Introductory comments by Web Master:

The book below, which was written by Charles W. Moore, presents historical background and arguments concerning restoration of Christian unity. It is extremely well written and except for expected differences, due to faith backgrounds, I highly endorse it as being informative to Catholics, Orthodox, and other Christian believers. NOTE: Colorization has been added.

THAT THEY MAY BE ONE

To heal the scandal of the fragmented Church

By CHARLES W. MOORE
1997 Copyright © 1997 -- All rights reserved.
Web published here by permission.

PREFACE

PART I CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS
Chapter 1: HOW DID CHRISTIANITY GO OFF THE RAILS?
Chapter 2: THE PROBLEM WITH PROTESTANTISM
Chapter 3: RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
Chapter 4: THE END OF CATHOLIC CULTURE
Chapter 5: THE SPIRIT OF SKEPTICISM
Chapter 6: SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REFORMATION
Chapter 7: LIBERAL HUMANISM
Chapter 8: THE LONG ROAD BACK TO CHRISTIAN UNITY
Chapter 9: The strange case of how 2,000 protestant Evangelicals ended up joining the Orthodox church
Chapter 10: ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM
Chapter 11: What the Church Is Not: Liberal Mainline Protestantism and "Protestantized" North American Catholicism

PART II DIFFICULTIES
CHAPTER 12: AUTHORITY
Chapter 13: SACRAMENTAL GRACE
Chapter 14: THE EUCHARIST
Chapter 15: THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION
Chapter 16: CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION
Chapter 17: LITURGICAL WORSHIP
Chapter 18: VENERATION OF MARY AND THE SAINTS
Chapter 19: PRAYERS TO MARY AND THE SAINTS
Chapter 20: MANDATORY CELIBACY IN THE PRIESTHOOD
Chapter 21: "CALL NO MAN FATHER"
Chapter 22: PURGATORY
Chapter 23: ICONS, RELICS, AND IMAGES
Chapter 24: THE TRADITION

Part III WHAT IS THE CHURCH?
Chapter 25: THE TASK

"Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and the same judgment." (1 Cor. 1: 10)

"The Christian Church is in one hell of a situation."

Anglican Catholic

PREFACE

"And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together."

Monteigne

This book is about a big idea -the oneness of the Christian Faith- nothing less than restoring the doctrinally unified, undivided Christian Church that existed prior to the Great East-West Schism of c.1054 AD. It may be too big an idea for one little book; but I hope what follows here will serve as a catalyst for thought and discussion. This much I am sure of: having His Church divided, let alone fragmented into literally thousands of competing--all too often warring--denominational factions cannot possibly be God's will.

Jesus prayed: "Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are." (St. John 17: 11) So, while the idea that this book articulates and advocates may be overly optimistic, I believe that it is worthy. The divided Church is a tragedy and a scandal. It is sinful. It needs to be healed.

A divided Church presents a disastrous witness to the unity in Christ we purport to affirm. No one in his right mind would argue that the voice of a unified Church would not be vastly more effective in witnessing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a broken and sinful world, than is the cacophonous babel of contradictory Christian positions that exist today.

It was not always so of course. Throughout the first Christian millennium, the Church spoke with one voice. Divers heresies cropped up to challenge unity and sound doctrine during those thousand years, but the Church managed to stay one--as Christ desires. The first great Christian schism, between Rome and Constantinople, accrued honour to neither party, but at least it could be said that both sides in the dispute retained orthodox doctrine--the sacred Deposit of Faith.

The second schismatic wave that occurred 500 years later inadvertently precipitated a descent into heresy and apostasy that destroyed Christian culture and set in motion a process of philosophical and moral decay, from which it is as yet unclear whether the Church will survive as more than a tiny, culturally irrelevant, island of faith in a vast roiling sea of pagan secular barbarism.

In this book I shall attempt to explain how we got into these regrettable circumstances. It is necessary to have some understanding of the Church's history in order to make an informed evaluation of what caused the fragmentation of Christendom, and to decide whether those reasons stand up to scrutiny. What I have to say on the pages that follow will not be a comfortable message for many, and it is certainly inadequate as a prescription for healing the Church. I do hope however that my thesis herein might serve as a catalyst for further thought, and ultimately, action, toward restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ as One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, unified body. I invite you to join me in this quest.

Part I: CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS'

Chapter 1: HOW DID CHRISTIANITY GO OFF THE RAILS?

Christianity is in crisis at the end of the second Christian millennium, The Church's cultural purchase is melting away like ice-cream in the hot August sun, its moral authority over what used to be Christendom all but spent. How did the Christian Faith lose its rightful place at the head of the civilization it established and built? A complex concatenation of factors led to this sorry pass, chief among them being the fact that for the past 500 years Christianity has addressed the world with an ever more fragmented and incoherent babel of often contradictory voices. The weakening, destructive effect this has had on the Church's effectiveness as a witness to the risen Christ, cannot be underestimated or overstated. It is a tragedy that has exponentially aided the forces of wickedness in the world. The unfortunate spectacle of literally thousands of Christian sects, frequently hostile to one another, all simultaneously claiming to be the true Church founded on the love of Christ, does not tend to encourage thoughtful people to wish to join or even seriously listen to any of them.

Of course the troublesome question is: which of the multiple banners flown by fragmented Christianity as it marches and staggers and retreats these days can the Faith be restored to unity under? The only logical answer to that is a return to the true, undivided Faith that existed in essential doctrinal unity for the first thousand years of Christendom, and which continues in the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic traditions today. For over 1,000 years, from Christ's ministry to A.D. 1054, there was ONE Church, and at least from the Council of Chaledon in A.D. 451 to 1054, doctrinal stability prevailed in that Church. There really was a time when the same Universal (Catholic) Faith could be defined as "what was believed by all men everywhere" throughout the undivided Church. Any logical-thinking Christian absolutely must regard the sundering of Church unity that began with the great east/west schism of 1,054 as a tragedy of cosmic proportions.

Christ founded a Church against which He declared the gates of hell would not prevail, and He promised to abide with that Church until he comes again. It simply cannot be a matter of indifference to Him whether the human beings He desires to save from sin and its consequences are a part of that Church or not. Jesus did not say: "The gates of hell will not prevail against my churches." He referred to His Church in the singular. Some Protestants recite the Apostles' and/or the Nicene creeds, which affirm belief in "The Holy Catholic Church;" and "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church;" respectively. The work around rationalization is that the real universal or "catholic" Church is not any visible communion but rather an "invisible fellowship of true believers in all churches." However, this argument doesn't stand up convincingly under historical scrutiny.

Early Christians regarded the visible Church as not only the form, but quite literally the context of Christianity. The Church was one; with one doctrine, and exercising one authority. Dissent within the communion was not tolerated. A universal union of local churches was bound together organically in the unity of the Apostolic Succession, one liturgy, and the sense of common victory by grace over natural divisions. For them, the Church was the literal Body of Christ--a divine-human organism. Were they wrong? St. Paul affirms that the Church is One (Eph 4: 3-5) with Christ as its Head (Eph. 4: 14-16) The word catholic comes from the Greek Katholikos, meaning "universal." which in turn derives from katholou, "in general". It was first used by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch in a letter to the Smyrnians (c. AD 110) to distinguish the whole Church from individual congregations. Subsequently, the term "catholic" distinguished orthodox Christians from those who embraced heresy. Catholicism and affirmation of infallible Church authority (on matters of doctrine and morality) are identical. A "Catholic" who considers himself free to believe as he chooses is a contradiction in terms. For Catholics, reason and truth are objective--not what each individual chooses to make them.

The word orthodox (from the Greek: "right-believing") affirms the claim of doctrinal consistency with apostolic truth, The term "Catholic" in the sense of the Church being universal can only apply to a Church in which there is agreement as to what constitutes true doctrine. The word Catholic was used in the primitive, undivided Church to define the commonly held doctrine affirmed in the Church "by all men everywhere"--the rule of faith defined in the 5th Century by St. Vincent of Lerins as "Let us hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all, for that is truly and properly Catholic." Consequently, unless we subscribe to the exclusive catholicity of one particular branch of the divided and fragmented Church, strictly speaking there has been no truly catholic Church since at least 1054. The term "Catholic" cannot be legitimately considered to mean "universal" alone, unless it is acknowledged to incorporate universality of doctrine, orders, morals, and sacraments. The nearest approximation of true catholicity that exists in post-schism, post-Reformation Christendom, resides in the branches of Christianity that retain the essential doctrines, creeds, orders, tradition, and sacraments of the primitive, undivided Church, but none can legitimately claim exclusivity.

At this point, I must appeal to Protestant readers to bear with me and to not prejudicially dismiss my argument at least until you've absorbed it in its entirety. Let me state clearly at the outset that this is NOT an anti-Protestant polemic, and while a critique of Protestant ideas and the philosophical assumptions behind them necessarily appears herein, it is emphatically not intended as an attack on, or disparagement of, the sincere faith of Protestant Christians, past or present. I acknowledge and celebrate the fact that the life and work of sincere Christians adherent to Protestant beliefs has had profound and beneficial effects on millions of individuals and countless societies and cultures over the past five centuries.

My own family background is Baptist, and I became a Christian believer through the ministry of Protestant evangelism. However, a subsequent quarter-century of scriptural, theological, and historical inquiry has led me to conviction that division of the Christian Church into competing camps--Orthodox/Catholic and Protestant--cannot be God's will. I have further become convinced that the Christian Faith in its fullness can only be lived and experienced within the sacramental compass of the original apostolic Orthodox/Catholic Faith. Additionally, I believe that the Protestant reformers, despite presumed good intentions, were predominantly responsible for unleashing a mood and spirit of subjective anarchy from which derives the depraved and frequently vile liberal humanism that is currently busily at work destroying Western civilization.

I think also, speaking from both personal experience and observation, that few Protestants ever seriously consider Orthodox/Catholicism on the basis of what it claims to be in its written doctrines, dogmas, and policies, but rather only through an accretion of hearsay assumptions and prejudices that are often inaccurate or even maliciously biased. As Catholic apologist Sir Arnold Lunn observed: "Most Catholics avoid controversy not because they dislike intelligent discussion with a non-Catholic, but because the preliminary spade work which is necessary to clear the ground of debate from the litter of ignorant prejudice exhausts all but the stoutest heart." One of my hopes for this book is that it might sweep away some of that litter and to help non-Orthodox/Catholic Christians to view the Apostolic Church from a more informed perspective.

I concede that the breadth and scope of "Orthodox/Catholicism" is itself a matter of much controversy. The Eastern Orthodox Church claims to be the only true apostolic Church, with an unbroken line of historical continuity, episcopal succession, and doctrinal orthodoxy extending back to the communities created by Christ and His disciples in the Levant and Asia Minor. It claims to hold the original Christian faith that was common to the primitive, undivided Church in both East and West during the first millennium of Christian history, and has always regarded itself as the organic continuation of the original Apostolic community and as holding a faith fully consistent with the Apostolic message.

On the other hand, Rome considers the Eastern Church to be schismatic. Orthodoxy reciprocally regards the entire Western Church, subsequent to Rome's break with Constantinople in 1054, to be schismatic and/or heretical. Roman Catholics deem Protestants to be heretics. Many Anglicans labour under considerable ambiguity as to whether they are Protestant or Catholic. The Eastern Orthodox have grave doubts about the validity of Anglican orders, and the Roman Church explicitly declared them to be null and void in a Papal Bull of 1896, in which it was claimed that Matthew Parker's consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559 was illegitimate due to doubt over whether the orders of his chief consecrator, William Barlow, were valid. While Roman doubts about Barlow have not been proved, and even if they were for argument's sake correct, legitimacy would have been secured through Archbishop William Laud, from whom the present Church of England Episcopate derives. Laud's consecration in 1621 was through the hands of undisputed bishops in the Irish and Italian succession.²

To be Apostolic, Orthodox, and Catholic, a church must affirm certain fixed principles, which are derived from four principal sources: the teachings of Christ; the Apostles, the early Church Fathers, and the inspired revelations in the canonical Scriptures. For the purpose of this book I am applying the general term "Orthodox/Catholicism" (and vice-versa) to churches that affirm the traditional, apostolic, orthodox doctrines and creeds, sacramental grace, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; the episcopal apostolic clerical orders of the historic, undivided Church, and that hold Church tradition³ as well as Holy Scripture as authoritative. These qualifications obtain in Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Traditional Anglican Catholicism.

