of her character. Such creatures are allured to serve God with their lips only, and there is no love of truth in them.

The argument is also, as a matter of practical fact, untrue: the Amish are not more austere than the Franciscans, nor the Calvinists more intellectual than the Jesuits, nor is a Baptist revival meeting more expressive than the feast days of Mardi-Gras, nor the Puritans more penitential than the fast of Lent.

The disunity is not based on a different of worldview, for we are all baptized Christians who believe in the Apostle’s Creed. It is based on small theological differences and large differences of hierarchy. I submit that any soul who would rather go to hell than submit to the truth about the filioque controversy is damned in any case, whether he is right on that point or wrong.

One friend thought I should be grateful to see side a wide marketplace of denominations, each with its own booth, all hawking their wares energetically, and perhaps the competition would keep all denominations honest and alert to serving their customer’s needs. The metaphor is a disingenuous one: should we make the house of worship into a place for tradesmen and moneylenders, indeed a den of thieves?

If the various denominations were merely ethical clubs of like-minded individuals gathered to do some good for the community, the disunion among them would indeed have the beneficial effects that spring from competition in the marketplace of ideas. But few denominations, perhaps none, make the claim that they are unnecessary to salvation, and that their truths they preach are no better and no worse than any other. The whole point of starting a new denomination, if it is not just willfulness or sordid politics, is that the heresiarch thinks he is orthodox and all others are heretics. He thinks he has not a truth but the truth.

An ethical club, or for that matter a restaurant, might think it had the best food or the best ethical program, but none think theirs is the only food on Earth without which men starve. A church is nothing like an ethical club or a restaurant. A denomination claims, or should claim, that theirs is the bread of heaven, without which men die and do not rise again. If the new denomination does not claim this, on what grounds is breaking from their prior denomination justified?

And yet I noticed none of my Protestant friends willing to say within my hearing that his denomination and his alone —Seventh Day Baptists, let us say — was the one, true, holy and sole Church founded by Christ outside of which there was no salvation. (I have on the Internet encountered two voices willing to say so; but far from being sober theologians, they were crackpots.)

One friend, indeed, praised ecclesial disunity on the grounds that were there but one Church, his particular denomination (which is small and eccentric) would have been blotted from existence with stake and faggot. This struck me as a good argument against a nationalized or established church, such as the Protestants erected in England under Henry VIII, or the Russian Orthodox suffered under the Czars, but not an argument at all against Church unity.

I did not understand why, in principle, a theological dispute could not be resolved in the future as they always had been in the past, by synods and counsels and, if need be, general counsels. Any Christian who accepts the Nicene Creed accepts the authority of the Council of Nicaea. I do not understand how, in principle, a Christian can claim to have the right to be a Christian without submitting to Christian teaching, that is, submitting to what Christ taught.

I did not notice any of my Protestant friends who praised disunity quoted scripture to support his position. Not one showed me any passage where Christ was seen praying that his followers should each man go his own way, and should interpret Christ’s saying each man according to his own lights, and should not submit nor serve his brothers, and should accept no authority over him. Logically, it may be that this disunity is Christ’s desire, and it may be that natural reason or Christian tradition can reveal this to us. But it cannot be that the scripture is the sole and sufficient source of all truth necessary for salvation, and that the correct interpretation of scripture is open to any scholar who diligently seeks it, and that disunity is needed for salvation, because the scripture does not say so (and says much indeed against).

But I noticed that none of my Catholic friends praise disunity, and all of them have a powerful irenic desire that the breech between Christendom be closed, and the old wound healed.

They were the only ones woebegone over the scandalous disunity. Nor should this be a surprise: while there may be some in Great Britain grieving over the loss of the American colonies who rebelled, there can be no Americans thus grieved, because they are the rebels. To them, the rebellion is laudable, not shameful, since to them it is an escape from a dark dungeon.

This then was the first point at which I realized that my reasoning would not allow me to agree with my Protestant friends but forced me to agree with the Catholics. One Christ came to Earth and preached one message with one baptism about the establishment of one kingdom.

The Church is unique in world history. Even an atheist must recognize that. No other prophet, sage or philosopher established a Church properly so called.

