Based Catholic Quotes

As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.

God's love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it based on anything we do, and that 'anything' were to collapse, then God's love would crumble as well. But with the God of Jesus no such thing can possibly happen. People who realize this can live freely and to the full.

But the most catastrophic display of misogyny in all religion lies at the very heart of Christianity—in the story of the Virgin Mary. That Jesus was born of a virgin is a fundamental narrative upon which all Christianity is based. It is one that is carried through to Islam, where the Quran holds Mary in great esteem. The implications of this have historically been devastating to women. ...Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ as a virgin, with no man ever having touched her. She is therefore described as pure, chaste, undefiled, innocent—being the product of an “immaculate conception” herself (as per Catholic doctrine), and now hosting God’s immaculate son in her unblemished womb. What does this mean for women who are touched by men? Are their conceptions corrupted? Are their characters and bodies now impure or unchaste? Have they been “defiled”? ...Was all of Mary’s beauty, sanctity, chastity, and innocence confined to her vagina? Fetishizing Mary’s virginity—as Christians and Muslims both do—is a sickness that directly leads to a dangerous, unnatural glamorization of celibacy and sexual repression.” Excerpt From: Ali A. Rizvi. “The Atheist Muslim.” iBooks.

Secularism should not be equated with Stalinist dogmatism or with the bitter fruits of Western imperialism and runaway industrialisation. Yet it cannot shirk all responsibility for them, either. Secular movements and scientific institutions have mesmerised billions with promises to perfect humanity and to utilise the bounty of planet Earth for the benefit of our species. Such promises resulted not just in overcoming plagues and famines, but also in gulags and melting ice caps. You might well argue that this is all the fault of people misunderstanding and distorting the core secular ideals and the true facts of science. And you are absolutely right. But that is a common problem for all influential movements. For example, Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offence at this and retort that all these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity. Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion of his teachings. We can sympathise with this claim, but it would be a mistake to let Christianity off the hook so easily. Christians appalled by the Inquisition and by the Crusades cannot just wash their hands of these atrocities – they should rather ask themselves some very tough questions. How exactly did their ‘religion of love’ allow itself to be distorted in such a way, and not once, but numerous times? Protestants who try to blame it all on Catholic fanaticism are advised to read a book about the behaviour of Protestant colonists in Ireland or in North America. Similarly, Marxists should ask themselves what it was about the teachings of Marx that paved the way to the Gulag, scientists should consider how the scientific project lent itself so easily to destabilising the global ecosystem, and geneticists in particular should take warning from the way the Nazis hijacked Darwinian theories.

Moreover, his view was precisely the one that many English Protestants feared would result from a careful analysis of the New Testament text, namely that the wide-ranging variations in the tradition showed that Christian faith could not be based solely on scripture (the Protestant Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura), since the text was unstable and unreliable. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics must be right that faith required the apostolic tradition preserved in the (Catholic) church.

I assure you, we are bathed in love and mercy. We each have a Father, a Brother, a Friend, a Spouse of our soul, Center and King of our hearts, Redeemer and Savior; bent down over us, over our weakness, and our impotence like that of little children; with an inexpressible gentleness watching over us like the apple of his eye; Who said I will have mercy and not sacrifice; A Jesus haunted by the desire to save us by all means, Who has opened heaven under our feet; And we live too often like orphans, like abandoned children as if it were hell which had been opened under our feet. We are men of little faith.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

Lay Catholics and priests alike expected that Vatican II and the deliberations of a fifty-eight-member commission appointed to study the birth control issue would result in an end to the ban on artificial contraception. Instead, Pope Paul VI, negating the majority report of his own commission, issued the 1968 Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church's birth control prohibitions. Garry Wills asserts that Humanae Vitae was based on a minority report from the commission that emphasized the need for continuity in Church teachings. The teachings could not change because it had been the teaching for so long, and, if it changed, the Church would have to acknowledge that it had been in error about the teaching, and how would they explain what had happened to all the souls supposedly in hell for using artificial birth control?

The nub at the center of the notorious Roman Catholic sexual predation is an idolatry of the priest and of the priestly status that goes by the name of "clericalism." It is a malignity marked by a cult of secrecy; a high-flown theological misogyny that demeans all women and fosters an unbridled male supremacy; suppression of normal erotic desire; a hierarchical domination of priest over laypeople; and a basing of that power on threats of the doom-laden afterlife, drawn from a misreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That dominance came to an abrupt end with the creation and implementation of what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy. The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of the big cities.50 Some conservative political strategists admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy, though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a Southern, racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”51 Similarly, John Ehrlichman, special counsel to the president, explained the Nixon administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way: “We’ll go after the racists.”52 In Ehrlichman’s view, “that subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”53

Vatican’s secretly composed message to all of Germany’s Catholics. On Palm Sunday, 1937, the letter had been read by every priest, bishop, and cardinal across Germany to their congregations and three hundred thousand copies had been disseminated. Drafted by Munich’s Cardinal von Faulhaber and Pope Pius XI, it told German Catholics in carefully veiled terms that National Socialism was an evil religion based on racism that stood contrary to the church’s teachings and every man’s right to equality. It made reference to “an insane and arrogant prophet” without naming Hitler.

St. Thomas explains that for a law to be just, it must conform to the demands of reason and have an effect which is both good and for the benefit of those for whom it is intended. A law can cease to bind without revocation on the part of the legislator when it is clearly harmful, impossible, or irrational. It would certainly constitute an abuse of authenticity for a pope to forbid the celebration of so hallowed, venerable and Catholic a rite as the Tridentine Mass. Should it be done, there is a sound case to justify the faithful in resisting him, based upon accepted norms within Catholic theology. (p. 25).

Not being able to see this, culture-based explanations for economic development have usually been little more than ex post facto justifications based on a 20/20 hindsight vision. So, in the early days of capitalism, when most economically successful countries happened to be Protestant Christian, many people argued that Protestantism was uniquely suited to economic development. When Catholic France, Italy, Austria and southern Germany developed rapidly, particularly after the Second World War, Christianity, rather than Protestantism, became the magic culture. Until Japan became rich, many people thought East Asia had not developed because of Confucianism. But when Japan succeeded, this thesis was revised to say that Japan was developing so fast because its unique form of Confucianism emphasized co-operation over individual edification, which the Chinese and Korean versions allegedly valued more highly. And then Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea also started doing well, so this judgement about the different varieties of Confucianism was forgotten. Indeed, Confucianism as a whole suddenly became the best culture for development because it emphasized hard work, saving, education and submission to authority. Today, when we see Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand and even Hindu India doing well economically, we can soon expect to encounter new theories that will trumpet how uniquely all these cultures are suited for economic development (and how their authors have known about it all along).

Russian bolshevism, replacing eastern Christendom by the grim religiosity of Marx, produced a caricature of the evangelical counsels with many a diabolical aspect. There is a good deal of “communism” in monasteries and convents, yet this is based upon a voluntary renunciation of perfect human rights. On account of our free will we can make supreme sacrifices which ennobles our very existence. Bolshevism on the other hand forces us brutally into a parody of monastic life amidst fellow monks and fellow nuns who hate their habit and sigh under the ferocious tyranny of their pseudo-abbot. This evil distortion of an otherwise Christian ideal is more satanic than wanton, a thoroughly pagan and diabolic opposition to Christian existence. This explains also the reason why the Vatican has found stronger words against “altruistic” bolshevism than against egoistic capitalism

As a nation, we began by declaring that ’all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

He spent a very uncomfortable few moments trying to remember his prepared position for explaining to God that he had nonetheless been right not to believe in Him on the basis of all available evidence, and that his empiricism and advocacy of sceptical enquiry was vindicated because faith-based belief had proven hugely detrimental to humankind's welfare. At the same time, another part of his brain was busy thinking: "Please don't let the Catholics be right, please don't let the Catholics be right.

