The Anti-Catholic Bible
Not so long ago people were saying
that anti-Catholicism was going the way of the dinosaur. If so, it looks
like the dinosaur has made an unexpected comeback, because anti-Catholicism
is healthier and more widespread now than it has been for years.
Since the late 1970s several new
anti-Catholic organizations have been founded, and some older ones have
been revitalized. A partial lineup includes Chick Publications, Mission
to Catholics International, Lumen Productions, Research and Education Foundation,
Osterhus Publishing House, Christians United for Reformation (CURE), Harvest
House, and Bob Jones University Press. Combined they turn out more anti-Catholic
tracts, magazines, and books than ever before—millions of copies
each year.
When one reads enough of this
material, one becomes aware that the same points tend to be made by different
writers in the same way, even in the same words. Who is borrowing from
whom? It doesn’t seem that any of these groups relies very heavily on any
other. Instead, they all fall back on one source, Loraine Boettner’s work,
Roman Catholicism, a book first published in 1962 by Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Company of Philadelphia and reprinted many times since.
This book is the origin of much
of what professional anti-Catholics distribute. It can be called, to use
a phrase that might rankle some, the "Bible" of the anti-Catholic movement.
At first glance Roman Catholicism
seems impressive. Its 460 large pages of text are closely packed with quotations.
The table of contents is broken down into dozens of categories, and the
indices, though skimpy, at least are there. But a careful reading makes
it clear that the author’s antagonism to the Catholic Church has gravely
compromised his intellectual objectivity.
He Swallows Them Whole
The book suffers from a serious
lack of scholarly rigor. Boettner accepts at face value virtually any claim
made by an opponent of the Church. Even when verification of a charge is
easy, he does not bother to check it out. If he finds something unflattering
to Catholicism, he prints it.
When the topic is the infallibility
of the pope, Boettner quotes at length from a speech alleged to have been
given in 1870 at the First Vatican Council, where papal infallibility was
formally defined. The speech, attributed to "the scholarly archbishop [sic,
bishop] Strossmeyer," claims that the "archbishop" read the New Testament
for the first time shortly before he gave the speech and found no mention
at all of the papacy. The speech then concludes that Peter was given no
greater authority than the other apostles. The trouble is that the speech
is a well-known forgery. Bishop Strossmeyer did not make that speech, and,
in fact, when it was being circulated by a disgruntled former Catholic,
the bishop repeatedly and publicly denied that it was his and demanded
a retraction by the guilty party. A glance at the Catholic Encyclopedia
or a work like Newman Eberhardt’s A Summary of Catholic History
would have clued in Boettner.
This gross error has been repeated
by many of the anti-Catholic groups that rely on Boettner. None of them,
apparently, became suspicious, though the speech reads as though it came
from a stereotypical "Bible thumping" Protestant rather than a "scholarly"
Catholic bishop.
Sometimes Boettner’s mistakes
are just juvenile. He calls All Souls’ Day (November 2) "Purgatory Day,"
a term never used by Catholics because the feast is not in commemoration
of purgatory but of the souls there.
He argues that the book of Tobit
cannot be an inspired book of the Bible because its "stories are fantastic
and incredible," and it includes an account of appearances of an angel
disguised as a man. Boettner does not seem to realize that such an argument
could be used against, say, the book of Jonah or Genesis. Is living in
the belly of a great fish any more incredible than meeting an angel in
disguise? And then there’s the more basic problem that other books in Scripture—books
Boettner and all Protestants accept as inspired—also contain references
to angels appearing disguised as men (cf. Gen. 19; Heb. 13:2).
When he writes about the definition
of papal infallibility, Boettner says that a pope speaks infallibly only
"when he is speaking ex cathedra, that is, seated in the papal chair."
He then points out that what is venerated as Peter’s chair in St. Peter’s
Basilica may be only a thousand years old, implying that since Peter’s
actual chair is not present, there is no place for the pope to sit, and
thus, by the Church’s own principles, the pope cannot make any infallible
pronouncements.
Boettner entirely misunderstands
the meaning of the Latin term ex cathedra. It does translate as
"from the chair," but it does not mean that the pope has to be sitting
in the literal chair Peter owned for his decree to be infallible and to
qualify as an ex cathedra pronouncement. To speak "from the chair
of Peter" is what the pope does when he speaks with the fullness of his
authority as the successor of Peter. It is a metaphor that refers to the
pope’s authority to teach, not to where he sits when he teaches.
Notice, too, that the term ex
cathedra, as a reference to teaching authority, was not invented by
the Catholic Church. Jesus used it. In Matthew 23:2–3 Jesus said, "The
scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat (Greek: kathedras,
Latin: cathedra); so practice and observe whatever they tell you,
but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice." Even though
these rabbis did not live according to the norms they taught, Jesus points
out that they did have authority to teach and to make rules binding on
the Jewish community.
Where Did You Get That?
Boettner’s Roman Catholicism
contains a mere two dozen footnotes, all of them added to recent reprintings
to reflect minor changes in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican
Council. Within the text, biblical passages are properly cited, but references
to Catholic works are so vague as to discourage checking by making it difficult
or impossible to locate the work or the reference. Many times there is
no reference. A certain pope will be alleged to have said something—but
there is no citation given to support the claim. A Catholic author of the
seventeenth century is alleged to have claimed something—but again no reference
that can be checked. Sometimes there may be mention of a Catholic book,
but no page number or publication information given.
By contrast, when non-Catholic
authors are cited, the reference usually includes title and page number.