Mohammed, peace be upon him, established a law-code called Shariah, defining both religious and civic practice (in Mohammedanism, the distinction is meaningless) and he founded a theocratic dynasty, but he did not establish a Church, that is, a non-secular body with a magisterial authority to define doctrine. The Caliphate authority is the same as that claimed by the King of England: namely, the right to punish religious deviation as treason against the state.

Because that dynasty did not outlast the third generation before an event that was both civil war and heresy (namely, the revolt of Omar against the descendants of Mohammed), in the West it is often forgotten that the Muslims do not have a church or anything like it.

What they have is a theocratic state, a Caliphate, which is torn by civil wars and subdivided into smaller tribes and states: it is a world-state, a universal empire recognizing no boundaries and no legitimate non-members. Every soul is either within the House of Submission or within the House of War and waiting to be conquered. Mohammed, in other words, founded a world-state that merely has not yet conquered the world.

Buddha and Confucius did not even establish a religious practice: they a basically philosophers, one teaching a doctrine of asceticism and the other legalism, who were revered by their grateful followers with divine honors, like Caesar or Hercules.

Again, Lao Tzu no more established a Church than did Plato or Plotinus. And so on for the other prophets and sages and philosophers mistakenly said to have “founded” a religion. None of them founded a Church.

Nor in any prior culture whatsoever has there ever been an international priesthood or hierarchy like the Church: from Shinto to shamanism, all such priestly rites are carried out by the local nobility or a heredity clan or caste of priests, Levites or Magi or Brahmins. All are tribal or national. Only Mohammedanism claims this universal character, but it does not even claim to have a universal priesthood or institutional structure.

Zoroaster and Moses both codified and gave laws to their religions, but in each case, what was established was a hereditary priesthood, Levites or Magi, propitiating a tribal or imperial God, and not a body which established a doctrine: the Sadducees, for example, did not have the power to expel Pharisees for heresy because one believed in the resurrection and the other did not. That was not the function of these Levite establishment, nor the Zoroastrian Mages.

Now, the matter is a main point of controversy between Protestants and Catholics as to whether Christ Himself founded the Church, or whether this was done by Peter and Paul or later generations of disciples. Be that as it may, there is no controversy that all the writings of the Early Church Fathers, and every scrap of evidence we posses, shows at least that the official teaching of the Church, long before any split between East and West, Coptic or Melkite, was that the Church was founded by Christ and His apostles.

Certain crackpots whose name I will forebear to mention put forth the idea that Constantine alone founded the Church, which before then had no hierarchy or discipline or doctrine either agreed-upon nor enforced.

In order for this theory to be true, Constantine and his successors, would have had to possess the ability to discover all copies of both scripture and patristic writing extent at the time (including copies beyond the reach of the Empire, in Syria and Malabar) and redact or forge or burn them, to as to abolish all trace of this alleged original non-Authoritarian and non-Episcopal and non-Doctrinal proto-Feminist Church — and then with equal facility to erase all trace of this great act of book burning and book altering.

I note that the founder of the Qin Dynasty of China, when he attempted to burn all books and bury all scholars, that all history should begin with him, was not able to erase the trace of his bookburning. Was it possible that Constantine, who gained the purple after a civil war, was able to exact so complete an obedience from a wide empire that remembered other masters, that all would conspire to deceive future historians by failing to keep any record, verbal or oral, of such a vast program as a purge of all history would entail?

And yet somehow, even though the Imperial government of Constantinople possessed such overwhelming and thoroughgoing powers as this, the very next Emperor could not abolish the orthodox catholic Church in favor of Arianism, and by the time Julian the Apostate achieved the purple, he could not abolish Christianity in favor of paganism. Since these events were in living memory, one would think Constantius or Jovian or Julian would have left some memo about the sudden loss of the world-history-erasing power which their grandfather had enjoyed, or would have left some complaint about its use to benefit the Catholics and no one else.

The idea of Constantine as the sole founder of the authoritative Church can be dismissed as the ravings of historically-illiterate loons akin to folk who say the moonlanding was faked on a soundstage.

Without reaching the issue of who founded the true Church when, it was clear enough that through all history, including all Reformation history until the Treaty of Westphalia, that every Christian denomination taught that there was one true Church, founded by Christ, and the other Churches schismatic, false, heretical and apostate. In the early days the Reformers wanted to Reform the Church because they said she had fallen into error and corruption. The idea of founding a new Church was alien to the very idea of a Church.

