A Protestant Scholar’s View of the Catholic Church

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 16, 26 April 1923, Page 17

A Protestant Scholar’s View of the Catholic Church

We are indebted to Father Antony Huonder, S.J., of Exaeten, Holland (says the Fortuity hIIy vine, St. Louis, U.S.A.), for the following valuable extract from a paper by Prof. Fairbairn (presumably Andrew Martin Fairbairn, the well-known Scottish Congregationalist), in the Contemporary Review, February to June, 1885, titled “Catholicism and Apologetics.” The passage occurs in the course of a sharp criticism of Ward, Lilly, and especially Newman, and is not without apologetic value. It runs as follows: “If to be at once the most permanent and extensive, the most plastic and inflexible, ecclesiastical organisation were the same thing as to be the most perfect embodiment and vehicle of religion, then the claim of Catholicism Mere simply indisputable. The man in search of an authoritative church may not hesitate, once let him assume that a visible and audible authority is of the essence of religion, and he has no choice; he must become, or get himself reckoned, a Catholic. The Roman Church assails his understanding

with invincible logic, and appeals to his imagination with irresistible charms. Her sons say proudly to him: 1 She alone is Catholic, continuous, venerable, august, the very Church Christ founded and His Apostles instituted and organised. She possesses all the attributes and notes of catholicity— unbroken apostolic succession, a constant tradition, an infallible chair, unity, sanctity, truth, and inviolable priesthood, a holy sacrifice, and efficacious Sacraments. The Protestant churches are but of yesterday, without the authority, the truth, or the ministries that can reconcile man to God; they are only a multitude of warring sects whose confused voices but protest their own insufficiency, whose impotence almost atones, for their sin of schism by the way it sets off the might, the majesty, and the unity of Rome. In contrast, she stands where her Master placed her, on the rock, endowed with the prerogatives and powers He gave, and against her the gates of hell will not prevail. Supernatural grace is hers and miracle; it watched over her cradle, has followed her in all her ways through all the centuries, and has not forsaken her even yet. She is not like Protestantism, a concession to the negative spirit, an unholy compromise with naturalism. Everything about her is positive and transcendent; she is the bearer of divine truth, is representative of the divine order, the supernatural living in the very and before the very’’ face of the natural. The saints, too, are hers, and the man she receives joins their communion, enjoys their goodly fellowship, feels their influence, participates in their merits, the blessings they distribute. Their earthly life made the past of the Church illustrious ; their heavenly activity binds the visible and invisible into unity, and lifts time into eternity. To honor the saints is,to honor sanctity, the Church which teaches man to love the holy 7 helps him to love holiness. And the Fathers are hers, their labors, .sufferings, martyrdoms were for her sake; she treasures their words and their works; her sons alone are able to say: c Athanasius and Chrysostom, Cyprian and Augustine, Anselm and Bernard, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are (tins, their wealth is our inheritance, at their feet we learn filial reverence, and divine wisdom.’ But rich as she is in persons, she is richer in truth, her worship is a glorious sacrament, her mysteries are a great deep. Hidden sanctities and meanings surround man; the sacramental principle invests the simplest things, acts and rites, with an awful yet most blissful significance, twines all worship now into a divine parable, which speaks the deep things of God, now into a medium of His gracious and consolatory approach to men and man’s awed and contrite, hopeful and prevailing, approach to Him. Symbols are deeper than words, speak when words become silent, gain where words lose meaning, and so in hours of holiest worship the Church teaches by symbols truths, language may not utter. And yet she knows better than any other how to use reasonable speech; the Fathers and doctors of theology have been hers. For every possible difficulty 7 of the reason, or heart, or the conscience, she has not one, but a thousand solutions. If men are gentle of heart, and do not like to think that all men without the Church must be lost, distinctions are made as to the body and soul of the Church, as to kinds and degrees of ignorance, softening stern doctrines into tenderness. If they have difficulties about infallibility, whether due to papal sins and blunders in the past, or freedom in the present, or progress in the future, they can easily be obviated by methods of interpretation and known and noted constitutional limitations. In the Church alone has casuistry become a science so perfect as to have a law and a cure for every real or possible case of conscience, in her schools theology has become a- completed science, which has systematised her body of truth, explicated her reason, justified her being and her claims. And so the Catholic Church is in a. sense altogether her own, not only an ecclesiastical institution, but a religion, a system able to guide the conscience, satisfy the heart, regulate the conduct, adjust and determine the relations of God and man.”