What Are We To Make of the Anti-Catholics.

What are we to make of the anti-Catholics? How can we explain the assault on the Church by those who profess in their words the same mission of the Church, the Salvation of mankind, but through their deeds deny it? Are the fabrications, falsehoods, and lies about the supporting beliefs of the Church, about the lives of its saints and clergy, about the verifiable facts of history justified because of doctrinal disagreements? Does any of this matter in the face of the greater assault on Christ and his flock? It defies rational thinking.

In the face of a Muslim onslaught that is bombing Christmas Masses, executing Christians for a nonexistent heresy and apostasy, and a jihad against Christians of all stripes on a massive scale we get shrill unwarranted criticism of how Catholics peaceably worship the One true God. Is smells and bells really a greater sin than sawing off heads in the name of the prophet?

In the face of a secular socialist assault that is killing babies at a pace that outpaces the crimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined there are degrading insults and accusations over the difference between worship and veneration. Corrections and explanations are ignored and the apologists are pilloried. For what purpose?

In the face of the threat of Communist China that suppresses worship of all kinds and enforces forced abortions we get feeble ad naseum criticism of the Real Presence in spite of the acceptance by Catholics, both Eastern and Latin Rite, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Methodists. All the while the anti-Catholics continue the charade of Christian unity, minus those damned Catholics of course.

So in the face of the advance of worldwide evil some would have us believe that it is the Catholic Church should be destroyed when the destruction of the Church would serve to provide aid and comfort to that evil. Why? Qui Bono, for whom the benefit?

That the Church is and has always been a target of evil cannot be denied. Neither can it be denied that the Church has never been harmed or compromised by that evil. Satan can only work in this world through the actions of his willing accomplices. Those accomplices have long ago recognized that the greatest harm can be done from within the Church and history has produced numerous examples of sinners wearing the collars of priests. Regardless of the contentions of the anti-Catholics that does not negate the good that the Church has done not diminish the saints who have served God through her. Nor does it excuse those who blame one of the victims of the evil doers, the Church itself.

Perhaps those who irrationally assault the Church daily, those who spend inordinate hours researching the internet looking for dirt, those who accept any lie or indiscretion on nothing more than its bias against the Church are consciously or unconsciously in league with evil. Lex Parsimoniae, the principle which generally recommends accepting the answer that requires the fewest assumptions, when the potential answers are equal in all other respects. Is there a simpler answer?

"I’d be interested in your take on the Pope’s recent comments about evolution - God being the cause of the Big Bang, to paraphrase."

The Pope' comments are not out of character or different than his positions before he became Pope. Science is not incompatible with Christian faith. He says that scientific processes are among the creations of God. Their perfection is a reflection of their Creator and the wonder of their complexity, with every new discovery, a testament to their author. He states that the Bible is not intended to be a science text book seeking to answer how God created the universe. It is a declaration that He created it and an explanation why.

In his 1986 Commentary on Genesis; "In the Beginning..." then Cardinal Ratzinger said;

"These words, with which Holy Scripture begins, always have the effect on me of the solemn tolling of a great old bell, which stirs the heart from afar with its beauty and dignity and gives it an inkling of the mystery of eternity. For many of us, moreover, these words recall the memory of our first encounter with God's holy book, the Bible, which was opened for us at this spot. It at once brought us out of our small child's world, captivated us with its poetry, and gave us a feeling for the immeasurability of creation and its Creator.

Yet these words give rise to a certain conflict. They are beautiful and familiar, but are they also true? Everything seems to speak against it, for science has long since disposed of the concepts that we have just now heard -- the idea of a world that is completely comprehensible in terms of space and time, and the idea that creation was built up piece by piece over the course of seven [or six] days. Instead of this we now face measurements that transcend all comprehension. Today we hear of the Big Bang, which happened billions of years ago and with which the universe began its expansion -- an expansion that continues to occur without interruption. And it was not in neat succession that the stars were hung and the green of the fields created; it was rather in complex ways and over vast periods of time that the earth and the universe were constructed as we now know them.