In the world of Ramon Lull, the brilliant civilisation of the Spanish Moslems, with its mysticism, philosophy, art, and science, was close at hand; the Spanish Jews had intensively developed their philosophy, their science and medicine, and their mysticism, or Cabala. To Lull, the Catholic Christian, occurred the generous idea that an Art, based on principles which all three religious traditions held in common, would serve to bind all three together on a common philosophical, scientific, and mystical basis.

The Atonist nobility knew it was impossible to organize and control a worldwide empire from Britain. The British Isles were geographically too far West for effective management. In order to be closer to the “markets,” the Atonist corporate executives coveted Rome. Additionally, by way of their armed Templar branch and incessant murderous “Crusades,” they succeeded making inroads further east. Their double-headed eagle of control reigned over Eastern and Western hemispheres. The seats of Druidic learning once existed in the majority of lands, and so the Atonist or Christian system spread out in similar fashion. Its agents were sent from Britain and Rome to many a region and for many a dark purpose. To this very day, the nobility of Europe and the east are controlled from London and Rome. Nothing has changed when it comes to the dominion of Aton. As Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe have proven, the Culdean monks, of whom we write, had been hired for generations as tutors to elite families throughout Europe. In their book The Knights Templar Revealed, the authors highlight the role played by Culdean adepts tutoring the super-wealthy and influential Catholic dynasties of Burgundy, Champagne and Lorraine, France. Research into the Templars and their affiliated “Salt Line” dynasties reveals that the seven great Crusades were not instigated and participated in for the reasons mentioned in most official history books. As we show here, the Templars were the military wing of British and European Atonists. It was their job to conquer lands, slaughter rivals and rebuild the so-called “Temple of Solomon” or, more correctly, Akhenaton’s New World Order. After its creation, the story of Jesus was transplanted from Britain, where it was invented, to Galilee and Judea. This was done so Christianity would not appear to be conspicuously Druidic in complexion. To conceive Christianity in Britain was one thing; to birth it there was another. The Atonists knew their warped religion was based on ancient Amenism and Druidism. They knew their Jesus, Iesus or Yeshua, was based on Druidic Iesa or Iusa, and that a good many educated people throughout the world knew it also. Their difficulty concerned how to come up with a believable king of light sufficiently appealing to the world’s many pagan nations. Their employees, such as St. Paul (Josephus Piso), were allowed to plunder the archive of the pagans. They were instructed to draw from the canon of stellar gnosis and ancient solar theologies of Egypt, Chaldea and Ireland. The archetypal elements would, like ingredients, simply be tossed about and rearranged and, most importantly, the territory of the new godman would be resituated to suit the meta plan.

May a society which is based solely on the power of wealth shudder as it sees the impotence of the law in dealing with the workings of a system which deifies success, and pardons every means of attaining it. May it return to the Catholic religion, for the purification of its masses through the inspiration of religious feeling, and by means of an education other than that of a lay university.

The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of the big cities.50 Some conservative political strategists admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy, though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a Southern, racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”51

Differences between Catholic and Protestant countries did not incite rivalries between European states, or cause the growing sense of national identity and, sometimes, isolationism that was developing among the countries of Europe. These were happening anyway, for a complex variety of political and economic reasons. But religious differences did, at times, contribute to them—for example in Spain, where the inward-looking institutions of the Counter-Reformation seemed aimed at creating a nation of soldiers and ecclesiastics in great contrast to the outgoing, trade-based, profit-minded society of the Calvinist Netherlands. These generalizations hide many local variations—there were busy Spanish merchants, and contemplative, spiritual, people in many Protestant lands. But travelers across Europe remarked on the increasingly striking differences between nations.

As Kraynak notes, “the Founders believed that freedom was based on moral order, not moral relativism.” They drew their natural law principles from John Locke, Cicero, and others, as well as from the strong natural law tradition in Christian thought. Thus, for Kraynak, “Without natural law—meaning an objective moral law put into nature and human nature by the Creator—the ideal of republican liberty lacks an ultimate foundation.”13 The

The world is broken up by tribalism—the British, the German, the Swiss, the Hindu, the Buddhist, are tribes. See the fact that they are tribes, glorified as nations, and that this tribalism is creating havoc in the world, bringing wars in the world. Each tribe thinks in its own culture opposed to other cultures. But tribalism is the root, not the culture. Observing the fact of that is the action that frees the brain from the condition of tribalism. You see actually, not theoretically or ideationally, the fact that tribalism glorified as nations is one of the causes of war. That is a fact. There are other causes of war, economics and so on, but one of the causes is tribalism. When you see that, perceive that, and see that cannot bring about peace, the very perception frees the brain from its conditioning of tribalism. One of the factors of contention throughout the world is religion. You are a Catholic, I am a Muslim, based on ideas, propaganda of hundreds or thousands of years; the Hindu and the Buddhist ideas are of thousands of years. We have been programmed like a computer. That programming has brought about great architecture, great paintings, great music, but it has not brought peace to mankind. When you see the fact of that, you do not belong to any religion. When there are half a dozen gurus in the same place, they bring about misery, contradiction, conflict: “My guru is better than yours; my group is more sanctified than yours; I have been initiated, you have not.” You know all the nonsense that goes on. So when you see all this around you as an actual fact, then you do not belong to any group, to any guru, to any religion, to any political commitment of ideas. In the serious urgency to live peacefully there must be freedom from all this because they are the causes of dissension, division. Truth is not yours or mine. It does not belong to any church, to any group, to any religion. The brain must be free to discover it. And peace can exist only when there is freedom from fallacy. You know, for most of us, to be so drastic about things is very difficult, because we have taken security in things of illusion, in things that are not facts, and it is very difficult to let them go. It is not a matter of exercising will, or taking a decision: “I will not belong to anything” is another fallacy. We commit ourselves to some group, to an idea, to religious quackery, because we think it is some kind of security for us. In all these things there is no security, and therefore there is no peace. The brain must be secure; but the brain, with its thought, has sought security in things that are illusory.

And to make things worse we started mixing religion with politics. An old argument just like the Crusades. Our God is better than your god. ‘God Is with Us’ on the Nazi belt buckles. Holy Wars against women and children, Catholics killing Protestants in Belfast. We went into Iraq for the wrong reasons and we left our friends behind. More people have been killed in the name of God and so-called ‘faith-based values’ than for any other reason.

As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.89

It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime. The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation.

Richard Dawkins called bits of cultural information memes and treated them as transmitted and inherited in the same way as genes. But whereas genes can be understood in terms of chromosomes and the ACGT bases that form DNA, memes cannot. For example, is each technounit in a well-made arrow a meme or is the entire implement? Is it possible to regard the belief system of the Catholic Church as a super meme? Trying to reduce culture to bits of information is to miss the point of its agency in human activity.

Income from the Maryland province had already helped finance the school that would become Saint Louis University in Missouri and established the Washington Seminary, which later became Gonzaga College High School, in the nation's capital. It also supported Georgetown Preparatory School, a private Catholic high school now located in North Bethesda, Maryland, which was once part of Georgetown College. ... Meanwhile, Jesuits based west of the Mississippi River, who also relied on slave labor, ran colleges in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio.

33. . . . Both men and civil society derive their origin from the Creator, Who has mutually ordained them one to the other. Hence neither can be exempted from their correlative obligations, nor deny or diminish each other's rights. The Creator Himself has regulated this mutual relationship in its fundamental lines, and it is by an unjust usurpation that communism arrogates to itself the right to enforce, in place of the divine law based on the immutable principles of truth and charity, a partisan political program which derives from the arbitrary human will and is replete with hate.

