A faith in flux (the Catholic Church)

Jack Gannone was about to have a defining moment, one that would unite him with more than a billion people of 200 nations and 600 languages.

The day was April 23, a Sunday, and inside the sparely modern sanctuary of St. Eleanor Roman Catholic Church in Collegeville, 6-month-old Jack squirmed on his mother's lap.

"Parents, do you understand what you are about to do?" the Rev. Andrew Brownholtz asked. John Gannone and Sara Benton nodded.

Suddenly Jack found himself tilted head-back over a marble font. He did not howl, but gave a what-in-the-world roll of his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling as holy water streamed onto his downy brown hair.

"I baptize you," the priest intoned, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

In that instant, Jack Gannone became a Roman Catholic, a member of the largest Christian church on Earth, one of an estimated 67 million adherents in the United States and nearly 1.5 million in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.

Statistically, he probably will remain in the fold for life. Although American Catholics have a higher dropout rate than Protestants of any major denomination, 80 percent stay at least nominally in the church from cradle to grave.

But what kind of Catholic might Jack - and indeed, any of his 21st-century soul mates - grow up to be?

If today's strong trends are an accurate compass, they point to someone whom the hierarchy has never gladly embraced: a Catholic who lives the faith on his or her own terms.

From baby boomers through Gen-Xers and Millennials, a streak of spiritual autonomy is growing more pronounced among those who count themselves as practicing Catholics. Religious scholars scan the horizon and see little that might reverse the slow drift away from not only the dictates of Rome but also some core teachings of the faith.

"My sense is that this is an enduring condition, not just an anomaly," said Chester Gillis, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown University in Washington and author of Roman Catholicism in America, a 1999 portrait of the U.S. church.

"There's a tension between Catholicism and American culture," he said. "American culture is winning out."

With that comes a deepening dilemma that the church has long faced in Europe, where institutional Catholicism is in near-collapse and Pope Benedict XVI has decried a "dictatorship of secularism."

"What can the church do? If she stands by her moral teaching, then she will be seen as standing in judgment" of a sizable portion of the membership, said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, former master general of the religious order of Dominicans. "If she does not, then she will be seen as surrendering to modernity."

Some of that "modernity" is evident in a Zogby International telephone poll of 1,901 Catholics nationwide, conducted in March for The Inquirer and Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. Of young adults ages 18 to 35, fewer than half said they:

Think that the church alone has the final say on sex outside marriage (25 percent).

On some issues, opinions varied little from the youngest to the oldest respondents. They found common ground in a question about abortion: About half of all age groups thought both the church and the individual should have a say. Across generations, two-thirds said the church should be more democratic in its decision-making.

But increasingly, it is the young who are stretching the fabric of one-size-fits-all Catholicism, according to an author of the poll, and who do not want the church standing in judgment.

"They want an institution that understands how they live, that is responsive to their attitudes and opinions," said Matthew T. Loveland, an assistant professor of sociology at Le Moyne, founded by Jesuits.

He recalled asking his students earlier this spring to define a "good" Catholic. "Did it mean going to Mass, or confession, or doing this and not that?" he said. "And their answer wasn't yes or no. It was more like, 'What a stupid question!' "

Yet even among those who eschewed some of the rules, the poll found a durable bond with Catholicism. The majority of 18- to 35-year-olds said:

It's important for younger generations of their families to "grow up to be Catholic" (91 percent).

"They think of themselves as Catholic, regardless of whether they agree with church teachings," Loveland said. Still, their accelerating autonomy should concern church leaders, he added, for it "opens up the possibility of their breaking away."

In recent years, discontented voices of all ages have been heard over the media microphone, calling for changes ranging from women's ordination to the opening of the church's ledgers. But the angriest have been in response to the pedophilia scandals in the clergy. A survey for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops found that nearly 4,500 priests had been involved in more than 11,000 alleged cases of child sexual abuse since 1950.

