Tag Archives: Catholic Church

Newman defends Papal Infallibility

24 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman

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It was well-known that Newman had lively doubts about the wisdom of pronouncing on Papal Infallibility, so there was some surprise when, in his response to Gladstone’s critique, he did just that.

Newman’s defence of Infallibility deserves to be read in full, as it remains one of the best I know. That those who were making extreme claims for the dogma were as dissatisfied with it as those who disliked it; but as time has shown, Newman had it about right.

Gladstone had claimed that since the Pope was infallible in matters concerning faith and morals, and since there was no area of life which did not involve at least one of these, he was, in practice, able to command the civic and public allegiance of his subjects: ‘therefore Catholics are moral and metal slaves, and every convert and member of the Pope’s Church places his loyalty and civic duty at the mercy of another.’[iv] Far from shying away from the duty of obedience to those set in ecclesiastical authority, Newman, in the best Protestant style, cited the relevant passage from St. Paul (Hebrews 13: 17) enjoining submission to those placed in positions of authority and challenged Gladstone directly: ‘Is there any liberalistic reading of this Scripture passage?’[v] Catholics held that the Pope was the successor of St. Peter; that being so the obedience paid to him was only that demanded by Holy Scripture itself – and Newman denied utterly that obedience to that authority amounted to ‘slavery’. He drew an analogy between divine and human law. The Law, he argued, was ‘supreme’ and those under it were bound to follow its direction, but no one would claim it ‘interferes either with our comfort or our conscience.’ Newman attempted to correct the English obsession with the power of the Pope. Catholic consciences, like those of any Christian, were regulated by an ancient system of moral theology deriving from sources common to all: the Ten Commandments; the Pauline injunctions of Faith, Hope and Charity; and the practices of fasting, sabbatarianism and tithing; the Pope had little, if anything, to do with these matters. The Pope’s jurisdiction lay in matters ecclesiastical, not in civil affairs; Gladstone’s evident confusion of the two was, Newman commented wryly, the origin of his alarm.

Nor did Newman shy away from Gladstone’s attempt to link Infallibility and the Syllabus. He denied that any of the Pope’s words could be construed as releasing subjects from their allegiance to the State, or as condemning either freedom of the press or of conscience. Failing to anticipate where arguments for the latter would lead, Newman asserted that that no one would say that everything should be published, or that people had the right to unrestricted liberty; every State provided, in its laws, for limits to these things; it was the abuse of such liberty, not the liberties themselves, which the Pope condemned. It was the ‘liberty of self-will’ which was being anathematised, not liberty per se. The Syllabus was, Newman reminded Gladstone, a collection of propositions already condemned in the writings of previous Popes; it had been sent by Pius IX to his bishops, and could only be properly understood in that context; it contained no new matter by the Pope. None of this justified Gladstone’s equating the Syllabus with ex cathedra pronouncements of the Holy See: ‘Utterances which must be received as coming from an Infallible Voice, are not made every day, indeed they are very rare; and those which are by some persons affirmed or assumed to be such, do not always turn out what they are said to be.’ Patience was the ‘sine qua non’ when it came to the interpretation of documents emanating from Rome. It was quite untenable, in Newman’s view, to attribute Infallibility to the Syllabus; from this came all Gladstone’s errors.

Newman’s words are as wise and relevant now as they were then, treading a line between the claims of the Ultramontanes and the liberals. Understood aright, Infallibility is the guard against Christ’s Church teaching error; no more, no less.

[iv] Ibid., p. 39

[v] Ibid., p. 40.

The politics of anti-Catholicism

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith, Newman, Politics

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Two main motives can be discerned in the timing of Gladstone’s actions. In the first place, his Government had been brought down, at least in part, because of the refusal of the Catholic bishops to support his education and Irish policies; Gladstone’s hopes that Cardinal Manning would back him had come to naught, and he had become convinced that the reason was because the Catholic bishops were being guided by the Vatican; that would have been reason enough to be concerned that a foreign power was wielding undue influence on British politics. But that does not explain why he was exercised by the Tractarian influence. For that, we have to look closer to home, so to say.