A scientist must put faith in the experimental data reported by other scientists, and in the institutions that sponsored those scientists, and in the standards by which those scientists received their credentials. A scientist must put faith in the authority of the journals that publish the results of various studies. Finally, but perhaps most fundamentally, a scientist must trust that empirical reality is indeed perceptible and measurable, and that the laws of cause and effect will apply universally. No scientific endeavor can proceed if the experimenter subjects every phenomenon to radical doubt, disqualifying his own observations as well as those of his peers. Polanyi concluded that science proceeds from a trust that is “fiduciary”—a word that derives from the Latin root meaning “faith-based.” Such faith is well placed and well founded, and it enables science to proceed apace; but, nonetheless, it is a species of faith, not an absolutely certain knowledge. “We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge,…” Polanyi said. “No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.” Secularism’s attempts to replace the authority of religion with a supposed “authority of experience and reason” has proven, in Polanyi’s words, “farcically inadequate

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negoes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Himmler left the Catholic Church in 1936, and as the war later raged he sometimes reflected on Islam’s supposed advantages in motivating soldiers. “Mohammed knew that most people are terribly cowardly and stupid,” he told Kersten in 1942. “That is why he promised every warrior who fights courageously and falls in battle two [ sic ] beautiful women. . . . You may call this primitive and laugh about it . . . but it is based on deeper wisdom. A religion must speak a man’s language.” These reflections have a crackpot quality, as did much of the rest of Himmler’s thinking about the spiritual world, which included an interest in mysticism and the occult. It is, of course, no reflection on the Islamic faith that Himmler read its sacred text so shallowly or that he subscribed to the hoary cliché about Islam’s supposed martial character.

In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., a devout Catholic fresh out of Yale, the son of an oilman, suggested a new approach to destroying the liberal consensus. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley suggested that the whole idea that people would make good decisions through argument based on evidence—the Enlightenment idea that had shaped America since its founding—was wrong. Had that been true, Americans would not have kept supporting the government activism launched by the New Deal. Americans’ faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition,” he said, than the superstitions the Enlightenment had set out to replace.15 Rather than continuing to try to change people’s beliefs through evidence-based arguments, he said, those opposed to the New Deal should stand firm on an “orthodoxy” of religion and individualism and refuse to accept any questioning of those two fundamental p

QUOTES & SAYINGS OF RYAN MORAN- THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MAN Favorite Sayings of Ryan Moran: The World's Most Powerful Man “Sometimes the withholding of a small part of the truth is not only wise, but prudent.” “There is one principle that bars all other principles, and that is contempt prior to investigation.” (Ryan was fond of paraphrasing Herbert Spencer) “What do you mean?”, “How do you know?”, “So what?” “I don’t need much, just one meal a day, a pack of cigarettes and a roof over my head.” “Well…, we must have different data bases, mustn’t we?” “This guy is more squirrely than a shithouse rat” The CIA—you know, the ‘Catholic Irish Alcoholics’ “That dumb fuck.” “Oye! A Jew and an Irishman—what a team!” “Okay, everybody, up and to the right ten thousand feet,” ( If things in general were not going well. Refers to his jet flying days) “Is that what you want to do?.....Are you sure?" “Curiosity is self serving,” “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will end up somewhere else.” “So…, what are you thinking?” “I can do anything that I want, as long as I have the desire and I am willing to pay the price.” (His working definition of honesty) “Well, what did you learn tonight?” “Don’t let your emotions get the best of you, and don’t get too far out into your future.” “If you meet someone in the middle of the desert and he asks you where the next water hole is, you had better tell him the truth. If you don’t, then the next time you meet, he will kill you.” “Damn it!” “And remember to watch your mirrors!” (Refers to the fact someone may be following us in the car) “A person either gets humble or gets humiliated.” “That’s right.” “Oye, Sheldon, a Jew and an Irishman—talk about guilt and suffering!” “Pigs grow fat, but hogs get slaughtered.” “A friend is someone who is coming in, when everyone else is going out.

Nor are languages any respecters of frontiers. If you drew a map of Europe based on languages it would bear scant resemblance to a conventional map. Switzerland would disappear, becoming part of the surrounding dominions of French, Italian, and German but for a few tiny pockets for Romansh (or Rumantsch or Rhaeto-Romanic as it is variously called), which is spoken as a native language by about half the people in the Graubünden district (or Grisons district—almost everything has two names in Switzerland) at the country’s eastern edge. This steep and beautiful area, which takes in the ski resorts of St. Moritz, Davos, and Klosters, was once effectively isolated from the rest of the world by its harsh winters and forbidding geography. Indeed, the isolation was such that even people in neighboring valleys began to speak different versions of the language, so that Romansh is not so much one language as five fragmented and not always mutually intelligible dialects. A person from the valley around Sutselva will say, “Vagned nà qua” for “Come here,” while in the next valley he will say, “Vegni neu cheu” [cited in The Economist, February 27, 1988]. In other places people will speak the language in the same way but spell it differently depending on whether they are Catholic or Protestant.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

Men with strong religious beliefs tend to form into two broad categories, and constitute churches accordingly. One category, among whom the archtetypal church is the Roman Catholic, desire the certitude and tranquility of hierarchical order. They are prepared to entrust religious truth to a professional clergy, organized in a broad-based triangle of parish priests, with an episcopal superstructure and a pontifical apex. The price paid for this kind of orthodox order is clericalism—and the anticlericalism it provokes. There was never any chance of this kind of religious system establishing itself in America. If there was one characteristic which distinguished it from the start—which made it quite unlike any part of Europe and constituted its uniqueness in fact—it was the absence of any kind of clericalism. Clergymen there were, and often very good ones, who enjoyed the esteem and respect of their congregations by virtue of their piety and preachfulness. But whatever nuance of Protestantism they served, and including Catholic priests when they in due course arrived, none of them enjoyed a special status, in law or anything else, by virtue of their clerical rank. Clergy spoke with authority from their altars and pulpits, but their power ended at the churchyard gate; and even within it congregations exercised close supervision of what their minister did, or did not, do. They appointed; they removed. In a sense, the clergy were the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a democratic element from the start—albeit that such electoral colleges were limited to the outwardly godly.

Only the Nazis were positioned to be all things to all men and women. They made an appeal that reached beyond narrow economic interests and narrow religious interests. The base of their support may have been among Germany’s small-town middle-class Protestants, but they also won important backing in the cities with Catholics and blue-collar workers. As more research is done on Nazi support, the wider and more diverse that support appears to have been. Indeed, anyone who had lost patience with traditional politics and was looking for a new direction was a potential Nazi. They were the “catchall party of protest,” calling for people to put aside social divisions and class differences for the sake of a larger ideal, the nation, the Volk. The message had enormous appeal to any unaffiliated (and non-Jewish) voter, and to students and the young, who provided the party with its bustling energy, it was a political elixir. There were no more enthusiastic Nazis than the idealistic young. Across the English Channel, George Orwell may have disliked what he saw, but he understood its power. Hitler, he said, “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.” The Nazis knew that “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short-working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades.” Or as one anti-Nazi German journalist wrote, “Hitler was able to enslave his own people because he seemed to give them something that even the traditional religions could no longer provide: the belief in a meaning to existence beyond the narrowest self-interest.

Summing Up In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, whose official teaching states that procreation defines the essential purpose of marriage, most Protestant churches emphasize instead that the unitive meaning of marriage defines its essence. Therefore, though procreation always assumes and requires the context of marriage in Christian ethics, marriage does not require procreation in order to be valid, and the inability to bear children is never a sufficient reason to dissolve a marriage. Society’s interest in supporting marriage is based in part on its desire to provide for the care of children, but this does not by any means make up the only reason why marriage receives legal benefits in modern societies. Society benefits in a wide variety of ways when people live together in long-term committed unions. If this is true, then the lack of procreative capacity cannot of itself be a sufficient reason to deny the legitimacy of stable gay or lesbian marriages or marriagelike relationships.

