The March 2 issue of Christianity Today carried an article, written by Jackie Alnor, titled “Groups Battle over Catholic Outreach.” The impetus for the article was an Ex-Catholics for Christ conference held at John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California (where Alnor lives). Halfway through the article come these lines: “Catholic activists have been quick to respond to these doctrinal challenges from Evangelicals. Catholic apologist Karl Keating, focusing on [Jim] McCarthy’s controversial video, Catholicism: Crisis of Faith, has accused McCarthy of using deceptive tactics to promote sales. ‘It is cunningly packaged to look like a Catholic video — for a good reason,’ Keating wrote in a recent review. ‘Its producers want to get it into the hands of unsuspecting Catholics.'”
We appreciate the mention in the pages of Christianity Today, but the “recent review” Alnor refers to (it was ten pages long) appeared in This Rock in May 1993.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), in a letter to more than 400 Catholic bishops and Evangelical leaders, urged that their flocks be encouraged to “follow Jesus by adopting a vegetarian diet through Lent and beyond.” Bruce Freidrich, who is called the organization’s “vegetarian coordinator,” bases his argument that Jesus was a vegetarian on the claim that Jesus was an Essene. Essenes were the monastic folks who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they supposedly refused to eat meat (not that there was much meat to be had where they lived in the desert, of course).
Fr. Joseph Fitzmyer, who formerly taught at Catholic University of America, responded to the PETA initiative by saying, “It’s a kooky idea. There’s nothing in the New Testament that would suggest Jesus was a vegetarian.” He noted that there is no proof at all that Jesus was an Essene.
Over the years PETA has engaged in demonstrations against what it considers to be cruelty to animals. Among other things, it opposes — sometimes violently — medical research involving animals. When the Oscar Mayer “wienermobile” was auditioning children for a television commercial, PETA members disrupted the event by yelling that “meat is murder.”
It is rumored that some opponents of PETA have established an organization using the same acronym. Their group: People Eating Tasty Animals.
The Village Voice carried a public advertisement for a pair of vocalists. It ended with this sentence: “Must be dedicated, creative, not afraid to offend everyone and anyone. No Christians.” Catholic League president William Donohue called the classified department of the newspaper and requested the following ad be run: “A pair of male vocalists to play with band. Must be dedicated, creative, not afraid to offend everyone and anyone. No gays.” This, said Donohue, is what happened next:
“The woman who fielded my call paused at the mention of “no gays” and said she would have to check to see if this was okay. After checking, she said that it wasn’t acceptable. When I asked her why it wasn’t, she hesitated, saying that there was a word for something like this. Being a nice guy, I volunteered, ‘Bigoted?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. I then informed her that she must be mistaken because the Village Voice certainly has no problem with bigotry, offering as an example the “no Christians” ad. That was an error, I was told, and against the rules. I then asked for a copy of the rules and, lo and behold, she was unable to provide me with them. Disturbed again, she twice consulted with someone else, and then I finally disclosed who I was and what this was all about (but not before telling her that I didn’t believe a word she said).”
So much for tolerance, eh?
“The Holy Spirit (Ruach) is the invisible dynamic force, the mind, the power emanating from the Father and shared by the Son . . . The Holy Spirit is likened to the wind, a dynamic, invisible force and is not a person. Therefore, we find that the Trinity doctrine is not scriptural but is from paganism.” So teaches Donald R. Mansager, leader of a sect known as Yahweh’s New Covenant Assembly, located in the quaintly-named town of Kingdom City, Missouri. The sect styles itself as the only authentic Christian body. Apparently an offshoot of Seventh Day Adventism, it promotes Saturday worship, a strong apocalypticism, and an insistence on using “Yahweh” as the name of the Father and “Yahshua” as the name of the Messiah. Mansager says, “Our goal is to return as closely as possible to the true and pure teachings of Scripture. That means rooting out many popular doctrines and traditional teachings that are not biblical, but which developed through the centuries from human custom or by compromises with error.” Among those doctrines: belief in an immortal soul.