In August 1874 Gladstone’s wife, Catherine, received a letter from Lady Ripon, the wife of a former ministerial colleague of Gladstone’s; it contained the news that her husband was about to convert to Catholicism. Gladstone was ‘stunned’ by the news. How was it, he asked Lady Ripon, that Ripon ‘can have gone through those processes of long and long-tested enquiry, which are the absolute duty of such a man as he is, before performing that tremendous operation of changing his religion, and becoming a sworn soldier in the army banded to destroy the Church that had been his home?’ He found it unintelligible that, after the Syllabus and the declaration of Infallibility, any man of intelligence and spirit could take such a step. ‘There is not a man who is more sensible than I, of the hollowness of the popular arguments against Romanism; nor is there one who is more profoundly convinced that the Romanism of today is the best ally of unbelief because it continually drives off from faith, wherever it has sway, the awakened and the searching, even if reverent, mind of man.’[i] Ripon’s conversion was, to Gladstone, ‘a deplorable calamity’. It also triggered concerns even closer to home.

That September Gladstone visited Cologne where his sister, Helen, another convert to Rome, was living.  His purpose was the usual one, a brotherly attempt to win her back for Anglicanism.  Whilst there he talked with his old friend, Dollinger, the leader of the old Catholics who had broken with Rome over Infallibility.  He also followed closely the attempts of the Bismarck Government to bring the Catholic Church under state control – the Kulturkampf.  It was out of this maelstrom that Gladstone’s pamphlet emerged.

It ought to be noted, however, that, it did not emerge without consultation with his old friend, Lord Acton, the great white hope of liberal Catholics. It was natural, given the mutuality of their admiration for each other, and their dislike of the Vatican Decrees, that Gladstone should have turned to Acton for assistance. On 19 October he wrote that: ‘Circumstances have made it necessary for me to say a few words … with respect to the actual Church of Rome in its relations to mental freedom and civil loyalty’; the next day he began writing a pamphlet on the theme.[ii] Acton, who thought that Ultramontanism was ‘incompatible with Christian morality as well as with civil society’, replied that ‘no reproach can to be too severe’, because ‘Real Ultramontanism is so serious a matter, so incompatible with Christian morality as well as with civil society, that it ought not to be imputed to me who, if they knew what they are about, would heartily repudiate it.’ There were, he feared, too many Catholics ‘who know not what they adhere to, and are unconscious of the evil they are really doing, besides many who take a more or less honest refuge in inconsistency.’ [iii] Thus encouraged,Gladstone pressed ahead with his pamphlet.

But when he actually saw the text, Acton was taken back: ‘The result is to demand of the Catholics security against Ultramontanism under pale of losing their claim to Liberal, to national respect and support – in reality, under pain of a tremendous No Popery cry.’ Gladstone was ‘deaf’ to Acton’s ‘political, spiritual and other obvious arguments against publication.’ [i] Since one of his intentions was to divide the Ultramontanes from the liberal Catholics, the fact that Acton of all men was driven to say ‘I should meet his challenge on my own account’, ought to have given him pause for thought; that it did not is a sign of the headwind behind the former Prime Minister.

As he explained to Granville: ‘My proper and main motive has been this: the conviction that I have that they (Roman Catholics) are waiting in one vast conspiracy, for an opportunity to direct European war to the re-establishment by force of the temporal power … I desire in homely language to do the little in my power to put a spoke in their wheel’. He acknowledged that ‘the priest party will be furious’, but he hoped to embarrass the ‘moderate men’ into doing ‘their duty.’[ii] Had Newman ‘possessed will and “character” enough, he ought to have been in the same noble conflict for the truth’ as Döllinger;[iii] Gladstone’s pamphlet might smoke him – and others – out. It was an indication of the effect of ant-Catholicism on his thinking that Gladstone failed to see that ‘the simple fact of the matter was that if a Catholic accepted Infallibility, he was one of those attacked … Protest as he might, Gladstone had thrown the gauntlet down before all Catholics, including his liberal friends.’[iv]

[i] McElrath, The Syllabus of Pius IX, p. 228, Acton letter, 4 November, 1874.

[ii] Ramm, Gladstone-Granville Corr. II,  p. 458.

[iii] McClelland, Gladstone and Manning, p. 161.

[iv] McElrath, p. 229.

 

[i] Josef L. Altholz and John Powell, ‘Lord Ripon, and the Vatican Decrees, 1874’, in Albion, vo. 22, no. 3, 1990, pp.450-451.