Do these words, then, count for anything? In fact a theologian said not long ago that creation has now become an "unreal" concept; that if one is to be intellectually honest one ought to speak no longer of creation but rather of "mutation and selection." Are these words true? Or have they perhaps, along with the entire Word of God and the whole biblical tradition, come out of the reveries of the infant age of human history, for which we occasionally experience homesickness but to which we can nevertheless not return, inasmuch as we cannot live on nostalgia? Is there an answer to this that we can claim for ourselves in this day and age?

Difference Between Form and Content

One answer was already worked out some time ago, as the scientific view of the world was gradually crystallizing; many of you probably came across it in your religious instruction. It says that the Bible is not a natural science textbook, nor does it intend to be such. It is a religious book, and consequently one cannot obtain information about the natural sciences from it. One cannot get from it a scientific explanation of how the world arose; one can only glean religious experience from it. Anything else is an image and a way of describing things whose aim is to make profound realities graspable to human beings. One must distinguish between the form of portrayal and the content that is portrayed. The form would have been chosen from what was understandable at the time -- from the images which surrounded the people who lived then, which they used in speaking and in thinking, and thanks to which they were able to understand the greater realities. And only the reality that shines through these images would be what was intended and what was truly enduring. Thus Scripture would not wish to inform us about how the different species of plant life gradually appeared or how the sun and the moon and the stars were established. Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world.

Know the enemy

There is a difference between anti-Catholicism and Protestant Christianity. Most Protestants are those who sincerely believe us to be wrong but will be truly filled with God when they explain what THEY believe.

Anti-Catholics are of two types:

1. Members of the OPC and PCA. These are the shouters, fully filled with the hate of their master and hating Christians all. They may call themselves doctors or moms or whatever, but their words are filled with hate and not with doctrine or love. They will insult, post fake photographs, links to fake articles, whatever. They never post what they believe. And when they do not get Catholics to attack, they will attack Arminian (Baptists, Methodists, etc.) telling them they follow a Satanic gospel, or Lutherans, Anglicans who believe in the true presence calling it a heresy to believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist. The noise they make belies the size of these groups (20,000 for the OCP and 300,000 for the PCA and dropping).

2. The singletons who form kirks of one. You can make these out by the cluelessness in which they post. Whether they say they were cool or are babel truths or evangelical MLKs, it's the same, tired repeated nonsense they spout. They post threads stating how they hate large churches and how reading any Bible besides the KJV is a heresy. They also don't know anything about the Catholic Church besides how much they hate it -- they have been known to say "The pope never washes anyones feet" and then when given pictures of Maundy Thursday, they move on to another fake attack.

You may also find Lutherans copied in the replies but they don't exhibit the same kind of loony responses and I don't know why they don't point out to these guys when they attack the Real Presence. There are also Pentecostals who don't seem to realise that the OPC and PCA consider them heretics for talking in tongues and believing in modern miracles. The Pentecostals also reject Calvinist double predestination so we know the PCA/OPC cliche hate them. And woe betide any Arminian Baptist (Mr. Rogers or GRizzled Bear as a case in point) for debating double predestination with the Calvinists -- they scream at him and call him names and say he doesn't know anything or that he is a Catholic "tool" and then use the same insults and lies against him as they do against us. That's why most Protestants stay away from these threads because the PCA/OPC cliche either disgusts them with their vitriol, or if they object, THEY become the target of the PCA/OPC anti-Catholic cliche.

Sigh.. I said this on the same thread and I'll repeat it here -- do read what the Pope actually SAID as opposed to what the MSM journalist wrote. In fact, what the Pope DID say was quite little "The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe,", "Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God,

The Church's stance is that any such gradual appearance must have been guided in some way by God, but the Church has thus far declined to define in what way that may be. It has just not commentated on the veracity -- just that God's hand was behind our creation.

you can refer Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1986, 1995]

We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the 'project' of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary -- rather than mutually exclusive -- realities.

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