Cy Kellett welcomes apologist Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the concerns of a former Baptist pastor who is contemplating joining the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Caller: I have been a Baptist pastor for 24 years and resigned last month. And my wife and I have been moving toward the Catholic Church.
Joe: Glory to God. Glory to God.
Cy: And Paul. What a magnificent. That’s a big move. God bless you. I can’t imagine that there was anything easy about resigning after 24 years.
Caller: I mean, I obviously have a lot of questions, but one thing that gives me pause is, you know, so many seem to be since Vatican II, you know, all the people, you know, the Catholic Church is abandoning truth and tradition, and there’s so many of those voices. There’s just so much of that. And, you know, to be honest with you, it gives me pause. You know, I’ve actually heard people say that the goal is to rid, you know, Catholicism of the TLM and they’re moving away from what has been traditional doctrines and traditional practices. And how far does that go?
Joe: Those are great questions. I would step back and I would ask this. Throughout the ages, the Church has been beset by people preaching heresies and error and predicting the end of the Church and saying the Church’s days are up, they’re numbered, they’re over. And, you know, the Church isn’t going to survive the Roman Empire or, you know, they’re not going to survive the fall of the Roman Empire, or they’re not going to survive the Reformation, or they’re not going to survive the rise of Napoleon, or fill in the blank. Time after time after time after time. It looked like we were toast after Muslims conquered Istanbul. Well, you know, Constantinople and then turned it into Istanbul. They were very clear that Rome was next and Rome was not next. It never happened.
And so God has protected providentially, not through human agency, because if you look at the history of the Church, the human figures were fallible and broken and sinful and sometimes corrupt. And in spite of all of that, through all of that, God has continued to work through His Holy Spirit to keep the Church in the truth and to keep the Church in existence.
And if you look now, it is a matter of objective fact that the oldest government on Earth is the Vatican. Whether you agree with the Catholic Church or not, there’s just no getting around the fact that this small, relatively defenseless government that has been invaded numerous times by the Holy Roman Empire, by the Germans, by the Vandals, by the Goths, all of them seemingly coming from the same place. As I say that out loud, not a lot of invasions from the city. Napoleon. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.
And so they’ve been conquered repeatedly and yet survived. And the Pope was never replaced, and the papacy visibly continued on. The idea that Christ does this for 1900 years, and then at Vatican II is just like, ah, peace out. The Holy Spirit’s not going to protect you anymore. I protected the first 22 ecumenical councils, but not this one. That goes against every fiber of everything we know about Catholic teaching now.
Were there and are there people who tried to make Catholicism more popular and accessible in ways that backfired horribly? Absolutely. Are there people who were bad shepherds and malicious shepherds, in some cases predators, in some cases wolves in shepherd’s clothing? Absolutely. That is the case in the recent past. That’s certainly the case at times now. That was the case throughout the whole history of the Church.
But none of that invalidates the core claims that Christ built this Church and has sent His Holy Spirit to protect the Church, so that amidst all of the chaos, the Church still stands. And there are times that are more placid and times that are more chaotic. There’s a beautiful passage by St. Basil the Great writing in the three hundreds in the aftermath of the First Council of Nicaea and just describing how chaotic the Church was. And he described it as like a naval battle where every ship was firing upon every other ship and even your friends start shooting at you.
And that circular firing squad is very much what Catholic YouTube can feel like or the Catholic Twitter world can feel like, of just Catholics attacking other Catholics and everybody tearing one another down. And that is, again, even though it’s new in one way with the media, it’s not new in another way, because the hearts of men are what they always were.
And as a result of that, I can say with confidence, whatever damage we may do to one another in the online space, however much we may be adjudicated guilty for having torn down our brothers rather than building up the body of Christ, the Church itself will remain, and it has remained in the face of similar controversies and conflicts in the past. So don’t fall for the lie that for 1900 years, God protected the visible Church. And then, you know, for the past 50 or 60 years, He just decided not to anymore.
Caller: My concern is not that I believe the Church will collapse and cease to exist. My concern is the, you know, the drift toward liberalism and the loss of reverence, which is one of the things that has so drawn me to Catholicism, you know, is when I walk into the sanctuary, there is just a sense of the holy, you know, that’s so absent. And, you know, so many Protestant churches are just so casual, you know, and I guess I’m just concerned about a drift toward liberalism and toward abandoning traditional, you know, doctrines and beliefs that have always been, you know, just standard, you know, Christianity.
