We knew right away it wasn’t what we had been waiting for. Even before we could open the invitation to attend the 1993 Dignity/USA convention in New Orleans, out from the envelope fluttered a lavender feather. Not a good omen.
Reading the invitation, we came to this line: “Rooted proudly in the Catholic tradition, Dignity/USA nevertheless vigorously promotes the reform of Catholic sexual teaching.” That’s sort of like saying, “Rooted proudly in the civil rights movement tradition, we nevertheless vigorously promote racial segregation.” Somehow the two ends of the sentence just don’t fit together. If you are “rooted proudly in the Catholic tradition,” you don’t oppose that tradition. You come to oppose it only once you are proudly unrooted from it.
Here’s a convention we’d much prefer to go to: the National Association of Catholic Home Educators is having its third annual convention and book fair July 2-3 in Manassas, Virginia. Among the speakers will be Cardinal Jose Sanchez, Kimberly Hahn, Fr. John Hardon, and Dr. William Coulson (whose daughter Nancy used to work at Catholic Answers). For information contact William A. Bales at (703) 347-7345. By the way, this is a rarity: a convention at which kids are welcome.
Don’t write off Louisiana for hosting the Dignity convention. The state has balanced that off in that an anti-Catholic radio program has been booted off the air after Catholic protests. The program was called “Upon This Rock,” and the host was Greg Durel, whose ministry is called Catholic Outreach of Louisiana.
Our subscriber Steve Neef called KAJN radio. The receptionist told him that “many Catholics consider the program a Catholic bashing program, and KAJN doesn’t want to offend anyone.” “Hogwash!” says Steve. “They’ve known for ages how offensive this program is to many of us. I think their reasoning was that they needed Catholics’ money, so they better stop bashing them.”
KAJN broadcasts out of Crowley. A local assistant pastor, Fr. Mario Romero, sent the management a polite but firm letter, noting that, from the title, one might think “Upon This Rock” is a Catholic program, but it “is dedicated entirely to the bashing of the Catholic Church. Instead of the show’s host stating the gospel message in a positive light, he spends the whole time presenting our Catholic doctrine in a distorted manner and then tries to rip it apart. When was the last time you heard any Protestant bashing being done on EWTN?
“You won’t hear any because we feel that’s not the way to evangelize people. To respectfully compare and contrast the various biblical interpretations held by different Christian denominations is one thing. To say another Christian denomination is unchristian because it doesn’t use the same terminology or hold the same biblical interpretations is quite another. I request that you discontinue airing this Catholic bashing program on your radio station. If you choose to continue to run the program, at least give me equal air time to play tapes that present the Catholic side of the story.”
Well, Fr. Romero wasn’t invited to host a program (surprise!), but he let Bishop Harry Flynn of the Lafayette Diocese know about the situation. Bishop Flynn alerted Catholic pastors, who in turn alerted their congregations. Since half the population in the broadcast area is Catholic, the message got through, via the station’s pocketbook, and Greg Durel is off the air. But he hasn’t disappeared. He was a featured speaker at the recently-completed Tyndale Institute in Gretna, Louisiana. This is a yearly conference at which Fundamentalists learn the proper way to oppose the Catholic faith.
In nearby Alabama the prisoners are up in arms. Well, maybe it’s better to say they have their arms up. No, that gives the wrong impression too. We mean they’re raising their hands–because they have questions about the Catholic faith, and those questions are being answered through a prisoner-founded catechetical institute named after the late Fr. Killian Mooney, a long-time prison chaplain.
“Applying the methods of St. John Bosco for evangelization,” reports Russell L. Ford from inside the walls, “we have founded an institute for evangelistic religious education. Each of our three courses awards a diploma for successful completion. This is very important to prisoners, as most of us have never completed anything worthwhile in our lives.
“The initial course is called Basic Universal Christian Theology. It consists of 26 lessons of 30 minutes each by Fr. Robert J. Fox on video. Our methods take the videos and stretch them to an hour and a half.
“Our second course is Advanced Universal Christian Theology. This is still the basic catechism, but it is far more comprehensive than what is found in probably 95 percent of all RCIA and CCD programs. The course consists of thirteen lessons, with tests for proficiency. Each lesson is a combination of lecture and reading, and each is more challenging than the previous.
“The third course is still in development and is called Universal Christian Apologetics. It is the result of research in solid apologetical materials and in the limited patristics available to us. Its primary focus is on those points of theology in which Catholics often find themselves at conflict with non-Catholic Christians.”
Ford reports that these courses are only the beginning of a much larger effort, which will include a network of prison ministries and programs, at various levels, that will cover “Christology, Mariology, hagiography, catechetics, apologetics, ecclesiology, Church history, moral theology, and sacramental theology.” The network will act as a clearing house, putting prisoners in touch with outside pen pals (a good way to evangelize!). At prisons that are part of the network there will be special seminars, missions, and debates.
For more information, contact Ford at this address: AIS# 148620, P.O. Box 5107, Union Springs, AL 36089.
