Amen, amen, amen and amen

I posted a reply to Mr. Ramus on another thread and bemoaned the lack of a solid Catholic reply BEFORE I had read Mr. Zmirak’s outstanding reply above.  I thank Mr. Zmirak, who has stated the matter with eloquence and insight. 

Authority does reside in Scripture ("the written”, that part of the Tradition which is written down), but it also resides in the unwritten Tradition of the Deposit of Faith, which, following the rules of Saint Vincent and the Venerable Newman, the Magisterium of the Church works out.  So Authority also resides in The Church.and also in the Holy Spirit Himself.

Just a quibble.  Mr Zmirak means “a 30 Years War” just as hyperbole.  Those who make it an analogy (and Mr. Zmirak isn’t doing so) ignore that war and hijacking are coercive acts.  Mr. Ramus is coercing no one.  Indeed his welcomed presence has brought forth the fruit of the fine article above.

Hey John Z, a hearty handshake from me!

And I trust you’ll admit that I am not anti-Catholic, although I think you know I have more reservations about the Papacy than you, and that my reservations about the Papacy are part and parcel of my English heritage, including a heritage of Anglicanism in my family until my great-great-grandfather’s stepfather (c 1850) got caught up in the Tractarian movement and converted to Catholicism - and it was a very incomplete and wobbling conversion, and so the “Catholicism” in my English family has remained, since then, always with a bit of Protestant reservation in it.  And I still have, and believe in, that reservation against total submission of my own conscience to the Bishop of Rome.
(And most of my family converted back to Protestantism one generation later; it was only because my own nominally Catholic grandfather married an Irish Catholic Lady, that he agreed to raise his son, my father, as a Catholic; otherwise my grandfather, John Ball Sr, lived and died with the mind and conscience of a Protestant, and so did my Father for that matter, not least because of his memories of the nuns beating the shit out of him and trying to fill his mind with superstitious crap, and of his mostly Irish-American classmates ranting, in their teens, about their and their fathers’ hatred of the British, ie of my Father’s own family and heritage.)

And I agree with almost everything you’ve argued here, especially your refutation of bibliolatry and the ahistorical, illogical belief that the authority of the Bible is in any way separable from the authority of the community (aka, Church) who sorted out the canonical books from the dross circa 300s AD.

However, John Z my friend, SINCE you titled this article with the name of the Fifth-columnist useful-idiot English traitor and terrorist, Guy Fawkes, kindly allow me to offer an English (and Anglican) perspective on all this:

1.  You wrote, “The bishops who discerned which books were really the Word of God were in union with the Pope”

...so far so good.  But being “in union with the Pope” is an essentially contestable concept.  Union is not the same thing as absolute subordination.

2.  The English had bloody good reasons to repudiate the religious AND POLITICAL authority of the Pope, because back in the 1500s and 1600s, the Popes conflated their own religious authority with political authority.  I’m no great fan of Henry VIII (although, actually, the Church of England’s repudiation of the Papacy was really effectuated under Elizabeth I, not Henry), still, get real:
Henry (and then more forcefully and more effectively, Elizabeth) repudiated the Papacy because the Popes and their partners-in-international-crime, the bloody Spaniards, were arbitrarily meddling in the internal political affairs of England under a thin veneer of
religious authority.

Look at it - and look at Guy Fawkes’ Day - from an English perspective.  In the 1500s, Spain was the Superpower of the West (and of the Americas too - a condition whose effects continue to afflict the USA today), and in 1588 the bloody Spaniards attempted to invade and to conquer England.  Thank God, the Spaniards failed to do so, otherwise you, John Z, would not enjoy the patrimony of English law and (what vestiges remain of)
English customs of tolerance and simple decency that you have in America today.
In any case, the USA as you know it is the child of English Protestantism, and you can look at Mexico or Cuba to see a more Hispanised interpretation of law and liberty - and that’s what the Spaniards almost inflicted upon England in 1588.
(Not that the Irish would have noticed, half-pagan barbarians as most of them were at the time.)

3.  And then you mention Guy Fawkes?  I notice that you say nothing in his defense - because he is indefensible.
He was a traitor and a terrorist (yes, terrorism is the correct word.) You say
(and I believe you mean it), that you believe in “embracing the rights of non-Catholics NEVER to be persecuted by the state, so long as their beliefs pose no threat to “public order.”

If so, then you, John Zmirak, ought to share at least one drink with me on Guy Fawkes Day, to toast the memory of how the true and lawful King and Government of England (and Scotland) discovered and prevented a mortal threat to “public order”.  Furthermore, in THOSE times,in 1605, the reign of terror of the “Catholic” (a REALLY “bad Catholic”, you’ll agree?) Queen “Bloody Mary”, was still within living memory among my English ancestors.  You believe non-Catholics should never be persecuted by the state?  All when and good - today - but in 1605, there was a real and present danger in England, of non-Catholics being persecuted by the state, as they were under Bloody Mary.
And as the Pope and his vicious Spaniard useful idiots would have enforced even more so upon the unwilling people of England, if Guy Fawkes had not been discovered and sent to his well-deserved shameful death.

4.  And then there’s another digression which I can’t get into now:  a digression about my experiences, as an American-born grandson of England who accidentally was baptised Catholic (but thank God I never went to Catholic primary or secondary schools, although I did go to a Catholic university) - my experiences of encounters with all too many Irish-American Catholics whose Catholcism seems, to me, to have more to do with hatred of the British than with faith in Christ.  One of my history professors at my Catholic University was an Irish-American who said, in the very first class, that he makes bombs for the IRA (wink wink, oh he was just being a cute little Leprechaun!  (Sarcasm)) - and he asked all of his students to indicate whether they were “Irish” on a form he handed out on the first day.  Although I’m one-fourth Irish (peasant, Catholic, bog-Irish), I filled out his form saying:
“I wear Orange on St Patrick’s Day.” He almost failed me for that course until the Dean intervened on my behalf because I was about to graduate with honors.

5.  And so, Johnny Z, you wonder why some, or rather most, British and people of recent British descent, always maintain just a WEE bit of reservation about total submission to the Papacy?

In the memories - both personal and inherited - of the peoples of Britain, the Papacy is equated with political intrigues with foreign enemies who tried - and thank God, failed - to conquer Britain.  Today’s Papacy is not like it was in 1500-1650.  It no longer poses any peril for the liberties of the peoples (Protestant AND Catholic, and others) of Britain, America, Australia, etc.  But 400 years ago, it was a different story, and so, although I DO agree with you about the traditional and ancient community of the Church, and bishops etc, being the foundation of the authority of the Bible, still, I maintain
reservation about surrendering my personal conscience - or the internal affairs of my country (now Australia) to the arbitrary, personal and historically
politicised authority of Bishop of Rome.

All that said, John Zmirak:  GOOD ON YA, as we say here in my new country, Australia, where my temporal sovereign is Good Queen Bess the Second, and my eternal sovereign is Christ, and although I admire Pope Benedict very much, he has no authority over me in this world or the next.

What say you, John Zmirak, my friend?

PS, Johnny Z,

As a gesture of affirming the essential Christian brotherhood between you and me - and the peace for which we both pray to come between your ancestral island and mine
(well my Grandmother was Irish but my greatest ancestral love is for Britain) -
here is a poem which I think you might already know, a poem recited by (Irish) Richard Harris during the Troubles in Ireland in the early 1970s.  He speaks in the voice of Christ, and my favourite lines are:

“I am not Orange, I am not Green;
I am a half-ripe fruit
Needing both colours to grow into ripeness,
And shame on you who have withered my orchard.
I in my poverty, alone without trust,
Cry shame on you again and again,
For converting me into a bullet,
And shooting me into men’s hearts.”

Here’s a link to the entire poem:

http://www.sdanet.org/steve/best/Too_Many_Saviours

@John

Among the awful actions of the Spanish Empire, why
don’t you count the battle of Lepanto which stopped
the advance of the Turkish expansion, all while good
Protestants sat on their hands mumbling that maybe
the Turks were sent by God as a punishment? (as Martin
Luther did until the Turks got too close for comfort)

As for the Anglican Church, wanting a divorce to marry
your mistress hardly classifies as a valid reason to
break with Rome.

Thanks for the post.  One of many things I learned volunteering for Pat Buchanan was the surprising extent of anti-Catholicism in America.  Before volunteering for Buchanan, I had always believed anti-Catholicism to be largely extinct.  But I was told my many evangelicals, who agreed with Pat on the issues, that they would never vote for him because he “wasn’t a Christian.”

For some of these folks, the Enemy will always be Rome.  Very strange.

Adriana,

1.  The Spanish Empire resisted the Turks at Lepanto because it was in the interest of the Spanish Empire to do so, just like it was in the interest of Communist Russia to resist Hitler.  Both of those interventions by enemies of England were good for England (and good for Europe, and for Christendom), but that does not mean that they were proof of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility or of Communism.  Churchill said of the Russians, “they’re fighting to save their own skins”, and the same can be said of the Spanish Empire at Lepanto.

2.  And you wrote, “As for the Anglican Church, wanting a divorce to marry
your mistress hardly classifies as a valid reason to
break with Rome.”

...I agree, but that does not mean that there was no good reason for the Church of England to break with Rome.  Bloody Mary and the attempted Spanish invasion of 1588 were the main reasons (among myriad reasons) for the majority of English people to say, “to Hell with Papists!”