As a member of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, this writer is part of the international Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), which explicitly affirms the ancient, Apostolic, Orthodox/Catholic faith of the primitive, undivided Church in its principal doctrinal statement, "The Affirmation of St. Louis." Since the TAC is not well-known outside Anglicanism, or indeed even within it, a brief explanation is in order. Contrary to popular misconception, an autonomous Church of England existed long before King Henry VIII and the Reformation. Indeed an autonomous British branch of the one Apostolic, Catholic Church can trace its roots back to Celtic Christianity in the 2nd Century, when it was part of a classical form of Christianity that was neither Eastern Orthodox nor Roman Catholic--not under the authority of the Bishop of Rome or any other foreign bishop, but "autocephalous," as the Eastern Churches have always been; that is: governed by its own head bishop, and simply in continuum with the common Apostolic Christian heritage.

The earliest undisputed documentary evidence of the organized Christian church in England is found in written works of early Church fathers (EG: Tertullian and Origen) early in the 3rd Century, although the first English Christian communities were probably established significantly earlier than that. Three English bishops attended the Council of Arles in 314, and English bishops also attended the Council of Sardica in 347 and the Council of Ariminum in 360. Several references to the Church in Britain during the Roman occupation are found in the writings of 4th Century Church fathers. There are two schools of thought with regard to whether the first Christian missionaries came to Britain from the Eastern Church of Asia Minor through Ireland, or from the Western Church in Rome. The Celtic British Church existed mainly in the north of England. When later missionaries arrived from Rome, they found the Christian Church already established in Great Britain.

The early Celtic Church was spiritually vigourous and strongly evangelistic, preaching the Gospel not only to pagans in the British Isles, but also sending missionaries to Europe, Africa, Iceland, and perhaps even pre-Columbian North America. St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Columba of Scotland are probably the ancient Celtic Church's most well-known figures. Some other early British Christian Saints are Saints Alban, Aidan, Hilda, and Chad.

In the 5th and 6th Centuries, the British Isles were subjected to increasing attacks and invasions by Norse and Baltic pirate raiders, especially on the east coasts of England and Scotland, resulting is a barbarization and re-paganization of society there. The invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove the original English Celtic Christians into western enclaves in Cornwall and Wales. In 595, St. Augustine (of Canterbury), a Benedictine monk and prior of St. Andrew's Church in Rome, was dispatched by Pope Gregory I (The Great) leading a group of some 40 missionaries to re-evangelize Britain.

Augustine landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent. King 'thelbert of Kent (c. 552-616) was a pagan, but his wife, Bertha, daughter of Charlibert, the King of Paris, was a Christian, and the couple with members of their court, went to Thanet to see Augustine, who, according to the Venerable Bede, came to meet them in procession behind the Cross and a picture of Jesus, and "prayed both for themselves, and also for them to whom and for whose sake they came thither."

'thelbert was impressed by Augustine's preaching, and invited the missionaries to his capital, Canterbury, where they were allowed to hold masses in the old church of St. Martin, which had been built during the Roman occupation. 'thelbert became a Christian, and was baptized on June 2, 597. On Christmas Day 597, tradition has it that more than 10,000 persons were baptized in the River Swale by Augustine, the first Archbishop of the English Church at Canterbury. He appointed two other Roman missionaries, Mellitus and Justus, Bishops of London and Rochester respectively, founded a monastery, and re-consecrated another nameless, disused Roman church at Canterbury as Christ Church. This building was eventually expanded into the present-day Canterbury Cathedral.

Augustine attempted to secure unity with the Celtic bishops, without success, but over the next hundred years he and his successors gradually re-established Christendom--the Mass, Latin writing and letters, and Christian civilization in general, to the ravaged regions bounded by the North Sea. During this time, the Church in western Britain, though impoverished and beleaguered, remained stubbornly autonomous, and refused to help the Italian papal missionaries. Consequently, the Roman Church encouraged and financed campaigns by east-coast-based British chieftains against the fiefdoms of western British warlords and bishops.

Most of Ireland was already under the authority of the Roman Church, and Irish missionaries were enlisted to help with re-Christianizing the barbarized eastern districts. However, the Irish Church still retained a semi-autonomous spirit and disagreed with the Romans over certain customs of the Latin Church, notably Easter observances.

Things came to a head at the Synod of Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, convened by King Oswy of Northumbria in A.D. 664, where arguments for conformity with Roman customs and usages prevailed. At Whitby most of the British Celtic Church voluntarily submitted itself to the Bishop of Rome, and to full unity with the Latin or Western Church in Europe, although it still remained largely autonomous due to its geographical isolation from the papal see. Some dioceses in Wales and Ireland remained independent of Rome until the 12th Century. Consequently, it is argued that Henry VIII merely restored an autonomy to the native British Church in 1531 that parts of it had forfeited only 300 years earlier, and as long as he remained on the throne, the official religion of England was virtually Catholicism without the Papacy. Henry claimed that he was reaffirming the ancient right of Christian princes and kings to exercise supremacy over the affairs of the church within their domain, citing as precedents, relations between church and state in the Eastern Roman Empire and until the 9th century under Charlemagne.

The reader will search these pages in vain for any attempt at a defense of the particular motive behind Henry VIII's break with the Papacy, or of the English Reformers' introduction of selected Continental heresies to the Church of England.

I also have no intention of mounting here an apologetic for the impaired and heterodox late 20th Century Church of England. Unfortunately, mainstream Anglicanism has been handicapped since Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer busily set about adding Continental Protestant theological accretions to the English Church's Catholic doctrines immediately following Henry VIII's death in 1547. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the influence of Puritans within the Anglican communion increased, and they succeeded in bringing the Church of England into closer conformity with Calvinistic Reformed ideas. On the other hand, during the 19th century the Church of England experienced a "counter-reformation" of sorts, when a group of clerics at the University of Oxford initiated a movement to restore the Catholic elements in the Church of England's spiritual heritage that had been suppressed by the Reformation. The "High Church" Oxford movement transformed its version of Anglicanism, placing renewed emphasis on the dignity and beauty of religious observances and affirming the central place of worship. The Anglo-Catholic High Churchmen revived theological concern for the traditional Catholic and Apostolic character of the ministry and the sacraments, and the ancient creeds of the undivided Church.

Today, the Church of England suffers from acute institutional "multiple personality disorder," a disease induced by the Canterbury communion's wishy-washy ethic of "inclusivity." In the Anglican Church, you can find most any doctrinal confession, ranging from paganism through outright atheism, Gnosticism, agnosticism, addle-brained liberal modernism and radical post-modernism, Evangelism, Pentecostalism, to "bells and smells" Anglo-Catholicism. Many Anglicans extol this inclusiveness as a virtue but in fact it is an acquiescence to compromise-- the resort to ambiguous formulae that both believer and heretic can subscribe to, which, axiomatically, accords the heretic equal status in the church as the true believer. This ethic is not coincidental in a state-established church, since the typical orientation of statesmen is to seek compromise where a reconciliation of opposing views seems a remote prospect. Thus an uneasy sort of peace is achieved, but it satisfies none of the participant parties.

Recent innovations embraced by "mainstream" Anglicanism, like the ordination of women, and in some Anglican provinces non-celibate homosexualists as well, have served to harden Orthodox and Roman rejection of Anglican orders. However, the Traditional Anglican Communion and other "continuing" Anglican communions maintain that Anglican Catholicism chose to align itself with the universal doctrines and practices and the Apostolic succession of the universal (catholic) Church. They introduced no peculiar creeds, no unique sacraments, and no distinct ordinal practices or orders. They simply retained the bishops, priests, and deacons of the Orthodox/Catholic Church.

In contrast with the European Reformers like Luther, Zwingli, the Anabaptists and later, Calvin, who put themselves in a position of having to develop a new theological system on the fly, as it were, the tenets affirmed by the 16th and 17th Century Anglican Church were not the work of any original theologian in the way that Lutheranism and Calvinism were. The English Reformation produced no new confessional document equivalent to Philip Melanchthon's Lutheran Augsburg Confession or the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism, but rather simply reaffirmed what the English Reformers deemed to be the teachings of the ancient apostolic faith. Traditional Anglicanism has no creeds other than the ones developed by the early Church, and shares this creedal catholicity with the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

Henry's usurpation to himself of the place of Supreme Head of the Church of England was an act of arrogant hubris to facilitate ignoble ends--his determination to defy Pope Clement VII and divorce Catherine of Aragon so he could marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn. However that was essentially a political act of state and not an ecclesiastical or theological revolution, such as was happening on the Continent.

The English Catholic Church at the beginning of the 16th Century was relatively uncorrupt, and in any case, Henry VIII was no Reformer. Indeed, the title "Defender of the Faith," still held by British monarchs today, was originally awarded to Henry VIII by the Pope in appreciation of Henry's forceful treatise against the anti-Papal theology of Martin Luther. In this work, Henry wrote that no punishment was too great for one who "will not obey the Chief Priest and Supreme Judge on earth," and that it was impossible to draw distinctions between "Christ's Church" and "the Pope's Church," because the Pope is "Christ's vicar in that Church over which Christ is the Head," and furthermore, "the whole Church is not only subject to Christ but, for Christ's sake, to Christ's only vicar, the Pope of Rome."⁴

Henry VIII remained a Catholic to his death, albeit a spectacularly apostate one, and the Church of England, in his lifetime, also remained Catholic in virtually all respects except obedience to the Pope. The "King's Book" published in 1543, and the Act of Six Articles, enforced belief in transubstantiation, the sufficiency of Communion of one kind, clerical celibacy, the binding effect of vows of celibacy, the rightfulness of private Masses, and the necessity of Sacramental confession.

Henry publicly burned Protestant translations of the Bible, and during his final illness rejected suggestions from Protestant advisors that he receive the Eucharist sitting. He replied: "If I could throw myself not only on the ground but under the ground, I should not hold myself to have given sufficient honour to the most Holy Sacrament." Deathbed contrition no doubt, but Henry had much to be contrite about.

One persistent voice of conscience on Henry's life was his cousin Reginald Pole, son of Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, and the last of the Plantagenet line. Indeed, historian T.M. Parker asserts that "the Poles, descended from George, Duke of Clarence, Edward lV's brother, were more certain heirs of the Plantagenets than the reigning [Tudor] dynasty."⁵

In 1535, Henry wrote to Pole in Rome, ordering him to submit his opinions on Henry's breach with the Papacy and self-appointment as the Supreme Head of the English Church. Pole replied in a letter entitled "Concerning the Unity of the Church," denouncing Henry's destruction of Church unity, his creation of a national Church, and above all his taking the title Head of the Church:

"Are titles given for nothing, or less than nothing," Pole wrote, "that men should call you, the robber and persecutor of the Church, the Head of the Church? Your father was a penurious man, but even he founded a few monasteries for the care of the poor; but who can cite any good deed of yours? Pleasure-houses, built for your own gratification, ruined monasteries, wrecked churches, their possessions confiscated to the Crown.... You have destroyed your nobles on the most frivolous pretenses; you have filled your court with worthless men, to whom you have yielded up everything. But what shall I say of the butcheries; of the dreadful executions which have made England the slaughter-house of the innocent? The holiest and most spotless men, for the new crimes invented by yourself, put to death in the most horrible and unheard-of manner. The gracious Bishop of Rochester, the unparalleled [Sir Thomas] More, the learned Reynolds, and so many others were victims of your senseless and wicked fury. In their bloody death no torment was spared to them nor any insult to their religion.... And you are the man who holds that the Pope on account of his moral deficiencies cannot be Head of the Church!... Finally I turn to you Henry, as your friend, your physician, your one-time intimate. I say to you repent, return, make good your misdeeds. In contrition lies man's hope. I am your Nathan. Be my David."