[ii] Gladstone diaries VIII, p. 537.

[iii] J.Altholx and D. McElrath (eds.), The Correspondence of Lord Acton, volume I, (Cambridge, 1871), p. 46.

Politics & Religion

07 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Politics

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When I was young, my father, who rarely spoke about such things anyway, advised me never to talk about politics or religion, so running a blog which combines the two is not, it is safe to say, what he’d have advised. Most of us will be familiar with the claim that ‘social justice’ was at the heart of what Jesus came to do, and that to be a Christian means to be left-wing. Catholics are not the only Christians to be aware that their leaders speak with more confidence on such matters than they do on doctrine and dogma. But is it so?

The Gospel is directed at each of us, and it brings us the good news not that we are saved in this world and that all will be well, but that we are loved by God and that through His Son He has wrought our salvation. It is aimed at converting us, at changing our hearts and minds, and by doing that, by conforming us more to God’s will, helping us be part of a change. Were each of us to behave as God wants us to behave, then the world would become a better place. But our impact, we might complain can only be local; local is good, and is better than no impact. We exist in a society profoundly suspicious of Christians and Christianity, and if we are honest we’d have to admit that the behaviour of some in all churches is part of what has created that atmosphere. As ever when one group in society preaches a moral reformation, any shortcomings in its members will be used mercilessly to smear the vast majority of people in that church who lead blameless and even praiseworthy lives; the critic with a hostile agenda is not interested on those people, he obsesses only on the black sheep. But, of course, he does so not for the reasons Our Lord did – to save them – but to use them as sticks with which to beat others.

Which, of course, brings us back to where we started, which is that our faith becomes a political weapon in the hands of those who would seek to mobilise us for agendas which are not our agenda. Attempts to do this are best resisted. The individual can make up his or her mind as to how much their faith would let them vote for candidate x or y – but no one should pretend that that will advance the kingdom of God as much as dealing with their own sense of sin and walking with God’s laws would. It is a mark of our sinful nature that men and women should have so much more certainty in their secular political solutions than they appear to have in the teachings of orthodox Christianity.

Recently, at my Church, we had a missionary priest, who spoke of his work in the poorest, and some of the most dangerous parts of Africa. He did not talk of bringing social justice, but of bringing Christ to those who had not known Him, and what the people who received Him got from that great gift. I had no idea what his politics were, but I knew a real Christian when I met one. He spoke of the need to witness to the hope that is in us – I just wish I could do it as well as he did.

‘We are Church’?

06 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition

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It is a peculiarity of our Western society’s development that so much emphasis is now placed on the individual; this is something relatively new. For most of history, and for many societies still, it is the family unit, or someother social unit such as the tribe, which has mattered, and where the individual had found his or her place. That is not to say that the individual has not mattered, he or she always has, but it is to say that the individual has usually been seen as part of a wider whole. What does this have to do with religion? Quite a lot, I think.

We did not get the Bible from any one individual, nor do we, in our age, get to decide what is scripture. It may be significant in this respect that nowadays, as well as trying to interpret Scripture by the light of our individual reasoning, there is also a tendency afoot to ‘add’ to Scripture in the form of ‘gospels’ rejected by the Church more than 1500 years ago. The called-out community – the Church – received books from their ancestors – who were part of the group. These books were not designed to be studied by individuals, they were designed to be read in Church, as part of a cllective act of worship. So, we owe the BIble to the community of the Church. That modern man can say otherwise, simply reflects the process of egotism so common in our world; no one knows the Bible except through the tradition of the Church. There are no verses in the Bible which tell us the books of the Bible.

Similarly, where the family or the tribal unit is concerned, worship is a collective act; one might indeed, as the Lord suggested, withdraw to a quiet place to pray by oneself, but it was the public acts of worship around which the Church was constructed; the Eucharist is a shared act in which we gather to offer worship to God and to receive the body and blood of the Lord. The priest is no more than the leader of the gathered community who makes the sacrifice for us – he stands in Christ’s place, not in any right of his own; he is the servant of the servants of God. In such a world there is no place for the ‘rock star’ priest. It is the collective – the Church – which serves and is fed.