And those continuing “gifts” from the IRA, all the bomb scares in London (through which I have muddled with a stiff upper lip), and the Irish-American Catholics who send money - under the guise of “Catholic” charities, mind you - like NORAID - all those atrocities, too, are reasons why the British (and I) remain a WEE bit reluctant to profess unreserved loyalty to the Bishop of Rome and/or to the Church he leads, all too many of whose congregations are temporal, political enemies of Britain and of the peoples and descendant nations of Britain and their domestic tranquility.  (cf, inter alia among myriad examples, bloody Joe Kennedy, who actually TOASTED Germany’s pending (or so he wished) conquest of England in 1940.  (Too bad, Joe Kennedy - your wish didn’t come true and never will, you bog-dwelling Fenian criminal whoremongering swine.  Although, to be fair, I think Joe Kennedy had more class than his execrable son, JFK.  At least Joe Kennedy probably would not have gotten America into the tribal-feudal-swamp-war of VietNam, as his “America Firster” son JFK did.)

Hey, you wanna call the Pope your spiritual leader?  Fine.  The last two Popes, John Paul and Benedict, have been/are great men.  (And although I’m not a good Catholic - actually I should not call myself a “Roman” Catholic - I hope Pope John Paul the Great will be canonised soon.) If it suits you to call the Bishop of Rome your spiritual AND temporal final authority, then fine.
But in the end, I will continue to pledge my temporal loyalty to my English Protestant (AND “catholic”, small “c") heritage, of acknowledging the authority of the Apostles and their successors in all things EXCEPT in temporal matters of internal politics of any sovereign state.

THAT is my heritage and patrimony from English Protestantism, and it is inseparable from the heritage and patrimony of the US Constitution, not to mention the Constitution of my adopted country, Australia.

You wanna subordinate your personal conscience to the Pope?  Fine.  But keep it out of the internal affairs of the sovereign state - because the Pope, after all, is just the Bishop of Rome, one temporal sovereign among many.

And neither I, nor John Zmirak, nor Taki, would be free to write and publish openly about such matters, if England had not dug in its heels against the depredations of the Papacy in the 1500s-1600s.

All that said, I want to say:  “Saint John Paul the Great (Pope John Paul II), pray for us!” :-)

John Ball:

Henry VIII repudiated the Pope because he wanted a divorce, Liz I because not to so repudiate would have made her illegitimate, in both the political and familiar meaning.

And speaking of legitimacy, I invite Mr. Ball to drink a toast to the true and lawful King of England, Wales, Scotland, and the dominions beyond the sea:  the Jacobite Pretender, the current Duke of Bavaria.

For some of your issues, see Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/index.html
Also worthy are his Difficulties of Anglicans and The Development of Doctrine (I prefer the first edition).  I needn’t mention his Apologia.  These works and reading Dante and Trent got me into the Church. 

You have a wrong, though common, misunderstanding of Papal Authority.  No Pope, indeed no clergyman, as a general rule may tell me how to vote in an election, no more than I can tell them how to celebrate Mass.  The Church enunciates and defines general moral principles and theological truth.  The job of applying those truths is the job of the laity.  She can warn about abuses, or admonish when the laity do a poor job, and in an emergency, step in and deny the sacraments to lawmakers who vote for evil, or to segregationists who practice and preach racialism (the New Orleans case).  That’s not the same thing as surrendering conscience. 

The contents of conscience itself are not a conceptualist given; conscience needs guidance and formation.  Sometimes it is formed rather badly.  I would add: self-reliance is the most foolish of doctrines.  Each ought ask himself, “who has deceived you the most?” The answer is found in a mirror.  Truth requires dialogue with the living, with the dead, and even with the future.  A tradition that has stood the proverbial test of time might be a good one to dialogue with.

@ Sid, “A tradition that has stood the proverbial test of time might be a good one to dialogue with.”

I do dialogue with it (that’s what I’m doing now!) But a major portion of that “tradition that has stood the test of time”, is the Eastern Orthodox Church who repudiated the Papacy almost 1,000 years ago - and when I lived in Russia for a few years, I was overwhelmed (not just emotionally, but in my logical mind too)
by the authenticity of the Faith of the Russian Christians, AND by their rituals etc, all of which were evidently (and I have no reason to doubt the evidence) much closer to the Christianity of the Apostles than anything I’ve ever witnessed in any Roman Catholic Church, not to mention among the putative “believers” of the Roman Catholic Church.

If you want to see the closest surviving approximation of the Church of the Apostles, go to Russia.  The Church there has survived more intact than it has in the West, precisely because of its
many centuries of striving to preserve orthodoxy against the depredations of Christendom’s mortal enemies.

But the Russian Christians (and I mean the REAL Christians of Russia, the elders who were born into the Faith and who carried it on through the “Communist” interlude) - the Russian Christians don’t give a flying fiddler’s F about the Pope.
Yet they are more truly “Orthodox”, in ALL meanings of that word, than almost 100 percent of Roman Catholics, including
most of those mean-spirited geldings who call themselves Cardinals.  (Eastern Orthodox Priests are expected to marry, like the Apostles did.)

All that said, I reiterate:  Pope Benedict is a great man and I think the late Pope John Paul is a Saint.  But subordinating my conscience to the Roman Papacy is another matter entirely.

“Eastern Orthodox Priests are expected to marry.” Not their bishops.  I’m an admirer of the Eastern Church as well, especially its liturgy and art.  Alas, Autocephaly has lead to some Eastern Churches becoming kept under the thumb of the Czar, or becoming an instrument of jingoist nationalism.  And they haven’t had a council for a while.  What’s the Eastern teaching on when the respirator may be removed?  And who teaches it, and teaches it with authority?  The Papacy ain’t perfect by a long shot.  The Medici popes, Leo X the pope that dealt with Henry, weren’t the best negotiators. Paul IV was a profound moral criminal.  Paul VI, a good man, didn’t stop a bad situation getting out of control.  A saint, John Paul II, chose a number of bad Gringo and Brit bishops. Benedict needed a corollary to his Regensburg Address. Of the Borgia pope, the less said the better.  And yet the popes have preserved the unity of the church, and, in teaching faith and morals, they haven’t done poorly at all. And when they speak about faith and morals, they speak not arbitrarily but with respect to a tradition, and appeal to other authority, and with argument. They have also kept the Papacy free from becoming the puppet of a ruler, from the days of Pope Gelasius on.  Even after the loss of the Papal States. 

As for subordinating conscience, I again insist that the content of conscience and its governing voice are not givens.  Conscience needs formation. It doesn’t form itself.  Even Kant thought conscience needs a guiding rule.

John,

Hi there. I’m a Protestant and a philosophy graduate student with strong interests in theology and political theology. I thought I’d take the chance to reply to your recent post piece by piece.

You say:

“If Christ’s promise to remain with His Church until the end of time did NOT mean that an institution would continuously remain in existence (if not at Rome, at least pace the Orthodox in the person of local bishops) which would serve to shepherd His flock, then by what authority do you speak about any religious matter? The Bible?”

One could argue that just as the Roman Church has differences within it, so does the Church of Christ in general (which includes all of us, Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox alike). Christ is with us all.

You also ask about authority. On my view, in light of analytic epistemology, the Bible has authority because it was inspired by God, but that has what we call an externalist construal. The Bible has authority just in case it was inspired by God, and since I believe that the Bible has authority, then if it was actually inspired by God, it is warranted for me to believe what it says.

The obvious response is to ask me how I know. Well, I don’t *know* that I know. But I don’t think knowing how you know something is a requirement to know it (realize that the principle here would generate a regress). I have reason to suppose that the Bible is true, enough to warrant my belief, I think. So, the Gospels seems like reliable testimony from a fair historical perspective, and within the Gospels, Jesus speaks of the authority of Scripture as a whole. That’s one reason. I could go on, but I want to address your other claims.

“The New Testament itself was created by the Church, not the other way around.”

Wittgenstein pointed out once that just because we are certain that 2 and 2 are 4 does not mean that we are infallible calculators. In the same way, the Church can authorize the Bible without itself being infallible.

“There were dozens of books floating around, claiming to be “gospels,” full of every kind of crackpot anecdote about Christ—including a few which portrayed him as a wicked prankster who performed malicious miracles. Each time another of these 3rd century fantasy novels pops up, like the “gospel” of Judas, it makes the cover of Time.”

I don’t know what the argument is here. I take it that these gospels didn’t take root because they didn’t inspire people or match the testimony of those who knew Jesus. What is the problem?

“It took over 300 years of debate among the Fathers of the Church to decide which books were authentically inspired.”

That makes it sound as if it were a continuous debate. It wasn’t. Nonetheless, their criterion were reasonable and give us reason to trust the canon handed down to us. But that does not require that they be infallible.

“The bishops who discerned which books were really the Word of God were in union with the Pope.”

Again, I don’t think this, if true, is a problem for Protestants. My understanding is that “union with the Pope” meant something quite different then. It just means that they agreed on doctrine, not that the other bishops were in total submission to the Bishop of Rome.