So, likewise, the idea proposed by my friends that disunity was part of Christ’s will for His Church had no support in history or scripture or logic.

I knew at that point in my own search that any denomination which proposed that all denominations were equally valid, and (why not?) oriental and classical pagan and shamanistic belief systems as well, was not teaching the truth about Church unity, and had impeached itself from any claim to be the one true Church following the one true Christ.

It was merely a Christian-flavored prayer society, no doubt peopled by kindly or even saintly souls. But it was not achurch much less the Church. A bridge that leads halfway across the sundering flood of the Jordan will not help me reach the Promised Land.

To recap: I took it as fundamental that the Church was meant to be unified, a single institution under a single head, if for no other reason that the disunity of the denominations made a mockery of their claims of exclusive and universal truth. While some older Protestant denominations are bold enough to make the claim that they are the one, true, universal Church founded by Christ, returning to the primitive roots which an apostate Church abandoned, other younger denominations did not, and did not preach or teach that the Church was meant to be one.

Those younger denominations I dismissed from consideration.

ON COMMUNION

The sixth point I encountered was the question of the Host.

I had noticed that various non-Catholic denominations were willing to share with me, even though I was not one of them, their bread and wine of their Host. It was not until later that I discovered that this was not a Host at all, but merely a memorial or symbol of the Host.

That formed a powerful reason in my mind why I could not join them: Like Groucho Marx unwilling to join any club that would admit him, I was not willing to join any communion not serious enough to exclude me.

Let me not pass this point flippantly, for I mean it seriously. While I was debating and weighing the decision of which denomination to join, one Protestant friend of mine urged me not to join the Catholic Church on the grounds that she could not explain to her daughter why it was that they two were not allowed to take the Host at Mass when they visited a Catholic service, whereas their friendlier denomination forbade nobody.

I asked her if she believed the bread and wine was the very body and blood of Christ. She said in the strongest possible terms that it was not.

I asked her on what grounds she believed 1500 years or so of Christians to be mistaken on this point, and she replied by telling me the scripture on this point is allegorical: when Christ says “this is my body” and “do this in memory of me” He was speaking in parables. She seemed unaware of the body of Christian writings penned between the moment after Saint John put down his pen and Martin Luther picked up his. When I asked her about the Antenicene Fathers (who seemed, if anyone could be, to have been immune from any allegations of early corruption, since they lived during persecutions) her reply was to tell me not to read them.

Again, I was not Catholic nor Protestant at the time, but the simple logic of the situation made me unable to sympathize with my friend’s plight, or even to understand it.

Either the bread and wine is Christ’s body, or it is not. The Protestant says it is not on the quite reasonable grounds that it does not look or smell like it is. The Catholic says it is on the quite reasonable grounds that Christ said it was.

Without deciding the nuances of that fundamental argument, it is clear enough that if a Catholic walks into a Protestant chapel and is offered bread and wine that is quite ordinary in every respect, except as a symbol showing loyalty to Christ, to eat and drink is no more idolatrous and irresponsible than to salute the flag or doff your hat to a lady. It is a gesture of respect and nothing more. Hence it is perfectly reasonable that Protestants allow Catholics to partake in their holy meals.

It is also clear enough that whether or not the Catholic claim is true, the claim being made is that the bread and wine in a Catholic mass is the sacred body and blood of Christ, who is God. Now suppose a Protestant approaches the altar rail for a wafer of this bread.

There are only three possibilities. First, that the bread is Christ but the Protestant thinks it is merely bread, in which case, to eat is blasphemy, because it denies divine worship owed to a divine thing.

Second, that the bread is not Christ, and the Protestant knows it is not Christ, but he nonetheless consumes it in an act of worship, in which case, to eat is idolatry, because it shows divine worship to what is not divine.

The third possibility is that the Protestant thinks it is the body and blood of Christ, in which case he has no business being a Protestant, and should join the Church so he can eat the bread lawfully.

But no matter who was right or wrong about the question of the Real Presence, both parties surely must agree that the Catholics treat the matter of the bread and the wine with much more seriousness and sobriety than the Protestants. Right or wrong, the Protestants say what they are doing is a gesture, nothing more. Right or wrong, the Catholics say what they are doing is a sacrament, as real as childbirth or marriage or death, and touching divinity.

