Free Republic

The grave of the 19th Century Cardinal John Henry Newman did not contain his body, the Catholic Church has revealed.The plot, at the Oratory House, Rednal, near Birmingham, was excavated on Thursday at the Vatican's instruction. His remains were to have been moved to the Birmingham Oratory, in preparation for Newman's anticipated beatification. Newman's body may have decomposed, as his coffin was not lead-lined. Its absence will not affect the progress of his cause in Rome, a spokesman said.In a statement released on Saturday, Peter Jennings from the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, said: "Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts from...

Dr Akinola, the Primate of Nigeria and a leader of traditionalists worldwide, said the alleged offences of bestiality in south London showed how "spiritual degradation" was destroying the country's soul. He also claimed the advent of civil partnerships for homosexual couples showed that politicians are "upturning the natural order" and doing away with God and family life. Dr Akinola referred to the alleged farmyard sex crimes in an important speech to the General Synod of the Church of Nigeria, the 18 million-strong church's governing body, last month. He said: "As a church we cannot but continue to decry the disturbing...

There is a branch of Catholic prophecy that predicts a series of events prior to the rise of Antichrist that lead to a unified Catholic Europe. Generally speaking, the events that lead to this foretold conversion are horrendous. Economic collapse, civil war, more war, an Islamic invasion of Europe, pestilence, and natural disasters. Death on an unprecedented level. It is at the point that Europe (and the world) are forced to admit that this was all the result of the godless world of their own creation. In their desperation, they finally turn back to God. From this turmoil rises two...

LOURDES, France, SEPT. 25, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Devotion to the Virgin Mary has an essential role in ecumenical dialogue and the journey to full and visible unity among Christians, says the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.Cardinal Walter Kasper affirmed this Wednesday when he presided over an ecumenical celebration in Lourdes, where Anglicans and Catholics had joined on pilgrimage. Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury gave the homily at the event. The pilgrimage began at the Anglican shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in England. "Lourdes is known for its miracles," Cardinal Kasper said. "Who would have imagined,...

LONDON (CNS) -- Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, England, has come under fire for his homily during a pilgrimage to the Marian sanctuaries in Lourdes, France. Archbishop Williams, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said in a homily during a Sept. 24 international Mass at Lourdes that when Mary appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 "she came at first as an anonymous figure, a beautiful lady, a mysterious thing, not yet identified as the Lord's spotless mother. "And Bernadette -- uneducated, uninstructed in doctrine -- leaped with joy, recognizing that here was life, here was healing," he said....

Church of England apologises to Darwin Anglican Church’s neo-Chamberlainite appeasement of secularism 20 September 2008 ...it’s notable that many evolutionized clergy not only have appeased secularism but also appeased radical Islam: the leading cleric in the CoE, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated earlier this year that adoption of sharia law in the UK seems unavoidable. (Click link to read entire article...a must read!)

The House of Bishops purported deposition of Bishop Robert Duncan will not change the agenda for the Oct. 4 Diocesan Convention or change Bishop Duncan’s status as a bishop in good standing within the Anglican Communion. The action of the House of Bishops, which was taken in a closed meeting on September 18 in Salt Lake City, Utah, contravenes numerous canons of The Episcopal Church. While Bishop Duncan continues to believe that the "deposition" is unlawful, he will not challenge the "deposition" prior to the end of the diocese’s October 4 convention unless forced to do so by the leadership...

Doctor Rowan Williams is to become the first leader of the Church of England to make a pilgrimage to the Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes. The Archbishop of Canterbury flies to the shrine of Our Lady in the French Pyrenees on Monday, a week after Pope Benedict XVI made his own pilgrimage there. He will be part of a historic pilgrimage of ten Church of England bishops, 60 Anglican priests and 400 Anglican lay worshippers. The event shows how church leaders are committed to closer ties. Dr Williams will preach, take part in a number of Catholic celebrations and pray...

Leaders of the Episcopal Church of America will take a vote this week on whether to remove Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan from ministry. Duncan notified the Pittsburgh diocese Saturday of the vote, which be taken Thursday during a meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops in Salt Lake City. Duncan is charged with abandonment of the Communion of the Church, a charge initiated by five priests and 16 lay people from the Pittsburgh diocese, Duncan said in a letter. The Pittsburgh diocese is scheduled to vote Oct. 4 on whether to secede from the U.S. branch of the Episcopal Church...

LONDON, September 3, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A biographer of John Henry Cardinal Newman has refuted the claims of an English homosexualist activist that Newman was a closeted homosexual. Fr. Ian Ker, a priest and biographer of Cardinal Newman, told the Weekend Australian yesterday that homosexualists were using Newman's close friendship with another priest as a political ploy. "Clearly" Fr. Kerr said, Newman "did love his dear friend" but he called it "ridiculous" to claim, a century after the fact, that they were homosexuals who lived "as husband and wife." "There is no evidence for that whatsoever, and everything he...

A Fairfax County judge dealt the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia a third defeat in their efforts to retain millions of dollars of church property being held by 11 breakaway congregations. On Tuesday, Circuit Judge Randy I. Bellows ruled on whether the U.S. Constitution's contracts clause applies to the case and whether the breakaway churches had the right to invoke what's been termed the "division statute," an 1867 law that allows a majority of a breakaway church to retain the property. ... The diocese and the Episcopal Church had asserted in an Aug. 11 hearing that even if...