“These bishops baptized infants, venerated relics, prayed for the dead, gave absolution for sins, filled their churches with religious art, used incense at Mass and believed in the Eucharistic presence of Christ. Their churches venerated Mary as a Virgin, and most of their liturgies referred to her as “immaculate,” referred to her assumption into Heaven, and implored her intercession. These beliefs are older and more apostolic then the canon of the New Testament itself.”

I’m a Lutheran. We baptize infants, give absolution (although it isn’t required), adore religious art, aren’t opposed to incense or religious art, and believe in the Real Presence of Our Lord. We also believe that Mary was a virgin.

But that are other things here to object to: the veneration of relics, masses for the dead, the legends about Mary’s sinlessness and assumption, and the practice of asking for her intercession. These practices existed because of certain theological beliefs that, Protestants have argued, are in conflict with the best interpretation of Scripture either directly or in spirit. So we have reason to reject them.

“These bishops based their decisions on which books were inspired largely on which ones had been used at the eucharistic liturgy in major cathedrals around the world—and on which ones accorded with the oral Tradition of interpreting Christian doctrine handed down from the apostles.”

This is also not in conflict with Protestantism.

“In other words, the infallible word of God was compiled, edited, and fixed in its current form by a bunch of heathen, papist idolaters. And you still believe in this book?”

I don’t think that those at the Council of Nicea were heathen, papist idolaters.

“It took Church councils to assert the reading of scripture which affirmed the Divinity of Christ, for that matter. Reject councils, and that too is up for grabs.”

It’s not anymore up for grabs than reliable, but fallible scientific claims, like that the earth goes around the sun. There’s a huge logical space there.

Note, if you accept all councils, I think you’re in trouble. If you like, I’m happy to link you to councils that condemn men to die through burning at the stake and affirm the Roman Church’s authority to burn heretics alive.

Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council demands that Jews and ‘Saracens’ have a unique style of dress. Canons 69 and 70 are worse.

Canon 27 of the Third Lateran Council authorizes the persecution and enslavement of heretics.

In Session 8 of the Council of Constance, it is ordered that heretic John Wycliff’s bones be exhumed and scattered.

In Sessions 13-15 of the Council of Constance, it is decreed that communicants may not receive in both kinds. Doesn’t that contradict current church practice?

In Session 16 of the same council, John Hus is condemned to die. He was burned. It is for this reason, among others, that Luther stopped believing in the infallibility of councils.

There are more examples, but I’ll stop here.

And I’ll leave off the offensive remarks about moral corruption with Protestantism aside for now.

@Tom Piatak:

I’m a protestant and I have (unfortunately) many relatives who have gone into the fringe groups and even with the fundies.  I had nonetheless most of my relatives supporting Pat Buchanan and sending him money and passing out literature during his 1996 run.  One of my “converts” to Pat was a local Twin Cities kid, a big Swedish guy going to Wheaton College.  He was supporting Pat mostly because of abortion, but I won him over to the other main issues and he stuck with Pat thru his Reform run. 

One of my cousins was going to Bob Jones and went to see Pat when he spoke there during his 2000 Reform run.  On Meet the Press, Pat quoted Joe Sobran to the effect that he would rather have the faculty of Bob Jones run American than the Harvard faculty (a take on WFB’s famous formulation of phone books and Harvard). 

Both protestants and Catholics could be better politically.  But a very large number of Catholics remain leftists of a very troubling kind.  Sure, most of the Prots are confused, but many Catholics seem to be even worse.

@John

About your comments aobut Ireland, pray remember the potato
famine when England stood impassible while a million
of Irish people, who had been made to accept her authority
by force of arms, starved to death, and another million had
to emigrate in horrible conditions with only the clothes on
their back.

England then said that saving the Irish was against the
laws of the free market, and that it was a good thing that
the land was cleared of its surplus population.

You may not like Joe Kennedy, but as the child of those
inmigrants who knew that for England they counted as less
than nothing, did you really him expect to send his sons to
be killed for the sake of that England that had thrown his
parents away like garbage?

Of course, there were other factors in World War II, but it
would be unfair to ask Kennedy to care about them.

And if you do not like what those inmigrants did to the
American political process, then get mad at England for
dumping them on you, because it wanted the land cleared of
it excess population.

As for the reasons the Spaniards stopped the Turks, the fact
was that they did it, which is more than can be said for
the Protestants, who just sat on their duffs, hoping that the
spaniards would get the chestnuts out of the fire for them.

Not bad, Zmirak, not bad… Now the rest of you LAZY Catholics need to get off your butts and do likewise.  Now Watson’s giving us this “sola scriptura” crap and “Roman Church” lingo from from some hayseed corn-fed Luther College out on the American steppes!  And there weren’t’ no “continuous debate” about the Canon? B as in B, S as in S! And you Catholic guys just sit around like damn roosting gamecocks doing monkey shines with your fingers up your @@@@@! so MOVE IT! MOVE IT! MOVE IT! 

[Welcome, Mr. Watson. Glad you’re here. Stick around!]

Mr. Watson:

Of course Pat had many Protestant supporters, and American Catholics are, as a group, too left wing.  But I was shocked at the number of evangelicals who didn’t vote for Pat just because he is Catholic.  The Christian Coalition, including the now disgraced Ralph Reed, pulled out all the stops for Bob Dole in the South Carolina primary in 1996, and I have reason to believe they were doing this because Pat is Catholic.  The notion that any conservative would choose Dole over Buchanan because of Buchanan’s religion was, and remains, astounding to me.

Interesting threat over at Chronicles: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=380#comment-37897

Part of the problem in South Carolina in 1996 was the influence of the Neocons, who at that time hadn’t revealed to the brain dead “evangelicals” (in my mind usually heretical quasi-protestants) that they were even greater enemies of a “Christian American nation” as they imagined Roman Catholics to be. 

Ralph Reed has demonstrated that he is a Neocon, and I think lost his own race recently in Georgia.  Reed was also tied at the hip with the disgraced Neocon lobbyist Jack Abramoff. 

Finally, some of the problem Pat ran into was the heretical notion among these quasi-protestants that Israel is some kind of Vatican City-State.  Pat was clearly on record as having his political loyalty to the USA, and many evangelical leaders view the nation-state of Israel as their prime loyalty.  This of course contradicts the teaching of Jesus, who not only told his followers to render under Caesar (i.e., be loyal to legitimate political authority) but also that His Kingdom is not of this world.

With all due respect Mr.Watson, by what authority did Martin Luther throw out some sections of Bible and sacraments that are part of both the Roman and Orthodox apostalic tradiitions.Who was Martin Luther but a disgrundled cleric who brought babble to a third of Christianity and he could see the babble coming well in his lifetime.If the Bible came with God’s blessing who gave Luther authority to edit parts.You have answered none of Mr.Zmiraks points, you can’t they are all true.

they may have been compiled...but not WRITTEN.

• In other words, the infallible word of God was compiled, edited, and fixed in its current form by a bunch of heathen, papist idolaters.
• And you still believe in this book?

and again these beliefs...may be older than the compilation but the epistles were WRITTEN before these pervertions came about.

These beliefs are older and more apostolic then the canon of the New Testament itself.

I think there is some confusion here.  One of the possibly drunken Catholics has confused me with the Lutheran student who signed himself “selfreferencing” or some such.

I have no real interest in disupting scripture versus tradition or the assumption of the virgin Mary or the Virgin of Fatima or whatever.

I’m interested in politics, not in turning religion into politics.

Pardon me mr Watson I mixed you up with the Luthern gentleman above and I don’t drink. I also am a Buchananite from days of yore.

For John Ball it seems history in England started with the Henry VIII. Before that nobody was there.

Mr. Ball, have you ever heard about the Dissolution of the Monasteries that took place between 1536 and 1540? Much early than Guy Fawkes, the Spanish Armada and Mary Queen of Scots.

Talking about traitors, I think the real traitors where the guys who did the revolution. Traitors to their country, Merry Old England, which they turned into something bitter. Traitors to their history, traditions, and religion. It was written they were going to end very bad. And they did.

As Chesterton put it the Protestant Reformation “was the rising of the rich against the poor”. You cannot do better than that.

Mr. Watson,

You are right about Ralph Reed and Abramoff.  I agree with you about religion and politics as well.  That’s why the example of anti-Catholicism I wrote about was a political one.

Hurrah to “selfrefrerencing” for saying much that I intended to say, and hurrah also to Mr. Zmirak for being a good writer and a passionate Christian, in spite of his tendency to mix his faith with authoritarianism.

Talking about traitors, I think the real traitors where the guys who did the revolution. Traitors to their country, Merry Old England, which they turned into something bitter. Traitors to their history, traditions, and religion. It was written they were going to end very bad. And they did.

Thank God for the work of Eamon Duffy in telling us the true state of the Catholic religion in England before the Reformation.

“For some of these folks, the Enemy will always be Rome.”

Tom,
For others the enemy is the local party. I had Pat set up to speak to a Catholic school and the old nuns were excited. Yet,when word got around, they had to cancel as the locals in “the party “ were complaining. But you are right and it has been so since the beginning. Suffering and sacrifice are a stumbling block to the world. That is why I have hope that as things get worse and the persecution of paleos continues to intensify, the dawn of a new morning will begin to break.