Beneath the public outrage, though, is something bigger, more profound, and unconnected to the scandals, said David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio reporter who is now an author of books on Catholicism and a TV commentator.

"Americans felt the hierarchy had been reprimanding and remonstrating about their faithlessness and their dissenting and perceived shortcoming for decades," Gibson said. "There was this sense that they couldn't do anything right, that they weren't being listened to.

The dissatisfaction has been evolving since the 1960s out of a "minimalist" understanding of the faith, said Bishop Joseph Galante of the 488,000-member Camden Diocese.

Rooted in an 18th-century Protestant nation, the American Catholic Church spent its formative decades in an atmosphere of intense anti-"papist" bigotry. From hostile soil sprang an ironweed of an institution, one whose prelates kept the faithful just that - faithful - by maintaining what author Charles Morris termed a "prickly apartness" from mainstream culture well into the 20th century.

In 1934 in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, which had g ained a reputation for straight-and-narrow Catholicism, the famously severe Cardinal Dennis Dougherty banned members from movie theaters "under pain of mortal sin." (The ban has never been formally lifted.)

Everywhere, though, Catholic identity was reinforced with obligatory Sunday Mass, confession, and meatless Fridays.

That would prove a problem when, in 1966, Pope Paul VI relaxed the ban on eating meat on Fridays. Millions who believed such abstinence had been prescribed by God felt "hoodwinked," Galante said.

Unaware of the difference between church discipline - which is changeable - and doctrine, many Catholics began to suspect that other practices, such as Mass and confession, were "made up," he said, and "the whole pyramid fell down."

Like many in the clergy and the laity, Galante has ideas on how that pyramid might be rebuilt. They include better education of young Catholics on the "whys" of the faith, and a closing of the power gap between clergy and laity. They do not include a return to lock-step obedience.

"People aren't afraid of anything anymore. They're not afraid of hell... . Fear does not regulate behavior as it used to," he said.

"Until we get serious about... bringing people to a much better understanding of what it means to be Catholic, we're going to be spinning our wheels."

Other recent surveys have painted an even more dramatically changed group portrait of young American Catholics than that in the Inquirer/Le Moyne/Zogby poll.

In a national study of Catholic attitudes commissioned by the independent weekly National Catholic Reporter and published last fall, researchers Dean Hoge, James Davidson and Mary Gautier found that among the 18- to 25-year-olds, only one in three planned to never leave the church. Just 15 percent said they attend Mass weekly.

Few priests are emerging from the younger generations. Many dioceses predict that their ranks of active priests could shrink by as much as three-quarters by 2025. Last month at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Cardinal Justin Rigali ordained this year's Philadelphia graduates - a total of three new priests.

"Young people respond remarkably when introduced to traditional practices such as devotions to the Holy Eucharist and to Mary," he said on a CD that he recorded in response to The Inquirer's written questions.

He noted that the Philadelphia Archdiocese had received nearly 1,000 converts in the last year. "There are so many positive signs that the Catholic Church is vibrant and strong in the United States," he said. "So many people are living their faith with conviction and generosity."

Such optimism for American Catholicism is more likely to be heard outside the United States than within. Because, even for an institution built on absolutes, some things are relative.

The U.S. church looks robust to Catholic leaders in most other parts of world, and even to some critical eyes in the Vatican.

In Europe and South America, the church is struggling for relevance in nations it once defined. In parts of Africa and Asia, it is seeking to plant the cross on frontiers made inhospitable by governments and entrenched religions.

Archbishop John Foley, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications and a Philadelphia native, ran down a list of American Catholicism's strengths in an Inquirer interview: "The percentage of Mass attendance is much higher than in Europe; parish life is relatively vital; your fraternal organizations, like the Knights of Columbus, are flourishing."

Some sea-change trends that are worrisome to many Americans look like blessings when viewed through that international lens.

