Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Catholicism and the Full Truth
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| Father Robert Behnke |
Every year for the past 38 years, two events occur simultaneously toward the end of January: the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity – sometimes called the Chair of Unity Octave – and the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade (along with Doe v. Bolton) ruling. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has a much longer history, having been initiated in 1908 by Father Paul Wattson, who was a convert from Anglicanism to the Catholic Faith. During the past 38 years since Roe v. Wade – and that number of years is engraved in my memory, because it coincides exactly with the number of years I have been a priest, Roe coming in January and my ordination the following May – so over 38 years I have become – and here I am not at all certain what precise word to use – perhaps more skeptical, less enthused, less hopeful, more hesitant – about the prospect of the union of the Catholic Church with any of the literally thousands of Protestant ecclesial communities. It is not that I do not pray for it, and hope for it, and in my younger days worked for it by means of engaging in common projects with some Protestants. The Holy Father again this year stressed that the union of all Christians must be the prayer and the work of every Christian, simply because it is the expressed will of Our Lord: …ut unum sint…. But it is what I detect, quite frankly, about contraception and abortion, and more recently now same sex unions, coming from much of the leadership of the mainline Protestant ecclesial communities – the Lutherans and the Methodists and the Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ (and not so much the Baptists) but most especially the Episcopalians (they prefer to be called Episcopals, I have been told) – the American Anglicans – that convinces me that union of these groups with the one, holy, Catholic, apostolic Church is far down the road. What Pope Benedict has started with the ordinariates, making it possible for Anglicans to come into full communion with the Catholic Church, is, I believe, a ray of hope; I believe Pope Benedict is truly the pope of genuine Christian unity. But those seeds are just now planted, and they will take a long time to grow, and their growth is itself as yet undetermined. Meanwhile, most mainline American Protestant ecclesial communities and their leadership are, at very best, wishy-washy about issues of life and marriage and sexuality, and, at worst, some of their leaders have referred to abortion as a “blessing” and even “a sacrament,” so condemnation and disgust of all that, rather than unity, must characterize the true Church’s stance toward those pseudo-Christian “leaders.”
If you saw any of the 400,000 participants in the March for Life last week on EWTN (which, unless you were in Washington last week, was the only way you could view the march, as it was otherwise ignored by the rest of the media), you may have heard a group of young people – probably high school age – chanting over and over as they walked, Hey, Obama, your mama, chose life. What are the chances that those young people were of some faith other than the Catholic Faith? Yet, just in time for the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Washington-based Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) pledged to bring its …moral force to bear… to ensure …full coverage of abortion services… through Obamacare's tax-funded state insurance exchanges set to begin in 2014. You must recall that, as part of last year's deal with pro-life congressional Democrats, President Obama signed an executive order that his administration claims will prevent federal funding of abortions. At the time, RCRC denounced that order …an unconscionable deal… they called it, for offering any potential impediment to government-facilitated abortion. Pro-life skeptics doubt that the executive order ultimately will have much legal force. And pro-abortion rights groups like RCRC will determinedly push against it. Mostly mainline Protestant groups founded RCRC (originally less euphemistically called the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights) in 1973 in the immediate wake of Roe v. Wade, to ensure widespread religious backing for the U.S. Supreme Court's overthrow of state restrictions on abortion. For years RCRC was based in the United Methodist Building United Methodist Church
The obvious and logical difficulty and trouble with all this for any genuine Christian who hopes and prays for genuine Christian unity is that it all presupposes what C. S. Lewis called, in his book of the same name, mere Christianity – watered-down least-common-denominator Christianity - which in turn presupposes three other principles, all of which are demonstrably false. First, mere Christianity assumes that the beliefs most Christians hold in common are somehow more central or important to Christianity than the beliefs over which they differ, so disagreement of the issues of life and marriage and sex can be overcome by agreement about Bible translations and the sinfulness of racism or terrorism. Second, mere Christianity assumes that it has within itself the means to preserve itself when, in fact, one of the things it leaves out is the very authority principle so essential to self-preservation, the one thing required to prevent any group from claiming whatever it wants to be true, the devastating results of which are easily demonstrated through both logic and history (Luther started what became the first Protestant church, and there was just one Protestant church for about one minute; now there are thousands, none of which hold exactly identical beliefs); Catholics call that essential authority principle the papacy, the Petrine office, and genuine Catholics cling to it like a lifeline in this age of nuttiness and absolute confusion. And third, mere Christianity assumes that the differences among various Christian groups are insufficiently powerful to undermine the effectiveness of Christian witness throughout the world, rendering Christianity not so much a witness to truth as the ultimate witness to the proposition that truth is unknowable (if even Christians cannot agree about it). The illogic of this assumption is obvious to anyone who has studied the secularization of the Western world since the Protestant Revolt.