I think we are in general agreement except on one point.  Buchanan wasn’t rejected by some voters because he was Roman Catholic.  It was on specific issues, some of them dealing with Buchanan’s entirely correct views on Middle East policy, that were the reasons for some to vote against Buchanan.  At that time, the Neocons were more or less in league with the Dole establishment wing of the Republican party (i.e., the Neocons didn’t hold the upper hand as they do today).  The Neocons along with others were able to demonize some of Buchanan’s entirely correct positions, on the Middle East, on trade policy, the role of the USA in world affairs and even on immigration.  The Neocon swear words of the time were “protectionist, isolationist, nativist.” Of course, today the huge US trade deficit is a nightly topic on Lou Dobbs, as is immigration and the disastrous results of our interventionist foreign policy. 

Note that some famous Catholic Republicans hold the same views as those evangelical and fundamentalist “conservatives” who rejected Buchanan in 1996.  Former Senator Rick Santorum and current Senator Sam Brownback come to mind.  Check out the Catholics at National Review and you will find more.

The neocons had several candidates as stalking horses to water down Buchanan’s vote in the early primary season.Alan Keyes,William Kristal’s college roomate, is the worst example, but so was Bob Dornan.I think their votes cost him Iowa and that was the nomination.Plus the usual antisemetic crap they are even trying on Ron Paul.

Dear John Ball:
There was no important Christian group in 1550 which proposed religious toleration, especially in England. When blessed Mary took the throne, it was in a country divided between an overwhelming Catholic majority and a powerful Protestant minority which had just finished denuding the churches, closing the monasteries which had fed and educated the poor, burning alive Carthusian contemplatives for remaining true to the faith of their ancestors, stealing the cash which had been left by generations of pious Englishmen to endow monasteries and pray for their dead, and in general enacting an authoritarian revolution along the lines of what the French accomplished in 1790-94. She attempted to enact reaction, using the same means which had been employed by the Protestants--the persecution of dissenters. It is positively dishonest to suggest that the Protestants were champions of “ancient English liberties.” Indeed, no one in England (or, alas, anywhere in Europe at that time) believed in liberty of conscience. The question was simply, in ugly Leninist terms, “Who whom?” Who would persecute and subjugate whom? As it happened, she did not bear a male child, and so the bastard Elizabeth took the throne (by falsely swearing to uphold the Catholic faith), and proceeded to make the celebration of Holy Mass punishable by death. She tortured to death hundreds of Catholic clergy with no political connections, and enacted through a very efficient secret police a religious revolution akin to Lenin’s in Russia. Through a campaign of propaganda, she helped create an English nationalism (that should set off your Lukacs meter) which entailed in its very essence the rejection of universal papal authority in favor of royal supremacy. At the same time, the Reformation throughout Europe reduced the Church to either the victim or the ally of the State. A Church which had once served as an alternative locus of power to the State now depended on the State for her very existence--since any king whom she displease could turn Protestant at will. So the Church’s age-old role (since Theodosius) as moral censor of the State was almost abolished, even in Catholic countries. Is it really honest, even sane, to condemn the Spanish monarchy for engaging in the same sorts of persecutions which Calvin was conducting in Geneva, and Elizabeth in England?
The liberties which we treasure from the Anglo-Saxon heritage arose by Providential accident--since it suited the political aspirations of non-conformist and Puritan Christians of the rising mercantile classes (see “The Cousins’ Wars” by Kevin Phillips) in their struggle against an Anglican monarchy. On most of the Continent, the old Common Law traditions did not succeed in counter-acting the ambitions of centralizing monarchies--except in the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and to some degree in Italy. As a result, the Anglosphere, Protestant though it was, became the transmission belt for medieval, Catholic ideas of decentralism and subsidiarity--which were themselves the heritage of Germanic, feudal Europe. And Whig history distorted all this to suit English nationalism, as neocon nationalism today distorts American history to suit its ends. It’s our job as thinkers to step back from such false versions of triumphalism, and look critically at our own national (as well as religious) heritage.
And yes, given that his co-religionists were being tortured to death for saying Mass by a monarch who proclaimed (against St. Robert Bellarmine) the Divine Right of Kings, I DO regard Guy Fawkes as a freedom-fighter, like Claus von Stauffenberg--and I intend some year to build a little House of Parliament on his day and blow it to smithereens.

I see Politics as oil and Religion as water that mix with agitation and seperate without.

JZ, we’ll agree to disagree about a lot of this, except perhaps for the following remark you made:

“I intend some year to build a little House of Parliament on his day and blow it to smithereens.”

Many Englishmen of various religions and parties would agree with that sentiment.  Sometimes they jest, “Guy Fawkes was the only man who ever entered Parliament with honourable intentions.”

But seriously, come on, he was no Claus von Stauffenberg, as Stuart England bore no resemblance to Nazi Germany, although all too many Irish Catholics sympathised with the Nazi Party and supported it overtly or covertly.

I fail to see how selfreferencing, as long winded as he is impertinent, has answered the author. Protestants who reject the divine authority of the Catholoic church but embrace its Holy Writ are in logical contradiction with themselves. His quarrel is with Aristotle, not Zmirak.

When the West was ascendant it was ok for Protestants and Catholics to squabble with each other.  Now we’re on the back foot, we need to stick together.

Bravo John Zmirak. The whole story started with that
lecherous tyrant, Henry VIII, who stole from the Church
and the poor, and gave from this rapine to the nobles.

I made the point that those who decry the State funding
social services, they should if they do not like it,
return the Chuch’s property so that it can carry out its
ancestral mission of caring for the poor, the sick, the
excluded,and educate children, thus letting hte State,
with good conscience get out of it. But not to let it
withdraw from those activities while retaining the fruit
of their rapine.

A similar thing happened in France at the Revolution. In
name of the Rights of Man schools and hospitals lost their
funding, teachers and nurses were hounded out, because they
wore an habit, and some sent to the guillotine (one of hte
last executed before the fall of Robespierre was a sister
of Charity, a daughter of St. Vinny). Later the Revolutionaries
would make a great ado about the schools they created, and
kept silent that they could staff them because there were
a lot of teachers who had previously taught in Chruch school
that needed jobs.

One can regret the excesses of Mary, but they were but a
pale reflection of the excesses of the murderers of St. John
Fisher and ST. Thomas More and the persecutors of thousands
of monks and nuns who had been loyal subjects as well as good
Catholics. Not to mention the persecution of her mother and
herself, nor the judicial murder of St. Margaret Pole.

Mr. Ball,

Pat Buchanan certainly was rejected by some voters because he is Catholic.  There simply is no other way to interpret a statement that someone will not vote for Buchanan because “he’s not a Christian.” Of course, this was far from the only factor in Pat’s defeat (I am thinking primarily of ‘96, when he had a real shot of winning the GOP nomination), but it happened more often than you suppose, and more often than I would have thought possible before I became involved in the Buchanan campaign.

Mr.Zmirak you are terrific,there is a good book in this, if you ever have time.

O ye gods, ye gods! Must I endure all this?  Zmirak sets the place on fire, and Squire Square Ball (aka, Lord Pom Pom) splashes water all over everyone.  Pray, the miraculous result will be the evaporation of all discord.

Mr Piatak,

Your above comment addressed to me is addressed to the
wrong guy.  I didn’t say anything about Pat Buchanan.

And an afterthought, to JZ:  It should be obvious
that I take the snark about blowing up a model
“House of Parliament” in the same good humour as you
intended it.  But ya know, calling Guy Fawkes a
“freedom fighter” is a pretty poor advertisement
for Catholicism if you really want to persuade
English Protestants to convert…

John Ball does not address any of the points being argued.

I don’t know if anyone is still reading this thread, but two commenters decided to claim that I didn’t answer Mr. Zmiraks claims. I think I have, but if you could point out what I’ve missed, I shall be grateful.

Two arguments were given by these two commenters:

First, I was asked by what authority Luther removed books from the canon. My understanding is that the apocrypha was never canon, nor were they canonical for Jews.

Second, it was maintained against me that those who hold Scripture to be infallible but not the Roman Church are in contradiction. I presume that the commenter believes there is a contradiction because he believes in the following conditional:

If the Bible is infallible, then the organization who created it must be infallible.

And I suspect that the truth of the above is supposed to be maintained by the idea that the Bible cannot have been given its authority directed by God independently of the Roman Church. But it’s not clear to me why I should think this. I would like it to be explained to me.

Mr Piatak

Well, the comment that Pat “isn’t a Christian” which you invoke to prove that prots didn’t vote for Pat because he is a Catholic isn’t conclusive evidence.  I submit that the meaning of that statement is simply that Pat didn’t follow the crazy notions about Israel, as well as the smear job the Neocons then allied with the Dole establishment made against Pat.  Note that Pat did well among Christian Prots in Louisana, Iowa and New Hampshire in 1996.  He didn’t do as well in Arizona, where Forbes did better offering greedy old people a tax free life.  Surely, Christian right voters weren’t jumping on the Forbes bandwagon over Pat’s religion.  Dole furthermore had a long track record with the anti-abortion forces, which no doubt helped him. 

After a while, old stock American conservatives get tired of Catholics sounding like Jews, blacks, gays and others with the usually bogus claims of unfair discrimination.

Mr. Watson,

I don’t disagree with most of what you write.  And I’m not claiming that Catholics are generally subject to discrimination.  And of course Pat had lots of Protestant supporters.  In fact, given that America is a predominantly Protestant country, and the GOP is a predominantly Protestant party, probably most of Pat’s supporters were Protestants.

