SELECTIONS BY PAULY FONGEMIE
The Background to Protestantism
It has been shown in earlier chapters that a good number of the Council Fathers and periti had succumbed to the disease of ecumania, a state of mind in which the prime criterion for explaining any aspect of Church teaching is not whether it is true but whether it is ecumenical. It has also been shown that those with this ecumenical obsession were sufficiently powerful to adapt the official documents to this standpoint sometimes by ambiguity but more often by a change of emphasis. The true Catholic position can usually be found by those who look hard enough, but sometimes phrased in such muted tones that Protestant commentators have been able to give a number of the documents a most enthusiastic welcome. The influence of Protestantism upon the Council will be examined in more detail in the next chapter and will also be made very apparent in Chapters X and XVI. But before doing so it will be useful to take a look at the nature of contemporary Protestantism.
The first and most obvious point to make is that it is not really possible to make any generalized statements about the positive aspects of Protestantism, i.e. common beliefs and common practices. It is worth recalling the comment by Douglas Woodruff cited in Chapter VI, that the history of Protestantism is one of division, fragmentation, and conflict - a fragmentation into seventy thousand distinct communions. [Not in our excerpt since it is mentioned in this chapter - the Web Master.] But the process does not stop even here - for within each Protestant denomination each individual is his own pope in the final analysis. It was shown in the first book of this series, Cranmer's Godly Order, that the heretical concepts of justification and grace devised by the Protestant Reformers dispensed with the need for a divinely founded Church mediating the grace of God to man and able to teach with authority. An infallible magisterium was replaced with an infallible book, the Bible. But even an infallible book needs an interpreter and the inescapable logic of Protestantism is that no individual has the right to impose his interpretation on another. Fr. Bouyer relates that: "The Princess of the Palatinate once described German Protestantism to Louis XIV with this formula: 'In our country, everyone makes up his own little religion.' " [The Decomposition of Catholicism, L. Bouyer, London 1970, p. 31] Fr. Bouyer does not hesitate to point out the irony inherent in the fact that since the Council, within the Catholic Church: "Every priest, or almost every priest, is at this point today. All the faithful have to say is Amen. They are still blessed when the pastor's or the assistant's religion does not change every Sunday, at the whim of his reading, the foolery he has seen others at, or his own pure fancy." Another fact inherent in the nature of Protestantism is that if each believer is free to make his own reason the ultimate judge of truth then Protestantism must inevitably move towards Rationalism. This is a process which Cardinal Manning analyzed with great perceptiveness in 1877. "Every age has hitherto had its heresy," he wrote. "It may be said that the nineteenth century has no heresy, or rather that it has all heresies, because it is the century of unbelief. The intellect of man for three hundred years has broken loose from faith, and the heresy of the day is a heresy against the order of even natural truth; it is the assertion that reason is sufficient to itself. We, as compared with the men of the sixteenth century, have a great advantage. We see the whole intellectual movement which then began fully worked out to its legitimate conclusion. They saw only the first deviation from the path, which then was hardly appreciable. The reason of man either is, or is not, sufficient to itself If it be, then Rationalism is its perfection. If it be not sufficient to itself, then something higher than reason is needed. Or, in other words, reason is either its own teacher, or it needs a teacher higher than itself. The Christian world till the sixteenth century believed that the teacher of the reason of man is God, ... and that the reason of man is thereby related to him as a disciple to a guide. The movement of the sixteenth century in its last analysis is the assertion that the reason of man is the critic and the measure of all truth to itself. ...
In his encyclical Pascendi Gregis, Pope St. Pius X warns "by how many roads Modernism leads to atheism. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path; that of Modernism makes the second; Atheism makes the next." [Pascendi Gregis, p. 51]
The epitomization of the process described by ... the Pope is found in the writing of such German biblical scholars as Bultmann. "Too many theologians have accepted Buitmannism as the only authentic revelation," writes Cardinal Heenan. "This is surprising because Bultmann did not say anything essentially different from the theologians once called modernists ... Radicals used to be content to explain away mysteries and miracles. Bultmann explains away the whole Gospel ... In his view, the story of Christ is no more historical than the story of creation in Genesis is scientific. Incarnation, the Virgin birth, and Trinity and, of course, the Resurrection are all myths. It is as absurd to talk of God on earth as of God in Heaven ... God does not exist outside this world." [Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 22, 1972]
Given the truth of the thesis which has been put forward in this chapter, it is quite clear that the ecumenical movement as it now exists is based on the completely false premise that organic unity with Protestants can be achieved by ecumenical negotiations. Such a belief is the most illusory form of Utopianism imaginable. The often impressive structures of the major Protestant bodies are, in reality, no more than facades behind which there exists a series of ill-defined systems undergoing an inexorable process of mutation into Rationalism.