Also, the sheer unfairness of my friend’s accusation was quite striking to me. No sane man makes claim that Luther was the Pope and that the Church rebelled against him, leading all the princes of Italy and France, Spain and Austria into a new and heretical sect that bowed to St Peter. All sides agree that it was Luther who was not Pope, and he rebelled against the Church, leading the princes of Germany and Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway, and inspiring England to revolt. My friend, or her ancestors, left the Church, and then accuses the Church of injustice, because the Church will not admit into communion those who fought both with words and swords to depart from that communion.

Now, at the time I was a “mere” Christian of no denomination, coming from an atheist background with no previous opinions and no presuppositions. I did not automatically think that adoration of the Host was idolatry, nor did I automatically think the refusing to adore the Host was blasphemy.

What I did think was that God, being omnipotent, could incarnate Himself into bread and wine as easily as He did into flesh and blood, and the one claim was not any more or less absurd or sublime than the other.

But, again, upon looking into the matter, I was struck once again by the undisputed fact that the claims are not symmetrical. We have 1500 years or so of Church practice, which even Arians and Donatists and Albigensians performed, of consecrating the host and taking it as if it were the body and blood of Christ. Then we suddenly have Martin Luther and his epigones who discover that the Host is a symbol only, not the Christ.

On the one hand, the claim is that this is and was the Church practice from Pentacost onward, as attested to by the Patristic writings and all surviving records. On the other hand, the claim is that this practice crept into the Church by copying pagan models, such as the sacred meals of the Second Century devotees of Mithra, and God saw fit that all the Christians from Iceland to India for fifteen centuries should be consigned to perdition, and not until Luther did God reveal the long-buried and forgotten truth.

From an objective point of view, speaking as someone neither Protestant nor Catholic, I could not see how the Protestant claim could be true if the Catholic claim was false, since the evidence from the Patristic Writings quite clearly showed the Host being adored as the very body and blood of Christ long before Christianity became of the official religion on the Empire, hence long before there was any reason for any unscrupulous Church official to compromise the truth of the faith. Men who are willing to be thrown to the lions rather than burn a pinch of incense to Diocletian are not likely to preach what they know to be idolatry of a morsel of ordinary bread to their persecuted flock. If you are knowingly performing idolatry, and if you have so much control over the minds of the gullible Christians that they will accept idolatry without demur, why not simply say that God allows the faithful to give incense to Diocletian, and avoid being torn to pieces by lions or red-hot pincers?

This question in my mind, as did so many other questions, was resolved by trying to establish the date of the apostasy of the Church. For the Protestant claim to be true, there had to be a date before the first trace of pagan corruption or the doctrines of men crept into the Church, and there had to be a date (either the same date or a later one) after which the Church corruption was irrevocable and acted as a final abdication of her authority. Anything between those two dates was suspect, and could as easily be a corruption as be true doctrine.

The problem was that the Patristic writings show that all the crucial unique Protestant doctrines, such as the merely symbolic nature of the Host, or the lack of prayers for the dead, come from a strata of time earlier than such things as Arianism and Patripassionism.

In other words, the things alleged to be corruptions date from a time before the things alleged to be true doctrines, such as Trinitarianism and the Incarnation. On the other hand, there is no trace whatever of uniquely Protestant doctrines in any writings before the Fifteenth Century, such as the doctrines of Sola Scriptura, Sola Fides, and Sola Gratia, and there is certainly no trace of a Church that consists of a national king or secular leader having the power of a General Church Council or Pope to define doctrine, or which elects all its officers with no Episcopal hierarchy.

Also, there was growing in my mind a mild impatience with the claims of Church corruption if the date of Apostasy was pushed to the time before the Ecumenical Councils which established the Nicene Creed or the doctrine of the Trinity.

While a Mormon or a Christian Scientist, who espouse theories even further from the mainstream than Arianism and Albigensianism, can say without a blush that all the Ecumenical Councils were wrong, no one who believes the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity can do so. These doctrines have little or no basis in scripture, and no basis whatever in natural reason: they are purely artifacts of the deposit of faith entrusted to the Apostles and their successors, and rest solely on the authority of the Church to define Christian doctrine. Anyone who denies that authority has no warrant to believe them; anyone who believes them has no warrant to deny that authority.