One suspects that Boettener took his alleged Catholic quotations and citations
from Protestant works and then deliberately failed to reference them in
order to conceal the extent to which he is dependant on secondary sources.
This is a common tactic among writers who have not done primary source
research and rely on second-hand sources.
What is even worse, Boettner seems
to have no appreciation of the Catholic Church from the inside. He seems
to have made little effort to learn what the Catholic Church says about
itself or how Catholics answer the objections he makes. His "inside information"
comes from disaffected ex-priests such as Emmett McLoughlin and L. H. Lehmann,
or outright crackpots like the nineteenth-century sensationalist Charles
Chiniquy.
The bibliography lists more books
by ex-Catholics with grudges than by Catholics. Of the mere seven books
he cites written by Catholics, one is an inspirational text (by Archbishop
Fulton Sheen), one concerns Catholic principles of politics (a topic hardly
touched on by Boettner), three are overviews of the Catholic faith written
for laymen (one dates from 1876), and the last is a one-volume abridgment
of Philip Hughes’s three-volume work, A History of the Church, from
which Boettner takes a few lines (out of context) because, in isolation,
they look compromising. These books are all fine in themselves, but refer
to only a fraction of the topics Boettner writes about, and none of them
were written as a response to Protestant arguments. On most issues he provides
only a statement of the Fundamentalist position, which he contrasts to
a caricature of the Catholic position as set out by one of the ex-priests
he cites.
It may be that a man leaving one
religion for another can write fairly, without bitterness, about the one
he left behind. John Henry Newman did so in his autobiography, Apologia
Pro Vita Sua. But some people have an urge to write about their change
of beliefs to vent their frustrations or justify their actions. Their books
should be read and used with discretion, and if they show signs of rancor
or bitterness, they shouldn’t be regarded as trustworthy, unbiased explanations
of the religion they abandoned. Alas, Boettner can’t keep away from such
books. He even uses works by the notorious anti-Catholic writer, Paul Blanshard,
whose writings were so contorted they were disavowed in the 1950s by other
anti-Catholics.
Do Your Homework First
When writing about his own faith,
Boettner remarks that the Evangelical or Fundamentalist position "came
down through the ante-Nicene Fathers and Augustine," which suggests that
he accepts as in some way authoritative Christian writings prior to 430,
the year of Augustine’s death. But Boettner shows virtually no familiarity
with the patristic writings of the first several centuries of the Christian
era. His book includes only six references to Augustine and nine to Augustine’s
contemporary, Jerome. There is one mention of Pope Gelasius I, who lived
a century later, and the next oldest writers cited are from the Middle
Ages.
Boettner could have examined Patrology,
Johannes Quasten’s four-volume work on the writings of the early Church,
composed in the decade before Roman Catholicism was written;
or Joseph Tixeront’s History of Dogmas, an older but standard
Catholic work on historical theology. Even a casual reading of these works
would have demonstrated to him that from the earliest years distinctive
Catholic doctrines were held and taught by the Church—belief in the Real
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, baptismal regeneration, a hierarchy
of bishops, priests, and deacons, the Mass as a sacrifice, the special
authority of the bishop of Rome, prayers for the dead—and he would have
seen that the contrary Fundamentalist positions he espouses are not supported.
He thinks he knows what Augustine and the other Fathers wrote, but he gives
no impression that he is at all familiar with their writings.
In the chapter on Mary he claims,
"The phrase ‘Mother of God’ originated in the Council of Ephesus, in the
year 431." Boettner makes a score of blunders here. Does he expect his
readers to believe that the phrase "Mother of God" was never used until
the day it became a dogma? He presupposes that his readers trust him with
a blind obedience, never bothering to do the homework that he failed to
do.
By suggesting that a doctrine
is not taught until it is infallibly defined, one could equally argue that
no one believed that Jesus was God until the Council of Nicaea defined
the matter in 325. The divinity of Christ was taught centuries before Nicaea,
just as the phrase "Mother of God" permeated the writings of the Church
Fathers long before Ephesus. Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Cyril of
Jerusalem, Athanasius, Ambrose, Jerome, and numerous others took for granted
that Mary could rightly be given this title. Boettner curiously omits reference
to these, as they would decimate his argument.
In his introduction, Boettner
boasts: "Let Protestants challenge Rome to full and open debate regarding
the distinctive doctrines that separate the two systems, and it will be
seen that the one thing Rome does not want is public discussion." The curious
thing is that many of the anti-Catholic groups that rely so heavily on
Boettner are unwilling to engage in public debates.
Many representatives of such groups
will give talks at Fundamentalist churches to stoke the fires of anti-Catholicism,
and those in the audience will be sent to stand outside Catholic churches
and distribute tracts. But challenge any to a debate and what happens?
The people with the tracts will say they have to check with their pastors.
Besides, they say, they aren’t professional debaters and don’t want to
be set up. Their pastors refuse to sanction any public forums because they
say they "don’t see the need," or they worry about heat from their congregations
for consorting with papists. Is this the "full and open debate" Boettner
calls for?
Many Protestants—whether or not
they realize how inaccurate and unscholarly Boettner’s work is—look to
Roman Catholicism for their arguments against the Catholic Church.
Catholics should prepare themselves for discussions with Protestants by
studying Scripture and Church history and by reading solid books on apologetics.
That way they will be prepared to heed Peter’s exhortation: "Always be
prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the
hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence" (1 Pet. 3:15).
NIHIL OBSTAT:
I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
IMPRIMATUR:
In accord with 1983 CIC 827
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004
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