Alas, Henry's "senseless and wicked fury" was far from spent, and he was further enraged by the fact that the Pope had made Pole a Cardinal and appointed him Papal Legate to England. Henry hired assassins to attempt (unsuccessfully) to kill Pole, seized and killed two of Pole's brothers on a trumped up charge of treason, and even arrested Pole's 70-year-old mother, Margaret, and beheaded her for refusing to acknowledge Henry as Head of the Church.

When the news reached Pole, he remarked: "Until now I had thought God had given me the grace of being son of one of the best and most honoured ladies in England. Now he has vouchsafed to honour me still more, by making me the son of a martyr."

Anglican apologists might argue that Pole, who returned to England after the death of Henry's short-lived son Edward VI in 1553, as Papal Legate, spiritual advisor to Queen Mary, and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury, was at least party by association to plenty of religious executions himself, including those of the Anglican Reformers Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer. Latimer could hardly complain, having written to Henry VIII's Master of Rolls and Vicar General, Thomas Cromwell, at the time of the killing of Pole's family: "Blessed be the God of England whose minister ye be! I heard you once say you would make him [Pole] eat his own heart, which you have now brought to pass, for he must needs eat his own heart and be as heartless as he is graceless.⁶

It has been argued that of the 273 individuals burned by Bloody Mary, two-thirds would likely have been burned anyway by Cranmer, had he remained in power, as "Anabaptists"("the Devil's martyrs, according to their Lutheran co-Reformers). Clearly there was plenty of shame to go around, and this writer finds respective citations of atrocity by Catholic and Protestant apologists a singularly unprofitable line of debate. As Roman Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton said of Mary's reign: "She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not allowed to deprive great men of their property--or rather of other people's property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had not gone to church and sparing men who had gone there to steal the church ornaments."⁷

In point of fact, Pole and Mary did have a plan to reform the English Church within Roman Catholicism, to enforce clergy to be resident in their parishes; to instruct all congregations in the principles of the faith through frequent and intelligent preaching; for bishops and priests to live frugally, using the greatest portion of revenues for charity and education; to establish seminaries with high educational standards, to publish a new English language translation of the New Testament, a catechism, and a book of homilies, and they did produce a new English prayer book for private use. However, within three years of the 1555 national synod at which these proposals were tabled, both Reginald Pole and Mary Tudor died, coincidentally within hours of each other, on November 17, 1558. With them died the hope of reversing the English Reformation.

Chapter 2: THE PROBLEM WITH PROTESTANTISM

I have no desire to offend my Protestant friends here, but when mutually contradictory positions exist on matters such as sacramental grace, the nature and function of the priesthood, Christ's real presence in the Mass, or baptismal regeneration, one view must necessarily be correct and the other mistaken, no matter how sincerely each is held. It is illogical to assert that both can be ordained of God. The notion that "you can believe one thing and I another about a matter of fact or truth, and neither of us has to be wrong," is a relativist sophistry unsupported by reason or logic.

There is also the troubling matter of the major Reformers' theological "creativity." As historian Philip Hughes observes: "And the Lutheran conquest of Christian thought--the immediate conquest--was, in its essence, that an orator of genius persuaded the ordinary man by the thousand to throw over what every preacher he had ever heard had always said, and to accept instead of it, merely on the word of a man who said he knew better, ideas never heard of until now."⁸ In his bull of 1520 condemning Luther's teachings, Pope Leo X notes that if Luther's ideas were true, it would follow that the Church, whose guide is the Holy Ghost, would have to be in error and always had been in error. The day after Luther's famous defiant stand at the Diet of Worms on April 17, 1521, the young Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared that "A single monk, led astray by private judgment, has set himself against the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years and more, and impudently concludes that all Christians up till now have been in error."

What probable cause exists to determine which view-- Orthodox/Catholic or Protestant--is true in disputed matters?. On one hand we have a unified body and unbroken line of doctrine and tradition reaching back 2,000 years to the very beginnings of the Christian Church. On the other, a constellation of belief systems, none yet 500 years old, all derived to some degree from the Orthodox/Catholic tradition whose authority they repudiate. The undivided Orthodox/Catholic Church's heritage belongs to Protestant Christians too, unless they propose that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al., started something entirely new from scratch back in the 16th Century. However, while some of the European Reformers may have been convinced that by repudiating the Papacy and medieval Catholic Christendom they were returning to primitive Apostolic Christianity--they were grievously mistaken. Certainly they had no appeal to the Eastern Church. Patriarch Jeremiah II (1572-'95) rejected the Augsburg Confession as obvious heresy. "You can never be in agreement with us, or rather, say with the truth," wrote Jeremiah, "And we beg you not to trouble us further, not to write us or appeal to us while you go on reinterpreting the guiding lights of the Church and its theologians in other ways, paying them respect but repudiating them in deeds... Go your way, and write us no more about dogmas."⁹

Protestant apologists will counter that corruption in the medieval Roman Catholic hierarchy justifiably provoked the Reformers' revolution, and they will cite various more recent moral failures and other shortcomings particular to Orthodox/Catholics. While such criticisms are often overstated and/or not informed by fact so much as by myth and prejudice, no historically literate person will dispute that the immediately pre-Reformation Roman Church had many serious problems, or that Orthodox/Catholic individuals have always been, and continue to be, poor sinners afflicted by failings common to humanity. However, the faults of the medieval Church were matters of individual conduct--not doctrine--and any legitimate reform initiative should have remained within the Church to address the problems there.¹⁰ Reform doesn't necessarily imply secession, and to reject Orthodox/Catholicism because certain individuals past and present have failed to honour and live up to its teachings is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Protestantism abandoned the universal Church on the basis of misdirected good intentions mixed with erroneous philosophical assumptions and political opportunism.

It must also be understood in the interest of historical accuracy that as bad as the corrupt popes of the Renaissance were in terms of personal morality, not one of them made heretical alterations to the theological, moral, or doctrinal teaching of the Roman Church. As former Protestant, now Roman Catholic convert, Tom Howard notes: "Whereas other benches of bishops, which shall be nameless, in our own day are applauding homosexual promiscuity, adultery, everything else, themselves in a frolic through Sodom and Gomorrah, not one of those wicked Renaissance popes ever said, `Yes, I have lovers backstage here and this is a deeply Christian style of life.' They knew they were going to hell. They knew they were sinning."¹¹ Yet they did not adulterate the Deposit of Faith.

It must be remembered that the original Reformers all started out as Roman Catholics, and that the Protestant Reformation was born in a spirit of rebellion. Sometimes this revolt was manifested in utterly sophomoric forms, such as Ulrich Zwingli's stunt of publicly cooking up a pan of sausages in the middle of the 40 day Lenten fast, thus "showing our emancipation from such man-made rules." Luther and his followers ceremonially burned Leo X's bull, along with the Corpus of Canon Law and some minor scholastic works, on the town sewerage dump at Wittenburg on December 10, 1520.

To argue that the Reformers only rejected the Roman Catholic Church's 16th Century present, and didn't break with the Christian past, simply doesn't stand up to critical scrutiny. The European Reformers, albeit to varying degrees, rejected the Church's Sacraments, Tradition, and Authority, not merely the corrupt Catholic hierarchy of the time. Under Protestantism's revolutionary ethos, all forms of innovation came to be greeted with enthusiasm, rather than with caution and suspicion as they had been under Catholicism. Free enquiry and "the right of private judgment" are the paradigms of Protestant culture, which denies any central, united authority of doctrine or knowledge. Reformed Christianity would rest solely on individual faith based on the guidance contained in the Bible. This assumption inevitably destroyed the cultural purchase disciplined philosophy previously exerted on society prior to the Reformation, and the notion that there would be profound differences of opinion on fundamental issues came to be taken for granted.

G.K. Chesterton, a convert to Roman Catholicism relatively late in life, argued that with Luther, "[The Augustinian tradition] came out of its cell again, in the day of storm and ruin, and cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies.... It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless.... Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain."¹²

The gloomy outlook Chesterton refers to was articulated in Martin Luther's own Wittenberg Testament, in which he affirmed that "Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in saying; Repent ye! intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence. This word cannot be understood of sacramental penance, that is, of the confession and satisfaction which are performed under the ministry of priests. It does not, however, refer solely to inward penitence; nay, such inward penitence is nought unless it outwardly produces various mortifications of the flesh. The penalty thus continues as long as the hatred of self, that is, true inward penitence, continues, namely: until our entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven."

Luther asserted the total depravity and corruption of human nature, the utter powerlessness of man to do good, and the belief that men are predestined by God to heaven or hell without regard for what sort of life they lead. Calvin amplified this into an inflexible and horrible doctrine about predestination to hell that equated all temporal pleasure with sin. The Reformers were nothing if not inconsistent. Calvin rejected the Catholic Church's authority as that of the anti-Christ and proclaimed the sovereignty if individual human conscience. Yet he claimed that "... if authority and liberty of judging the law be left to private men, there will never be any certainty set down, but rather all religion will become doubtful." In that saying, Calvin concisely defined the problem with Protestantism, and prophesied its inevitable consequences for Christendom.

The Reformation did much more than ending the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope in Western Christendom. It changed the general Christian focus in the West from an objective concentration on praising God and acknowledging what He has done for us, to an increasingly subjective emphasis on personal experience and internalized faith. The Right Rev. Robert Mercer, C.R., Diocesan Bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada observes: "I note that after, say, 1700 AD hymns tend to be more subjective. Me and my Savior. Me and my love for Him. Me and my sin. We even sing hymns to ourselves, preach ourselves musical exhortations, as it were...."¹³ This obsession with personal feeling was and is at odds with Orthodox/Catholic tradition, in which what one "feels" during Christian worship is essentially irrelevant. Fr. Andrew Neaum says: "The worship of the church flows on whether I am there or not, whether I feel pious, moved, or not. The tradition flows on, and simply by going one slips into its river, and is carried along for an hour, to slip out again refreshed and renewed, whether one recognizes the fact or not."¹⁴

In Protestantism there is a constant emphasis on the subjective self, EG: "In order to be a Christian `I have to," or "one has to.'" In Orthodox/Catholic understanding, becoming a Christian is a more objective process, whereby you are not expected to grasp the whole light of Christian understanding immediately. It is like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts saying: "I know I'm reading something that is significant, but what does it all mean?" In the present chaos of Western denominational pluralism, the Protestant Christian is left to figure out "what it all means" almost entirely on his own resources, without any authority or guidance other than his own interpretation of what the Bible says to him as an individual.