An important qualification is necessary here. Under no circumstances whatsoever should it be thought that the tendencies described in this chapter are intended to apply to all Protestants. What has been done is to examine the direction which contemporary Protestantism is taking; many Protestants would concur with regret that the analysis is only too accurate ...
It is no coincidence that those countries in which the process of ecumenical compromise has the longest tradition, i.e. the countries of the Rhine, are those in which Catholicism has been most affected by Rationalism. This tendency was already manifesting itself in Germany at the time of the First Vatican Council. It was above all in Munich, among Dollinger and his supporters, that the nineteenth century liberals went into schism as a response to the definition of Papal Infallibility.
... Cardinal Heenan remarked in 1972 upon the extent to which the disease of rationalism is now rampant within the Catholic Church. "Theological controversy," he wrote, "is no longer inter-denominational. Orthodoxy and, if the word may still be used, heresy have become transconfessional ... There is a remarkable unanimity about the theological works which have appeared in recent years. Theologians seem to read mainly each other's books. Unlike academics in other fields they appear to spend little time in research ... One does not need to be a prophet to realize that without a dramatic reversal of the present trend there will be no future for the Church in English speaking countries." This, then, is what is at stake - the future of the Church not just in the English-speaking but in all the advanced western countries. The Church has become, as Fr. Houghton wrote, the talking Church, and in the present ecumenical dialogue she is in the process of talking herself out of existence in the West.
Cardinal Heenan's warning was confirmed in the most startling, horrifying manner in 1975 with the publication of a book entitled The Common Catechism. [London, 1975] It was produced by a team of Catholic and Protestant scholars from Germany and was described by its publishers as "an epoch-making attempt to state with one voice the common basis of Christian belief." What it does do, in fact, is to remove the entire basis of any form of Christian belief either Catholic or Protestant - by denying or casting doubt on every fundamental doctrine of the faith. It was, of course, greeted with a chorus of adulation from both Catholic and Protestant progressives - a striking confirmation of Cardinal Heenan's remark that heresy and orthodoxy are now transconfessional. It also makes it clear that conservative Catholics and Protestants now have more in common with each other than with the liberals in their own communion - a Catholic is obviously much closer in belief to an evangelical Protestant who accepts the Divinity of Christ, the Virgin-birth, the Resurrection, and the doctrine of the Trinity than with a nominally Catholic Modernist who accepts none of these doctrines. The point will soon be reached, if it has not been reached already, when the line of demarcation will be between those who believe in a personal transcendent God and those who believe there is no God but the world. Protestants who wish to hold fast to the basic Christian dogmas are alarmed at the manner in which Catholic ecumenists are now blundering towards Rationalism with all the haste and enthusiasm of a horde of lemmings. Fr. Bouyer writes:
It is what is most jumbled, inorganic and amorphous about the rest of Christianity that they have suddenly and gleefully discovered. But even that does not satisfy them and they want to flirt with every form of belief and especially non-belief. In others words, as one of the best contemporary ecumenists, a Protestant, observed with ironic sadness: "The greatest danger for ecumenism is that Catholics grow into enthusiasts for everything we have recognized as harmful, and abandon everything whose importance we have rediscovered." [The Decomposition of Catholicism, L. Bouyer, London 1970, p. 34]
Once the position has been reached that there is no God outside this world, i.e. that the world, that mankind itself, is God, then it is only logical that Christians should devote all their energies into building up an earthly paradise rather than saving men's souls for an illusory paradise in Heaven. Christ said that the hatred of the world would be a distinguishing mark of his disciples; because they loved Him the world would hate them. This has proved to be true throughout the history of the Church - but with that hatred there has always been mingled respect. The abysmal state of contemporary Catholicism is made most manifest in the fact that it is not feared or hated but despised by the world. Progressive Catholics, lay and clerical, are falling over each other in their anxiety to bow down and worship the world, to worship the new deity they name Progress with a zeal they never displayed in the service of the Blessed Trinity.
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