But I have no doubt that he did lose votes in ‘96 simply because of his religion.  That was my experience, and it was the experience of many others I knew in the campaign.  And that experience made an impression on me, because it was not something I expected at all.

Although this post has fallen off the front page, I do think I owe my friend JZ a more detailed response:

“Dear John Ball:
There was no important Christian group in 1550 which proposed religious toleration, especially in England.”...mostly correct, unless one regards Wyclif as “important” (as I do); and where Christianity is concerned, numbers don’t determine truthfulness or importance.

“When blessed Mary took the throne”

..."Blessed Mary?” Oh dear.  JZ, the only redeeming thing about that remark is that it proves you’re as nuts as I am, and no one but a Holy Fool ever sees salvation :-) (cf St Paul, passim)

“it was in a country divided between an overwhelming Catholic majority and a powerful Protestant minority”

...that’s debatable.  The apparent number of people nominally confessing (at least on paper or in appearance) subordination to the Pope does not tell you much about the majority’s actual beliefs or practices.  It’s not like the majority of English were consciously devoted to the Pope, although outrage against the corruption of the Roman church was widespread.

“which had just finished denuding the churches”

...I, and many Anglicans today, regret that that happened.  But if destruction and atrocities are the measure of a church’s falsity, the Roman Catholic Church lost all credibility as early as the Sack of Constantinople if not long before.  Oh and let’s not forget the Albigensian crusdade. 

“… in general enacting an authoritarian revolution along the lines of what the French accomplished in 1790-94.”

...see above about the Albigensian crusade. 

“She attempted to enact reaction, using the same means which had been employed by the Protestants--the persecution of dissenters.”

...this would almost be a chicken-and-egg
controversy, but if you posit the Roman Catholic Church as the “older” (or only) one, then the reactionaries were the Protestants, reacting against centuries of Roman Catholic persecution of dissenters.  You can’t say the Protestants started the whole dreadful round of perseuctions and torture etc.

“It is positively dishonest to suggest that the Protestants were champions of “ancient English liberties.””

...In the 1500s, perhaps not, but the extraordinary civil and political liberties enjoyed by England (and America) in succeeding centuries was a direct effect of the religious pluralism which began with the Reformation.  Contrast and compare to what happened to the French, who had the appalling judgment to purge their country of Protestants - the most productive people in the country - and the French Revolution was the ultimate consequence of THAT!  So once again, JZ, as you (and I) despise the French Revolution, you owe
a toast (I’ll pay for the round) with me, to toast Protestant England and Wellington and Nelson for saving Europe from the depredations of the French Revolution.  (And another shot to toast our Russian Orthodox allies in those wars.)

“The question was simply, in ugly Leninist terms, “Who whom?” Who would persecute and subjugate whom?”

...That wasn’t the right question, but it was what the persecutions were about in the end - contests between temporal sovereigns, of whom the Pope was one.  The traditional Protestant perspective on this is that “Protestantism” was not a positive movement positing something new, but a reactionary movement repudiating the superfluous political powers of the Popes and their fifth-columnists.

“the bastard Elizabeth”

...ah, we’re back to that old canard.  Come on, you’re not REALLY saying that the Popes never annulled any marriages for political reasons?  Or that the reason why the Pope refused to annul Henry’s marriage was entirely a matter of doctrinal purity, and had nothing to do with the Pope’s temporal allegiance to Spain?  Do you REALLY believe the Popes were always consistent in the matter of divorces/annulments?

“...took the throne (by falsely swearing to uphold the Catholic faith)”

...I know this will make you scream, but it depends on how one defines “the catholic faith” - at any rate, whether the “catholic” faith was necessarily the Papal one was exactly what was in dispute at the time.  You can disagree with Elizabeth’s interpretation, but you can’t accuse her of swearing falsely.

“...a religious revolution akin to Lenin’s in Russia.”

...JZ, whatever you’re smoking, I want some.  “Religious revolution”, maybe.  But “akin to Lenin’s in Russia?” Not even Pope Benedict would go that far.
JZ, now hear this, listen up:  THE ANGLICAN CHURCH BEARS NO RESEMBLANCE TO THE BOLSHEVIKS! 

“...she helped create an English nationalism (that should set off your Lukacs meter)”

...I don’t think he would mind my telling you that Lukacs once said to me, over a private lunch, that he often feels more at home in an Anglican Church than in a Catholic one.  This doesn’t mean he’s not a Roman Catholic (he is, much more than I am), but he’s very sympathetic to Anglicanism and does not regard it as nationalistic - in CONTRAST to, say, the kind of Catholicism practiced in Croatia,
not to mention among many Irish.

“A Church which had once served as an alternative locus of power to the State”

...one can say Christianity serves as an alternative locus of power to the state.
But the problem with your argument is, that the Vatican IS a state.  The temporal politicisation of the Vatican was precisely what provoked the Reformation.

“Is it really honest, even sane, to condemn the Spanish monarchy for engaging in the same sorts of persecutions which Calvin was conducting in Geneva, and Elizabeth in England?”

...well, YES it IS sane!  If the Spaniards were engaging in THE SAME sorts of persecutions, then yes they SHOULD be condemned in the same way!

“The liberties which we treasure from the Anglo-Saxon heritage arose by Providential accident--since it suited the political aspirations of non-conformist and Puritan Christians of the rising mercantile classes (see “The Cousins’ Wars” by Kevin Phillips) in their struggle against an Anglican monarchy.”

...MARXISM ALERT!  Next thing you know, you’ll be agreeing with my (recent) Chinese Communist students who are brainwashed to believe ALL religion is a “false consciousness” and the “superstructure of class struggle.” Do you REALLY wanna go there?

Enough for today (for me anyway.) I’m looking forward to those toasts with you,
because my way of persuasion in arguments with friends about religion is ultimately not the rack, but the highball and a few laughs - a point of faith upon which we both agree unreservedly :-)

Mr. Piatak: 

I can’t rule out that some people refused to vote for Pat because he was Catholic.  However, I do note that South Carolina did vote for JFK in 1960.  I can’t imagine that Pat struck the people of South Carolina as more Catholic than the Irish Catholic from the former home of Yankeedom (Massachusetts is now a majority Catholic state). 

My impression was that Pat’s opposition to the Iraq war (even in 1996) and his opposition to free trade were much bigger issues than his being a Roman Catholic.  I recall how the Catholics at Chronicles complained about how the Prots in their state, Illinois, voted for the Roman Catholic ethically challenged former Gov. Ryan (now on his way to jail) over the Baptist Democrat who I was informed was a “lite” version of Buchanan.

And PPS to John Zmirak (but first scroll up to my other response, made today),

Another question.  You seem fond of CS Lewis, and for good reasons.  He was an Irish Protestant, and upon his re-conversion to Christianity after a bout of atheism, he joined (or re-joined?) the Church of England.  (Or was it the Church of Ireland?  I forget, but either way, he was a Protestant until his end.)

So tell me, JZ, how much heresy do you perceive in the writings - very effective evangelistic writings, I think - of CS Lewis? 

If the Church to which CS Lewis belonged was heretical - or even an agent of Satan
as you seem to imply in your unreserved and hyperbolic anathemae poured out upon the Anglican church - then doesn’t that “poison the well” of Lewis’ evangelistic books?  Conversely, if Lewis really did (as I think, and you seem to agree) understand and promote and propagandise for authentic Christianity, then how could he do so if he was not in communion with what YOU regard as the True Church?

You might object, or qualify, that Lewis as an Anglican was “not in FULL communion with the Church”.  And correct me if I’m wrong (as I said, I never had much formal Catholic training, thank God ;-), but isn’t that the position of Pope Benedict too?  That the Anglican church IS after all part of the universal Church, but only (from an RC viewpoint) “imperfectly?”

If so, then isn’t it a BIT over-the-top to call Guy Fawkes a “freedom fighter”, as if regicide and hurling the state and government of England into anarchy and invasion and occupation by a merciless foreign empire (Spain) would have been justified by...by WHAT? 

Are you really advocating violent crusades to convert all so-called heretics back to what you regard as the one true Church?  The RC Church tried to do that to its Eastern Orthodox brethren in the 1200s.  Eisenstein’s 1938 movie, “Alexander Nevsky” was based on inherited memories of those old wounds.

And the Nazis pretended to be Western Christian crusaders (against the “Jewish”
Bolsheviks) in pretty much the same spirit.  (Aided and abetted by so many Irish Catholics whose hatred of England blinded them.)

Hoo boy.  I’ll just try, as always, to close on a charitable note, and tell you what an old friend of mine, a (now elderly) Methodist Minister once said to me, about Christians:  “We are a tattered and stained coat of many colours, desperately in need of mending.”

Fawkes was definitely a terrorist, however honorable his intentions.  Most terrorists have honorable intentions - the road to hell is paved and all that.  England under Elizabeth was not only persecuting the majority Catholic population, but was a rogue state sponsoring the international terrorism of piracy against Spain.  And Spain, under Philip II, was busy looting newly conquered imperial provinces of gold and silver so it’s hard to muster much indignation over the robbers being robbed.  With the end of the bastard Elizabeth’s reign and the coming of the Stewarts, you had the beginning of the restoration of Catholic legitimacy in England although it took a few generations to work out.  Then the Protestant oligarchy overthrew the legitimate monarchy and began the practice of bringing in Dutch and German Protestant rulers which has continued to this day.