Poor and working-class whites in both the North and South, no less than African Americans, responded positively to the New Deal, anxious for meaningful economic relief. As a result, the Democratic New Deal coalition evolved into an alliance of urban ethnic groups and the white South that dominated electoral politics from 1932 to the early 1960s. That dominance came to an abrupt end with the creation and implementation of what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy. The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of the big cities.51 Some conservative political strategists admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy, though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a Southern, racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”52 Similarly, John Ehrlichman, special counsel to the president, explained the Nixon administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way: “We’ll go after the racists.”53 In Ehrlichman’s view, “that subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”54

To try to understand the words, first and foremost, is a fool’s errand. That’s why everyone thinks Christian fundamentalists, or really any kind of religious fundamentalists, are wackjobs or idiots or both. What most Catholics understand, it seems intuitively, or perhaps because they were baptized as babies and already put on their path without much of a say, is that they are supposed to behave like actors; it’s about learning the lines, the cues, then feeling them, there in the church and also out in the world. That’s it. That’s how Christianity is supposed to work; it is based on feeling, not knowledge. That’s what it means to be a follower.

To be justified is to be declared righteous in the sight of God, fully legally exonerated in the divine court, based entirely on what another (Jesus) has done in our place. But our hearts are wired in such a way that we constantly drift from a moment-by-moment belief in this full exoneration. That heart resistance to complete acquittal before God based on what Christ has done became codified in medieval and then Roman Catholic theology. The Reformers such as Luther and Calvin recovered and rightly recentralized the doctrine of justification, and every generation since then has had to rediscover this doctrine afresh for themselves. It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will.

To the extent that Catholicism contains any good ideas, they all come from the covert Mithraic and Platonic pagan elements of the religion. The Protestants got rid of the pagan elements and returned Christianity to a type of Judaism. In the absence of pagan elements, Christianity was never anything other than Messianic Judaism based on Jesus Christ as the Jewish Messiah, so the Messianic Jews are unquestionably the purest Christians in the world. Protestants are Jews who haven’t realised they’re Jews and Catholics are pagans who haven’t realised they’re pagans.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have not been known for creating “harmonizing” people. In general, peacemaking, non-violence, love for the outsider or the poor, humility, and dialogue have never been the strength of these religions. Even though many people in each group attained higher levels of transformation, our concern was usually group order, consistency, organization, and clarifying and enforcing of membership requirements: not all bad, but not all good either, because we lost some essential values that the harmony-based religions preserved. (Members of those religions could probably identify values they lost as well.) The fact that the two great wars emerged in a Christian Europe filled with churches and theology schools needs to be examined. The fact that racism, profound social inequity, and anti-Semitism were not broadly recognized as a serious problem until almost two thousand years after Jesus is forever a judgment on the immaturity of Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant.

The fictional Rev. Abraham, however, was granted very different views, based on the entrenched version of Anti-Catholic history – what Smith called the tradition of ‘fire, faggot and bloody Mary’. Smith in his role of Peter Plymley expostulated: ‘Are you aware that there were as many persons put to death under the mild Elizabeth as under the bloody Mary?

All " knowing" of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the purpose of all this imaginationmachinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes a dogma — namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world — both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith. When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude towards things, and, holding as he thinks the only key to real knowledge, to explain religion itself empirically and psychologically — in other words, to "conquer" it with the rest. Now, the history of the higher Cultures shows that "science" is a transitory spectacle, belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course.

Nevertheless, the issue of Catholic marriage deserves some additional theoretical and historical consideration to prevent ambiguity. Naturally in our case it is not the arguments of “free thinkers” that turn us against this kind of marriage. Earlier I mentioned the contamination between the sacred and the profane. It is worth recalling that marriage as a rite and sacrament involving indissolubility took shape late in the history of the Church, and not before the twelfth century. The obligatory nature of the religious rite for every union that wished to be considered more than mere concubinage was later still, declared at the Council of Trent (1563). For our purposes, this does not affect the concept of indissoluble marriage in itself, but its place, significance, and conditions have to be clarified. The consequence here, as in other cases regarding the sacraments, is that the Catholic Church finds itself facing a singular paradox: proposals intending to make the profane sacred have practically ended up making the sacred profane. The true, traditional significance of the marriage rite is outlined by Saint Paul, when he uses not the term “sacrament” but rather “mystery” to indicate it (“it is a great mystery,” taken verbatim—Ephesians 5:31-32). One can indeed allow a higher idea of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble union not in words, but in fact. A union of this type, however, is conceivable only in exceptional cases in which that absolute, almost heroic dedication of two people in life and beyond life is present in principle. This was known in more than one traditional civilization, with examples of wives who even found it natural not to outlive the death of their husbands. In speaking of making the sacred profane, I alluded to the fact that the concept of an indissoluble sacramental union, “written in the heavens” (as opposed to one on the naturalistic plane that is generically sentimental, and even at base merely social), has been applied to, or rather imposed on, every couple who must join themselves in church rather than in civil marriage, only to conform to their social environment. It is pretended that on this exterior and prosaic plane, on this plane of the Nietzschean “human, all too human,” the attributes of truly sacred marriage, of marriage as a “mystery,” can and must be valid. When divorce is not permitted in a society like the present, one can expect this hypocritical regime and the rise of grave personal and social problems. On the other hand, it should be noted that in Catholicism itself the theoretical absoluteness of the marriage rite bears a significant limitation. It is enough to remember that if the Church insists on the indissolubility of the marriage bond in space, denying divorce, it has ceased to observe it in time. The Church that does not allow one to divorce and remarry does permit widows and widowers to remarry, which amounts to a breach of faithfulness, and is at best conceivable within an openly materialistic premise; in other words, only if it is thought that when one who was indissolubly united by the supernatural power of the rite has died, he or she has ceased to exist. This inconsistency shows that Catholic religious law, far from truly having transcendent spiritual values in view, has made the sacrament into a simple, social convenience, an ingredient of the profane life, reducing it to a mere formality, or rather degrading it.

Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia, conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in a regime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect external measures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unity could only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way of thinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level. Then the marriage could even lack "happiness," the "needs of the soul" could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familial unity should persist even when the man or the woman "does not agree," and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increase of so-called failed marriages and related divorces and separations is natural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now a change of an existential order. After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify what can be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them. All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significant to merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes in itself, not from the social perspective.) The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane and its bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious, indissoluble, Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more than a facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concerned in the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is important only to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, or simply put up with each other, that they remain together for simple convenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, is of little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that the family remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization—as if it had any right—for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the "indissoluble" Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permits divorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedly for the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens in the United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than a puritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized free love.

A Note on the Text This is a work of fiction based in no part on any individual or individuals. Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013. Acknowledgements

Since all are free by nature, all government, whether by written law or a prince, is based solely on the agreement and consent of the subject. For if by nature men are equally powerful and free, true and ordered power in the hands of one can be established only by the election and consent of the others, just as law also is established by consent . . . It is clear, therefore, that the binding validity of all constitutions is based on tacit or express agreement and consent.

Years ago, when I was a young priest speaking at a Catholic men’s prayer breakfast in Cincinnati, I said, ‘What if the Gospel is actually offering us a win-win scenario?’ A well-dressed businessman came up to me at the break, and said in a very patronizing tone while drumming his fingers on the podium, “Father, Father! Win-win? That would not even be interesting!’ Perhaps he was just being consistent, as one whose entire worldview has been formed by sports, business deals, and American politics, instead of the Gospel. But over the years, I have come to see that he is the norm. The systems of this world are inherently argumentative, competitive, dualistic, based on a scarcity model of God, mercy, and grace. They confuse retribution-what is often little more than crass vengeance-with the biblically evolved notions of healing, forgiveness, and divine mercy.

Aside from the base Christian norm, which we must all follow, modesty, prudence, decency, and proper decorum can vary in our state in life. God calls all to work for the same goal: that of eternity, the salvation of their souls, and the souls entrusted to them. Those called to married life must be holy models for their children and helpmates to their spouse. Those called to the religious life are to be obedient to their superiors and God. A married woman must practice a different form of modesty than a Nun, for example. A nun must obey the order’s rule, wear her habit, and obey her religious superior’s directions.

Catholic social doctrine is natural and is for the restructuring of the social order. It is for every human being, regardless of faith or philosophy. In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI stated many times explicitly and by implication that natural law-based Catholic social teaching is for everyone.