Arnold Lunn described Protestantism as "a mixture of objective truth and subjective error." That is: it is objective insofar as it retains selected Orthodox/Catholic doctrines, and the Orthodox/Catholic arguments in defense of these doctrines, but the Protestant must also rely on subjective feeling to bolster his incomplete belief in Orthodox/Catholic Truth. Ergo, the Protestant who still accepts the Orthodox/Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, but who rejects the authority of the Church to define that doctrine, must necessarily fall back on his own subjective feeling to support his Trinitarian belief, because it is impossible to prove that doctrine on the basis of New Testament texts alone. Sola Scriptura does not conclusively protect Trinitarian belief. Orthodox/Catholicism, on the other hand, is objective in terms of doctrinal belief. The Affirmation of St. Louis (TAC) declares that "The conscience, as the inherent knowledge of right and wrong, cannot stand alone as a sovereign arbiter of morals. Every Christian is obligated to form his conscience by the Divine Moral Law and the Mind of Christ as revealed in Holy Scriptures, and by the teachings and Tradition of the Church."

Protestantism, implicitly rejects the concept of immutable absolutes and affirms liberal progressivism in the sense that it is theoretically willing to change and adopt new or "better" ideas and discard the traditions of the past on the basis of democratic opinion. For example, several conservative Protestant denominations have voted to issue policy statements strongly condemning homosexual behavior (although not the PERSONS who practice it) as sinful and inimical to Biblical teaching. That is commendable as far as it goes, but the point too easily overlooked is that the very process of voting on this matter implies a priori that the vote could potentially go the other way--that affirmation and acceptance of homosexual behavior could also become church policy on the basis of a democratic vote. This has of course already happened in several liberal Protestant denominations. However, in terms of Orthodox/Catholic understanding, the matter of rejection or acceptance of homosexual behavior is not a negotiable issue--not something that could ever be legitimately voted on. Scripture and 2,000 years of Holy Tradition have declared homosexual behavior to be sinful and morally deficient, and there is simply nothing to discuss.

However, Protestants in the post-modern West, and indeed many Western Catholics, have been so thoroughly conditioned by the reflexive assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, that Orthodox/Catholic certitude on moral issues (or anything else) becomes extremely difficult to accept. It seems like an abdication of intellect and reason, although it should be carefully noted that it is only after a Catholic has accepted by reason the concept of an infallible Church that he surrenders private judgment to the judgment of the Church, and then only on points where the Church speaks with the voice of God. On all other points, private judgment for Catholics remains unimpaired. However, in the not-unrelated paradigms of Protestantism and liberalism, EVERYTHING is theoretically negotiable and mutable, since there is no fundamental ground of knowledge and authority. Even the appeal to Scripture is open to interpretation. If something seems like a "better idea" at the time, Protestants and liberals want to adopt it. Conversely, Orthodox/Catholics acknowledge and affirm that there is absolute truth that doesn't change with the ephemeral fashions, whims, and obsessions of time.

The only thing that prevented Protestant anti-authoritarian freedom from degenerating into secularist chaos during the first post-Reformation centuries was the fact that laws and public morals--the social consensual ethos--continued to be based on a priori assumptions of Biblical inerrancy. The late Protestant evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer wrote: "The Bible's absolutes provide a consensus within which freedom can operate. But once the Christian consensus has been removed... then the very freedoms which have come out of the Reformation became a destructive force leading to chaos in society."¹⁵

Schaeffer's son Frank, whose conversion from evangelicalism to Orthodoxy is discussed in a later chapter, says that: "Any Protestant who is honest will admit concerning the chaos of Protestantism that it's debatable that if that chaos had been in the Church from the beginning there would be any Christian witness left. It has had such a diluting effect on it."¹⁶

Besides their reference to Scripture as the sole authority, sola scriptura, the Reformers, because of their concern about prevailing attitudes that salvation depended on works of merit rather than the grace and mercy of God, developed the companion doctrine of sola fides - -justification¹⁷ by faith alone. Martin Luther wanted to excise the book of James from the Bible because of its affirmation that faith without works is dead. John Calvin recognized only one will operating in the universe--the Divine Will, which he emphasized so strongly that he virtually denied (in his stress on the role of predestination) the power of human free will. Man's good works, which proceeded from no free will in Calvin's construct, were thus of no consequence in terms of salvation.

Both Luther and Calvin had a bleakly pessimistic view of human nature, and affirmed the total depravity of man; that no "good works" done by man avail in the slightest toward his salvation. Man's nature is utterly sinful, and remains so even after baptism and justification by grace. All man's acts are essentially sinful, and continue to be sins even after he is justified, although God no longer holds these sins against him. In the Reformers' theology, there was no room for natural goodness, no such thing as small sins, and no such thing as human merit. "Without the faith that works through charity, even the works which appear good are sins," wrote Luther, who taught that God not only permits sin, but that sin cannot be committed unless God commands it. "It does not follow," he maintained, "that God wants the sin to be committed, although He wills that it should take place." The reason for this alleged divine perversity, according to Luther, is to demonstrate through divine anger punishing the sinner how hateful sin is to God.

The primitive, undivided Church also affirmed that salvation was granted by the mercy of God, and that those baptized into Christ were called to believe in Him and that good works would be the fruit of their faith. The concept of faith versus works was unknown in the early Church. Or as C.S. Lewis observed, it's like trying to decide which blade of a pair of scissors is more important.

Orthodox/Catholics believe that justification by faith in God is part of being brought into covenant relationship with Him, rather than a sort of legal acquittal before Him. It is God's mercy, not our own faith that saves us. God initiates and makes the New Covenant with us. For Orthodox/Catholics, justification by faith is a dynamic--not static-- concept. It is not a point-in-time thing. Faith is not something the Catholic Christian exercises at one critical moment, expecting it to be effective for the rest of his life. True Christian faith is not just a decision, but a carrying through of that decision as a way of life. Orthodox/Catholics happily affirm justification by faith (Rom. 3:28), but not justification by faith alone, which contradicts Scripture (James 2: 17, 25).

Chapter 3: RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

It would of course be unfair and inaccurate to place sole blame on Protestantism for the ascendance of secular humanism in Western society, although the Reformers unquestionably pulled the bung out of the liberal barrel. The Reformation either originated or facilitated the advancement of a constellation of interconnected modern ideas that had a profound influence on political, economic, and philosophical developments in the centuries that followed up to our present day. As G.K. Chesterton put it: "On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world.

"He was the first man who ever consciously used his consciousness; or what was later called his Personality. That is what we now call personality. A little later is was called Psychology. After that it was called Advertisement or Salesmanship.... [Luther] did in a very real sense make the modern world. He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion."¹⁸

The spirit that presaged the end of dominant Catholic Christendom really began to stir with the Renaissance during the 14th and 15th Centuries, a movement whose most ardent apologists extravagantly regarded as the rebirth of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. Indeed Renaissance scholars had re-discovered, and developed profound admiration for, the rich cultures of pagan antiquity, and in the process become semi-pagan in spirit themselves. This revived enthusiasm for Graeco-Roman glory--its art, architecture, literature, and philosophy-- aroused a notion that the nemesis of these great cultures was none other than the spread of Christianity. Indeed this had been implied before by such pagan reactionaries as Julian the Apostate, who wrote in the 4th Century of "The Christians, to whom we owe all our misfortunes...."

This postulate has remained persistent since the decline of the Roman Empire became manifest, coincident with the exponential spread of Christendom during the half-millennium between Christ's Resurrection and about A.D. 500. Blaming Christianity for divers malignancies-- present and ancient--has become especially fashionable in the latter part of the 20th Century. However a contradictory school of thought has been articulated at least since the time of St. Jerome (A.D. 320-420), who argued that if the Graeco-Roman world had accepted the Orthodox/Catholic faith sooner, the decay of ancient material and cultural civilization would never have taken place.

The paradigm-shift that the Renaissance represented had divers catalysts. Beginning with the revival of the Holy Roman Empire (which was, as has been noted, neither holy, nor Roman, nor in fact--an empire) under Otto I in 962, popes and emperors competed for supremacy. A, bitter antagonism developed between Rome and the German Empire, which was exacerbated in the 14th and 15th Centuries by burgeoning German nationalism. Increasing resentment of papal taxation, and submission to a foreign Pope also developed in northern Europe, especially England and Germany, during this era. The late Middle Ages were punctuated by various power-struggles between the Popes and secular Kings, emperors and other lay-potentates, which led to the Avignon papacy of 1309-77, in which Christendom's central authority was captured by one of its provinces. This state of affairs ruptured Church unity and resulted in the papal Great Schism of 1378-1415. A unified papacy was reestablished under Martin V, but it had suffered heavy damage to its prestige, and the popular sense of Christian commonwealth was severely eroded.

Meanwhile in England, the statutes of Mortmain in 1279, Provisors in 1351, and Praemunire in 1393, substantially reduced the Church's power to withdraw land from the control of the civil government, to appoint clerics, and to exercise judicial authority, setting the stage for Henry VIII's breach with the Papacy a century and a half later.

Anti-Catholic critics have made much of the Church's descent into superstition during the late Medieval period, and although essential doctrine remained untouched by bad popes and general corruption, it was indeed overlaid by a great deal of superstitious unfortunateness, particularly the issue of indulgences, which were to soon result in catastrophe.

The doctrine of indulgences affirmed that Church authorities can assign what could be described as "spiritual credits" earned by especially saintly individuals who had led holy lives to the benefit of others: an indulgence granted. In the late Medieval era, indulgences began to be handed out--essentially sold--in exchange for alms or other monies given for a pious purpose, a clear distortion of the basic concept. In addition, the ecclesiastical courts had in many cases become engines of extortion, since it was always convenient for Church lawyers and judges to discover cases of heresy or other spiritual misdemeanors for which fines could be levied. These abuses brought the credibility of the Church as a repository of truth into disrepute, and promoted skepticism about essential doctrines.

"I did see the common people of Christendom to be corrupted, not only in their ways, but in their ideas," wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam. "I considered the most part of those which profess themselves to be pastors and doctors to abuse the titles of Christ to their own advantage... preaching men's inventions and alleging them to be God's commandments... indulgences, financial substitutes for penance, and such like..."

There was also the matter of payment to the Church of mortuaries- -dues payable upon death. When a person died, one or another clerical organization had the right to bury him and collect the mortuary payment. Ordinarily this would be the local parish, which would collect funeral dues from the surviving family after the funeral. However practices varied in different clerical jurisdictions, and in some places the mortuary would take the form of the Church appropriating the deceased's most valuable material possession. This practice of mortuaries amounted to a gratuitous tax which enriched the clergy at the expense of the laity.

The Church had also become rich due to feudal land holdings and other endowments that had come into its possession. The Church's tax-free land holdings, are estimated to have included as much as one-fifth to one-third of the area of Europe. Much of this wealth was used for commendable purposes, building and maintenance of church buildings, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and higher education institutions. However, by the end of the Middle Ages, widespread abuse became common whereby the Church's endowments came to be regarded as a source of private income for clerics and even lay-nobility designated as "guardians" of Church properties. Witnessing monies and land that had been donated for the proper conduct of the Church, to help the poor, or to finance education or medical care, used to finance lavish lifestyles for corrupt clerics or even laymen, promoted a general cynicism and resentment. It should however be acknowledged that despite this scandal, most of the Church's income continued to be applied to rightful purposes.

The fate of the medieval Greenland colonies provides a capsule vignette of the effect abuse of indulgences and mortuaries could have. The Greenlanders had been evangelized around AD 1000 by Lief Ericsson, who was converted to Christianity and made a missionary by King Olaf Trygveson during a visit to Norway in 999. Nineteen year old Lief returned to Greenland with several priests, and his mother, Tjodhild, built the first church there at Brattahlid.

Eventually there were 16 churches in the Greenland colonies--12 in the Eastern Settlement and four in the Western Settlement. The Cathedral at Sandness, whose foundation still remains, measured 80 feet by 60 feet. The bishop's residence was said to be even larger.

However, by the mid-14th Century, the Greenland colonies had fallen on hard times, partly because climate change was making already marginal conditions more difficult. As well, nearly all of the colonies' 250-odd farms had become possessions of the Church through payment of mortuaries and the sale of indulgences. The formerly independent, landowning, Viking farmers were reduced to tenancy and serfdom.