In my opinion, in the present times, the case for “just rebellion” has gone the way of the case for “just war”.  In theory you can make it; in actual practice the vast collateral damage to innocents and the likelihood of an even worse outcome prohibits a resort to violence.  Prayer and fasting, redemptive suffering, perhaps combined with non-cooperation or non-violent resistance, are the only weapons of which a Christian should avail himself.  Pro-life and anti-war activist John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe has pointed out that both the Poles and the Afghans ridded themselves of Soviet Communist rule - the Poles non-violently and the Afghans violently.  But which nation has been better off since?

Good article and discussion.

There’s more on this in my blog.

AFAIK C.S. Lewis returned to the practice of Christianity in the Church of England. (The Church of Ireland is also Anglican and may be what Lewis was born into but he had left Ireland by then. I think he was Anglo-Irish not Presbyterian Scots-Irish.) He was more Catholic than his legions of Protestant fans today. He never identified with Anglo-Catholicism (he went to one of Oxford’s AC churches simply because he lived in the parish) but believed in purgatory and went to confession the last 24 years of his life. He remained anti- or at least resolutely un-papal to the end.

RE: John Ball

John, my comments in the article were mostly in response to Ramus, who summons everything he can find in the scrap heap of history to hurl at the passing Corpus Christi procession. Note the emphasis I placed on Church councils--accepted, at least the first ones, by all liturgical Christians. So that would include… the Anglicans, except for teachings from Trent, Vatican I and II.
Regarding Guy Fawkes, he had the right to resort to violence NOT because the state had rejected, or would not promote the True Faith, but because that State was PERSECUTING believers. (Fawkes’ co-conspirators did not attack him for not converting, but because he would not lift viciously punitive anti-Catholic laws.)

Elizabeth hunted priests as avidly as Hitler hunted Jews. Remember poor Anne Frank hiding in the attic? There were hundreds of priests hiding in “priest holes” across England. Yes, I know they had CHOSEN their vocations, while she didn’t choose her race, which makes the Nazis even more barbaric than the Elizabethans (and Louis XIV, who similarly hunted Huguenots). The point is that ANY one, of any religion, has the right to use violence against a state which persecutes members of his religion to the death--even if his religion is false, and the state’s religion is true. Just as a slave has the right to flee his master--and use violence, if need be, to escape.

Some trad Catholics will no doubt object here, but I think their arguments boil down to nothing more than

“We have the Truth.” (check)

“The Truth has vastly different rights than error.” (Er, how does an abstraction have “rights” in a modern political sense? What are its responsibilities? If the Truth shirks them, can a court strip it of some of those rights?)

“Error has no rights.” (Check, but not very meaningful, since it’s people we’re talking about, and THEIR right to follow even a misinformed conscience--thankfully reaffirmed at Vatican II.)

“So those in error have no rights--at least, not to partake in error. Because the source of the right to act on a belief is its objective truth or falsehood--not one’s dignity or freedom, although those DO seem to be part of the reason God bothered to create free, responsible creatures in the first place and to redeem them....

Which is all kind of confusing. Why DID He bother to make men free? It’s all so messy. Surely that was some sort of oversight. Let’s set up a state apparatus to tie up some of the loose ends in Creation and Redemption. We’ll need a secret police (an Inquisition) of course. And--what a great idea--a Grand Inquisitor!
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm

Hey John Z, my Friend,

Good to hear from you!  And now, true to your pattern as a Holy Fool and a good man inspired to the edge of madness (something you have in common with me ;-), I see that your most recent comment makes MORE sense in SOME ways (than your previous ones did), but in a few other ways you’re talking madness.

As one of my other true (English) friends tells me, “A friend is someone who tells you when you’re going mad.” So, JZ, I’ll do that for you here, and I’ll expect you to to the same for me whenever I’M talking nonsense.  (This is, as you know, the whole point of the “Church")

So, you wrote:

“John, my comments in the article were mostly in response to Ramus, who summons everything he can find in the scrap heap of history to hurl at the passing Corpus Christi procession.”

I agree with bits of what Ramus says, but I disagree with his blinkered and CONTRA-ECUMENICAL (ie, sewing hatred and mistrust in the Church, OUR Church) anti-Catholicism.  I think Ramus speaks some half-truths; he speaks some truths in his criticisms of the RC Church, but his evident hostility to the RC Church is
based on lies and hatred, and therefore much of what Ramus writes is not Christian.  And he’s not a “good” Protestant either; Martin Luther would have raised many passionate arguments against what Ramus writes.

(Gloss about Luther and German Protestants:  Mind you, John Z, I grew up in a semirural valley in Montgomery County, near Philadelphia, mostly populated by Pennsylvania Germans (NOT AMISH, the Amish are something else), descendants of German Protestants who came to Pennsylvania in the 1700s for religious freedom.  Actually, I went to Kindergarten in the basement of an old Lutheran Church, here’s an old photo of it:
http://www.jelc.org/images/JELC_Front_Facade_-_2_small.jpg

...and growing up among those Pennsylvania-German Protestants - many of whom were SCHWENKFELDERS (German Protestants who dissented from strict Lutheranism and went to Pennsylvania to practice a very simple religion, simple faith in Christ and the Gospel without complications, and tolerant of all other faiths, and they believed in the supremacy of personal conscience) - well,
through all that, AND through my family inheritance and patrimony of English and Scottish Protestantism, the end result was…

...that although I was born into the Roman Catholic Church, all the rough edges of the Catholic Church’s suspicion of, and intolerance of, Protestants, was bred out of me throughout my childhood.
And dare I say, that was a gift from God, to me.  And dare I say, I think it has qualified me to speak for the cause of ecumencial peace and renewed (even if imperfect) community between the Catholics and Protestants of our Christian Church.  (And Eastern Orthodox too, but my connections with the Eastern Orthodox Church is a story I can’t get into here.)

And you wrote:

“Note the emphasis I placed on Church councils--accepted, at least the first ones, by all liturgical Christians. So that would include… the Anglicans, except for teachings from Trent, Vatican I and II.”

For the most part you and I agree on that.  But then you wrote, insanely:

“Regarding Guy Fawkes, he had the right to resort to violence NOT because the state had rejected, or would not promote the True Faith, but because that State was PERSECUTING believers.”

Oh Good God.  JZ, do you realise that in those words, you have proffered justification for Al Qaeda to nuke New York?

And you wrote:

“Elizabeth hunted priests as avidly as Hitler hunted Jews.”

Sorry, my Friend, but that’s just not true.  There were many qualitative (not to mention quantitative) essential differences between Elizabeth’s governments persecution of Catholics versus Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.
Come on, be honest.  The QUALITIES (and the quantity, which is less important) of those two persecutions were categorically different.  Queen Elizabeth’s government persecuted and martyred Catholics, yes, I agree that’s true.  But the quality of that purge of perceived enemies of England was QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT from what the Nazis did to the Jews - and the main difference was, that Queen Elizabeth of England was not trying to abolish Christianity (actually she was trying to PRESERVE Christianity in England, according to her own limited lights) - but Hitler and the Nazis intended to return all of Europe, including England and Ireland, back to Paganism.

Come on, JZ, my friend.  You know in your heart, that Queen Elizabeth - bitch though she might have been - was in NO WAY comparable to Hitler, and English Protestantism is, and was in 1940, A MORTAL ENEMY OF the Paganism which the Nazis attempted to enforce.

And you wrote:

“Remember poor Anne Frank hiding in the attic? There were hundreds of priests hiding in “priest holes” across England. Yes, I know they had CHOSEN their vocations, while she didn’t choose her race, which makes the Nazis even more barbaric than the Elizabethans (and Louis XIV, who similarly hunted Huguenots).”

Okay, you make sense there.  But THEN you go on to say - in a temporary fit of madness:

“The point is that ANY one, of any religion, has the right to use violence against a state which persecutes members of his religion to the death--even if his religion is false”

But, Johnny Z, if you say that, then you give full moral license to bloody AL QAEDA!  Good GOD, man, don’t you SEE?
You and I, both traditional Christians and defenders of Christendom, you and I both AGREE that Al Qaeda and the (my good Muslim friends would say, that Al Qaeda is “ANTI-Muslim") Islamicist freaks pose a mortal threat to Christendom. 
If you acknowledge a moral license for
(in your words) “anyone, of any religion” to use violence against a state persecuting it - in your words “even if that religion is false” (as I believe Islam is LARGELY false, but less false than most religions) - then, JZ, you are acknowledging license for Islamicist Fanatics to nuke Washington and New York and London and Sydney and Paris AND ROME ...etc etc.

And now, HERE, John Z, what follows below is where I could no longer make sense of what you were saying, because it all sounded garbled and confused.  You wrote:

“and the state’s religion is true. Just as a slave has the right to flee his master--and use violence, if need be, to escape.
Some trad Catholics will no doubt object here, but I think their arguments boil down to nothing more than
“We have the Truth.” (check)
“The Truth has vastly different rights than error.” (Er, how does an abstraction have “rights” in a modern political sense? What are its responsibilities? If the Truth shirks them, can a court strip it of some of those rights?)”