The January-February issue of the sect’s magazine, YNCA Light, carries an article titled “Two Men and a Dragon.” It argues that the Man of Sin will oppose “churchianity’s most widely recognized and celebrated ‘holy times,'” which “are nowhere taught in the Bible. Pagan holy days celebrated by carnal mankind were accepted by the church early on to accommodate the growing gentile population. The gentile church was filled with the unconverted and the spiritual decay is with us today.”
Mansager, who accepts the hoary ecclesiastical history believed by many anti-Catholics, expects the Man of Sin to ingratiate himself with Jews and Muslims by canceling Sunday worship and instituting Saturday worship (it isn’t clear how this will impress Muslims, who worship on Friday) and discouraging “Xmas, Easter, Lent, and Halloween. . . . He might be lenient, allowing people to observe pagan holidays, but would restore and enforce the holy days of Leviticus 23.” Thus, instead of being relentlessly secular in appearance, the Man of Sin will emulate Old Testament ways-but only so he can fool all the people all the time.
The YNCA mandates that women wear veils in church. For men there is a different injunction. “Following in the footsteps of Yahshua the Messiah may also include the physical aspect of wearing a beard. While not mandatory, the many scriptural verses show that a beard was a part of the Savior’s makeup (Isa. 50:6), and a number of Scriptures indicate that Israelites were expected to have a beard (Lev. 14:9, 13:29-30), but not a pointed one (Lev. 19:27, 21:5). Beards are an individual preference.” Mansager and his son, Alan, sport beards.
Douglas Wilson, writing on authority in Credenda Agenda, a Calvinistic bimonthly published in Moscow (Idaho, not Russia), says that “the position of historic Protestants is that the Word of God is self-authenticating.” You’ll know it when you read it. This doesn’t mean that the “Church has declared certain books canonical,” he emphasizes. “The Church must claim no authority of any kind over the text of Scripture itself, and yet the Church must acknowledge the canon of Scripture and the text of Scripture-which, incidentally, should be the textus receptus” (the text from which the King James Version was translated). “Authority is being exercised, but it is not authority over the self-authenticating text of Scripture. The authority is being exercised in the household of God and over spurious writings. . . . If someone claims that the Book of Mormon, for example, is the Word of God, the true Church of Christ has the full authority to reject it as a merely human composition. To authoritatively reject that which is not Scripture is the necessary counterpart of submissively accepting that which is Scripture.”
If you sense an epistemological dilemma here, you’re not alone. The Church has the right and the authority, says Wilson, to determine what doesn’t belong in the canon. It does this by accepting what does belong in the canon and then drawing the logical conclusions. What does belong in the canon? Well, whatever is in the received text. Anything else doesn’t belong there. Those who submit themselves to the authority of the received text have the authority to declare that anything outside of it is bogus. In doing this they aren’t saying what is canonical; they take that as a given and work from there.
Neat, but this line of argument avoids the key question: How do we know that what we accept as the received text is the real canon, with no admixture of uncanonical books, with no canonical books omitted? We know, answers Wilson, because of the self-authenticating power of Scripture. We don’t have-and don’t need-an external authority, such as the Catholic Church perceives itself to be. Yes, well, ah . . . Isn’t that the same argument Mormons use to confirm that the Book of Mormon is Scripture? Their missionaries give out copies of their holy book and ask prospective converts to pray to God for an interior affirmation, a “burning in the bosom,” that “self-authenticates” the Book of Mormon as the Word of God. What does Wilson offer beyond this, other than a tradition that is older than that offered by the Mormons? They can trace their methodology only to 1830. Wilson can trace his to-the Westminster Confession of 1647 (though, admittedly, he thinks his principle goes back to the first century).
The Reformation’s rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church resulted in a search for another authority. The only one that seemed to “work” was the authority of Scripture itself. Scripture had to become “self-authenticating” because now there was no independent authority to determine what constituted Scripture. The beginning of Christian faith had to be a leap of faith. The received text was taken, in a sense arbitrarily, as the starting point, and everything was expected to flow from that acceptance. But Protestantism’s initial point never has been able to resolve the dilemma of the canon. All it can say is “We accept these books as canonical on their own say-so, and everything else is uncanonical.” But how do we know we haven’t left out canonical books? How do we know we haven’t included books that shouldn’t be considered part of the canon? The original assumption can’t resolve those questions. It must ignore them, but, in the long run, such ignoring is unsatisfying to inquiring minds.