In 1342, the entire population of the Western Settlement disappeared, leaving no evidence of epidemic disease or violence. Their ships were gone, and it was speculated that fed up with living in quasi-slavery in harsh conditions, they, "having given up all good manners and true virtues, turned to the people of America." No conclusive trace of the lost colonists has ever been found.

The last officiating Greenland bishop died in 1383, but a large wedding with guests from Iceland took place in 1408, and two papal letters mention church services there in 1418. A great naval attack by native Eskimos, which killed hundreds and destroyed homes and churches, struck the Greenland colony's deathblow that same year.

Along with a corrupt clergy, another factor that increased the burgeoning of doubt and undermined Church authority was the assault on traditional certitudes resulting from new scientific discovery and speculation, as well as a vastly expanded geographical context that came with New World discovery. Things were shown to be not what they had so long dependably seemed, and this greatly disturbed the equilibrium of Christendom. Rapid expansion of material knowledge upset long-fixed traditions of thought about the nature of the universe. The now-familiar tension and conflict between science and religion began in earnest with the Renaissance spirit.

Without doubt the most revolutionary technological development of the late Middle Ages was Johann Gutenburg's printing press (c. 1452), which facilitated radically more efficient, rapid, and general communication of information--both true and false--than had ever existed before in history. Techno-prophet and conservative Catholic Marshall McLuhan, most of whose self-perceived fans never bothered to find out what he really had to say, argued that the balance of human senses had been disrupted by the "bombshell" of a phonetic alphabet in the 4th Century BC, and even more so by the "H-bomb" of movable type in the 15th Century. McLuhan believed that "Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear," making the visual sense paramount over the other four senses. This, he protested, led to an unhealthy obsession with specialization, and a fragmentation of peoples and cultures that was manifested in such phenomena as the Protestant Reformation, the concept of the nation-state, the rise of bureaucracy, and the ascendancy of the "expert." McLuhan's famous observation that "The medium is the message," which became a misappropriated buzz-phrase of the baby- boomer generation, actually meant that any communications medium creates a particular mental environment of its own that in turn colours how people it touches perceive and experience the world. Printing, for instance, would engender the concept that only documented knowledge is reliable and trustworthy, making tradition, including the traditional authority of the Church, suspect. This idea would become incorporated with the sola scriptura doctrine of the Reformation.

In reaction to their eroding moral authority, the clergy struck back, often brutally, using threats and acts of force to impose order on an increasingly restive laity. Not only heresy and rebellion, but even complaints expressed about clerical excesses were met with harsher and more frequent punishments. The ancient practice of burning people alive was revived with a vengeance, enlarging the quotient of fear and resentment of the Church and its "reign of terror" at the end of the Middle Ages.

The Hundred Years War in France and the War of the Roses in England both contributed to the social and spiritual ferment of the pre-Renaissance period, but the most shattering cataclysm of all was the Black Death--Bubonic Plague--which tore into Europe via Mediterranean ports in 1348 and killed at least a third of Western Christendom--25 million people--within the span of two hideous years, throwing its economies into chaos. The ranks of the clergy were decimated, making it necessary to ordain many poorly educated or otherwise inadequate priests. This state of affairs also opened Church offices to those who sought them as a means to achieve personal gain and power, with subsequent disastrous consequences.

In many respects, Christian civilization, which had arguably reached its zenith in the High Middle Ages during the 11th, 12th, and 13th Centuries, never fully recovered from the Black Death's ravages. The modern era hadn't quite begun, but it was waiting in the wings, poised to burst onto the stage of history and steal the show. Meanwhile the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, and the German Peasants' Revolt some 150 years later that was so brutally put down with the blessing of Martin Luther,¹⁹ bore witness to the lingering economic effects of wars, plague and late medieval corrupt mismanagement of affairs both spiritual and temporal.

The Renaissance period is consensually deemed to have marked the end of the Middle Ages, the burgeoning of modernism, the decline of traditional Catholic religion as the dominant Western socio-political force, and the rise of the secular nation-state as a political paradigm. In this new conception of the world, focus shifted from the general destiny and unity of all Christendom, to the earthly progress of particular states, each of which should enjoy sovereign independence to make laws applying to its citizens without interference or sanction from any higher moral power. The time-honoured unity of Empire and Papacy, with all of Christendom operating under one civil authority acting in synergy with a central religious authority over spiritual matters, was discarded. Politics began to be regarded in secular terms--recognizing no higher law than the temporal welfare of the particular state and its citizens, to wit: "separation of Church and state." The future plagues of state bureaucracy and the confiscatory taxation necessary to pay for it also gained a foothold during the Renaissance. Niccolo Machiavelli more or less invented and defined modern, pragmatic, power politics in his famous 1513 work "The Prince."

During the Renaissance, humanism began to displace classical philosophy and disciplined medieval scholasticism. Voltaire considered the Renaissance to be a crucial watershed in the alleged liberation of the human mind from superstition and error, which he identified with Christianity. Sir Thomas More, who ironically was to become a sainted Roman Catholic martyr, foreshadowed socialist folly in his work, "Utopia,", in which he prescribed a classless, communal society, without Christianity, and guided solely by human reason. Nineteenth Century French historian Jules Michelet maintained that the Renaissance marked a true rebirth of the human spirit, which was a precondition for all of the great achievements of modernity, characterized by the rise of the individual, scientific inquiry and geographical exploration, and the growth of secular values. In the eyes of these humanists, medieval society was a period of unrelieved darkness--a point Christian admirers of Catholic society and culture hotly dispute.

In Christian terms, Renaissance "rebirth" was nothing other than a renovation of the human hubris that led to man's expulsion from Eden. To humanists, only human values are significant, and a culture of humanism is essentially hostile to Christian humility and reverence for the supernatural. The Renaissance humanists were profoundly convinced that society and its requirements had "outgrown" older modes of thought. The Renaissance was characterized by a rise in sexual immorality, and widespread interest in the occult, magic, and astrology. In religion, the durable old Gnostic and Manichean heresies--never entirely stamped out--once again reared their ugly heads.

The humanist virus also infected the world of Renaissance art. "In old times," wrote John Ruskin, "men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith to show their powers of painting. The distinction is enormous, the difference as incalculable as irreconcilable." Medieval Christian painters had consecrated their art to the service of Catholic religion. Humanist painters used their mistresses as models for the Madonna, and exploited sacred subjects to demonstrate their mastery of technique.

Ruskin believed that post-medieval architecture expressed the worst characteristics of pagan pride and ignorance, a "blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency." What he would think of today's Bauhaus monstrosities and suburban kitsch boggles the imagination.

"Something very beautiful passed out of the world at the Renaissance," writes Sir Arnold Lunn, "the beauty which was not the monopoly of class or clique, but which found expression in the common things of common men, in the peasant's hut no less than the palace..."²⁰

We only need compare the architectural glory of, say, 14th Century Venice, with Blake's "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution, the hellish no-man's-land of post-modern U.S. inner-city urban decay, or the cancerous strip-mall sprawl blighting the outskirts of nearly every North American city and town, to grasp what Ruskin and Lunn were getting at.

"The standard to which Ruskin appealed was ethical rather than aesthetic," notes Lunn. "The good produced the beautiful, but he was interested in the beautiful mainly because it was a reflection of the good. [Pre-Renaissance] architecture was nobler because it enshrined a nobler ideal."²¹

Unfortunately, as discussed above, the Roman Catholic Church found itself weakened by internal strife and ill-prepared, just at the time it needed to combat the tide of humanism, neo-paganism, and budding liberalism that swept over Europe during the Renaissance. Not least among these problems was the Great Papal Schism referred to briefly earlier in this chapter, which began after the death of Pope Gregory XI in March, 1378. Rome was determined that the papacy, which had been ensconced at Avignon and dominated by the French Crown for 70 years, must return to Rome with the election of the new pope. A somewhat rowdy papal conclave was strongly lobbied by crowds outside to elect a Roman, or at least an Italian pope. A Neapolitan priest who took the name Urban VI was chosen, a disastrous mistake as it turned out. Urban proved to be bullheaded, arbitrary, and ruthless when opposed or questioned. He launched a campaign to drastically reduce the power of the cardinals, who had been virtual co-rulers with the Avignon popes.

Under French influence, a majority of cardinals gradually withdrew from the papal court. In a meeting at Anagni the cardinals declared Urban's election null and void because, they alleged, they had elected him under extreme duress from the Roman mobs. A second pope, Cardinal Robert of Geneva who became Clement VII, was elected. Urban VI did not step down willingly, and Clement VII was obliged to exercise his reign from Avignon. Thus began nearly four decades of division in the Church along national, political, and religious lines between two lines of papal claimants: the Roman succession of Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII, and the Avignon line of Clement VII and Benedict XIII.

After decades of wrangling and fruitless negotiations, the cardinals finally called the Council of Pisa in 1409, which deposed both Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and then elected yet another pope, Alexander V (who was succeeded shortly afterward by the medieval John XXIII). The Pisan popes received the support of most of Latin Christendom, but the papal schism continued until the Council of Constance (1414-18) removed all three papal claimants and on Nov. 11, 1417 elected one new pope, Martin V, who was finally accepted by almost everyone. However, the papal battles were not quite over yet. Another schism emerged at the Council of Basel (1431-49) which elected "Antipope" Felix V. Happily, Felix abdicated in 1449, and the unified papacy was at long last restored.

However, the prestige and authority of Rome, and the Catholic Church in general, had been disastrously diminished in 39 years of internal strife. By the 15th Century the fractured papacy had surrendered most of its control of the Church to the French and Spanish monarchies. The fact that reforms were needed to address corruption became obvious, and various agendas for reorganizing the ecclesiastical hierarchy had been debated at the Council of Constance from 1414 to 1418, but none gained majority support, so none were implemented at that time, with disastrous consequences.

Some popes of the post-schism, post-conciliar period, notably Nicholas V (1447-1455) and Pius II (1458-1464) were learned, devout, Christian men and worthy leaders of Christ's Church, but others were interested mainly in political life, furtherance of their families' interests, and collection of revenue. Alexander VI (Rodrigo de Borja--father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, by his mistress, Vanozza dei Cattanei) ascended to the papal throne by means of bribery, blackmail, and other chicanery, and his reign was characterized by a descent into decadence that included oral readings of pornographic literature in the papal library. This perversion of the papacy resulted in deteriorating clerical discipline and morale, and flourishing heresies, making conditions ripe for the most successful of all heresies--Protestantism--to make its bow.

Julius II, the "soldier-pope," was enthroned in October 1503, and attempted to institute reforms during his decade of tenure, but was more interested in consolidating the papacy's eroding political influence. Giovanni de Medici (Leo X) of Florence (second son of Florentine commercial magnate Lorenzo "The Magnificent" de Medici) followed Julius II in 1513--a genuinely popular choice for pope despite the fact that he was only a 38 year old deacon who had not been ordained at the time of his election. However, virtually continuous wars, endless political intrigues, and Leo X's personal admiration for the Borgias and his desire to emulate their empire-building ambitions undermined his half-hearted Church reform initiatives.

Despite the advanced degree of apostasy and/or perfunctory concern for spiritual matters at the highest levels of the Church, there remained a remnant of spiritually discerning and morally upright clerics, who watched with growing dismay as the cancerous deterioration continued. Among these was a German Augustinian monk and university professor named Martin Luther.