Again, in such units, there is no question about the value of children. One of the things which singled out the early Christians from their fellows in the Roman Empire was that they did not resort to abortion, exposing new-born children to the elements to kill them, or other means of contraception. Every child was a gift from God, every child was ‘meant to be’. The notion of putting one’s selfish interests first was clearly abroad – as shown by the use of abortificents – but Christians formed a commuity where the interests of God’s will predominated.

The use, by the Church, of the language of family is not accidental. It comes from jesus himself. If our society loses sight of the unique role played by fathers, it will be badly placed to understand why Jesus refers to ‘the Father’ and not just ‘the parent’. Attempts, in the cause of the western ideology of ‘gender equality’ to pretend that men and women have interchangeable functions in all things, a re all directed to the role of the individual, perhaps because the ideologues do not see the value of families – or see in them an obstacle to their own objectives.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Our ancestors get a vote. We are not the first Christians, and gloom-mongers and ‘the end is nigh’ merchants apart – we shall not be the last. We need to situate ourselves as part of this larger and wider family. The voices of others remind us that we are not alone.

Being Saved

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Salvation

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When Christians say they are ‘saved’, what do they mean? Let us begin, as we should, with what Our Lord says. To be saved, we must believe:

Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.

Jesus goes on to say: “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life”. So, as simple as that. If we have faith, we are saved. But Jesus does not stop there. One problem with the way we read the Gospel is that it tends to be in chunks, when, if you have ever seen early codices, you will see it was meant to be read in its entirety; chapters and verses are relatively novel; designed to help us, our fallen nature so often ensures it does no such thing.

Jesus told those who followed him asking for more bread: “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world”, to which “They said to Him, ‘Lord, give us this bread always’”. To clear up any doubt, Jesus told them: “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.” We are told, now, by some, that this is a sort of metaphor, that all food gives us life, or some other explanation, but Jesus is clear. Indeed, he was so clear that the Jews listening were shocked. How could the son of Joseph be the ‘bread’ come down from heaven, and how could a man give them his flesh and blood to drink?

This was the perfect opportunity for Jesus to reassure them that he was not speaking literally. Why should they have thought he was? In verses 54-58 Jesus uses the word ‘trogo’. This is a word found only five times in the New Testament, and these are four of those times. It means ‘to chew’ or to ‘gnaw’, and in Greek is often used to describe the feeding habits of cattle and pigs. Up to this point in the Gospel, Jesus had been using the more usual word, ‘esthio’ (verses 49-53 all use it), so in changing the word he uses, Jesus is emphasising the literal nature of what he was saying; that was why the Jews took fright. He was telling them that to be saved we must eat his body and his blood – the connotations of cannibalism and of non-kosher food horrified his listeners – as he knew it would. He had ample opportunity to reassure them he was not talking literally. Indeed, as some left him, he had every reason to do so. He could quite easily have stopped many leaving him, but he did not do so.

He asked the Apostles if they wished to go; they did not, even thought they did not understand. It was only when they came to the Last Supper that they understood. That is why from the beginning. Christians have met to worship and to consume his body and his blood. St Paul passed this on to the Corinthians, as he had received it from the Apostles. Paul is clear about the literal nature of what was passed on to him, as he tells the Corinthians:

For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

Jesus told us “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life”. So, yes, we must believe in Him as Lord, but we must also partake of His body and His blood. Dos that mean there is no other way to be saved? God alone decides who will be saved, and anyone who pronounces on that issue takes upon him or herself the power of God – and I suspect God will not be mocked in that way, He is a merciful and compassionate God, who alone knows the devices and desires of our hearts, and who, alone, can read what is written there. He is the only Just Judge, and we can leave such questions to Him. Our part is to serve obediently where we feel we have been called.

Dagon fish hats revisited

02 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Blogging, Faith

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fish_h62

As we come to the end of this short series on anti-Catholic polemic, coincidentally, a Twitter follower retweeted this post from 2014 on Dagon fish hats and other nonsense.