Over the last few decades several thousand men left the active priesthood. Some left canonically, and others just dropped out. Some joined the pressure group CORPUS, which lobbies to have priestly celibacy dropped and to welcome back into the active ministry priests who left without following canonical procedures, including priests who attempted marriage. CORPUS is allied with organizations such as We Are Church and Call to Action.
But what about priests who left and want to be good Catholics, even if not as active priests? Is there no organization for them, one loyal to the magisterium? Now there is. It’s called Standing With Peter. The founder is Fr. Lawrence Michael, who had been in the Manchester, New Hampshire, diocese and who now lives in Vermont. He says his new organization “will be composed of presently inactive priests and active priests who, because of their defense of the Holy Father and the full magisterium of the Church, find themselves isolated and threatened. The essential requirement for membership will be complete loyalty to the Holy Father and to all the teachings of the Church.” He says the goal is “to offer support to one another so that we might more effectively support the Church.” Priests who might be interested may write to Standing With Peter, P.O. Box 2230, Brattleboro, VT 05303
Sister Lucia, the survivor of the three Fatima children, has said that the famous third secret is not intended for public revelation. In an interview broadcast on March 1, she said the secret was not intended to be made public; “it is only destined for the pope and the ecclesiastical hierarchy close to him.” That news will disappoint some people, but the real shocker — at least to a certain faction of Fatima devotees — is that Sister Lucia said that Pope John Paul II forestalled a nuclear war when he consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1984. What the Fatima seer was saying, in other words, was that the consecration in fact took place. This has been the position espoused by such proponents of the apparition as Fr. Robert Fox. But there are those who claim the consecration was not done properly and so didn’t “take.” They are led by Fr. Nicholas Gruner, a controversial priest who is resident in Canada but who is not incardinated in any diocese in North America. It will be interesting to see how his ministry, which raises millions of dollars yearly on the claim that there has been no valid consecration, will be affected — and whether he will claim that Sister Lucia didn’t say what she said or, if she said it, that advanced age has robbed her of her faculties.
Speaking of Fr. Robert Fox, who runs the Fatima Family Apostolate and publishes the Immaculate Heart Messenger: He has come out with a new book, A Young Catholic’s Apology for the Faith. He has taken statements on the faith written by young people (he has received thousand over the years) and has edited them into a cohesive, eighty-page primer on why, in a world with thousands of churches, the Catholic Church is the one we should join. Single copies of the book are available for $5.25 postpaid; discounts are available for bulk quantities. Write to Fatima Family Apostolate, P.O. Box 55, Redfield, SD 57469.
A third mention: Fr. Fox will be one of the speakers at the twelfth annual Marian Congress held June 12-14 in Alexandria, South Dakota. Among the other seven speakers are Bishop Robert J. Carlson of Sioux Falls, Curtis Martin of Catholics United for the Faith, and Fr. John Corrapi, a one-time millionaire and drug addict who now is a well-known evangelist. Further information on the event can be obtained by calling (605) 249-2718.
Quite a different kind of conference will be held in Milwaukee this autumn: the national Call to Action Conference. Appropriately enough, perhaps, the middle day of the three-day event will be — Halloween. Organizers say they are “looking for ideas to entice more young people to the conference, especially outreach to colleges and universities.” It is unclear whether the outreach will be made on the campuses of Thomas Aquinas College, Franciscan University, Assumption College, University of Dallas, Christendom College, and the several other schools that actually deserve the name “Catholic.”
Fr. Ray Ryland’s favorite store-front church name, seen in Ponca City, Oklahoma: The Church on the Right Track. And seen in Dickinson, Texas: Solid Rock Church. In reality, these names should be considered registered trademarks of a different Church, headquartered in a large city on the Mediterranean, but we’re not complaining.