One is the towering immigrant wave. Nationwide, Latinos make up 42 percent of the Catholic population, with the highest concentrations in the South and Southwest. Were immigration to stay at its current pace, the number of Hispanic Catholics would go from 30 million to 70 million by mid-century, making them the majority in the U.S. church.

For an Anglo-centric institution with a priesthood that is just 4 percent Hispanic, the challenges are immense. Yet so is the payoff, said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, president of Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla., and a publisher of Benedict's books.

"We have immigration coming from South America - people who share our Western traditions," he said. Whatever happens in the faith's traditional base, they virtually guarantee church growth.

The Latino infusion, Fessio said, separates the fate of Catholicism in America from that of its ancestor across the Atlantic.

Immigration into Europe has been markedly Muslim - hardly a source of new Catholic life on a continent where the birthrates of its traditional ethnic stock are some of the world's lowest.

More so than anywhere else, the church there is in grave decline. Mass attendance, baptisms, confirmations and church marriages are dramatically down among Europe's 280 million Catholics, particularly the young "postmoderns" skeptical of institutions of nearly any kind. In polls, most describe themselves as "spiritual," but not religious.

In South America, home to 450 million Catholics, prelates such as Brazil's Cardinal Claudio Hummes look enviously at the United States. After 500 years of dominion, the Latin Catholic Church now finds itself struggling to hold the lead in a crowded field of faiths.

From a mountaintop in Rio de Janeiro, the statue of Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer, still stretches giant concrete arms over the land. But Protestantism, chiefly Pentecostalism, has developed quite a reach of its own, drawing in millions of converts seeking a new religious fervor.

"In the United States, the church is a minority," Hummes said, predicting that Brazilian Catholicism will shrink to that state. Though it claims only about one-quarter of the U.S. population, "it is an important presence. Its voice is heard."

There are two prizes that not only Catholicism but all of Christianity has longed to claim: Africa and Asia.

For 400 years, missionaries measured conversions "like the body count in war," wrote the Rev. Peter Phan, a Georgetown University theologian who grew up Catholic in French-colonized Vietnam.

In Africa, priests baptized whole villages at once and then imposed Western dress, manners and religious architecture. Such efforts to graft Catholicism onto the native rootstock of ancient animist faiths often withered.

But with the collapse of colonialism and the new worldview of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, Catholic mission theology underwent a "Copernican revolution," Phan said. Instead of "church planting," the clergy came lightly, "bearing witness."

Such was Mother Teresa's savvy approach in India, said George Weigel, an American Catholic author and Pope John Paul II's biographer: "Embody the Gospel in service to the wretched. After a few hundred years, people will start asking questions."

The model of "servant church," bringing education and medicine, appears to be working in Africa. Its 140 million Catholics make up 12 percent of the church's global roll, up from 4 percent in 1950. Nigeria, for instance, has one of the fastest Catholic growth rates in the world.

Adding to the Vatican's delight, said Weigel, is that "they don't have a problem with obedience."

Yet Africa is no easy hunting ground for converts. Like much of the world today, it is a competitive marketplace of religions - but also a notoriously bloody one as Christianity and Islam, rooted there 1,000 years ago, vie for souls.

In Asia, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are so entrenched that Christianity is predicted to make only modest gains in the next half-century.

If there is any tantalizing opportunity for the church in Asia, however, it is China.

After nearly five decades of atheistic communism, most of China's 1.3 billion people profess no religious identity. The government allows five faiths to be publicly practiced, and Catholicism is one, claiming 4.5 million followers. But this church is not "Roman."

It is the "Patriotic" Catholic Church, controlled by Beijing. Its priests say Mass in Latin and are forbidden to condemn birth control or abortion. Some bishops have reportedly been forced to marry to prove loyalty to the state.

The arrangement has incensed the Vatican, which has supported an "underground" church thought to have about eight million members. Anyone caught worshipping at the secret in-home services risks a lengthy prison sentence.