Now even the Christian tradition in any form - Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopals - carries within it, as the Second Vatican Council taught so luminously, a number of graces provided by God for growth in holiness and salvation, and so by virtue of these graces it remains immensely powerful even when non-Catholic Christianity limps along incomplete. (Here I want to move into a brief personal digression. My dad’s father was Catholic; his mother was Lutheran. They had six kids; numbers 1, 3, & 5 were baptized Catholic; numbers 2, 4, & 6 were baptized Lutheran, but 0ne of these became Catholic as an adult. My grandmother was a good woman, a holy woman, a faithful wife and a faithful Lutheran, and perhaps a better Christian than my grandfather, but she never arrived at the fullness of truth, and I am convinced that served as a handicap throughout her life, an obstacle for her growth in holiness. How could it be otherwise, her lacking the graces of the seven sacraments except for Baptism, and especially lacking throughout her life the graces which come from worthy reception of the Most Blessed Sacrament?) So it is easy to see why, having experienced Christ even through an incomplete tradition, a Methodist or a Lutheran Christian can overlook what may be missing. He may notice it not at all, or regard it as decidedly secondary, or airily dismiss it as false. But as soon as one notices and begins to examine seriously the differences among various Christian bodies, one must surely figure out that mere and watered-down Christianity is insufficient, because it is not the mind of Christ. Mere Christianity simply begs too many questions; the radical departure of mainline Protestantism from the ancient tradition which for nearly 2000 years condemned contraception and abortion and any sexual activity outside of marriage shines a harsh beam of light upon the insufficiency of mere and watered-down Christianity for the one who wants to follow Jesus fully, precisely and exactly. Moreover, these questions are, or ought to be, particularly hard to ignore in the face of the sheer size of the Catholic Church in comparison with all the others. Yet so many Protestants seem unwilling to notice even this elephant in the room. The complacency of Protestant ecclesial communities, and especially of their leadership, evidences a certain complacency also about true unity, a complacency incomprehensible to a committed Catholic who may also be committed to the goal of the reunion of all Christians in one communion—as it was to Blessed John Henry Newman even while he was still an Anglican. Newman understood that Christian unity is founded on the individual’s conversion of mind and heart to all that Our Lord teaches, which is why Newman became a Catholic.
Ecumenism, Christian unity, involves many things, from simple acts of kindness to those in different Christian “communions” to formal explorations of theological differences, in the hope of improving relations and resolving such differences through means which both parties actually accept. Such ecumenical initiatives are important insofar as they remove unnecessary obstacles to unity. But ultimately, ecumenism cannot avoid the question of conversion. At some point, the non-Catholic party in ecumenical activity, in the quest for Christian unity, must learn to recognize the gifts he can receive only from the Catholic Church as not only essential to not a mere watered-down but to a full Christianity, but as unattainable by any means short of union with the institution of the Catholic Church. At some point the Protestant must recognize that Christianity cannot be full and complete without the authority of Peter, without a legitimate priesthood, and without all seven sacraments. Again, the issues surrounding life and marriage and sexuality demonstrate this: which other Christian church teaches without equivocation, and proclaims from the mouth of the one man who stands on earth in the place of Jesus Christ, that artificial contraception and abortion are always intrinsically evil, that marriage is and can only be between a man and a woman? And in recognizing this truth, the Protestant must also recognize that the truth cannot be possessed without institutional unity. Or, to put it another way, the full truth cannot be appropriated without conversion to Catholicism.
The Gospel today shows us that, even in the fiercest of storms, there is only one boat in which it is safe to be; there is no fleet of safe ships on the Sea of Galilee , nor is there a fleet of safe churches. This possession of the certainty of truth is worth conversion, as is every other element of the authentic Catholic tradition, every good in it that has been given to us by God as one more key and critical portion of His plan for our union with Him for all eternity. At some point in the quest for Christian unity, at some point in the ecumenical task, the non-Catholic party must recognize the remarkable weakness of leaders and groups and institutions that equivocate and obfuscate so stubbornly on the greatest moral question of our time: is it right or wrong to murder an unborn baby? Is it not clear that this equivocation and obfuscation – calling abortion an issue of “reproductive health” and “reproductive choice” - misses the full truth revealed in Jesus Christ? Will the sterile amorality of groups like RCRC prevail in their quest to insinuate abortion into every aspect of American life? Or will more and more Protestants care enough about, as Our Lord prayed in His prayer for unity on Holy Thursday night, being …consecrated in the truth… care enough about the truth to be willing to leave the comfort zone of Protestantism with such its of belief such that can even justify the wholesale murder of children? Leaving it all behind is what Blessed John Henry Newman did. There is no other path to unity. The convinced Protestant must “swim the Tiber .” He must embrace Rome Rome
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