ARTICLE 74: "SEARCH FOR THE CHURCH" VIEW IMAGE OF THE EXALTATION OF THE TRUE CROSS Roger Babson, the well known Wellesley Hills, Mass. statistician, and Dudley Zuver have recently put out a 245 page indictment against existing churches. It is claimed to be "a search" for the Church," believing that it "exists somewhere," as "no man can live without religion." They want a unified Church, instead of "the 213 different religious sects in this country," that exist because "fully 75 per cent of their officials now receiving salaries would cease receiving if proper consolidation took place." The title of the book---"Can These Bones Live?"---suggests their opinion of existing churches. The book is an invitation to "join in the search," but without belief in dogma, for which the authors have "a distrust," holding it to have led to "the professionalized religion (which) is a highly flattering and lucrative profession" for "the theologians (who) never understood Jesus." That being so, the book should be left on the bookshelf while on the search, as it is filled with dogmatic pronouncements and a theology that are as offensive at times as they are false. The authors fail to realize that a religion minus "theological dogma," by which its truths and moral requirements are proclaimed and judged, is as far from being rational as a statistician's profession of belief in mathematics minus its principles, maxims, and fixed standards of measurement. True to some extent is it, as we are dogmatically informed, that "no dogma will (or, more correctly, can) imprison God." But if it happens to be a dogma proclaimed by the Church that God established; a Church that is safeguarded by God from error in matters of faith and morals, it releases an understanding of Who God is, the truths that God revealed, and the obligations that God imposes. One of these Church dogmas is but a reechoing of the dogmatic proclamation of Jesus to Peter, as recorded in St. Matthew 16:18-20. It leads to the indestructible Catholic Church where the search for the unified Church of God ends. The authors of "Can These Bones Live?" are blind leaders of the blind, whose vulgar assumption that the Catholic Church "lost her virtue" through theology, dogma, money and association with Constantine, prevents them from seeing that the Church of Christ's making is the very one they malign. Much more can be said than space will allow to refute this hoary Protestant Constantinian assumption. Suffice it to say that association of the Catholic Church with Emperor Constantine meant Christ coming out of the catacombs into the bright light of day; the issuance of the Edict of Milan, the first governmental proclamation of religious liberty; the enactment of laws to further the welfare of the toiling masses, for instance by the passage of the first government Sunday rest law; the safeguarding of the marital rights of female slaves; the ending of legalized infanticide, etc., etc. If statistical data is desired to prove that the Christ-commissioned work of the Catholic Church continued after she is offensively assumed to have become a harlot, this reporter will be pleased to furnish Babson and Zuver with a list that he has compiled of 23 nations that were converted from paganism to Christianity by the Catholic Church; 205 universities of the highest standing she helped to establish; and the names of hundreds of Saints from all walks of life that she canonized, who lived after the days of Constantine. Contact Us HOME------------TRADITION www.catholictradition.org/Tradition/goldstein74.htm