It reminded me of the enduring power of sensationalist writing, as well as of the enduring influence of anything which reinforces peoples’ prejudices. The original piece dated to January 2014, and despite reading it then, Bosco continues to tell us that ‘dagon fish hats’ are proof that the Catholic Church is really some sort of pagan Babylonizn cult. When challenged on his sources, Bosco says he’s never read Hislop and gets it all from archaeology. He cannot, of course, cite on reputable archaeological source, which is not surprising because there is not one. Hislop had a vivid imagination, and a detestation of the Catholic Church, not, of course, that he had any knowledge of it in real life. One example of the depth of his ignorance will do. He wrote that:

 “In the Litany of the Mass, the worshippers are taught thus to pray:God Hidden, and my Saviour, have mercy upon us.” Whence can this invocation of the “God Hidden” have come, but from the ancient worship of Saturn, the “Hidden God”? 

In the first place, no such words form part of any Mass. But, and here is how this whole thing works, Hislop had read (just like Bosco has read) the work of one William M’Gavin, another Scotsman with an anti-Papist bent who produced a series of tracts which had wide circulation in the virulently anti-Catholic atmosphere of early nineteenth century Scotland. Hislop, like Bosco and others, had read something somewhere which confirmed his prejudice; why sully the purity of pure ignorance by accessing some real facts.

The anti-Catholic has an implicit and firm faith in his prejudice. Generations of anti-Catholic propaganda have left a deep sediment of rubbish in which otherwise intelligent people can genuinely argue heatedly that fellow Christians are really worshipping ‘Semiramis’ and bowing to ‘idols’ as an act of worship. As with McGavin’s nonsense about the Mass, a few moments study could show them the error of their ways, but they do not want to be shown the error of their ways, theor prejudice comforts them, it stops them having to think about the reasons why some of us joined the Catholic Church; it stops them, dread horror, from having a real explanation as to why they do not join it.

Fulton Sheen was right when he commented that: ‘There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.’ Many, such as Bosco, do not even know where they got their prejudice from. They sometimes say they have it from ex-Catholics, not for a moment stopping to consider whether they would, for example, trust an ex-Republican to offer an accurate assessment of the Republican Party/ The modern dealer in this mind-rotting nonsense is Jack Chick, whose tracts are simple enough to be taken at one sitting by the simple-minded, and the credulous. He simple repeddles the bigotry of M’Gavin and Hislop. The whole thing is a circular operation.

Whose purpose does this serve? Lies are always at the service of the Father of Lies, who loves nothing better than to sow hatred and dissent among Christians. He has been doing it from the moment there were Christians, and he will continue to exploit our weakness until the Good Lord comes again. Heaven knows there are plenty of things to be said against the conduct of the Catholic Church down the years, as there are against any organisation run by members of a fallen race, without the need to resort to obvious twaddle. But if it is perfection we seek in a Church, then we shall have to await the Second Coming. We are sinners all, and that we do as well as we do is only because with God’s help we can fight the good fight and spread the good news.

It genuinely saddens me to see Christian men and women spreading lies that can so easily be seen to be lies by those lacking the need for confirmation bias. It is a sign that the Father of Lies can penetrate even the best defences. For those who continue to peddle this stuff, I pray; but I also ask them to do some serious thinking and praying of their own, because they are in a trap and suffering from a delusion.

 

Primitivism: a common error?

01 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Bible, Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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There is a persistent strain in Christianity and Islam which emphasises that the nearer to the source, the purer the water; in both faiths we have seen, and we see, a search for ancient practices and belief. But the assumption behind this belief needs questioning, resting, as it does, on questionable assumptions.

The first of these is the notion that we can, in fact, extract a clear idea of ancient practice and belief from the surviving sources. Those scholars who have questioned whether there was in fact any concept of orthodoxy in the ancient church have emphasised a plurality of practice and implied something similar about belief; I am not entirely in agreement with them, but they have a point. We can construct only from what survives, and what survives will not give us a picture of everything, and even if it did, it would include much that is not orthodox. We could, of course, relive old arguments about Arianism, but on the whole I would advise against it (not least since there are  ways in which we often rehearse them).

The second assumption to be questioned is the idea that what is older is purer in some way. Any history of heresy will tell you that heretical ideas go back to the beginning – we can see St Paul criticising them, and SS Peter, John and Jude all warn about those teaching incorrectly; from the beginning understanding and misunderstanding are mixed.