John Z?  I have an IQ of 170 (or so they said on my last IQ test in high school, although in grammar school I sometimes tested out as low as around 120 on one bad day when I was bored) - ah, John Z? 
In any case my IQ tests all averaged at around 150, and I have two postgrad degrees and am a Doctor of Law, and, for the life of me, I can’t make any sense of what you wrote in the above lines.  Nor can I make sense of the following lines you wrote:

“Error has no rights.” (Check, but not very meaningful, since it’s people we’re talking about, and THEIR right to follow even a misinformed conscience--thankfully reaffirmed at Vatican II.)
So those in error have no rights--at least, not to partake in error. Because the source of the right to act on a belief is its objective truth or falsehood--not one’s dignity or freedom, although those DO seem to be part of the reason God bothered to create free, responsible creatures in the first place and to redeem them.... Whjich is all kind of confusing. Why DID He bother to make men free? It’s all so messy. Surely that was some sort of oversight. Let’s set up a state apparatus to tie up some of the loose ends in Creation and Redemption. We’ll need a secret police (an Inquisition) of course. And--what a great idea--a Grand Inquisitor!”

Um, John Zmirak?  My Friend?  I have absolutely no idea of what you were talking about in those lines.

All I know is that you’re a brilliant man, a genius in my opinion, and I remain your loyal friend and Brother in Christ,

John Ball

Dear John,
First, to clarify things. The lines which confused you are intended as a parody of the reasoning used by Trad Catholics who reject Vatican’s declaration on religious liberty. I think if you re-read them with that in mind, you’ll “get” it.

And no, an endorsement of Guy Fawkes in no way could justify Al Qaeda. Is the U.S. occupying Islamic lands and FORCIBLY converting them to Christianity? Is it torturing to death every Islamic imam it can find? Bin Laden, the sociopath, feels persecuted by the U.S. because we take Israel’s side in some petty land disputes, and because we had troops in Saudi (with the Saudi’s permission). If we WERE persecuting Islam as Elizabeth persecuted Catholics, that would STILL not justify attacks against civilians (hence, nothing justified the post 1926 activities of the IRA). What Fawkes did was an attempted assassination of members of an objectively tyrannical government, who offered no redress to domestic grievances. A better analogy would be a member of Iraq’s Shi’ite majority in 1991 trying to blow up a congress of the Ba’ath Party, along with Saddam Hussein. It’s too bad Hussein didn’t have a Shakespeare (probably a crypto-RC, see “Shadowplay.")

But my friend, I have no wish to argue this any more. I don’t normally go after non-Catholics, but Ramus has gratuitously insulting my Church for long enough on this site.

I ask you, for the sake of your own divided sympathies, to read one of Sarto’s favorite books, “The Stripping of the Altars,” by Eamonn Duffy. It depicts just how tyrannical an act was the English Reformation. Read it, and you will indeed weep....

I think that Mr. Zmirak gives us a good example of the spirit of grievance that was created (or imported into the USA) by ethnic Catholics and that has mutated into a general and virulent animus against European and Western civilization as a whole.  It was the germ of this attitude that was adopted by others, including Jews, blacks, womyn, gays and now hordes of third world “immigrants”.

What is particularly insane about it is that at the time the current official (if inoperative) Constitution was adopted, the USA was 98 percent protestant.  So, some Catholic ethnics imported their hostility and began attacking the host like a parasite.

If the Bible is infallible, then the organization who created it must be infallible.

I think, the reasoning goes, is that you cannot be certain the canon is infallible if the organization that put it together is itself not infallible.  To use a more modern comparison, one could very well believe that a bunch of monkeys typing on a bunch of typewriters could have infallibly typed out the canon of scripture.  But you could not be certain such canon was infallible (apparntly, Luther did not think so).

Of course, the Church’s concept of its infallibility is itself rather limited - it only applies when teaching matters of faith and morals.

Ah yes, Mr. Watson. To prefer the work of the monks who transmitted Classical culture to the rapacious land-pirates of Henry VIII means that I hate Western Civilization. Your notion of that civilization is so compromised by the perverse and perverting effects of the Reformation that you can neither appreciate it nor defend it. That said, you Protestants DID import us Catholics (and we came legally!) because you wanted our cheap labor. In a democratic political order, that means our descendants ultimately get the vote--and you might lose your precious Protestant order. Well, you should have dug your own damned canals (and, on another subject, picked your own damned cotton.) A lesson we should all take to heart before we allow millions of Mexicans to move here.

So, some Catholic ethnics imported their hostility and began attacking the host like a parasite.
Before we get into who attacked whom as parasites, let’s recall that much of the USA’s expansion came through conquering French and Spanish Catholic holdings.  If the “ethnic Catholics” attacked the Protestant US like a parasite on its host, the Protestant US attacked and overran much of the European Catholic new world like a virus.

C Matt,

You suggest: “I think, the reasoning goes, is that you cannot be certain the canon is infallible if the organization that put it together is itself not infallible.”

Two thoughts:

1) Then don’t we need an institution to give us certainty about whether the Church is infallible? And won’t this run into a regress?

2) Most epistemologists think that certainty is just a psychological concept. What we’re really after is justification or warrant. What we want is the knowledge that Scripture is true, and that only requires justification or warrant, not certainty.

But there are lots of easy ways to believe that one’s belief in Scripture is justified or warranted without the Roman Church’s seal. One can sense the presence of God in Scripture, believe one has an argument for the prima facie authority of Scripture, or believe in Scripture’s authority based on testimony.

The Church came long before the formal cannon.Who gave Luther the authority to pick and chooose the Holy Scriptures?Who gave Luther the right to pick and choose the Sacraments?The Scriptures are Holy and so is the Church that put them together, to be said at the Holy Eucharist.The Church has not surrived for 2000 years without God’s blessing.

One problem with Protestantism, apart from its tendency
to fragment - and it may be related to it - is that they
seem to lack a sense of history. Lack of tradition leads to
lac of history, and the temptation to start all over from
the beginning, losing what might have been learned in the
meantime, and repeating the same old mistakes over and
over.

It was a very bad idea to lose the cult of the saints, since
it is in the biographies of the saints that we can trace the
history of the church, not always edifying, not always proud,
but all in a continous whole that has much to teach us.

It is always a bad idea to lose one’s history.

Throw the book at them!  All 73, and a few are thicker than their counterpart.

I, too, marvel at how the wars of religion seem to break out in the writebacks on this site - though they seem less like the Thirty Years’ War, which was really about European temporal politics (with Cardinal Richelieu, a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, aiding the Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus against the Catholic Habsburgs), than like the self-destructive French wars of religion under the last of the Valois.

May I suggest that thoughtful Christians can be found in numerous denominations - and the first thing they should do is to admit that to themselves and each other? Then they should agree that they have more in common than they disagree about, and far more in common with each other than they do with crusading atheists, militant followers of Mahomet, ethnic Jews of the Abe Foxman type, etc.

A small point about Henry VIII, who has been roundly excoriated here. It is not really correct to call him the founder of Anglicanism. Henry’s religious belief, with the exception of his defiance of the pope, was thoroughly Catholic. Liturgically and sacramentally the English church remained Catholic until his death. The Mass was said or sung in Latin, translation of the liturgy or the Bible into English was resisted, and reform-minded clerics were punished.

Anglicanism as we know it was a product of the reign of his son Edward VI, a boy-king who was surrounded by nobles and clergy who favored either a Lutheran or Calvinistic reformation. The first Book of Common Prayer, little more than a translation of the Mass according to Sarum use with mild concessions to reform, was published in 1549, and followed in 1552 by a version that pleased the Calvinistic element more. After the return to Catholicism under Mary I, the Elizabethan settlement resulted in a compromise between the two previous versions of Anglican liturgy in 1559. It is this, slightly revised in 1604 and again in 1662, that defined Anglican practice for centuries to come.

Thomas Cranmer, who as archbishop of Canterbury was the principal author of the Prayer Book, was almost as great a trimmer in policy as the legendary vicar of Bray. Even so, whatever else may be said of him, he should be acknowledged for writing one of the formative works of English literature (just as Luther’s Bible was formative to German literature). If it were not for the influence of the Prayer Book’s stately language, could we imagine the poetry of Herbert or Donne, Walton’s Lives, or the work of Dr. Johnson?  Let us give credit where it is due.

Zmirak, you’re a brave man. Keep on fighting.

PS: more than ever I’m interested in buying your books.

One Catholic’s View of Protestants by Joe Sobran
April 11, 2002

http://www.sobran.com/columns/2002/020411.shtml

Today I write in an unaccustomed vein. I speak as a member of a minority group, though maybe not in the usual aggrieved style of minority group members.

I am a Catholic in a Protestant country. Even if Protestants are no longer a numerical majority, they have made this country what it is, and its culture remains thoroughly Protestant. What does it feel like to be a Catholic in Protestant America?

It feels wonderful. On the whole, Protestants must be among the world’s most decent people. I feel grateful to live among them, and it’s time someone said this. They are too nice to defend themselves even when they’re smeared, as they often are.

I have serious differences with them, because I take religion seriously. I know everything that has been said against them. I know their sins, their errors, their prejudices, their dark side — even their silly side. I can criticize them too. I have criticized them in the past, and I will so in the future.