Our religion,” he clarifies. “And I don’t feel like our family-owned business should hire someone who isn’t. Our company is based on our Catholic values. It’s what we stand for.

Among the more important were the British-based Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), which was prominent in Sierra Leone; the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, which had bases and schools along the west African coastal region; and the London Missionary Society (LMS), which initially worked mainly in southern Africa. Protestant missions also came from France, Germany, Holland and the United States. French Catholic missions followed later in the century.

According to the great and decisive discoveries of Bachofen and Morgan in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in spite of the rejection their findings have found in most academic circles, there can be little doubt that there was a matriarchal phase of religion preceding the patriarchal one, at least in many cultures. In the matriarchal phase, the highest being is the mother. She is the goddess, she is also the authority in family and society. In order to understand the essence of matriarchal religion, we have only to remember what has been said about the essence of motherly love. Mother's love is unconditional, it is all-protective, all-enveloping; because it is unconditional it can also not be controlled or acquired. Its presence gives the loved person a sense of bliss; its absence produces a sense of lostness and utter despair. Since mother loves her children because they are her children, and not because they are 'good,' obedient, or fulfill her wishes and commands, mother's love is based on equality. All men are equal, because they all are children of a mother, because they all are children of Mother Earth. The next stage of human evolution, the only one of which we have thorough knowledge and do not need to rely on inferences and reconstruction, is the patriarchal phase. In this phase the mother is dethroned from her supreme position, and the father becomes the Supreme Being, in religion as well as in society. The nature of fatherly love is that he makes demands, establishes principles and laws, and that his love for the son depends on the obedience of the latter to these demands. He likes best the son who is most like him, who is most obedient and who is best fitted to become his successor, as the inheritor of his possessions. (The development of patriarchal society goes together with the development of private property.) As a consequence, patriarchal society is hierarchical; the equality of the brothers gives way to competition and mutual strife. Whether we think of the Indian, Egyptian or Greek cultures, or of the Jewish-Christian, or Islamic religions, we are in the middle of a patriarchal world, with its male gods, over whom one chief god reigns, or where all gods have been eliminated with the exception of the One, the God. However, since the wish for mother's love cannot be eradicated from the hearts of man, it is not surprising that the figure of the loving mother could never be fully driven out from the pantheon. In the Jewish religion, the mother aspects of God are reintroduced especially in the various currents of mysticism. In the Catholic religion, Mother is symbolized by the Church, and by the Virgin. Even in Protestantism, the figure of Mother has not been entirely eradicated, although she remains hidden.

uses a striking analogy to explain what happens when one receives a sacrament worthily: “As fire transforms into itself everything it touches, so the Holy Spirit transforms into the divine life whatever is subjected to his power.”5 Three key effects are accomplished in the soul of one who receives the sacraments. First, the soul is further purified, cleansed from those base things that pose a barrier to God’s holiness. Second, the soul is strengthened and inured against the corrosive effects of sin. And third, the soul’s capacity for grace—in a sense, similar to the lungs’ capacity to breathe in air—is expanded. This is the meaning of the Church’s

Where is hell, anyway? Ancient man believed that hell was underground, in the center of the earth, where it was hot. This belief was based on the erroneous notion that the earth was the center of the universe. When science proved that the sun was the center of the solar system, then what? Well, the Bible and Sacred Tradition never again tried to define the exact location of hell. Because God created hell as a place to incarcerate the devil and all the bad angels who rebelled with him, and because angels are pure spirits and have no bodies that take up space, hell isn’t a physical place. It’s as real as heaven or purgatory, but you can’t travel to it anymore than a spaceship can reach heaven. The essence of hell isn’t a million degrees of heat from fire but from the heat that comes from hatred and bitterness. Hell is a lonely and selfish place; no matter how many souls it contains, not one of them cares about anyone else. It’s utter isolation as well as eternal torment, which is why everyone should want to avoid it at all cost. Heaven, on the other hand, is a place of happiness and joy because everyone there knows and loves each other. And, most of all, heaven is desirable because of what’s called beatific vision — seeing God face to face for eternity. Being in the presence of the Supreme Being who is all truth and all goodness ought to be the desire of every person.

Pew Research Centre, a self-described “fact tank” based in Washington.* This found that only 69% of adult Latin Americans are now Catholics, down from 92% in 1970. Protestants now account for 19%, up from 4%. Over the same period the share of those with no religious affiliation has grown from 1% to 8%—though most of these people still believe in God. Pew’s study finds sharp variations from country to country. In four Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua—barely half of the population is still Catholic. Though 61% of Brazilian respondents say they are Catholic, 26% are now Protestant. In many other countries there are still firm Catholic majorities. Whatever their denomination, most Latin Americans remain deeply religious. Only Uruguay stands out as a bastion of secularism—a tradition dating back more than a century. Two things distinguish Latin American Protestantism. First, it is mainly a result of conversion (see chart). Second, two-thirds of Latin American Protestants define themselves as Pentecostal. Much more often than Catholics, they report having direct experience of the Holy Spirit, such as through exorcism or speaking in tongues. Indeed, the words “evangelical” and “Protestant” are used interchangeably in the region. Pew finds that Latin American Protestants are conservative on social and sexual issues, such as gay marriage and abortion. As Catholics become more liberal on such questions, that points to looming American-style “culture wars”.

The Catholic theology of race thus enabled-required, even-American Catholics to hold a radically different perspective from white southern Protestants on the legitimacy of interracial marriage. If the Vatican proclaimed racial unity and common origins in Adam and Eve, then there was no doctrinal, biblical, or cultural basis for racial inequality, segregation, or legal prohibitions of interracial marriage. Although a terrible chasm loomed between theory and praxis -between what the church taught and how American Catholics behaved- Catholics never condemned marriage across the color line or cited biblical rationales for segregation G4 Indeed, by 1940, the racial theories emanating from Europe's fascist regimes and the verification of the Nazi death camps compelled the church to address decisively the issue of racial separatism and to take an explicit stance against such views. By this time, the Roman Church had begun to articulate a theology of race explicitly emphasizing the biblical bases for racial unity, and it had condemned civil prohibitions of interracial marriage.

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,140 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”141 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no 2333    circumstances can they be approved.

How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.26

Classical education was only half the old system of European education--below it and above it there was the religious education that was common to the whole people, and the higher theological education that was peculiar to the clergy, who provided the majority of the teachers in both the other departments of education. Now the lowest level of this structure, which has been least studied and least regarded, was the most important of them all. It is true that it differed considerably in different parts of Europe, but for the religious rather than material reasons. In Protestant Europe it was founded on the Bible and the catechism, whereas in Catholic Europe it was based on the liturgy and on religious art and drama and mime, which made the Church the school of the people. But in either case it provided a system of common beliefs and moral standards, as well as the archetypal patterns of world history and sacred story which formed the background of their spiritual world.

Ai xuống hỏa ngục đều có thể hát lên: Tôi đã sống theo ý tôi.

Whatever the future may hold for Nature, its past—indeed, its very existence—owes much to religious and political discontent. In the nineteenth century, academics at the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge were required to belong to the conventional Church of England. Those barred from these institutions for reasons of religion or politics—Catholics, Jews, atheists, and dissenters of every stripe—washed up, perhaps inevitably, in London, where, in 1828, University College was founded. It was a group of such London-based academics, centered on Thomas Henry Huxley—an early champion of Darwinian evolution—who found themselves with nothing to read. The group, known as the X Club (Ladies’ Night was known as the XYves), had been devotees of a periodical called The Reader. But when that folded, the X Club persuaded Scottish publisher Alexander MacMillan to underwrite a scientific magazine. And so, on November 4, 1869, Nature was born, and the MacMillan family has published it ever since.

Iraq and Syria were the bases for two great transnational churches deemed heretical by the Catholic and Orthodox—namely, the Nestorians and Jacobites.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, God-down, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,” “reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.” It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large. The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman.

