To be deep in history is to cease to be Catholic Protestant Christian Self-Righteous?

In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, St. John Henry Newman wrote a phrase that a number of Catholics like to quote: St. John wasn’t speaking from a shallow triumphalism; a former cleric of the Church of England, he had immersed himself in the history of Christian belief, emerging a devout Catholic who could speak of both the primacy of conscience and the primacy of the pope without batting an eye at the First Vatican Council’s definition of papal infallibility.

Catholic

I myself am no deep student of the history of Christian doctrine, though I am familiar with the broad brushstrokes. Perhaps for that reason, I’ve always found the quote ironic, as history itself keeps so many people away from the full faith.

Like me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m now well-esconced in the Catholic Church, and don’t see myself leaving, but I did hold Catholicism at arm’s length for decades in no small part due to what I knew from history. The way you look at an event is often colored by your value system, by what you don’t learn as much as by what you learn, or even by which side of a sword your ancestors faced. There’s a reason some Orthodox still say, “Better the sultan’s turban than the bishop’s mitre”. I find it hard to understand the Baltic Crusades as anything other than a papally sanctioned land grab by German princes, while the Pornocracy is, believe it or not, even worse than Alexander VI.

One could go on. Things like this kept me pretty well entrenched in Protestantism long after I knew I found Catholicism attractive.

Christian

Why set all that aside? Part of it was a growing, painful awareness that Protestantism didn’t seem any better, and much of it is manifestly worse. The Catholic Church makes headlines in part because it emphasizes holiness to such an extreme degree — think of the evangelical counsels: chastity, poverty, obedience — that just about every scandal that touches the Church becomes instantly salacious.

This is true even when the scandal has nothing to do with sex. If you doubt me, think of that recent failed London real estate scandal. What makes it so scandalous? It’s not just that the Church lost a huge sum of money in an speculative investment that went south; it’s that it did so while going out of its way to condemn, rightly, Western Society’s culture of avaricious speculation, frequently portraying its own clergy as poor, humble, disinterested shepherds, with Pope Francis being a prime example.✝I do not mean to accuse Pope Francis of hypocrisy, as I’m not sure he portrays himselfas humble. But his biggest fans have certainly presented him that way, pointing, for example, to his change of residence.

I’ve already mentioned the temptation I had to abandon Christian faith, altogether, though I didn’t go into much detail. I still won’t, but history certainly had something to do with that. At the edge of what felt like an abyss into atheism, something had to change.

Protestant

I still didn’t want to embrace Catholicism. Right about the time I decided I couldn’t continue with the “personal interpretation of Scripture” as my guiding light, and had settled on either Catholicism, Episcopalianism, or Orthodoxy — The Song of Bernadette had cracked open the door to Catholicism, but I was still not quite ready to cross that threshold — I happened on a book titled, A History of Christianity. It was written by an Episcopal priest, which was perfect!

Surely a history of Christianity written by an Episcopal priest would grease the metaphorical skids that would lead me into the Episcopal Church, right? Yet when I finished with the book, I was calling up the local Catholic parish.

What on earth was wrong with me?

The book left me with the impression that the Catholic Church strives to transcend ethnic, regional, or especially national divisions, which to my mind is generally what one would expect from the true Church of God. Both the Church of England and the various Orthodox Churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox… notice a pattern?) came out as too beholden to their national princes, whoever those might be, and/or to their cultural identity. Don’t get me wrong, this can happen in the Catholic Church, too; you get plenty of national churches that are all too beholden to the princes, all to eager to portray themselves as a little too patriotic, enlightened, and so forth. The critical difference is that the papacy fought hard, and eventually with great success, for the independence of the bishops from the local, secular authority.✞Indeed, of all the failings I perceive in Pope Francis, the only one that really worries me is his handing the Church in China over to the Chinese Communist Party, while the best he and his Secretary of State can muster in their defense is that having the Communists arrest faithful Catholics while they install bishops not merely unapproved by the Vatican, but unsubmitted for approval, in plain violation of the terms of the agreement, is some sort of “progress” because they’re “talking” to each other. Worse, it seems the Nicaraguans may be about to get the same sweetheart deal.

When I read things like this, I wonder how many bishops have realized that this papacy has set the Church back more than a millennium.

There was also the matter of the evangelical counsels themselves, but that digression is for another day.

Self-Righteous?

I like to think that this path I took helps inoculate me somewhat from a self-righteous reading of history, in that, while I am like St. John Henry Newman in that I disagree strongly with those who say that a reading of history would compel anyone to abandon Catholicism, and indeed, the study of the history of Christianity helped bring about my own acceptance of the fullness of faith, I can’t quite bring myself to agree with him that it compels everyone to become Catholic in the same way.

Were we all creatures of pure reason, and we all had access to all the facts, then of course I would agree with the conclusion. But we are not creatures of pure reason, and we don’t all have access to all the facts. St. John Henry Newman’s notion of conscience as “the primordial voice of God” dates at least to St. Thomas Aquinas, and doubtless before then. If I might adapt an observation of the Second Vatican Council, We’ve had an awful lot of that over the centuries, from every level of our One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.✟Even popes can teach error, and often teach imperfectly even when they’re not in error. Infallibility is very limited. Being right isn’t enough; if we mix it with self-righteousness, then people perceive not so much the light of heaven as the heat of hell. Nor is it really an excuse to say, “I’m only human.” We must be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect:

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