The third assumption is the one that implies that later is somehow more corrupt. This depends on a further assumption, which is that the Apostles understood the fullness of the relevation of Christ; there seems little evidence that this was the case. The assumption seems to be that at Pentecost the Apostles received not only the inspiration of the Spirit to speak in tongues and to go out as missionaries, but that they had a ful understanding of the nature of God as Trinity, and of Jesus as wholly-human and wholly-divine. If that were so, it was forgotten at once, as otherwise, when various heretics advanced what turned out to be misunderstandings of these things, the early Church would have cited Apostolic testimony to disprove them; this did not happen. Instead, the church did the hard work of trying to reach agreement on verses from Scripture which could be, were, and still are, read in different ways. Would it really be such a good idea to abandon these advances in understanding? On what ground, given the questioning of the various assumptions embedded in the argument that older is purer?

We are the inheritors of a rich and varied tradition of Christian practice and belief.  No doubt we inherit some bad things and some good, but we should take care not to discard what is old simply because it is not new.  To trespass on Catholic grief, it seems to me that this was one of the problems with the way Vatican II was interpreted; those who wanted to make all things new because they disliked the old, used it as an excuse to do something they already wanted to do.  There was a similar development in Anglicanism in this country which I regret hugely – the abandoning of the Book of Common Prayer.

What is old and still works is sanctified by the use of our ancestors; we should not lightly abandon their heritage in pursuit of a mythical past.

Changing Churches: a reflection

29 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Easter, Faith

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Whitby Abbey

To day is the anniversary of my reception into the Church. I was not born a Catholic. I was baptised in a Methodist chapel, and I attended another Methodist chapel as a child. On the wall above the pulpit was a banner proclaiming: ‘God is love’; do not ask how, but I knew it was the truth. I knew God loved me and I had faith in Him, and even though, after the age of 9 (when my mother became seriously ill) I stopped going to the chapel, I read my Bible and knew God loved me.

Always interested in history, I read voraciously, and one thing that struck me was that there was a great caesura between the sort of Christianity practiced in the Middle Ages, and that which I had encountered. I read Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and Chaucer, and I looked with wonder at the art of the period before the 1530s, and then I found something quite different, plainer, dourer, meaner, succeeding it. But as I read more literature, I discovered that that old sensibility – a Christianity shaped by its English location, survived. One sees that in the work of one of my favourite poets George Herbert, and also in Andrews and Eliot, but I see it, too, in Bunyan and John and Charles Wesley. There is what I can only call an English sensibility which runs like a golden threat through Christianity in these islands. I found it in the High Anglican tradition of Newman, Keble and Pusey. It is expressed perfectly in Eliot’s Little Gidding:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

We encounter the Eternal in prayer and at the Eucharist, but we do so in a particular place, and we come to that place with the baggage not only of who we are, but of the places which have shaped us. In Eliot’s words:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

That last sense, which has suffused me in many a church, is ‘England, and nowhere’. It is a tradition which, for an Englishman begins with Augustine’s mission, but which acknowledges that Bede’s description of what happened at the Synod of Whitby in 664 has implications for what followed.

In English Orthodox circles, there is a desire to find in St Wilfrid’s opponents, the voice of a more ‘authentic’ British Christianity. That is understandable; if one rejects Rome, then the decision taken at Whitby to go with Roman ways must be a caesura. But if one takes Wilfrid’s arguments as seriously as the Synod did, they become compelling reasons for seeing the long Catholic tradition as authentically English. As the Saint explained when dealing with the contested question of the date of Easter:

Wilfrid then named all the major places in the world that the Roman method was adopted and intimated that it was only the Picts and the British who obstinately did otherwise and were ‘foolishly attempting to fight against the whole world.’ Colman objected to Wilfrid saying that they were foolish citing that they followed the apostle reckoned worthy to recline on the breast of the Lord (John).