Humanism began to displace Scholasticism as the dominant philosophy of Western Europe during the 15th Century. Christian humanists like Desiderius Erasmus of Holland, John Colet of England, and others, anticipated the Reformation in their tendency to study the Bible directly, ignoring medieval commentaries, and in their application of "new learning" critical methods to New Testament study. Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla criticized Bible translations other documents that supported Church dogma and tradition. However, despite their flirtations with heresy, the Renaissance Christian humanists continued to regard themselves as good Catholics. Erasmus, for instance, refused to throw in his lot with Martin Luther.

Proto-Reform heretical movements led by John Wycliffe (the Lollards in England) and Jan Hus or "John Huss" (the Hussites in Bohemia) cropped up during the 14th and 15th centuries The execution of Huss as a heretic in 1415 initiated the Hussite Wars, a violent Bohemian nationalist rebellion, stamped out only with difficulty by the combined armies of the Holy Roman emperor and the Pope. The Hussite wars anticipated post-Reformation religious civil war (the Peasant's Revolt) in Germany and their residual influence played a significant role in the Reformation later on.

Wycliffe, (c.1330-1384) who was for a time Master of Balliol College at Oxford University, launched a series of forceful attacks on Catholic Practice and doctrine in the late 14th Century. In 1379, Wycliffe wrote: "All men are tenants-in-chief under God, and hold from him all that they are and possess; the Pope claims to be our mesne-lord, and to interfere between us and our divine suzerain, and therein he grievously errs."²² Wycliffe believed that the sacramental power of the priesthood was an illusion, and anticipated Protestant liberalism in his belief that reason and conscience are wholly adequate guides for the self-directed soul, asserting that the State must act as guardian over the Church, that the Church should be under secular power in each country, and that the papacy should be eliminated. "After Urban VI," declared Wycliffe in 1382, "no one ought to be received as Pope, but men should live, after the manner of the Greek Church, under their own laws." Wycliffe was mistaken about the Orthodox Church, but his writings and statements did make him one of the principal authors of the Protestant Reformation. King Richard of England's Queen, Anne of Bohemia, was a Wycliffe sympathizer, and sent his pamphlets home to Bohemia where they influenced Jan Hus, who in turn inspired Martin Luther.

It must also be noted, however, that devout, orthodox, Christian voices also remained within the Church during the Renaissance, such as Girolomo Savonarola (1452-1498), Thomas Kempis (c. 1380-1471), Francisco Xemenes de Cisneros (1435-1517), the "small-r" reformer Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1470-?) and countless others whose names are now forgotten but who kept the Faith alive through the bad papacies.

Chapter 4: THE END OF CATHOLIC CULTURE

The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution that followed them, ended medieval Catholic culture in Western Europe and launched the era of modern liberalization. The Reformation's repudiation of central spiritual and moral authority made Christian faith, as it had been understood by the Church for a millennium and a half, virtually impossible. Conviction was substituted for faith, establishing an environment in which everyone was free to interpret truth on the basis of subjective understanding and conscience, thereby paving the way for ideological plagues like liberal moral relativism, logical positivism, and situational ethics.

Not that the founding Reformers had abandoned all of the orthodox doctrines of the Church that had united Christendom for over 1,500 years. The proto-Protestants continued to affirm the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ; the immortality of the soul and the eternity of blessedness (or its polar opposite) after death. The essential definition of faith as certitude in things not demonstrable by direct experience or deductive proof remained. However it remained in increasingly fragmented groups, rather than as a universal affirmation, held commonly throughout Christendom, taken for granted as the central governing influence in everyone's life. There was now such a diversity of doctrinal emphasis and moral affirmation that no common consensual norm could be applied to all of our civilization. With no common moral bond, moral authority, or unified Sacramental expression in a single liturgy, Christendom was severely weakened. The loss of Christian unity vastly diminished Christian capacity for coordinated resistance to the sustained assaults of spiritual evil--a state of affairs that has become woefully obvious in the last third of the 20th-Century as what is left of Christian civilization slides ever deeper into an abyss of moral depravity.

Francis Schaeffer noted: "The [post-Reformation] freedom that once was founded on a biblical consensus and a Christian ethos has now become autonomous freedom, cut loose from all constraints. Here we have the world spirit of our age--autonomous Man setting himself up as God, in defiance of the knowledge and the moral and spiritual truth which God has given....

"As evangelical, Bible-believing Christians we have not done well in understanding this.... Very few have taken a strong stand against the world spirit of this age as it destroys our culture."²³

Differences in religion are the root of differences in culture, religion being the main determining element in the establishment of a civilization. The Catholic religion built Western Christian civilization, and that culture cannot be sustained without Catholic Christianity as its dominant moral compass. Since the Reformation, Christianity's influence on Western culture has steadily declined, a phenomenon directly attributable to Protestantism's demonstration that Church authority could be successfully challenged. However, behind the assertion that authority should be thrown off lies the assumption that freedom is a moral imperative--that what is not free absolutely and always ought to be free, and that limits on freedom of any sort are intrinsically evil. Unfortunately, the effect of doing away with anything and everything that inhibits or restrains personal autonomy is in fact a direct and deliberate rebellion against God and His law. Freedom without form, order, or limits amounts to chaos, and inevitably leads to the breakdown of society and civilization.

Rejection of authority and tradition led predictably and inexorably to the cultural embrace of modernity and secularization. The ascendancy of reductionist science, the Industrial Revolution, and the philosophical Enlightenment were all enabled and empowered by the Protestant Reformation. Questioning the beneficial goodness of these developments seems peculiar--even bizarre--to most modern minds, but historians of the future will be able to evaluate their consequences more objectively, given adequate time remaining to do so. The fact that we have taken what was a perfectly good planet for people to live on, and within an interval of 100 years or so turned it into a polluted cesspool that may not sustain human life much longer--a direct result of scientific and industrial activity--may provide the ultimate and definitive judgment.

Westerners in general and Protestants in particular tend to reflexively equate Christian virtue with progress, utilitarianism, and even material prosperity, a topic I will discuss more comprehensively in another chapter. This is one reason why monasticism has never made more than a peripheral impact in North America and is now in severe decline in Europe as well. The materialist assumptions of post-Enlightenment liberalism deem monasticism to be "useless." It has no immediately tangible social, political, or material benefit. It produces nothing "real." In Protestantism, especially North American Protestantism, material prosperity and social progress are assumed to be the inevitable fruits of Christian living. Western Christians in general have been conditioned to expect that Christianity will produce positive social results in a utilitarian sense. They want their faith to accomplish something economic or political that people can see. Such results are not necessarily wrong or undesirable, but they should not be the main objective of Christianity whose primary mission is the salvation of souls, not material prosperity and social reform.

The late Canadian philosopher George Grant astutely defined liberalism as an essentially anti-ecological creed: "The idea that man's essence is freedom and that what chiefly concerns man in this life is to shape the world as we want it."²⁴ Grant also argued that by aspiring to transcend "the human condition" and establish Heaven on Earth through application of technological means, post-Enlightenment liberals and leftists destroyed the intellectual and social conditions necessary for wisdom, heroism, and productive work. He noted that all "local cultures" were in danger of being swept away by a pan-global economic technocracy, as liberal humanist intellectuals everywhere pursued their agenda of tearing decent, but formally less educated, people away from their attachment to religion.

Grant believed that western Christendom was doomed, not merely compromised, by the fact that its theologians from at least the 11th century on have downplayed the mystical and over-emphasized rationality and intellect in their approach to God. He blamed these man- centred theologies for the rise of the scientism and industrialization that he believed were destroying civilization, arguing that many church leaders "don't seem to be aware of how deeply the principles of modernity... make the believing of Christianity an impossibility, and that these principles have to be shown to be false."²⁵ George Grant hoped for a religious revival that would re-establish "the idea of limits... the necessity of knowing in advance that there are things one will never do, things that one can know would be wrong at all times and all places.... God is that which we cannot manipulate. He is the limit of our right to change the world. In the recognition of limits the idea of law in some form must once again become real for us." Pre-Reformation Catholic culture in the West understood the crucial need for limits, but Protestantism's demand for individual moral freedom and rejection of authority quickly obscured that understanding in Western popular culture.

So what was Medieval Catholic culture really like? There is a received and seldom-examined assumption in our time that humanity has progressed from the alleged tyranny, oppression, and feudal servitude of the Middle Ages, through the great awakening of humanistic consciousness in the philosophical Enlightenment, to arrive in a brave new world of liberal democratic social justice. This facile and prejudiced view is false. The feudal system itself conferred numerous rights on the peasant classes, and was established in part as a reaction to the tyranny of the Roman Empire in its last days. The Medieval peasantry was exempt from military conscription. The peasant class was highly valued by Christian society, and in exchange for their work peasants were granted freedom (slavery disappeared in France in the 9th Century) and tenured quasi-ownership of their land. Low land taxes and generally fair contracts between feudal landlords and peasant farmers arguably resulted in a more equitable division of property than exists in Europe today.

Landlords seldom sought to be hands-on administrators of their holdings, and local parishes as a rule were governed semi-autonomously by council assemblies presided over by the local priest which elected stewards to one year terms. These stewards, acting on behalf of the landlord, made virtually all the practical, day to day decisions pertaining to administration of forest lands, waterways, roads, bridges, commons, and public buildings. The Reformation-facilitated Industrial Revolution transformed the guildsman and free peasant classes from being essentially self-governing proprietors who owned their own tools and worked out of their own homes for their own profit in organic local economies, into wage-slaves subject to increasingly remote and centralized governments, working for faceless corporations--a state of affairs that still obtains today.

According to French historian Raymond Delatouche, post-modern Europe is doomed because it has rejected the feudal system of small peasant farmers, along with the Christian Faith that built Western civilization. Delatouche observes that the post Industrial Revolution West is the "only civilization which is not based on peasantry," and the only one which in fact assumes that the mark of a truly developed society is the disappearance of small farmers. Delatouche believes that while an agricultural peasantry is the "irreplaceable foundation of any society," the industrial and technological revolutions are "only gigantic fireworks," with an insatiable appetite for fossil fuels used to produce more and more useless and destructive consumer products which serve mainly to create an artificial environment that isolates people from nature and God, and a profit-based economic structure that cares nothing for God or nature.²⁶

Medieval culture was largely illiterate, with perhaps only one of three people at the beginning of the 16th Century being able to read or write. Four hundred years earlier, in the High Medieval period, even great kings and nobles were unable to sign their names. Prior to the invention of the printing press, illiteracy was no great inconvenience or impediment to success in life. Until the late 15th Century, all books had been laboriously produced manuscripts, available to only the very rich, or to scholars and clerics with access to institutional libraries. Consequently, whatever ideas the vast majority of people had about God had been transmitted aurally, and it was through preaching rather than reading that the Gospel was heard. This fact makes Protestant complaints that the Roman Catholic Church "kept the Bible from its people" ring hollow. Except for at the very eve of the Reformation, no mechanisms had existed to put the Bible into the hands of the masses. However, contrary to present-day popular misconception, once printing came on stream in the mid 15th Century, many vernacular editions of the Bible were printed in Catholic Europe, in Italian, Spanish, French and German, but significantly--none in English.²⁷ Other religious books also were published, including prayer books, guides to spiritual life, and manuals for parents in instructing their children in the faith.²⁸

Feudalism was a complicated system of personal, economic, and legal relationships involving the control and use of land and military power. Sovereignty was decentralized and divided among powerful, land-holding nobles who maintained their dominance with private armies. Usually these tenured estates were not actually owned by the local lord or seignior, but were part of a higher noble's holdings assigned at the pleasure of the monarch. Likewise, peasants did not usually own the land they cultivated, but held it from the local seignior. Feudal society was held together by a consensus that every man had a place in the scheme of things with fixed duties inherited at birth which would be passed on to his descendants. Everyone was bound by rules, custom, and tradition in which it was taken for granted that each member of society owed it certain dues, but was in return guaranteed subsistence for himself and his family. Peasants could not be detached from the land they worked, and retained their tenure even if the land passed from one lord to another. This system created a static, steady-state society, organized around rules that provided a strong framework for the preservation of the character of the whole. This social stability was founded and sustained on universally accepted religion whose liturgy and philosophy explained the essential nature of life, death, and most importantly, man's relationship to God and eternity.

