Category: Other Christians

When I visited my Capuchin buddy Fr. Matthew last month, an old college friend of his was there for the occasion too, and together they told a story about how they traveled to Italy once, including some time in Rome. They went to visit the churches together, but Matthew’s friend is an Evangelical, so some of the Catholic practices he saw there were more than a bit foreign to him. Matthew’s devoted to the saints, and likes to express it by venerating their relics, which when you get down to it is a bit shocking to a good Bible Christian.
One day when they were visiting a church, Matthew saw an altar under which the relics of a martyr were displayed for the veneration of the faithful, so he knelt before it for a minute, and his friend asked what he was doing.
“Well, that’s Saint (so-and-so).”
“He’s buried here?”
“No.” (And pointing to the remains:) “He’s not under that: that’s him. I’m asking him to bless my rosary.” And he went back to his prayers.
Now, in telling the story, the Protestant chap laughs and says: my brain just fried then.
It’s understandable. Just look at all the stuff going on, all of which would be shocking to a good Evangelical:
(1) Matthew was venerating a saint’s relics!
(2) He was talking to the saint!
(3) He was asking him to do something!
(4) He was asking the saint to bless something!
(5) And the thing he was asking him to bless was a set of rosary beads for praying to the Virgin Mary!
It was a Catholic trifecta plus two.

Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online’s resident skeptic, is often priggish about other people being priggish. To him, any call to rein in one’s personal behavior brings us closer to the Fourth Reich, and any expression of religious belief is dangerous to his ideal world of fuzzy gray agnosticism.
I wrote about Stuttaford last year, and so I won’t repeat my criticisms. However, when he says something that is demonstrably false to support his worldview, it’s worth refuting. Here is his post on NRO’s The Corner, praising an atheist’s essay about the Church of England:

The London Spectator does not, incredibly, allow access to its web site these days even to subscribers (like me) of its print edition unless they pay an extra charge, and that’s a shame because it means that Matthew Parris’ brilliant – and curiously moving – article on the Church of England won’t get the readership it deserves.
It’s never easy to explain the traditional English attitude to religion (which used to find many an echo over here too) to those outside Albion, but Parris (an atheist, as it happens) does as well as I’ve ever seen:
”The Established Church…understood in her bones two great truths: the English are wary about religion; but the English do not want to be atheists. To the English mind, atheism itself carries an unpleasant whiff of enthusiasm. To the English mind, the universe is a very mysterious thing and should be allowed to remain so. And so the English church became what up to our own day it has always remained: a God-fearing receptacle for intelligent doubt; the marrying of a quietist belief in order, duty, decency and the evident difference between right and wrong with a shrewd suspicion that anyone who thinks he can be sure of more than that is probably dangerous…That right at the center of [English] national life, should for so long have stood this great and lovely edifice of sort-of religion, adorned (through her buildings, her rituals, her art and her music) with so much beauty, so much grace and so much balm for troubled spirits, and served in her priesthood by so many luminously decent men, has surely for centuries helped confound atheism on the one hand, and serious religious enthusiasm on the other. Not so much religious belief as religious relief, this has calmed everybody down. “You really don’t need to decide,” has been Anglicanism’s refrain, “and besides, who knows?”
Amen