At the same time, there was growing in my mind a truly vast impatience with the claims of Church corruption if the date of Apostasy was pushed to the time ever closer to Pentecost, or even to before it.

Mohammedans and Mormons and Christian Scientists told me without a blush that Mohammed and Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith understood Christ better than Polycarp, who studied at the feet of Saint John; or understood Christ better than Saint John, who laid his head on the breast of Our Lord at the Last Supper; or understood Christ better than Christ.

Joseph Smith claims, that as a prophet, he has the authority which perished from the world when the last of the Twelve Apostles perished, and that the Twelve Apostles had no authority to baptize followers nor anoint successors. Joseph Smith, in effect, claims Peter or John had no authority to lay his hands on a follower (such as Polycarp) and proclaim him a bishop, and ergo no authority to found the old Church, but Joseph Smith somehow had the authority to found a new church. Smith claims to understand the Christian teaching better than St Polycarp, who learned it from St John.

Mary Baker Eddy claims that when Saint John says Jesus Christ was the Eternal Word who was with God and who was God, he is mistaken or speaking in a misleading metaphor, since Jesus was a mortal prophet only; she claims that the mission of Christ was to teach men how to heal the sick, and that the Crucifixion did not reconcile Man to God, but was merely an example or demonstration of the illusionary nature of suffering and death, or, in other words, the illusionary nature of the belief that Man is severed from God and needs reconciliation to Him. Mary Baker Eddy, in effect, claims that she understood the nature of the Incarnation and Crucifixion better than St John, who missed the point.

Mohammed claims that Christ was a Mohammedan. Like Mary Baker Eddy, he calls Christ nothing more than a human prophet, not different than Moses or Elijah. Mohammed reads the scriptures where Christ makes outrageous claims to be God, and concludes that the real Christ never made these claims, but will mock the Christians as idolaters on Judgment Day. Mohammed claims to understand the Christian teaching better than Christ.

Now, these prophets of these claimed to have sources of revelation independent of Church authority, so that they knew about Christ and His true teachings from the archangel Gabriel, or the angel Moroni, or from diligent prayer and meditation leading to signs and wonders.

The truth or falsehood of those claims rest upon the reliability of the prophecy of the prophets. Since they are inconsistent, at times wildly inconsistent, from the prophets they themselves claim as their forefathers and forbearers in faith, from Moses to Saint Mary, it is not logically possible for the claim to be true. No Jewish prophet can claim he knows more about God than Moses, and no Christian visionary can claim he knows more about Jesus than St John.

The crackpot Dan Brown makes a claim of Church apostasy from the time of Constantine; this claim, while supported by not even the slightest scintilla of historical evidence, is at least logically possible.

The denominations who base their schism on the writings of a single visionary, like Mormonism of Mohammedanism, make a claim of Church apostasy from the time of the Patristic Writings is less possible; this claim involves a conspiracy theory view of history.

The claim of Church apostasy from the time of Polycarp is laughable, but not logically impossible. But the claim of Church apostasy from the time of Pentecost, or the Crucifixion, or the Incarnation, or the Exodus from Egypt, is not logically possible, because this makes the apostate Church older than the Church.

ON CONTINUITY

The seventh point is the matter of historical consistency or continuity.

I was shocked to learn that it is not merely the Catholics who forbid the use of contraceptives, but all Christian denominations throughout the world, until the 1930’s did also.

All the other denominations changed their stance, changed their teachings, and changed their minds in the years between the Great War and the Cold War.

And yet I have heard no rumor of a prophet whose many miracles convinced all these other denominations that God Almighty had excused them from what their fathers back to the First Century had taught and believed.

The Didache, which is perhaps the earliest extra-Biblical writing by a Christian that survives, acts as a handbook or Enchiridion of what the early Church believed, and it may be older than some of the Epistles.

It was just as striking to me that the Didache condemned contraception than that none of my Protestants friend with whom I spoke, and none of the Protestant writers whom I read, mentioned this writing, or seemed even aware it existed.

Obviously any denomination that is merely an ethical society or a Christian-flavored prayer meeting group can make no claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit to preach and teach infallibly and without error what Christ taught and wishes taught.

