There are two views of religion. One sees a legitimate authority governing, issuing money and stamps, exercising all the prerogatives of a closed and perfect society. This lawful government faces a government of rebels who challenge and usurp its authority, attempting to issue its own money and stamps, and otherwise appear legitimate.
That is the view of the Old Guard. Only the Catholic Church is legitimate. The rest are fakes and their money is counterfeit. They must be taught the error of their ways – not by force but by instruction and persuasion.
The youthful American Church accepted this view with enthusiasm, entering into the work of convert making as though it were merely a matter of supersalesmanship, contrasting the shortcomings of their neighbors’ religions with the supposed perfection of their own, boasting, flaunting the annual number of Catholic converts, the splendor of their achievements, the intellectual and artistic superiority of their communicants, and in general making nuisances of themselves. One community of priests is dedicated to “making America Catholic,” if you can imagine such bad taste. All this is “triumphalism.”
The Council – amazingly – ratified a far more pacific viewpoint. We must not make ourselves odious, the Fathers said. We must not despise non-Catholics but must respect them and acknowledge whatever truth is to be found in their beliefs. We must not be rude.
We have managed to turn this recommendation of the Council into a tabu on converting, resulting in a gratifying drop in conversions. We have silenced any statement of Catholic achievements. Father John J. O’Brien is out of fashion, and Father Richard Ginder. Belloc and Chesterton have been allowed to go out of print along with John J. Walsh’s monstrosity, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.
Walsh had totally identified medieval civilization with the Gospel. Belloc identified all of Western Civilization with the Catholic Church: “The Faith is Europe – Europe is the Faith.”
ACTUALLY THE CATHOLIC Church as we know it today has resulted from a combination of social and psychological factors. At first there was hardly any organization and very little firm teaching. The first Christians, the apostles included, were a free, loose-jointed fraternity, little more than a “Jesus Memorial Society.” But with the growing number of members and the gradual cooling of fervor, under pressure of persecution without and danger of bad doctrine from within, the Christians began to gather around their local bishops and finally around the Bishops of Rome. And that is how we arrive at that tightly structured institution now known as the Roman Catholic Church.
Our Church has been over-governed. Jesus never meant it to be a society regulated in all matters of thought and activity by a sort of military discipline, especially in matters of philosophical and theological speculation. “Ideas are not killed with a stroke of the crozier,” as Loisy put it.
We should never have let the Protestants get away in the beginning and now we can only do our best to repair that blunder. How? By letting them have their own way. There is no error that with good will cannot somehow be reconciled with the truth. One church is pretty much as good as another. We all worship the same God. We all seek salvation. It is just that the terms are different.
Hence we must put aside the late Ronald Knox’s arrogant dictum that “A Protestant is a Catholic gone wrong.” There is such a thing as being too Catholic.
BY SOME FORM of dialectical paradox, the Scholastic philosopher should be able to make the unique exception to the principle of contradiction whereby God could simultaneously both exist and not exist. It would, of course, be the one grand exception just as David Hume and many phoolosophers up to the late Bertrand Russell postulated creation without a creator. Actually, there is nothing contradictory in the prayer, “Dear God, I thank thee that I am an atheist.” [Obviously, anything imaginable can exist! Except God?]
With the atheists safe in harbor, we eye the Communists. To accommodate them, we must, in some way, rationalize robbery and murder. Our neologists are hard at work on the problem.
As a friendly gesture toward the Jews, now that we have the hats off women in church, we will require males to wear yarmulkes at prayer.
Let us end this chapter with a few odds and ends. The rosary will never be understood by our separated brethren. It must not be just left to die, but killed – banned, so that the rosary will no longer be either sold or manufactured; and henceforth anyone found telling his beads will be suspended, excommunicated, interdicted, exclaustrated, and anathematised, maranatha.
The contemplative orders of monks and nuns, being utterly useless, should be suppressed and their personnel committed to social action rather than waste their time praising God.
Anything we can do to speed the demise of exclusively Catholic educational institutions will hasten the death of the institutional Church as we know it, and clear the ground for our own neo-Catholic religion of reason. [THE HISTORICAL OR HYSTERICAL CHURCH.]