Virtually everyone in medieval Europe believed that the universe was created by God; that humans were distinct form other categories of living creatures by virtue of uniquely possessing an immortal soul; that death was just a transitionary stage in human existence; that after death man was intended by his Creator to live in perfect happiness in the Holy City, in the Light of God's immediate presence; that the divine plan had been disrupted by the first man's act of disobedience, which precipitated the Fall from grace; that consequently by his own doing man had destroyed the harmony of God's plan, and wrecked his chances for happiness beyond the grave; that happily, God in His divine mercy had intervened by becoming a man with the same nature as the Creator, who offered Himself as an infinite Sacrifice for the atonement of human sin, thus restoring the prospect of Paradise. These points were all but universally affirmed by everyone from the most powerful monarch to the most common serf.

Medieval European society was centred on a consensus of Christian principles that defined what was right and wrong, what was done and what was not. All human activities were conducted on the understanding that they were acceptable to God, from which derived the Medieval ethic of service. Feudal landlords and their tenants shared a complex relationship bounded my mutual obligations.

The first part of the European Middle Ages was unambiguously rural in temperament--a world of agricultural peasants, country-bred warrior lords, and landed monasteries. Nevertheless, the dominant influence of bishops and monks ensured that it was a cultured rurality, with great architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature and oratory, and central to it all the Catholic Faith. Medieval agriculture was of a truly sustainable nature, leaving the land more fertile than it had been, in contrast to the prodigal soil degradation and poisoning with chemicals that obtains today. One tenth of the crop, a tithe, was given to the Church, the proceeds of which were intended to support charity and cultural development.

On the other hand, our modern liberal sensibilities are affronted by the fact that dissidents and non-conformists of any sort were treated very harshly. However, it must be acknowledged that this (to our late 20th Century liberally conditioned minds--cruel) intolerance of non-conformity obtained in post-Reformation Protestant culture as well.

Medieval European life, even in the troubled late period, was structured around the Church calendar and its system of fasts and feasts, of which the greatest was the Lenten period followed by Easter. Medieval Catholic religion was not merely the private affair of individuals relating to their Creator, but the central reality in a culture where there was one religion professed by all in society, and in which everyone, at least outwardly confessed devotion to it. The Catholic religion thus dominated every aspect of medieval life: family, work, business, art, social life, and entertainment. It was, in a comprehensive sense, a Christian society in the way that no major society has been since.

It is probable that much late medieval preaching and pastoral teaching, especially after the Black Death had decimated the ranks of the clergy, was not of very high quality, as many priests were poorly educated themselves. Indications are that in many areas of Europe, Catholics only received Holy Communion once yearly during the late medieval period. This was in contrast to the earlier Middle Ages when Mass was conducted every Sunday and on 30 or so other Holy Days each year, and failure to participate was considered a serious sin. Priests were not permitted to marry dating from the 12th Century in Roman Catholic society. However, by the late medieval period many Catholic clerics, especially in rural areas, openly cohabited with women, weakening the Church's reputation and moral authority.

Poor instruction, perfunctory participation in the Sacramental life of the Church, moral corruption in the clergy, and an illiterate, bookless laity, all doubtless contributed to the rise of widespread superstition, belief in witches with resultant cruel atrocities, cults of saints and relics, the infamous abuse of indulgences, and other caricatures of Christianity that helped fan the flames of reformist sentiment. However, it also must be well noted that the superstitious hysteria about witches reached its bloody peak in countries dominated by Calvinistic branches of Protestantism after the Reformation. The very late medieval period also ushered in the Spanish Inquisition (in 1478), which put the ecclesiastical institution of the Church Court, whose true objective was not punishment, but rather conversion or restoration of the sinner to a state of grace, under the control of the state, where, as nearly everyone is aware, it was horribly abused to a legendary degree--a topic deserving of a book of its own.

The Middle Ages were thus a time of sharp contrasts and contradictions. However, it can be convincingly argued that on the balance the medieval system of guilds and freehold peasantry far better expressed the essential Christian belief in the infinite worth of every human soul than does industrialism and technocracy. The sort of democracy that has developed under capitalism and socialism (state capitalism) has actually widened the gulf between economic classes. Despite the hierarchical stratification of medieval society, hard boundaries of social division between rich and poor didn't exist. Catholic feudalism had gradually transformed slaves (who made up two-thirds to three-quarters of humanity at the time of Christ) into serfs, serfs into peasants, and peasants into peasant proprietors over 14 Christian centuries, but that process ground to a halt with the Renaissance.

The very early Christians would not have been able to conceive of any other socio-economic structure than slavery. However, through gradual spiritual awakening, the Christian Church first promoted laws making slavery more humane, and then eliminated it entirely from Christian societies. It was difficult for a baptized Christian to regard another baptized Christian as a chattel.

It was a slow process, but the slave of early Christian Europe, where people could be bought and sold as a commodity, was transformed into the free peasant of medieval times. The intermediate stage of serfdom involved obligations of labour, but also freedom to hold property and hereditary rights. No explicit process brought about this transformation, but rather a common, universal religion confessed by people of all social ranks, which made it more and more impossible to "buy and sell Christian men." The frequent forcible breakup of families in the slave trade was neither consonant with nor defensible under the Christian ethic. Unfortunately, slavery returned with a vengeance after the 16th Century colonization of the New World, and again, somewhat more subtly, as Catholic Culture gave way to post-Reformation industrialism, and the guildsman who owned his own tools and worked out of his own home was transformed into the wage slave toiling in machine age factories--the "dark satanic mills" described by William Blake in his poem, "Jerusalem." The filthy, pestilence-ridden sweatshops of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries are gone now, at least in the liberal West, but wage-slavery remains the economic paradigm for most people. In the late 20th Century, slavery has taken on the insidious form of servitude to material appetites, which keep most people, even in the prosperous West, chained to a treadmill of acquisition and debt. It is interesting to observe that in the Middle Ages, usury was illegal. It is not at all fanciful to imagine that as the last vestiges of Christian restraint crumble away in the post- Christian West, we will see the return of undisguised slavery.

In contrast to the caricature of feudal oppression, servitude, poverty, drudgery, disease, famine, and superstition and most people today associate with the Middle Ages, the stable civilization and Catholic Culture of pre-Reformation Europe allowed merchants and the artisans considerable freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary demands for services or taxes, and protection from marauders. These conditions prevailed in medieval towns where merchants and tradesmen organized their guilds as voluntary commonwealths of mutual help and solidarity that helped secure from the landed aristocracy the freedoms they needed. The guilds monopolized their occupations and trained apprentices and journeymen. The rule and spirit of the Guild forbade accumulation of wealth by the few. Apprentices were subject to their masters, but earned the right to become masters themselves in turn. Some guildsmen became as wealthy as the great landed lords, and some lords built town houses, where they spent part of the year. Most townspeople, however, were little better off materially than country people, and many were as dependent economically on their employers as villagers were on their lords. However, townspeople did have greater legal freedom.

In country or town, the feudal system was not based on materialistic greed, as both the modern socialist and capitalist systems are, but rather upon the belief that "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." Nationalism had yet to rear its ugly head. Individuals' loyalties were their families and local communities, to their immediate feudal lords, to higher temporal lords on up through the feudal hierarchy, and ultimately to God. Even the feudal absolute monarchs perceived their possession of kingdoms as a tenancy under God, the true Owner. There was no place in the feudal concept of government for ownership without responsibility, and no place for the modern notion of the nation-state as a mutual-benefit trust. Mutual benefit statism implies possession of "rights," a particular obsession of our post-Christian era, but Christian Feudalism recognized only duties towards God, and under God, towards men--whether one was a serf or a noble, a vassal or a prince. It was a system based on faith in God, rather than in money and power.

The High Middle Ages saw a flowering of culture. "It was that moment in which the Catholic culture came, in the civic sense of the word `culture,' to maturity...," wrote the great mid- 20th Century Anglo-French historian and Roman Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, "Never had we had such a well-founded society before, never have we since had any society so well founded or so much concerned with justice. A proof, if proof were needed, of the greatness of that time is the scale of the chief public characters...: St. Louis the King, St. Ferdinand of Castile, St. Dominic and St. Francis, with their new orders of friars; Edward I of England; and in philosophy, which determines all, the towering name of St. Thomas Aquinas."²⁹ The early Medieval period was a time of establishment of great political and social institutions such as Parliaments and Universities, as well as major advances in architecture, art, and literature. It was also a time of social emancipation, marked by developments such as the Magna Carta in England. especially with the Christian family paradigm coming under sustained attack.

In "Now I See," Sir Arnold Lunn draws the reader's attention to three particular paintings representing families during three phases in the history of Europe: Medieval Catholic Christendom; post-Reformation Calvinist Puritanism; and 19th-Century bourgeois modernism. The first painting described by Lunn is the Memling triptych of St. Christopher at Bruges. In the central panel is the commissioner of the painting, Burgomaster Morel, surrounded by his sons and his patron saint. In the right panel, his wife appears with her eleven daughters and her patron saint. "The whole picture is haunted by a strong faith in the supernatural," writes Lunn, "...and there is not one unhappy face in either group. And note as a sure sign of a superstitious age, that this great leader of commerce chose to be painted on his knees."

The second family is in a painting by Michael Schwerz. "If the first group symbolizes the happiness of Catholic supernaturalism," observes Lunn, "this study of a Calvinistic family shows the effect of supernaturalism gone sour. Note the cold cruel compressed lips of the mother, and the smug satisfaction on the face of the eldest daughter. Even the baby looks as if it had a vocation in Puritanism. The most human figure is the father, a pathetic creature with a hint in his eyes of suppressed revolt against the sour Puritanism of his wife."

The third group Lunn describes is in Romney's study of the Beaumont family. "In the interval, he writes, "Calvinism had gone the way of Catholicism. Religion only survived as a ceremonial background.... Look at the two young men on the left, one of them is admiring with satisfaction his own portrait... No reliance on saints here for protection. If good breeding, good looks, good health, and a good income were all that a man needs, the Beaumont family represent the crown of an evolutionary process which begins with Burgomaster Morel on his knees and ends with Mssrs. Beaumont standing firmly on their well-shod feet. Try to introduce a saint into the Beaumont group. The effect would be as incongruous as that produced by those modern stunt paintings of Apostles in lounge suits."³⁰

Chapter 5: THE SPIRIT OF SKEPTICISM

Protestantism's inherent spirit of skepticism, beginning with the statement: "I deny the authority of the Church; everyone must examine the credibility of every doctrine for himself," originally fell back on the prop of Scriptural authority. However, that retrenchment could not withstand the tide of liberal skepticism that the Reformers loosed on the world. Christian appeal to Scripture as the sole authority (sola scriptura) begged the question of New Testament canonicity. The present canon of 27 New Testament books was not finally accepted until the third Council of Carthage around A.D. 397. It should never be forgotten that the Scriptures referred to by St. Paul as being inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16) are the Hebrew texts--the OLD Testament. The New Testament was not available to the very early Church because it had not been written yet. However the Church survived, grew, and thrived somehow without New Testament Scriptural authority. For first-century Christians, the idea of the Church and the Bible as distinct and separate Revelation would seem a very odd notion indeed.