But any organization which does not claim to be infallibly guided by the Holy Spirit has no reason, in a world were heretics and odd opinions are as thick as locusts, and in a Church whose scriptures ring with repeated warnings against false Christs and false prophets, to have any faith that their fathers kept the teaching truthfully and faithfully.

And, worse, if their fathers repudiated the teaching of their grandfathers, and ignored not one nor a dozen but all of the prior generations of Christian thought and teaching, it is not logically possible to claim that the Holy Spirit has infallibly guided those decisions, because not even God can utter contradictions.

Only when the fathers repudiate a repudiation of their grandfathers, and return to the original teaching of their greatgrandfathers, can they seriously claim a loyalty to the truth across the generations.

And all honest Protestants make exactly that claim, for they say there was an original Church, before she turned apostate and diabolical, which preached and taught exactly what their own founders, Luther or Zwingli or Calvin or Wesley, preaches and teaches.

But when the fathers repudiate their grandfathers to follow the harlot of fashionable current opinion, as did the Anglicans in the 1930’s, more concerned with being Progressive than being Protestant, that denomination is not a church, but a prayer society, or a political society.

A Protestant who says that Polycarp was Protestant and so was Augustine, and that the Church grew unchristian ergo Catholic in the Twelfth or Thirteenth Century, and that Luther rediscovered the original hull of the Ark of Christ beneath the barnacles and accretions of Papist corruption—that Protestant makes the claim to be loyal to the Church Christ founded. That claim may be right or wrong, but it is not dishonorable even if wrong.

But a Protestant who says that urban life and industrialization requires population control, and that the innate concupiscence of man making chastity and abstinence impossible between married couples, therefore natural reason requires contraception, previously forbidden by God, is now allowed and welcomed by Him, on the grounds that God Almighty has my personal comfort and convenience as His greatest if not sole consideration of His ever-changing legislation — that Protestant claims only to be loyal to the world, and to his phallus, and very disloyal indeed to women. That claim not only cannot be right, it cannot be tolerated.

I could not, as a matter of conscience, join any congregation that displayed no consistency of conscience across the generations.

ON CHASTITY

An eighth point was the matter of the Holy Spirit and its war with the Sexual Revolution.

During the time when I was meditating and searching, the Episcopalian denomination was suffering a schism, because the Progressive Episcopalians, searching diligently through the writings of Saint Paul and the Patriarch Moses, not to mention the entire canon law from the First Century to the Twentieth, had allegedly found some emanation of a penumbra of some Right to Privacy implicit in Christianity, albeit not formerly enunciated: in addition to married priests and priestesses (oddly, for some reason always mislabeled ‘female priests’—I wonder if Queen Elizabeth is now going to be called a ‘female king’) , now there would be admitted lesbian and homosexual priests and priestesses. And no doubt lesbian priestesses joined in the holy sacrament of same-sex union to each other was soon to follow.

The laity and clergy more interested in following the teachings of Jesus Christ than those of Albert Kinsey decided to divorce themselves from their Progressive brethren.

Now from my own coign of vantage, the only thing I respected about the Christians back in the days when I was an atheist was the sobriety and strictness of their teachings about chastity. Since this is one feature which is the source of all real hostility toward Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, it merits a word of explanation.

The concubinage and polygamy permitted by ancient Jews and modern Mohammedans, not to mention across all oriental and American lands, civilized and uncivilized, disgusted me as both demeaning to women and degrading to men. Compared to that, the Christian doctrine of monogamy is rational and prudent.

The same ills which follow upon polygamy follow, albeit at a slow pace, upon a culture which permits and approves of no fault divorce. Men are free to be polygamous, merely in a serial fashion, one at a time, rather than all at once. The proud men can jettison wives and marry trophy girls as pleases them, and the fickle wife can expel her husband from his children and his home without explanation or excuse at any time, and garner his wages thereafter, or have him tossed in jail.

In modern times, the children have all the detriment of being in competition with the children of their stepmothers for the favor of their father which the sons of Oriental potentates suffer, but without the corresponding advantage of having a stable harem of nursemaid and women to help in their upbringing. So it is the worst of both worlds.

The doctrine forbidding divorce is the sole thing in the Gospel which Our Lord Jesus Christ says with utter clari