This is ahistorical nonsense, a falsehood wrapped in willfull ignorance and tied up with a bow of anti-religious poppycock. Of course the English people don’t want to be atheists; no people on Earth have managed to be thoroughly atheistic, including the Russians, who gave it the old Slavic try for decades, murdering millions of people in the name of state supremacy over God’s law. Even the French aren’t that foolish.
As for the essayist’s first point, I am intrigued to know how he manages to refute the entire history of his nation until the twentieth century. I am no expert on England, but I did take two semesters of British history, and (like most Americans) I know more about English religious history than any other country, as it is so bound up with our own past. There are so many counter-examples that one could write for hours about it.
Chaucer seemed to think that England was a religious nation; indeed, he thought it was so obvious that he never bothered to comment on it. Read the “Canterbury Tales” and see a nation permeated from top to bottom with explicitly religious ideas, where monks, priests, and nuns were a part of the everyday landscape.
Saint Sir Thomas More was not beheaded in 1534 for refusing to knuckle under to a “sort-of religion.”
Shakespeare’s England was roiling with religious controversies. Queen Elizabeth’s government carried out an ongoing campaign to exterminate Catholicism within her realm, which was stoutly resisted by many of her subjects, particularly in the north. The Church of England may have said many things at that time, but “You really don’t need to decide…and besides, who knows?” was not one of them. It was, “Worship in our churches or be suspected of sedition and get fined, possibly get arrested, and if we figure out you are a Papist you could have your innards boiled in front of you as you shriek in pain and your family watches you die. Then we’ll confiscate your lands and possessions and your family can wander in the street, penniless and starving.”
There was a general decline in religious observance, during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the superhuman efforts of the evangelicals, most especially the Wesleys — themselves Anglicans, though their followers became known as the Methodists — the nineteenth century was a time of religious revival. By the time of the Oxford Movement, when John Henry Newman leveled charges of laxity against the Anglican communion, his critics did not say that “the universe is a very mysterious thing and should be allowed to remain so.” They said he was wrong, and the Church of England was a bastion of Christendom.
It may well be true that the English people have settled in for a European-style agnostic fatalism (i.e., an embrace of the Culture of Death). I’ve been to England a few times, but I don’t want to generalize from my experiences, and perhaps Stuttaford and Parris are right. If that is true, then that attitude is a very recent vintage, and one way or another it will disappear: either because the English rediscover their roots, or because they will disappear like the other Europeans by aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence. Either way, secularist agnosticism is a dead-end, and cannot last.

From USA Today:

Charles Stanley, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, rose to address about 3,000 worshipers gathered for the 9 a.m. service Sunday and cut right to the point.
“He’s probably the kindest pope I’ve ever known in all my years,” said Stanley, who became senior pastor of the now 15,000-member church in 1971. “He’s the only one who’s every apologized for the persecution that Catholics have brought upon other peoples.”

This was a little tactless, ya gotta admit. It makes Dr. Stanley sound as if the injustices of religious persecution had all been committed on one side. Does he need to look up from his copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and notice the Reformation-inspired persecution of Catholics? Has anybody volunteered yet to express regret before God and man for the martyrdoms, say, of English and Irish Catholics? How about that of St. Fidelis in Switzerland? I don’t know if it’s been done — I hope somebody’s done it — but it would at least be a good thing.

Since the following comment from the thread on Tim Drake’s new book was, for lack of a better expression, off-topic, I thought I would re-post it here:
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Why would anyone accept Peter Vere’s opinions? Even the Adoremus Bulletin disagrees with his views (see the letters section in the October 2004 edition of the Adoremus Bulletin). He likes to think that he doesn’t criticize traditional Catholics as a whole, yet his many writings (letters, articles, etc) tend to lean in that direction.
The bottom line is that like many modern Catholics, he does not know anything about the Traditional Latin Mass, fails to define it in accord with traditional Church teaching, and fails to know its true history and development. Tim Drake has this same problem! They lack intellectual honesty. Yet Vere will say he attends the “old” Mass but where is his defense of it? He is more of a critic of the traditionalist movement than a friend. Meanwhile, the Church is being infiltrated with blasphemies such as the charismatic pentecostal-style Life Teen Mass and the “gay mass”, but no books or articles are written against these issues by neo-catholics, yet the Traditionalist movement, which is far less common in the Church, is more criticized
-fr. adler, STL
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Anyway, time for another plug of More Catholic Than The Pope…

White liberals think that because non-white minorities tend to vote for Democrats in America, therefore the Darker People (as they think of them) in the rest of the world must be secular liberals.
This is exacerbated by American universities, which, in their zeal to foist their warped ideology on young minds, trains non-whites to think of their skin color first in their intellectual formation. The schools also established things like Third World Studies and African Studies, where entire regions are seen primarily through the prism of exploitation, colonialism, and racism.
So it must be a continuing surprise every time the Darker People show they have not only minds of their own, but spines. How much more awful when the DP, having received the Gospel, refuse to abandon it for money.
The Anglican bishops of Africa deeply disagree with their Anglo-American co-religionists on the acceptance of homosexual acts and unions. Their faith teaches them that those acts are gravely sinful. While they are poor, they refuse to give in to their richer (and increasingly less numerous) white brethren.
In their latest gutsy move, the African Anglican bishops have agreed to pull their theological students from corrupt Western schools:

The Primate of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, put it bluntly: “Now we have discovered that they have a new theology and a new religion we feel it would be dangerous for the future of our church to continue to send our own future leaders to those institutions.”

I nominate the Anglican bishops of Africa for the Catholic Light Total Badass award for November.