Although it refuses to recognize the state church, "Rome has tried to accommodate the political realities," said Sister Janet Carroll, a former director of the U.S. Catholic China Bureau, at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

The Vatican has validated about 70 percent of the government bishops, who in turn have been allowed to acknowledge deference to the pope.

"We're very suspicious of one another just now," said a Vatican liaison to China who asked not to be identified because of the difficulty of diplomacy. "We've got no timetable. We're just waiting for them to say, 'Come, let's talk.' "

But should that happen, he added, the Roman Catholic Church will have to make serious adjustments to Asian culture, consisting of "more than replacing a bell with a gong."

Thomas C. Fox, author of the 2002 book Pentecost in Asia, described "the Western mind [as seeking] to separate, analyze, clarify," while the Asian mind "seeks wholeness" and prizes "silence and meditation."

"Catholicism in Asia," he wrote, "will become authentic only when it ceases to be Western."

The hands that held Jack Gannone over the baptismal font at St. Eleanor's wore a gold wedding band and a silver Buddhist "Om" ring, symbolizing the unity of being.

His mother, Sara Benton, is an Episcopalian who has been practicing yoga meditation since graduate school. At first, "it was purely a physical exercise," said the 38-year-old social worker. "But when I practiced it very regularly, I found myself feeling more empathic and grounded."

Benton already has started Jack on "baby yoga," stretching his arms and legs into the positions she will teach him as he grows older.

"Some people say it can detract from religion," she noted. "I'd say it can enhance it. Yoga in its purest form is a way to connect to the world around you."

Although she stays Episcopalian "because that's how I was raised," Benton said, she is not a regular churchgoer. So baptizing Jack a Catholic, like his father, was "the easy choice."

John Gannone, 37, a mailing-equipment salesman, admits to being casual about Sunday Mass attendance. But "I do believe Jesus died for our sins," he explained as his little boy napped in their Skippack, Montgomery County, home. "I want that to be a part of Jack's life."

Gannone's own commitment to Catholicism has faced some challenges. His mother was devout, he said, but his father had a "pretty negative attitude toward organized religion."

He also saw his history teacher at Bishop McDevitt High School, the Rev. Edward DePaoli, "taken out in handcuffs, with his coat over his head" in 1985. The priest was later convicted of receiving child pornography by mail.

"I was able to look past it," Gannone said. "In church, you're with the man upstairs. The priest just delivers the message."

Jack is due to start kindergarten at St. Eleanor's parish school in 2010, and his father hopes he will go on to Catholic high school and college.

"It would be nice if he stayed Catholic," Gannone said, but added, "I'm not going to disown him if he doesn't."

Author and commentator David Gibson, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, said he understands why those born into the faith - so-called cultural Catholics - might rebel.

"Discovering you've been baptized Catholic is like discovering you don't get to choose your parents," he said. "So we end up struggling with them forever." Remaining Catholic "means living with the imperfections of the church, it means living with the tension."

Benedict "wants people to be Catholic because they believe in Christ, not because it's the national religion or something your parents decided," Gibson said. "I think cultural Catholicism will continue to hold people, but it's funny: If you've got the church asking them to make a personal choice for the faith, will more fall away?"

Dean Hoge, a leading scholar of American Catholicism, has no answer for that. However, he is reasonably sure of one thing.

"We're going to have a different laity 10, 20, 40 years out," said Hoge, a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington. "They'll be thinking for themselves, deciding if they believe what the church believes.

On the absurdity of this article and why most of those described are not Catholic. See specifically #3.

Why I Am A Catholic

By G. K. Chesterton

From Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926)

Reprinted in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3 Ignatius Press 1990

The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.

Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.

The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there.

Thus, for instance, nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time, two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo's [Also known as , released in 1891] which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.

Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.

On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have said: "Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society." Follow it out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or again, it sounds quite pious to say, "Our moral conflict should end with a victory of the spiritual over the material." Follow it out, and you may end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life, that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass, in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.

Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.

Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.

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