And I guess that’s not so much that my concern is the Church will cease to exist. But gotcha is that, you know, there this drift toward, you know, I think you probably understand what I’m saying.
Joe: I do. I actually did an episode on Shameless Popery five months ago called “Why Liberal Catholicism Is Dying.” Just looking at the numbers, and you had a generation, really about two generations ago, that thought that the way forward for the Church was to become much more like mainline Protestantism. And then mainline Protestantism largely died, collapsed terribly. And similarly, people who followed that model of Catholicism died out. The people stopped going to church.
And you can see it in the numbers. So if you interview priests who were ordained back in the 60s, about 2/3 of them describe themselves as theologically and politically progressive. Today, that number for newly ordained priests is maybe 1%. So the future of the Church in terms of clergy, in terms of the governance and leadership of the Church, is very clearly not with, let’s water everything down and make everything super liberal.
Particularly here in the US you see that in such a marked and pronounced way that there is a real thirst for orthodoxy, reverence, and tradition. And so you still have some older clergy, including some older bishops, who would maybe like to see the Church go in a different direction, but they’re powerless to accomplish that. They can do a certain amount of, I would just say, frankly, a certain amount of damage, but they can’t change the direction that the Church is going in because they simply, they failed to raise up another generation of priests.
There were no young men who wanted to follow them into that model of Church. The young people who bought what they were selling simply ceased to call themselves Catholic. And so it led to an exodus from the Church. While those who stayed around, many of them, frankly, became priests or became devout Catholics in spite of weak and bad leadership, not because of it.
Now, those are perhaps harsh words, but I think those numbers are. That assessment is clearly borne out in the data, in the numbers. You see that in a pretty undeniable sort of way, whatever your own leanings might be. So I don’t think you have to worry that 20 years from now, 50 years from now, whatever, the Church is going to resemble liberal Protestantism. There might be some people who harbor that idea. There was certainly a whiff of that revolution in the air in the 60s and 70s and even into the 80s, and it just never materialized. It never happened.
And I think the reason it never happened has a lot to do with the power of the Holy Spirit.
Cy: I want to come back to you. What do you think about that, Paul?
Caller: Yeah, well, you know, the numbers he gives are encouraging, you know, and it’s like I say, for me, it’s. It’s not, you know, I’m not a skeptic by nature necessarily, but, you know, there’s a lot at stake here.
Caller: You know, because I’m in the Deep South and, you know, the modern thing, but Catholic, you know, so we’ve. Yeah. So for me. For me, you know, I mean, I’m going to lose all my friends and, you know, my family’s going to think I’m nuts and all of this, which is okay. But, you know, I don’t want to, you know, I want to make sure that I can have confidence, you know, that I’m, you know, I’m not stepping into something that’s.
Cy: Yeah, something that will support your weight once you get there.
Joe: Yeah. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. And I would just say take heart. Know that this sacrifice, you’re being willing to place all of your relationships at the altar and choose Jesus, no matter the cost, is something that Christ will richly reward. He’s promised that abundantly.
And additionally, there are good resources for you. I don’t know if you’re familiar yet with the Coming Home Network, but there’s some fantastic people over there that in many cases are themselves former Protestant clergy who have created a support network for people in very much your situation.
Cy: Are you familiar with them, Paul?
Caller: I am. I actually went to the clergy convert retreat back in May.
Cy: Oh, wonderful. But I also want to send you Steve Weidenkopf’s book. Steve Weidenkopf, a wonderful Catholic historian, wrote a book for us here at Catholic Answers Press called *Light from Darkness: Nine Times the Catholic Church Was in Turmoil and Came Out Stronger Than Before*. You know, of course, this is, at the root of this, is that the Catholic Church has been in crisis certainly since about the year 2002, but more likely you would say since the early 1970s, when the whole world went into a crisis following the utter stupidity of the 1960s.
So it’s a long, simmering crisis. But I do think that one of the things that I hope you take from Joe is that we’re getting on the other side of that crisis, it looks like. Not that we’re at the beginning of it. And I can tell you, as a child of the 60s, if you think we’re crazy now. You should have seen us in the 70s. You should have gone to the folk mass and seen what was going on.
Joe: Just be thankful you didn’t have to do that.
Cy: So I’ll tell you what, if you’ll hang on the line, we’ll send you those books. And I hope we’ll talk to you again. If you’re in touch with the Coming Home Network, you are in touch with the right people. They are good people. And God bless you, Brother Paul. Thank you so much.