A smart person, one who perhaps had her mind filled with religious ideas as a child but who recognizes that genuine mysteries exist with respect to the origins of the universe, can experience real pain if she opts for an easy mysticism. By the same token, if she refuses to opt for that easy mysticism and announces that she doesn't know ultimate answers and can't know ultimate answers, then she falls prey to the coldness and sadness that come with suspecting that the universe is taking no interest in her. Pain is waiting for her in either case, whether she tries to maintain a mysticism that she can see right through or if she sheds that easy mysticism but then doesn't know how to handle the resultant meaninglessness. As it happens, natural psychology provides a complete, satisfying, and uplifting response to this conundrum, one based on the idea of living the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning. If, however, she happens not to land on this good idea, she can spend a lifetime mired simultaneously in both unhappy camps, drawn to one mystical or spiritual enthusiasm after another—one year a Catholic, then a Buddhist, then a pagan, then a Taoist, then something with no name but with New Age trappings, and so on—while at the same time paralyzed by the thought that the universe has no meaning.

The political impact of new technologies has been massive. They shape the nature of our reasoning and our discourse. They’ve moved us away from a public square tempered by logic, debate, and reflection based on the printed word, to a visual and sensory one, emotionally charged and spontaneous.

[Martin Luther's] understanding of grace-based faith versus works-based faith was more than a personal revelation; it informed his entire rebellion against the church. After all, if human beings couldn't possibly earn salvation by their good works, if human beings had no righteousness of their own and were entirely dependent on Christ for their salvation and hope, where, then, did that leave good works like pilgrimages and fasting? Where did that leave the notion of purgatory? Where did that leave the monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity? Where did that leave the pope, with his sales of indulgences, and the priests, doling out penance in the confessionals? Luther came to believe that the church to which he had dedicated his life was built on sand, and each abuse, each indulgence, added an unsustainable weight to the structure. In his eyes, Romans 1:17 obliterated the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church.

I could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced. The facts might easily have helped the denunciation, where the fictions discredited it. There were any number of real Catholic doctrines I should then have thought disgraceful to the Church. There are any number which I can still easily imagine being made to look disgraceful to the Church. But the enemies of the Church never found these real rocks of offence. They never looked for them. They never looked for anything. They seemed to have simply made up out of their own heads a number of phrases, such as a Scarlet Woman of deficient intellect might be supposed to launch on the world; and left it at that. Boundless freedom reigned; it was not treated as if it were a question of fact at all. A priest might say anything about the Faith; because a Protestant might say anything about the priest. These novels were padded with pronouncements like this one, for instance, which I happen to remember: "Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no absolution. We term it a reserved case." Now obviously a man writing like that is simply imagining what might exist; it has never occurred to him to go and ask if it does exist. He has heard the phrase "a reserved case" and considers, in a poetic reverie, what he shall make it mean. He does not go and ask the nearest priest what it does mean. He does not look it up in an encyclopedia or any ordinary work of reference. There is no doubt about the fact that it simply means a case reserved for ecclesiastical superiors and not to be settled finally by the priest. That may be a fact to be denounced; but anyhow it is a fact. But the man much prefers to denounce his own fancy. Any manual would tell him that there is no sin "for which there is no absolution"; not disobeying the priest; not assassinating the Pope. It would be easy to find out these facts and quite easy to base a Protestant invective upon them. It puzzled me very much, even at that early stage, to imagine why people bringing controversial charges against a powerful and prominent institution should thus neglect to test their own case, and should draw in this random way on their own imagination. It did not make me any more inclined to be a Catholic; in those days the very idea of such a thing would have seemed crazy. But it did save me from swallowing all the solid and solemn assertion about what Jesuits said and did. I did not accept quite so completely as others the well-ascertained and widely accepted fact that "Roman Catholics may do anything for the good of the Church"; because I had already learned to smile at equally accepted truths like "Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no absolution." I never dreamed that the Roman religion was true; but I knew that its accusers, for some reason or other, were curiously inaccurate.

There are no marks in these books which would attest a divine origin. . . . both Judith and Tobit contain historical, chronological and geographical errors. The books justify falsehood and deception and make salvation to depend upon works of merit. . . . Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon inculcate a morality based upon expediency. Wisdom teaches the creation of the world out of pre-existent matter (11:17). Ecclesiasticus teaches that the giving of alms makes atonement for sin (3:30). In Baruch it is said that God hears the prayers of the dead (3:4), and in I Maccabees there are historical and geographical errors.17 It was not until 1546, at the Council of Trent, that the Roman Catholic Church officially declared the Apocrypha to be part of the canon (with the exception of 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh). It is significant that the Council of Trent was the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the teachings of Martin Luther and the rapidly spreading Protestant Reformation, and the books of the Apocrypha contain support for the Catholic teaching of prayers for the dead and justification by faith plus works, not by faith alone

The logic of hell is nothing other than the logic of human free will, in so far as this is identical with freedom of choice. The theological argument runs as follows: “God, whose being is love, preserves our human freedom, for freedom is the condition of love. Although God’s love goes, and has gone, to the uttermost, plumbing the depth of hell, the possibility remains for each human being of a final rejection of God, and so of eternal life.” Let us gather some arguments against this logic of hell. The first conclusion, it seems to me, is that it is inhumane, for there are not many people who can enjoy free will where their eternal fate in heaven or hell is concerned. Anyone who faces men and women with the choice of heaven or hell, does not merely expect too much of them. It leaves them in a state of uncertainty, because we cannot base the assurance of our salvation on the shaky ground of our own decision. Is the presupposition of this logic of hell perhaps an illusion—the presupposition that it all depends on the human beings’ free will? The logic of hell seems to me not merely inhumane but also extremely atheistic: here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven—or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect. If I decide for heaven, God must put me there; if I decide for hell, he has to leave me there. If God has to abide by our free decision, then we can do with him what we like. Is that “the love of God?” Free human beings forge their own happiness and are their own executioners. They do not just dispose over their lives here; they decide on their eternal destinies as well. So they have no need of any God at all. After God has perhaps created us free as we are, he leaves us to our fate. Carried to this ultimate conclusion, the logic of hell is secular humanism, as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche already perceived a long time ago. The Christian doctrine of hell is to be found in the gospel of Christ’s descent into hell. In the crucified Christ we see what hell is, because through him it has been overcome. Judgment is not God’s last word. Judgment established in the world the divine righteousness on which the new creation is to be built. But God’s last word is “Behold I make all things new” (Rev 21: 5). From this no one is excluded. Love is God’s compassion with the lost. Transforming grace is God’s punishment for sinners. It is not the right to choose that defines the reality of human freedom. It is the doing of the good.

At least 200 dates have been suggested, varying from 3483 to 6934 years B.C., all based on the supposition that the Bible enables us to settle the point.  But it does nothing of the sort.  The literal interpretation has now been entirely abandoned; and the world is admitted to be of immense antiquity.  On such questions we have no Biblical evidence, and the Catholic is quite free to follow the teaching of science.

There are two “camps” which interpret Sor Juana's final years: the Catholic interpretation sees her renunciation as a turn to spirituality and devotion, while the secular camp sees Sor Juana as a woman persecuted by the Church. Both positions are ideological, for they are based on a desire to depict Sor Juana as either converting to or surrendering to the desires of the institutional Church. Both are too simplistic.