There were indeed writings that the early Church preserved and distributed for instruction and encouragement in the faith, but it took several hundreds of years before these documents were critically evaluated and a very small proportion of them accorded special value as inspired and authoritative Holy Scripture. For instance there were more than 50 different records or alleged records of the life and teachings of Jesus, of which just four made it into the canon. This collection of documents cannot legitimately be considered the primary authority of the early Christian Church. That authority resided in the Holy Tradition of the Apostles embodied in the visible Church.

The same Church fathers who established Orthodox/Catholic credal doctrines of the Holy Trinity and Christ's Incarnation also determined (c. A.D. 350-397) which books would be included in the New Testament. Were they were right about the Bible and wrong about doctrine? As Frank Schaeffer observes: "The monopoly of truth [Protestants] affirm, the Scriptures for instance, only exists because they were preserved by the Church through history. And they were preserved because the Church kept a strict control of certain nonnegotiable traditions, including its own tradition of what was or was not considered Scripture."³¹

What became the Roman Catholic version of the Old Testament originated as a translation of earlier Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, beginning in the 3rd Century BC among Jewish communities in Egypt and elsewhere outside Palestine where there was demand for Scriptures in the language of the local culture. By the time the Christian Bible began being compiled, around the 1st Century AD, two distinct versions of Jewish Scripture existed: the older Hebrew Bible and the Greek Old Testament--the Septuagint.

The early Christian Church recognized the additional books that appeared in the Septuagint, and many writings of the early Church Fathers attest to this fact. However, Martin Luther removed the books that did not appear in the Hebrew version of the Jewish Scriptures and established them as the Apocrypha, which he suggested was useful for edification but not establishment of doctrine. His stated rationale was a return to earlier and presumably more accurate sources, but a secondary agenda was a repudiation of the Church's canonical authority.

The Reformers, found the story in the Second Book of Maccabees about Judas Maccabeus sending twelve thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to pay for sacrifice to be made in atonement for the sins of those fallen in battle particularly objectionable, because it was included in the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, which affirms: "Let none doubt that it is a pious thought and a salutary one to pray that the dead may have their sins remitted," which provided Old Testament authority for devotion to Requiems. The Introit and Gradual for these Masses: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat es," ("Grant them O Lord, eternal rest and let light perpetual shine upon them") comes from the Apocrypha as well.

The typical Protestant attitude toward Scripture is as if the Bible had suddenly been discovered in a desert or fallen from the sky like manna from Heaven in the 16th Century. It denies acknowledgment of those who suffered persecution and battled heresy to ensure that the Bible made it into the 16th Century intact, that is: the historical Church. Protestantism essentially ripped the Bible out of the Church's hands and claimed it for itself, while simultaneously denying the Church's Tradition, Sacraments, teachings, and Apostolic legacy.

Incidentally I would encourage any of my Protestant readers who subscribe to the myth that Roman Catholics do not esteem Scripture adequately, to carefully ponder the following citation from the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council: "The Sacred Scriptures contain the Word of God and, since they are inspired, really are the Word of God.... This sacred Synod urges all the Christian faithful to learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the `excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ.' `For ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.' Therefore that they should gladly put themselves in touch with the sacred text itself.... And let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture so that God and man may talk together; for `we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the Divine Saying."

Twentieth-Century Christians are blessed with unprecedented access to the Bible, and that is a wonderful thing. However, it is wrong to regard the Holy Scriptures as self-sufficient and self-interpreting. In Orthodox/Catholic understanding, the Bible is meant to be read and interpreted within the context of the life of the Church, under the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit. His work in the Church was not suspended after the first century, to sit out the next fourteen centuries, and then resume in the sixteenth.

The Council of Trent's mandate was to restate clearly Catholic doctrine, with particular regard to those points on which the Reformers had offered a new teaching. A decree of April 1546 states that the first objective of the Council was to preserve, not to restore "the purity of the Gospel," and to declare that the truth and the way of life revealed by Jesus Christ "were contained both in written Scriptures and in the unwritten traditions, which received by the Apostles from the lips of Christ had been handed on by them and so come to us." Trent also declared that "to decide the true meaning and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures is the business" of the Church.

The Orthodox Church teaches that while no other treasure of the Church's tradition equals the Bible in value and authority, and that the Bible is the main source of patristic theology, it considers the Bible to be a record of truth, but not truth itself, the truth itself being God alone. Orthodox theologians affirm other records of the experience of God, EG: the writings of the Church Fathers, liturgies and other sacred texts, and the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils. This, they assert, rescues the Church from exclusive focus on the Bible, and "thus guards Orthodox life from the error of idolatrous veneration of the text of Scripture" or "bibliolatry."

The Orthodox Church believes that Sacred Tradition (which is defined as "the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church") plays an important role in the interpretation of Scripture." Scripture and Tradition belong together according to Orthodox teaching, and indeed the Bible needs Sacred Tradition as the living interpreter of God's Word, just as Sacred Tradition needs the Bible as its anchor and foundation. Fr. Kallistos Ware writes: "...we do not read the Bible as isolated individuals, interpreting it solely by the light of our private understanding.... We read it as members of the Church, in communion with all other members throughout the ages. The final criterion for our interpretation of Scripture is the mind of the Church. And this means keeping constantly in view how the meaning of Scripture is explained and applied in Holy Tradition that is to say, how the Bible is understood by the Fathers and the saints, and how it is used in liturgical worship."³²

The Reformers imagined that they could cherry-pick selected creeds and dogmas of the ancient Church while ignoring the ecclesial structures that originally defined and authorized them as Divinely revealed Truth--an approach that is neither logically consistent nor convincing. If what the Church fathers established as doctrine and tradition in the seven great oecumenical councils (AD 325-787) was provisional and mutable, what prevents us from second-guessing them on what is or is not Scriptural? As Lutheran theologian Carl E. Braaten argues: "A purely biblical dogmatics that claims to go straight to Scripture--bypassing the question of the Church's authority in exegeting, interpreting, and transmitting the beliefs of the community for which this book and none other is Holy Writ--is surely self-deluded."³³

That Scripture is authoritative is undisputed among Christians, but the Church is the logical and proper primary interpreter of its revelation. Interpretation is not legitimately the role of just anyone who picks the Bible up, reads a bit, and then decides what it means to him, within whatever frame of reference he brings to the project. There is more than a little residue of the ancient, but remarkably durable, Gnostic heresy in the too-frequent Protestant presumption and acceptance that the "prophetic" insights of a single individual--be he Calvin, Luther, or a modern-day TV evangelist--can blithely ignore or even contradict the centuries of Church teaching and tradition that have gone before.

Indeed, Scripture must be interpreted, but the Apostolic tradition of the Orthodox/Catholic Church is the God-appointed, permanent witness to the Scriptural message, because the Church Herself belongs to that same revelation, being truly the Body of Christ. Protestant belief in sola scriptura is not adequate. As the Council of Trent (1545-1563) declared, tradition--that part of revelation not written down in Scripture, but transmitted through the teaching of the Church--is of equal authority to the Bible.³⁴

Surely Martin Luther never dreamed his teaching that every Christian could and should establish his own relationship with Christ through reading and interpreting Scripture for himself would eventually lead to the horror of Biblical "higher criticism," but once the unified Christian Church's authority had been repudiated, nothing was beyond skepticism. Textual criticism of the Bible that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was utterly predictable in an ethos of skeptical free enquiry and the asserted sovereignty of human reason. In this sense, Protestant Christianity was, as Hilaire Belloc declared, "auto-toxic," carrying within it the germ of its own destruction.

Originally, all Protestant sects asserted that the Bible is the uniquely infallible source of truth and authority, but respectively emphasized one or more self-interpreted text(s) upon which to distinguish themselves from other Protestants. With no objective spiritual discipline, no doctrinal unity, and in repudiating most of the Sacramental life of the primitive undivided Church, there was nothing to inhibit Protestantism from continuing to dissolve, ad infinitum, into ever more idiosyncratic fragments. Reductio ad absurdem. Protestantism bears within its founding notion the process of endless disintegration through perpetual reform; reformation upon Reformation. Reportedly, there are now in the neighborhood of 25,000 Protestant denominations and sects worldwide. How under these bizarre circumstances can Christ's voice be heard through this cacophony of voices, or Christianity speak with anything approximating coherent authority?

A direct progression can be traced from the Reformers' initial attacks on the Church's authority to modern wholesale assaults on every substantive aspect of Christian Faith. Christendom's modern adversaries won't be satisfied until the Church is obliterated as anything more than an irrelevant, toothless shell. Liberal-humanism will not and cannot tolerate the true Christian Gospel, and Christians are mistaken in the notion that they can tolerate a cultural environment dominated by liberal humanism, without profoundly compromising their Christian Faith. In Belloc's words: "We must attempt to destroy [the modern attack on Christianity] as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Faith by which man lives. The duel is to the death."

Belloc's friend G.K. Chesterton wrote that "On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world."³⁵

Chapter 6: SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REFORMATION

The salutary characteristics of Reformation theology and its secular spawn--socio-economic liberalism, include hard work, frugality and individual self-reliance. Modern materialism was developed around these principles, which favoured production over consumption and the interests of the individual over that of the collective community. The Protestant dogma of personal judgment advanced the concept of democratic governmental systems based on representing the preference of a majority or a plurality of individual voters. The destruction of the medieval system of authority removed traditional religious restrictions on trade and banking--especially proscriptions against usury--which had inhibited the development of modern capitalism.

Reformation theology, especially that of John Calvin, emphasized industriousness. The famous "Protestant Work Ethic" terminology actually derives from a famous study by a German Marxist economist, Max Weber, first published as "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism" in 1904/'05. Weber's thesis was picked up and expanded upon by English economic historian R.H. Tawney who argued in his "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" (1922) that historical causation is not influenced solely by economic considerations, and that the peculiarly Protestant (especially Calvinist) synergy of asceticism and worldliness facilitated the rise of capitalistic productive efficiency. Weber pointed out that while the necessary material and circumstantial factors that could have accommodated the establishment of capitalist economic structures had existed in Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Judaic, and indeed Orthodox/Catholic societies; various philosophical, religious, and ethical characteristics inherent to those traditions inhibited such development. By contrast, post-Reformation Christian society provided just the right conceptual soil in which the seed of capitalism could germinate and flourish.

Max Weber was the first to clearly identify and define the organic relationship between the Reformation theological ethic and broader social and economic developments such as capitalism and liberalism. He argued that the following characteristics of Reformed theory led to the rise of capitalism: (a) the emphasis Luther and Calvin placed on the Christian "calling" inclined people to work harder; (b) the Reformers' emphasis on frugality, including a greater commitment to earning than consuming, encouraged accumulation of capital for investment and business growth; (c) belief that success in one's temporal work provided an indication and assurance that the individual Christian was living a well-ordered, disciplined life; and (d) the commercial attitudes that inevitably evolved from these assumptions. In turn, R.H. Tawney argued that Calvinist Puritanism was most "congenial to the world of business," and that it gave the "capitalist spirit" a "tonic."

During the more than 12 centuries in which Roman Catholicism had dominated the spiritual and temporal affairs of Western civilization, economies grew at a glacial rate. In this steady-state environment, people tended to work only as necessary to fulfill immediate or short-term needs. Work was seen as something to be avoided entirely if possible by the higher social classes, and best left to serfs, servants, and peasants. Nor did the latter categories see anything innately virtuous about labour, and consequently they too did as little as they could get away with.

Hilaire Belloc observes: "Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, its distribution and exchange, was regulated with a view to securing a Christian life for Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in other words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly in the close connection between wealth and public function.... The artisan in the towns, organized in his guild, had control over his own life and that of his family. He was not, as he has now become, the economic subordinate of wealthier men. His relations with his apprentices were organic and domestic, unlike the modern relation of mere mechanical contract between laborer with the capitalis