At this Wilfrid explained that actually John celebrated Easter according to the decrees of Mosaic law from the evening of the 14th day of the first month (Nisan) irrespective of whether it fell on the Sabbath or not, whereas the Celtic calculation made Easter the first Sunday between the 14th and 20th day of the first moon. Wilfrid explained that the Roman calculation was based on Peter’s preaching in Rome where he waited for the rising of the moon on the 14th day of the first moon and if in the morning it was the Lord’s day, then Easter was on that day, if not, he waited for the first Sunday up to the 21st and began the Easter ceremonies the night before so it came about that Easter Sunday was kept on the first Sunday between the 15th and the 21st day of the first moon. Wilfrid then faced Colman and said ‘in your calculation you follow neither John or Peter, neither the law nor the Gospel

It was either the authority of Peter, or of whom? In the end, the only ‘other’ was oneself. Tempting as it is (because many I respect do it) to see ‘Celtic Christianity’ through some modern Romantic haze, as deeply ‘spiritual’ and personal, in contrast with Rome’s desire for conformity, that seemed to me to buy into a legend which fits with the contemporary desire for a free-wheeling ‘spirituality’ untied to dogma. Those who want that sort of thing need to find (or perhaps invent by retrofitting) their own ‘tradition’. For me, reaching back to Whitby, it was clear there was only one direction of travel. The phone call to my local priest followed.

Misreading the Bible: Jesus’ brothers and sisters

27 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Bible, Blogging, Catholic Tradition

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Yesterday I dealt with the common Evangelical misreading of what the Bible has to say about worship and idols. Today’s target is the misreading of the NT passages about the family of Our Lord. Truly there are no new errors under the sun. There are, however, repetitions of errors by those unversed in history.

In the fourth century a man called Heldvius wrote a book arguing that Mary was not a perpetual virgin and that the brothers and sisters of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were uterine siblings. This ran counter to what Christians had always believed, and St Jerome responded with a book called  The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary  in which he suggested that they were either cousins on Mary’s side, or children of a previous marriage of St Joseph.

The word used by the Evangelist is adelfos/adelphos. For monoglots who insist that the word brother must mean uterine brother, here is Strong’s defintion:

 Definition
  1. a brother, whether born of the same two parents or only of the same father or mother
  2. having the same national ancestor, belonging to the same people, or countryman
  3. any fellow or man
  4. a fellow believer, united to another by the bond of affection
  5. an associate in employment or office
  6. brethren in Christ
    1. his brothers by blood
    2. all men
    3. apostles
    4. Christians, as those who are exalted to the same heavenly place

This, of course, presents no problem for the Infallibilists among us, who proclaim on the basis of their own unaided reading of the KJV that that it has to mean uterine brother. Such a reading defies both the dictionary and most of Christian tradition. It also runs counter to usage elsewhere in the Bible and is, were another one needed, it is an example of the way in which such people tend to make it up as they go along (you won’t find Anglicans or Lutherans indulging in this).

For example, in Genesis 13:8 and 14:16, the word adelphos was used to describe the relationship between Abraham and Lot; however, these two men did not share a brother relationship, but one of uncle and nephew; so does it mean Anbraham and Lot were brothers? Of course not.  Similarly, Jacob is called the “brother” of his uncle Laban (Gen. 29:15). Kish and Eleazar were the sons of Mahli. Kish had sons of his own, but Eleazar had no sons, only daughters, who married their “brethren,” the sons of Kish. These “brethren” were really their cousins (1 Chr. 23:21–22). So, if we are going to insist on a single meaning for ‘adelfos’ then we are going to find ourselves with a pile of egg on our face.

There is an excellent post on this and links to other other explorations of the problem. You will note that like all true apologists, this one deals with care and in detail with the evidence; not once does he state that it must be as he says because the word in English is ‘brothers’ – as though it has only one meaning in English.  When I refer to fellow Christians as brothers in Christ, I am not implying that my late father and mother had lots more children.  When my Trades Union colleague refers to his ‘brothers’ in the Union, he is not implying that he is related to them by birth.

When the Holy Family go into exile in Egypt, there are three of them; when they go to present the child in the Temple, there are three of them; when they go to take the young Jesus to the Temple when he is 12, there are three of them. At the crucifixion Jesus does not commend His mother to Her other sons, he commends her to St John, His cousin. Of course, it could be that all those sons were hiding, or, as Bosco maintains, that they were not Christians, or that they just happened to have the same names as the sons of Mary and Clopas. Of course, it could also be that the Church and most Christians for most of history have it right. The Lutherans are wrong, the Catholics and the Orthodox are wrong, the Anglicans are wrong, but a few monoglot Englishmen with access to a dictionary know better than the people who spoke kione Greek. We see, once more, the effects of Original Sin at work. Mankind fell because it sought to be as wise as God. Some of those ‘born again’ claim such wisdom, and neglect, alas, to take advantage of the accumulated wisdom of Christians down the ages.