The Council itself identified religious truth as present in what was in effect a series of overlapping circles, with all Christian faiths possessing some degree of truth but “the fullness of Christ’s truth” present only in the Catholic Church. The new ecumenism appeared revolutionary to many, a complete reversal of what had previously been taught. It was, however, merely a change of perspective, in that the Catholic Church had always recognized the core of orthodoxy in Protestantism (the Trinity, the divinity of Christ) but had previously emphasized its errors. Now she chose to recognize its truths, as the basis of imperfect brotherly unity. Eastern Orthodoxy Ecumenical priority was inevitably given to the Eastern Orthodox, who were recognized as sharing most of the Catholic faith. Separation from the Orthodox was viewed by the Council Fathers as a lamentable historical misfortune, and the mutual excommunications of 1054 were formally rescinded after the Council. Protestants The Council warned against a false ecumenism based on an indifference to, or a misinterpretation of, doctrine. However, under Bea’s direction, official dialogues were initiated, especially with Lutherans and Anglicans. In practical terms, the immediate effect of ecumenism was to alter Catholics’ and Protestants’ attitudes toward one another, as for the first time they were allowed, even encouraged, to pray together both formally and informally, although they could not share the Eucharist. The

To be Catholic is to be part of a common life based on worship of God as he wants to be worshiped, reverently uniting one’s own self-sacrifice to that of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist, wondering in awe at the mystery of God and the grandeur of his gifts.

One of the distinctive differences between historic, orthodox Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church has been that Protestants base doctrine on “Scripture alone” (once again, the Latin phrase commonly used for this is sola Scriptura), while Roman Catholics base doctrine on Scripture plus the authoritative teaching of the church through history.18

The Two Babylons,  written by Rev. Alexander Hislop, published in 1858. Hislop claimed the Roman Catholic Church was a Babylonian mystery cult, basing the foundation of his argument almost solely on Revelation’s reference to seven mountains which he connected with the fact that Rome was called the ‘City of Seven Hills’. For decades since, under Hislop’s influence, the Bible’s Daughter of Babylon/Babylon the Great prophetic verses have generally been interpreted to apply to the Catholic Church.

form of social capital (here defined as the presence of supportive social networks) that was often absent for both public school students and students in non-Catholic private schools.

The Reformers rediscovered the biblical truth that a believer’s relationship with God is rooted in Christ’s sacrificial death alone, based on faith alone, and informed by Scripture alone. Neither meritorious works nor rituals nor ecclesiastical authority are to define a believer’s relationship with God. Neither Luther nor Calvin, however, fully developed these newly rediscovered truths. Both tried in different ways to retain a commonality with the traditional Catholic view of communion. A truly Reformed view of Christ’s presence associates it only with the faith of the believer. This gracious presence is not funneled through the church, priests, or rituals. Responding

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 29They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, 30slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

The Princess was anxious that her sons should also see something of the real world beyond boarding schools and palaces. As she said in a speech on Aids: ‘I am only too aware of the temptation of avoiding harsh reality; not just for myself but for my own children too. Am I doing them a favour if I hide suffering and unpleasantness from them until the last possible minute? The last minutes which I choose for them may be too late. I can only face them with a choice based on what I know. The rest is up to them.’ She felt this was especially important for William, the future King. As she once said: ‘Through learning what I do, and his father to a certain extent, he has got an insight into what’s coming his way. He’s not hidden upstairs with the governess.’ Over the years she has taken both boys on visits to hostels for the homeless and to see seriously ill people in hospital. When she took William on a secret visit to the Passage day centre for the homeless in Central London, accompanied by Cardinal Basil Hume, her pride was evident as she introduced him to what many would consider the flotsam and jetsam of society. ‘He loves it and that really rattles people,’ she proudly told friends. The Catholic Primate of All England was equally effusive. ‘What an extraordinary child,’ he told her. ‘He has such dignity at such a young age.’ This upbringing helped William cope when a group of mentally handicapped children joined fellow school pupils for a Christmas party. Diana watched with delight as the future King gallantly helped these deprived youngsters join in the fun. ‘I was so thrilled and proud. A lot of adults couldn’t handle it,’ she told friends. Again during one Ascot week, a time of Champagne, smoked salmon and fashionable frivolity for High society, the Princess took her boys to the Refuge night shelter for down-and-outs. William played chess while Harry joined in a card school. Two hours later the boys were on their way back to Kensington Palace, a little older and a little wiser. ‘They have a knowledge,’ she once said. ‘They may never use it, but the seed is there, and I hope it will grow because knowledge is power. I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress and people’s hopes and dreams.’ Her quiet endeavors gradually won back many of the doubters who had come to see her as a threat to the monarchy, or as a talentless and embittered woman seeking to make trouble, especially by upstaging or embarrassing her husband and his family. The sight of the woman who was still then technically the future Queen, unadorned and virtually unaccompanied, mixing with society’s poorest and most distressed or most threatened, confounded many of her critics.

As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal. We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.” In

The idea and principle of religious tolerance, based on the Christian virtue of charity and its “neutral principles of law” approach to religious law, is so inimical to Sharia because religious tolerance prohibits discrimination in favor of Islam. Islam traditionally eschews missionary work of conversion by persuasion and ultimately resorts to the sword. It does not hesitate to destroy the symbols of other religions, like Buddhist statues in Afghanistan198 or Catholic monasteries in Iraq,199 regardless of historical importance or present-day practice. The killing and harassment of religious minorities in Muslim lands are well documented. Moderate Muslims claim that Islam is a religion of peace. Yet historically Islam has never spread into a nation peacefully, but only by the sword.200 This religious conversion by the sword is called jihad. As Andrew McCarthy points out, We still don’t get what jihad is. Jihad, whether it is done through violence, or whether it is done by stealthier measures, is always and everywhere about Sharia. It is about the implementation of Sharia, the spread of Sharia, and the defense of Sharia. Sharia is the Islamic legal and political framework. We would like to think of Islam as just another religion, just a set of religious principles that’s separate from our secular or societal life. It’s anything but. It is a full service, comprehensive, political, social, and economic system—a military system—that happens to have some spiritual elements. But its ambitions are actually authoritarian in the sense that you have a central Islamic state that controls everything, and it’s totalitarian in the sense that it really does want to control everything, every aspect. Jihad leads to implementation of Sharia law in all lands for all people. That’s what makes Sharia so dangerous. The two are inextricably intertwined. You can’t combat one of these without combatting both of them.

Kundalini Christianity is Another Obvious Heresy that Has Entered the Church: Phillip St. Romain is a Catholic counselor at Heartland Spirituality Center in Great Bend, Kansas (1). This group integrates contemplative prayer (meditation) within their program (2). In Kundalini Energy and Christian Spirituality, Philip St. Romain claims that meditation, which awakens Kundalini energy is compatible with Christianity. Yet, before his spiritual crises, which began in 1986, Mr. St. Romain had never heard of the Kundalini and could not find any Christian literature to guide him through this experience (3). He could not find Christian literature on kundalini because Christianity forbids Eastern meditation techniques. However, Hindus claim that through meditation, they may awaken the inner fire of Kundalini, which lies coiled and dormant at the base of the spine. Then this energy migrates, through chakras as it activates them along the way. Then, the goddess Shakti meets Shiva at the crown of the head, and their spiritual wedding transpires. Then, devotees realize they are divine (gods) (4). This is the first lie that the serpent told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He said, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, KJV). References: 1. “Spiritual Oasis for Souls.” Heartland Center for Spirituality, 2. “Who are the Dominican Sisters.” Becoming Dominican. 3. St. Romain, Philip. Kundalini Energy and Christian Spirituality: A Pathway to Growth & Healing. Lulu Publishing, 2010, pp. 10-12, 52, 5. 4. Klostermaier, Klaus. A Survey of Hinduism. 2007, pp. 218-221.

That is the purpose of this book - to make you happy. Its plan is to have you base that happiness on God's own truth as given us in the Gospels. Any other base would be unworthy of God and too weak for you. For yours is a tumultuous and a tottering world; made so by men, who love the darkness rather than the light. Stability is to be found only in the unmoved Mover of this restless universe and in His Christ who is "the same, yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8). Fear stalks your land. Crippling anxieties and neurotic unrests warm round about you. But that is only because the highly publicized gospels of Expediency and Efficiency have had too many followers who have been altogether too faithful, while the only true Gospel, and the only Gospel of Truth, has been too hesitantly trusted and too listlessly tried.

