Jim B
Well-Known Member
To all those out there with a grudge against the Church, especially to the media, let me say this. I want you to attack the Church with everything you have. I want you to expose every skeleton, in every closet, of every Bishop, Priest, and Brother or Sister you can find. I want you to probe and penetrate, search and investigate, inquire and interrogate. Leave no stone unturned. Bring your experts on television, tell us your opinion, and make your predictions. Tell us in the strongest terms you can just how weak, how immoral, how stupid, cruel, cold and callous the leaders of the Catholic Church really are. I only ask that you tell the truth. Tell just enough truth, in just the right way, to make life in the Church appear solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Keep pointing your finger and cry bad, bad, bad until you run out of breath. I want you to use all your influence, howsoever much it might be, to persuade as many minds as you can that the Church is full of hypocrites, liars, cowards. Try to prove that all of us must finally come to agree with you that the Church is really nothing special. I even want you to talk with Catholic theologians who will agree with you, and demand that the Church must change, change, change, change! Let us hear how out of touch with reality the leadership is, let us hear how snotty, how arrogant, how aloof they are, how blah, blah, blah I want you to keep asking why the Church has not hired any P.R. firms to help maintain its image and credibility like the Mormon Church and Jehovah Witnesses do. Then I want you to turn around and blame the Bishops for only caring for the Church‚s image and credibility. Keep making these sorts of observations please, I urge you. Do not hold back. Your chains have been unloosed for a short while. Give us your best shot.
Oh how I relish these days! So many people at once thinking about the Catholic Church. To all those out there who are paying attention to the Church, to all the men and women of good will, let me say this. The claim we make now, always have made, and always will make is that the Church comes from the Apostles, the Apostles come from Christ, and Christ comes from God. My theology comes from above. The Catholic Church is established by God to communicate the truth about God, man, and the world to all people in every nation under heaven. She is endowed by God with all the power She needs to teach the truth and to perpetuate the mission of Jesus Christ in the world. Perhaps the word power frightens you. Perhaps you fear the Church is trying to impose Her opinions upon you. But before you fear, look at a crucifix and ask yourself whether that looks like a man trying to impose upon on you.
To all of you out there who are willing to think the matter through with me, I say that the argument is always the same. Either the Church originates from God or the Church originates from men. Now, if this plan or this undertaking is of men, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God. (Acts 5:38-9) That is why I want the attack to be severe. The more the wretchedness of Catholic leaders is brought to light the better. For if the Church is of God, then even the most furious attack upon it, even the most evident dirty truth about Her leaders -- no matter what its magnitude, no matter what its duration, no matter what its degree of intensity -- all of the efforts of those who would destroy the Church will come to naught. All the power and the influence of the media, the secularists, the skeptics, the Catholic bashers and the bigots, all of it will come to nothing, even though we ourselves hand them ammunition so damaging that they could ask for none better.
That is why I relish these days, for in these days the invincible stability of the Church is shining brightly. The evil, both within the Church and without, only shows that God is with us, that it is God Himself who stabilizes the Catholic Church. It is God who vouches for Her message. It is God who is telling the story that the Church is constantly telling about Herself. The Church is not merely the product of man.
What shall all you gleeful opponents of the Church say in reply? If you say that the Church is from men, that it is just one more social institution among others, then you are forced to defend the manifestly ridiculous proposition that it is Bishops and Priests who have held the Church together for thousands of years. Don't make me laugh. What shall you say? Shall you say instead that it is the laity who hold the Church together? Catholic laity are hardly known for their widespread and fervent enthusiasm. American Catholics these days indulge in their designer spouses all fixed up on their diaphragms and pills just as much as the rest of the world does. American Catholics so completely bought into the 60’s that we should expect to see the Church going the way of the 60’s. Why is it not? Why does the Church still teach that men should not sleep with men, nor women sleep with women, nor should women and men sleep with each other unless the other person is ones only living spouse and not semi-rejected with contraception?
Don’t bother saying the Church will change these teachings as soon as Pope Francis dies. When he dies, he will be stronger and more influential than ever.
Perhaps the best you opponents of the Church can do to explain why the Church is so invincibly stable is to pull out your old-fashioned rationalism. All you can say is that what keeps the Church going is simply that the Church provides a fairy tale to fill people‚s deepest emotional and psychological needs for personal meaning and comfort. But now you have passed from the ridiculous to the absurd. You are telling me that, despite all the hostile forces against it, despite all the obstacles in its path, and despite all the wickedness, wretchedness, ineptitude and imbecility in her own members, the reason why the world‚s oldest and largest institution has been perpetuated is just because Catholics have a great fairy tale to comfort them? Your explanation boils down to the claim that the Catholic Church has grown and survived, and become all that it is, just because Catholics are irrational. From your explanation, it follows that irrationality is more successful in the long run. If that is so, then why should I be what you call rational?
If irrationality is better in the long run, then what must we say of your god Rationalism? Rationalism has not smiled very brightly on the societies you organized in its name. For where are your rationally organized societies now? They are long dead, recently dead, or currently dying. It seems that your god Rationalism is good for nothing. The twilight of that idol has been upon us for some time now.
Any man who denies that the Church is from God must attribute to Catholics a certain sort of excellence that we would not dare attribute to ourselves. He must attribute to us the capacity to perpetuate our message and way of life for millennia, to spread it all over the world to people of every language and culture, and to get over a billion people to get down on their knees and say to a fictitious God, “Thy will be done”, all without any help from above, without any divine assistance, and without any grace from a real God. Do you realize what you have said if you attribute that sort of excellence to us? You have said that Catholics are “uebermenschen”: people who live, and move, and act far above the ordinary run of their fellows. You have said that we are a superior race of people, for ours is a two thousand year Reich, two thousand years and counting. Make no mistake. I do not say that we are uebermenschen. You do.
For it is you who deny that the Church is from above, it is you who deny that it is God who perpetuates the Church, it is you who deny that we are being taught by God, and so it is you who must affirm that we have achieved it all by our own natural talents. How ridiculous for you to say that we are all that.
When I finish visiting the pedophile priests that were protected by the Catholic church I will head over to the nearest pueblo and hear again how the Catholic church butchered their ancestors and believed in "kill the Indian, save the child".
Tell me, how many people have been murdered throughout history because they refused to join the Catholic church? Start with the crusades, continue with the various inquisitions and excommunications of believers, then cross the ocean and recount the murders of the indigenous people from Canada to Chile, all in the name of the Catholic denomination.
It is you who deny that the Catholic denomination has a bloody history, it is you who deny that it is God who perpetuates the true Church, not your denomination, and it is you who deny that Protestants and Orthodox are being taught directly by God, instead of by the Pope, the Cardinals, the Bishops and the priests.