Two Babylons?

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Blogging, Faith

≈ 83 Comments

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Our friend Bosco is fond of writing about Catholicism as the ‘religion of Nimrod’ and calling Catholics worshippers of Semiramis. He seems not to know that such stuff, which nowadays tends to be spread by Jack Chick and his devotees, derives from an early nineteenth century Scottish clergyman, Alexander Hislop, who wrote an anti-Catholic book called ‘The Two Babylons’. Whilst seldom recommending Wikipedia as a source to my students, I did ask Bosco to look it up, as it contains helpful comments and links which, essentially, show that the book is based on out-dated ‘scholarship’ that was not strong when it was written, and which has been comprehensively debunked since. To take one example, key to Bosco’s views:

Lester L. Grabbe  [an expert of Judaisim and ancient history] has highlighted the fact that Hislop’s entire argument, particularly his association of Ninus with Nimrod, is based on a misunderstanding of historical Babylon and its religion.[1] Grabbe also criticizes Hislop for portraying the mythological queen Semiramis as Nimrod’s consort, despite the fact that she is never even mentioned in a single text associated with him,[1] and for portraying her as the “mother of harlots”, even though this is not how she is depicted in any of the texts where she is mentioned.[1]

In 2011 a critical edition was published.[13] Although Hislop’s work is extensively footnoted, some commentators (in particular Ralph Woodrow) have stated that the document contains numerous misconceptions, fabrications, logical fallacies, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and grave factual errors.[14]

Woodrow is an interesting case, as his Christianity occupies the same end of the spectrum as Bosco’s, and he published a book based on Hislop. He, however, had the grace and the guts to (at some cost to himself as the book sold well) to withdraw the book when he realised how baseless its claims were. I wonder if Bosco has the same intelligence, humility and honesty? After 5 years of experiencing him, I am, sadly, betting that he will simply ignore all of this and then repeat the same of script. He has no argument left, just an immovable prejudice against the Catholic Church, which only a miracle can shift; but miracles happen.

As Wiki puts it in relation to the nonsense about Nimrod and Semiramis:

Much of Hislop’s work centers on his association of the legendary Ninus and his semi-historical wife Semiramis with the Biblical Nimrod. Hellenistic histories of the Ancient Near East tended to conflate their faint recollections of the deeds of ancient kings into legendary figures who exerted far more power than any ancient king ever did. In Assyria, they invented an eponymous founder of Nineveh named Ninus, who supposedly ruled 52 years over an empire comparable to the Persian Empire at its greatest extent. Ninus’s wife Semiramis was in turn a corruption of the historical figure Shammuramat, regent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 811 BC.[7] Hislop takes Ninus as a historical figure, and associates him with the Biblical figure Nimrod, though he was not the first to do so. The Clementine literature made the association in the 4th Century AD. An influential belief throughout the Middle Ages was that Ninus was the inventor of Idolatry,[8] a concept that Hislop clearly drew upon. However, Hislop wrote before the historical records of the ancient near east had been thoroughly decoded and studied, and it became apparent in the decades after he wrote that there never was any such figure as Ninus, and that the Greek authors whom he quotes were without credibility on the subject.[9]

And yet it is on such stuff Bosco relies. Why, you might ask, waste time on such poor stuff? The answer is simple. If you look on Amazon, which is still selling the book, you will see hordes of people praising it to the skies. some even saying that if it were not true, why has the Catholic Church not responded to it? That is a bit like saying why has it not responded to David Icke’s claims that the world is ruled by reptiles? Incidentally, and coincidentally, Wiki adds this:

Author and conspiracy theorist David Icke incorporates Hislop’s claims about Semiramis into his book The Biggest Secret, claiming that Semiramis played a key role in the establishment of a global conspiracy run by Reptilian aliens, whom he asserts is secretly controlling humanity.[18]

There is something heartbreaking about the thought of human beings so adrift from the real message of Christ’s Gospel, and the truth about His Church, that they find refuge and a truth they can believe in such sources. St Paul’s verdict applies:

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

The good news, for Bosco and for all who are misled by such toxins, is that the Church is there, opening its arms, which are the arms of God, and has the power of Christ to forgive all our sins and to help guide us on the road to Heaven.