That is the purpose of this book - to make you happy. Its plan is to have you base that happiness on God's own truth as given us in the Gospels. Any other base would be unworthy of God and too weak for you. For yours is a tumultuous and a tottering world; made so by men who love the darkness rather than the light. Stability is to be found only in the unmoved Mover of this restless universe and in His Christ who is "the same, yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8). Fear stalks your land. Crippling anxieties and neurotic unrests swarm about you. But that is only because the highly publicized gospels of Expediency and Efficiency have had too many followers who have been altogether too faithful, while the only true Gospel, and the only Gospel of Truth, has been too hesitantly trusted and too listlessly tried.

The official Church, including the magisterium, has now — finally — come to the recognition that slavery is against basic human rights and 'contrary to God's intent'. It comes too late for the millions of slaves in previous centuries whose lot could have been alleviated by correct Christian teaching! But at least Church authorities should draw a number of lessons. The so-called 'tradition' that was thought to endorse slavery and on which the magisterium based its justification of slavery, all those quotes from fathers and popes, proved, in fact, to have been spurious and contrary to the real tradition handed down from Christ. It had been a cuckoo's egg tradition. The true tradition that came down from Christ and the apostles was contained in the principle of fundamental equality for all, enshrined in the universal baptism of Christ applied to men and women, slave and free alike.

From the start, Obama’s adversaries on the religious right—from officials of the Catholic Church to leaders of antichoice organizations to evangelical celebrities—portrayed Obamacare as a socialist takeover that would force taxpayers to pay for coverage of abortion services. That was not true, but it proved a potent talking point, priming the base for outrage when the Obama administration, in early 2012, finalized a regulation under the act requiring employer-sponsored health plans to cover contraception without a copay. Even after the Obama administration exempted houses of worship from the requirement and offered religious nonprofits an “accommodation” that permitted them to opt out by signing a form that would put the onus of coverage on their insurers, the regulation triggered a series of overheated, Republican-led congressional hearings, activist protests, and years of protracted litigation.

Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. "Society," he opined, "has a special interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the state has a special interest in marriage." With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, "based on individual egoism" rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, "Such a 'caricature' has no future and cannot give future to any society." Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order's coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.

The Orthodox Church of Christ is the Body of Christ, a spiritual organism whose Head is Christ. It has a single spirit, a single common faith, a single and common catholic consciousness, guided by the Holy Spirit; and its reasonings are based on the concrete, definite foundations of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Apostolic Tradition. This catholic consciousness is always with the Church, but, in a more definite fashion, this consciousness is expressed in the Ecumenical Councils of the Church. From profound Christian antiquity, local councils of separate Orthodox Churches gathered twice a year, in accordance with the 37th Canon of the Holy Apostles.18 Likewise, often in the history of the Church there were councils of regional bishops representing a wider area than individual Churches and, finally, councils of bishops of the whole Orthodox Church of both East and West. Such Ecumenical Councils the Church recognizes as seven in number. The Ecumenical Councils formulated precisely and confirmed a number of the fundamental truths of the Orthodox Christian Faith, defending the ancient teaching of the Church against the distortions of heretics. The Ecumenical Councils likewise formulated numerous laws and rules governing public and private Christian church life, which are called the Church canons, and required the universal and uniform observance of them. Finally, the Ecumenical Councils confirmed the dogmatic decrees of a number of local councils, and also the dogmatic statements composed by certain Fathers of the Church — for example, the confession of faith of St. Gregory the Wonderworker, Bishop of Neo-Caesarea,19 the canons of St. Basil the Great,20 and so forth.

Supreme Court ruled in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984) that the creche was not objectionable if it was in the context of other “secular” Christian symbols, many mainstream Jews were distressed. They worried that Christianity was creeping back into the public square. Although Chabad, like some other Orthodox groups, had no objection to the ruling—after all, they wanted to display Menorahs in public spaces, and if Lynch opened the door to Christian displays, it would do the same for Jews—most American Jews instinctively embraced what Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and American public intellectual, called “the naked public square.” Ironically, in Israel, even secular Israelis implicitly agreed with American Chabad. They instinctively felt that for civic life to be meaningful, the public square should not be overly naked. Neuhaus agreed. He argued that a meaningful public moral discourse had to be based on tradition of some sort. Otherwise, he said, “politics becomes civil war carried on by other means.” Either we have some shared, essentially agreed-upon tradition that sets the tone and content of our society, or internecine cultural warfare becomes virtually unavoidable.

America has been a four-hundred-year-long natural experiment testing how religion develops with and without a powerful central organization. In other words, a big reason American Catholics are more reality-based than Protestants is because tenured grown-ups, from the Vatican on down, have consistently been in command, tamping down and pinching off undesirable offshoots.

Pell, a leader of a faith-based organisation, acquiesced in a process where his rolled-gold lawyers, whom he instructed to go hard, spent an inordinate amount of money defending Church coffers against a man who had been abused by a dodgy priest with other victims. (p.114)

Finally, we must note The Great Divorce, a highly imaginative book which Lewis composed in 1944. Tolkien described this book as “a new moral allegory or ‘vision’ based on the medieval fancy of the Refrigerium, by which the lost souls have an occasional holiday in Paradise.”[513] Lewis has been much criticised by Catholic theologians for his obviously faulty analysis of medieval theology at this point.[514] Indeed, The Great Divorce is clearly best regarded as a “supposal”: if the inhabitants of hell were to visit heaven, what would happen? Lewis initially titled this work Who Goes Home? but was happily persuaded to alter the title. The work is chiefly remarkable on account of its use of an innovative imaginative framework, similar in some ways to The Screwtape Letters, to explore a series of very traditional questions—such as the limits of human free will and the problem of pride. Perhaps the most important feature of this work, however, is Lewis’s demonstration—by art of narrative rather than by force of argument—that people easily become trapped in a way of thinking from which they cannot break free. Those in hell, on exploring heaven, turn out to be so comfortable with their distorted view of reality that they choose not to embrace truth on encountering it. Lewis deploys familiar cultural stereotypes of his day—such as the career artist who is obsessed with the avant-garde, or the theologically liberal bishop infatuated with his intellectual fame—to challenge the lazy and unevidenced Enlightenment assumption that humans recognise and accept truth when they see it. Human nature, Lewis suggests, is rather more complex than this trite, superficial rationalism allows.

In a thousand years, however, Mormonism will no longer be an upstart religion, with all the volatility and vulnerability of adolescence. People will no more leave Mormonism over the Mountain Meadows Massacre than modern Jews leave Judaism over biblical genocide. Mormon polygamy will be no more (and no less) vexing than ancient polygamy. The Book of Abraham will be no more textually troubling than the Bible’s Deuteronomists or multiple Isaiahs. Multiple versions of Joseph Smith’s first vision will be no more faith-shaking than varying accounts of Paul’s conversion or the disharmony of the Gospels. But we live now, not a thousand years from now. The scandals are real, and the doubt and pain they cause are real. To explain a problem and reconcile it in our minds is not to deny its existence or significance. Having spent my professional life working in an academy largely allergic to the extrarational claims of faith, and in a field of religious history where many colleagues are devoted evangelicals or Catholics, I know well that in the view of Enlightenment rationalism and scientism on the one hand and historic Christianity on the other, much of Mormonism appears foolish and scandalous. That the same can be said of every other religion hardly puts salve in the wound. We are not called to abandon our natural reason; to do so would not only lead to fanaticism but also to reject one of our greatest divine inheritances. Yet to remain open to all the infinite possibilities of an inexplicable cosmos, we have to humbly acknowledge the limits of human rationality and accept complementary ways of knowing and being. We do not proceed merely on faith, but we do recognize that faith and trust are essential ingredients in a holistic approach to life. By definition, to have faith—in God, in Mormonism, in anything—is to act on claims that in the end can be neither proven nor disproven. To base one’s life on unfalsifiable claims is not a sign of intellectual weakness or antirationality, but rather a perfectly normal human response to the uncertainty that is the lot of mortality.