Robert V. Julien, who claims to be a former priest, wrote an article called “The Rock of Christ’s Church” for Challenger, the newsletter of Mission to Catholics. He has comforting words for us: “Let every Catholic–from the Pope down–know that he, too, can become a ‘Peter,’ a petros, in the same way that Simon Bar-Jona became one. That’s exactly what he himself meant when, in his first letter to God’s people, he compared them to ‘living stones . . . built up a spiritual house’ (1 Pet. 2:5).”
You can imagine some Catholic reading this and saying, “I know that Jesus called Simon Petros in Matthew 16:18, and here he is, quite clearly, calling all of us the same thing. Why, of course! Why didn’t I think of it before!” The conclusion is that Peter was just one more stone on which the spiritual house of the Church was built–no different from us, really.
Ah, but there’s a sleight of hand here. Julien lets the reader think that in 1 Peter 2:5 the word used is the plural of petros, but it’s not. The word used is lithoi, the everyday word for stones. Petros was a comparatively rare word, and it must has chosen it for a reason–and a good reason was that our Lord was intending to contrast, not equate, Peter with the rest of us, that he was telling Peter and us that Peter’s status is special. He isn’t just another “living stone” used to build up our spiritual house. No, he is the authentic foundation of the Church and was made so by Christ, the ultimate foundation.
Amazing Facts magazine has distributed a direct-mail piece consisting of questions and very disputable answers. Here is a sample:
Question: “At death the body returns to dust–the spirit (or breath) returns to God. But where does the soul go?”
Answer: “It goes nowhere. It simply ceases to exist. Two things must be combined to make a soul: body and breath. When the breath departs, the soul ceases to exist because it is a combination of two things. When you turn off the light, where does the light go? It goes nowhere. It just ceases to exist. Two things must be combined to make a light: a bulb and electricity. Without a combination, a light is impossible. So with the soul, unless the body and breath are combined, there can be no soul.”
This is truly amazing–very deficient exegesis and even worse metaphysics. The answer relies on Genesis 2:7, which says, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The conclusion drawn by Amazing Facts: “Soul” refers to the composite being, which is made up of two things, dust and God’s breath.
There are two ways to read this. If you take it literally, then the soul is composed of two parts, body and breath. The body is material; so is the breath. Thus the soul is material. At death the soul dies and ceases to be. Thus no immortality, since, when we talk about immortality, we mean immortality of the soul.
The metaphysical problems are two. First, souls are spirits, and spirits have no parts. (That’s one of the philosophical underpinnings of the definition of spirits.) Things without parts can’t fall apart, which means they can’t die, so spirits (God, angels, our souls) can’t die. They always will exist.
Second, spirit and matter are different things. Spirit isn’t composed of matter, and matter isn’t composed of spirit. If you put together two material things, body and breath, you’ll end up with a material thing, not with a spiritual thing. Thus body and breath can’t be the constituents of the soul.
“Ah,” you say, “wait a minute! Amazing Facts is speaking metaphorically, not literally, just as Genesis was. When Genesis calls man ‘a living soul,’ it doesn’t mean the body and spirit, taken together, make up a physical thing called a soul. It uses a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. Besides, the breath of God is not to be taken literally. God the Father has no breath because he has no lungs. The breath of God is merely a metaphor for God’s life-giving power.”
Yes, all that is true, but that isn’t the impression Amazing Facts intends to leave with readers. It deliberately twists the meaning of Scripture. It wants readers to come away with the idea that traditional Christian understanding about the immortality of the soul is all wrong–because Scripture says so. Such are the theological and metaphysical oddities that have come out of movements such as adventism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
J. I. Packer is a leading figure in American Protestantism. An Anglican, he terms himself a Fundamentalist and 45 years ago wrote what remains an important book explicating Fundamentalist positions.
In a recent editorial in Christianity Today, Packer said he got into trouble because he “wrote in CT of some Roman Catholics being spiritually alive, without saying (1) official Roman teaching about Mary and the Mass is idolatrous, so that (2) apparent spiritual life among its adherents has to be hypocritical and unreal. The Protestant mafia was damning me for these omissions.”
Not that he doesn’t believe this, mind you. “To set the record straight: I have in the past written that the doctrines of the Mass (transubstantiation and sacrifice) and the practice of Mariolatry [sic], with the Mariological ideas that support it, are not acceptable. . . . On (1) above, therefore, trashers and trashed were substantially agreed, though they express themselves differently. . . . So, as I offend Roman Catholics by thinking them invincibly ignorant (which is, of course, what they think of me), I now offend some Protestants by thinking of Roman Catholics who love the Lord Jesus as real Christians.”
Actually, Packer offends because he agrees with the “Catholicism as idolatry” crowd. He phrases himself politely, but it is the same theological error. He is smart enough to know better, being an otherwise good scholar who has read the Catholic side, so it isn’t clear that he should be called invincibly ignorant.