Yet sharp criticism is a far cry from vague bad-mouthing, and when I hear some malcontent running down this Protestant country as “bigoted” or “racist” I feel a mild impulse to suggest that he shut the hell up. I want to say gently, “Well, I’d sure hate to live in a country where your kind were the majority, pal.” (Vivid examples may be found on the front page of today’s paper.)

In fact one of the chief faults of Protestants is that they are too nice for their own good. They have little instinct for self-preservation. They are slow to recognize deadly enemies, because they assume that others are as decent as they are. Your typical Protestant is like Shakespeare’s Edgar in King Lear, “whose nature is so far from doing harms that he suspects none.” And this amiable but tragic defect may yet prove the ruin of this great country.

The word Protestant covers a lot of ground, from the strictest fundamentalist to the laxest liberal. Yet there is, if not a creedal common denominator, at least a specific common style — a homespun gentility shared by every sort of Protestant, an ethos of simple friendliness, a love of honest plainness, even a certain aversion to elegance (expressed in disdain for the “fancy”).

This makes nearly all Protestants fatally easy to impose on, easy to take advantage of. The self-effacing Protestant style is even a topic of a special kind of comedy: think of Mary Tyler Moore, Garrison Keillor, or Bob Newhart. All three are Midwesterners; Newhart is a Catholic, but all Midwesterners are virtual Protestants in this respect. Protestants are supposed to be humorless, but there is a very definite Protestant humor, dry and subtle, and the world could use more of it. If only Osama bin Laden had been raised in Indiana! He is open to criticism on several grounds, but basically I think he just needs to lighten up a little.

A Protestant might almost be defined as a man who has to be warned against his own virtues. He is nothing if not tolerant. It wasn’t always so: once upon a time Protestants could persecute heretics with the best of them. But even then they were exercising that peculiar sincerity which they have seldom lost.

At times American Protestants were suspicious of immigrants, and though their suspicions have become notorious, they were not without reason. At any rate, the suspicions were quickly abandoned, and the immigrants were welcomed as fellow Americans. Today the immigrants are glorified and the natives disparaged, as if the immigrants were the originators, rather than the beneficiaries, of tolerance.

It might be suggested that so gracious a majority deserves more grateful minorities than it has received. Nobody thanks a Protestant. His virtues are taken for granted, like the elements of nature. He doesn’t even think of asking for thanks. “Don’t mention it,” he is apt to say. Maybe more of us should insist on mentioning it, even if it embarrasses him a little. Protestants are so unassuming that even the Pope hasn’t apologized to them.

All this may help explain why President Bush is so completely at sea in the Middle East. He is learning, to his confusion and dismay, that Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat are definitely not Protestants. As a cynical son of the old Catholic Europe, with the blood of the Borgias coursing in my veins, I could have warned him; but he didn’t ask me.

Anyway, it isn’t my purpose to glorify the Protestants; today I merely want to thank them.

Really?
To seek spiritual guidance, and wisdom, and the formation of conscience, not from the apotolic bishops in unbroken communion with the Vicar of Christ, but from one’s own touchingly naive and historically specious re-imagining of a “green and pleasant land” that ceased to be so when the thugs began to loot the abbeys and the souls of the faithful.

Let’s see:
the Pope? or Tony Blair?
Thomas Campion or Elizabeth and her quislngs?
Don Juan of Austria or Elton John?

Those who abandon the Truth inevitably seek affirmation in half truths and vain imaginings. But for England??

Henry mortgaged his soul to marry one of his sluts; and the CofE Bishops want to marry their boyfriends; there is a certain logic, here in the final days of the Empire.

With deference to Mr. Sobran, and to your general temperance too Mr. Watson, but surely you don’t really hold that l’USA’s grievance industry was launched by Catholic immigrants.  Rather a docile lot I fear they have proved, which may be why Mr. Zmirak’s bracing prose, not to say insights, rather shocks the resultant complaisance on that score. 
And Mr. Ball, though the one IQ test I’ve scored beat your worst, it fell far short of your best, so perhaps it was another bad day that prevented your grasp of Zmirak’s traditionalist tease, not to say his distinction between Fawkes and the, if less moral, more effective Saudi, that you found confusing.
Meanwhile, Mr. Higdon, it was Chesterton who once observed that good intentions are the one thing with which hell cannot be paved: I believe he added that only a Calvinist could think so, which perhaps gets Mr. Rencing off the hook.
Ah, and Mr. Watson, just in passing, Buchanan won the vote that day in Arizona, though not by enough to beat the write-ins of earlier days.

The November issue of Harper’s indicates that John Ball was right to move to Australia and not the U.S.; for the latter country, rather close to its sense of self, formally holds Zmirak’s view regarding Guy Fawkes.  The principle is older even than the Declaration of Independence, for in November 1775 General Washington officially banned the anti-Catholic feast, calling it “so monstrous as not to be suffered or excused.” Instead, Harper’s reveals, America would mark Guy Fawkes Day “with a new tradition: the exercise of the democratic franchise.” So the odd American tradition of trudging out to vote the first week of November every two years for a couple centuries and more, has been, with each vote cast, a silent tribute to the patriotism Fawkes embodied.
The Ron Paul campaign has meanwhile, according to Drudge, garnered $3.5 million (and counting) in the first 20 hours of its fundraiser specifically in tribute to Fawkes, which suggests the patriots over here still stand with Zmirak’s view.  Since Paul represents the best of that American Protestant portrait of Sobran’s, it also provides means for an ecumenical pax at Taki TopDrawer – with a contribution to the patriotism of Fawkes, and the Paul campaign.
So cough up, ye Christian lads and ladies, saving the dogmatic disputes for a later day.

Demais, I did not say that that hell itself was paved with good intentions, but quoted the old saying about “the road to hell”.  I was referring to Mr. Ball’s quote about Guy Fawkes being the only man who entered parliament with honorable intentions. Now Mr. Ball does say that he considers Fawkes a terrorist, as do I.  If this be Calvinism, make the most of it, but it would surely be the first time I’ve been called a Calvinist and for the most unusual reason.  But then I was first called a terrorist for handing out literature against abortion, so there is no telling how people’s twisted minds work.

I do find it disturbing that some of the people in this forum consider Fawkes to be some kind of hero, more disturbing still that apparently a lot of Ron Paul’s supporters are of that opinion.  I’ve been regularly contributing to Dr. Paul’s campaign myself but this perverted cheering for Guy Fawkes should be stopped immediately.  At best it might result in giving Paul’s opponents a convenient weapon to use to discredit him.  At worst it could inspire someone like Timothy McVeigh to commit another atrocity.  McVeigh could well be considered the American Guy Fawkes.

@John Ball,

As the Catholic descendant of an English Protestan minister in Vermont, I do not begrudge the English their protests against the church so much as the ritual murder of those English who for whatever reason stayed loyal to Rome.

Everywhere in the new world it was the Catholic Europeans be they French or Spanish who treated the natives with respect and dignity.  The black legend was a English smear campaign to justify stealing the territory of the Spanish and later the Mexicans.  The Spaniards treated the natives much better than the English who moved them off their land everywhere they came in contact with them.  They proceeded to renege on treaty after treaty and performed genocide on women and children. 

Then of course there is Ireland where the protestant English attempted to starve to death the population by taking shiploads of food to England, forcing the people in Irleland to stay in at night and stopping them from fishing, during what has been misnamed as a potato famine.  The Irish had never been dependent solely on potatos and where simply starved to death by the English to diminish their numbers..
The shipping records showing the amounts of food removed from Ireland during this period have been recetnly exposed but then suspiciously destroyed.
So ask yourself does it make any sense that an Island on which the potato is not even a native crop became the sole form of sustenence?  The hideous murder of these people is the legacy of protestant England.  People who have attempted to expose this black part of England’s history have been persecuted and silenced.

I think that we Catholics should admit that the Protestants who are NOT touched by the “predestination” of Calvin or the “salvation by faith alone” and “Sola Scriptura” of Luther (denials of the efficacy of “implicit grace” or “good works,” and, therefore, of the efficacy for salvation of the non-Christian faiths, as well as of the social justice teachings of the Catholic Christian Churches) are also NOT likely to be turned into fundamentalists, neo-con and “dispensationalist” supporters of apartheid Zionism or haters of the papacy. They are already, in many important senses, Catholic, whether they know it or not, and should not be attacked for the mistakes their ancestors made or for the heresies they temporarily embraced. Orthodox Christians of whatever tradition have much more in common now with each other than they do with the enemies of orthodox Christianity--among whom I count the Protestant Fundamentalists who dominate the Republican Party in America.

Come, Mr. Higdon, you’re being unnecessarily defensive here. If you’ll read the post, you’ll see you weren’t called a Calvinist at all. Just thought you’d like, instead of considering it twisted, the Chesterton insight.
Also, in passing, I quite appreciate your posts here generally, but fear you’re being a tad inexact (see Zmirak, et. al) in failing to recognize the difference between Fawkes’s precise intended attack on his people’s oppressors, over against McVeigh’s ‘collateral damage’ assault on innocents.

Fawkes could have blown up an entire building without killing any innocents?  Please - that’s a fantasy on a par with the precision bombing of the US air force.  In addition, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Catholics would have perished in vengeance slayings had Fawkes succeeded?  “V for Vendetta” indeed.  Making Fawk