CANTERBURY, UK, August 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Gene Robinson has castigated a fellow Anglican bishop for publicly disapproving of his crusade to inculcate "gay" values into the Anglican Communion. In an interview with SXNews, an Australian homosexual news website festooned with explicit sexual advertising, Robinson complained that the Sydney archdiocese is "bigoted" because its archbishop, Dr. Peter Jensen, boycotted the Lambeth conference, held this month in Canterbury, England. Gene Robinson is the active homosexual whose consecration as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire caused a crisis in the global Anglican Communion. He called the Sydney archbishop's defence of Christianity "ironic" given...

HEPWORTH: In the paragraph, "we accept the ministry of the Bishop of Rome" and the quote from Vatican II and from John Paul II's encyclical to the separated churches is sufficient indication that we are accepting contemporary statements of Catholic Doctrine and he explicitly made that statement ex cathedra. Secondly we signed the catechism of the Catholic Church which includes contemporary Catholic teaching on the papacy and we state in the letter we signed that we accepted this as the most perfect statement of Catholic faith in the world at the present time and that it is the faith we...

It’s all over the net. All kinds of talk about Anglicans swimming, put on swim trunks, taking the plunge, testing the waters, dipping the toe, crossing over, etc. It will be a wonder if the Tiber can handle the traffic as well as it handles the copious references to the metaphor … if they all come.Those who do come are deserving of a hearty welcome from those of us standing along the shore. They certainly will have paid a hefty price in strained and even lost friendships as they have made a momentous and meaningful journey to the Catholic...

Here is the bombshell: By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Relgious Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 11:19PM BST 13 Aug 2008 A group of 14 traditionalist bishops claim that there are “irreconcilable differences� over historic reforms that would introduce women as bishops without giving proper concessions to oponents of the move. In a letter to 1,400 clergy who have indicated that they are considering defecting from the Church of England, they are highly critical of a decision by the General Synod - the Church’s parliament - to ignore proposals for a compromise over the divisive issue. The Anglo-Catholic bishops have vowed to support...

<p>A delegation of Episcopal priests from Fort Worth paid a visit to Catholic Bishop Kevin Vann earlier this summer, asking for guidance on how their highly conservative diocese might come into "full communion" with the Catholic Church.</p> <p>Whether that portends a serious move to turn Fort Worth Episcopalians and their churches into Catholics and Catholic churches is a matter of dispute.</p>

The writhings of worldwide Anglicanism are another reason to disestablish the Church of England IN THE end it held together, but only just. The 650-odd bishops who attended the once-a-decade Lambeth conference went home with open schism between the liberal and conservative wings of the worldwide Anglican Communion averted. A split may prove no more than postponed, as the agreed mechanisms for making minds meet are oh-so-slowly put in place (see article). But at least the unedifying spectacle of comrades in Christ tearing strips off each other over gay sex will vanish from the headlines for a bit. Does it...

Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can “reflect the love of God� in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt. Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between men and women, and the key issue for Christians is that they are faithful and lifelong, he believes. Dr Williams is known to be personally liberal on the issue but the strength of his views, revealed in private correspondence shown to The Times, will astonish his critics. The news threatens to reopenbitter divisions over ordaining gay priests, which pushed the Anglican Communion towards a split....

An explosive article appeared Wednesday in the London Times entitled “Rowan Williams: Gay relationships 'comparable to marriage'”. Ruth Gledhill, the Religion Correspondent of the Times may have blown the lid off of the perceived pause in the internal battles threatening the the Church of England after the Lambeth Conference. Ms. Gledhill wrote: “Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can “reflect the love of God” in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt. Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between a man and woman and the key issue for Christians is that they...

The simplest way of describing the cracks running down the middle of the 80m-strong Anglican family is to say that the traditionalists, reflecting the conservative social mores of Africa, are at odds with liberals from the rich world, especially over the issue of homosexuality. To explain the Africans’ conservatism, many point out that they are on the front line of a contest with Islam; and that missionary work in Africa was carried out by evangelicals who reflect a rather fundamentalist strain of British Christianity. All that is correct up to a point, and it explains why bishops from Kenya, Nigeria,...

It's not about gays. Episcopalians keep insisting it's not. But, as American Episcopal bishops return home from an international religious conference this week, it's clear that the "gay issue" is one that continues to split the Episcopal church. Since the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson, Anglicans have been divided over their approach to gay priests, gay marriage and who holds ultimate authority in the communion of 77 million followers around the world. The once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, which ends today, showed no ability to suture those wounds. Although the conference was not...

<p>New York (AP) -- The spiritual leader of the world's Anglicans is urging an extended ban on consecrating another gay bishop until their troubled fellowship can be healed.</p> <p>Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams made the plea Sunday, the final day of the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade Anglican meeting in Canterbury, England.</p>

Cardinal Kasper’s address to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops was straight and to the point. LONDON (London Times) - The Roman Catholic Church has finally ended all hope that Anglican priestly orders will ever be recognized as valid. In an address to the Lambeth Conference of 670 Anglican bishops from around the world, the cardinal who heads the Council for Christian Unity said the dialogue between Anglicans and Catholics would be irrevocably "changed" as a result of the ordination of women and the recent vote to go ahead with consecrating women bishops. Cardinal Walter Kasper also reiterated the Vatican's...

Bishops meeting in Canterbury say confidence is being damaged as the Anglican Communion is ridiculed as 'the Gay Church' The Anglican Communion is ridiculed as “the Gay Church” and is losing members over homosexuality, say bishops meeting in Canterbury. Mission is being damaged and confidence in the validity of the Anglican Communion is being hurt, they say. The bishops’ comments appear in a draft of the final Reflections document of the Lambeth Conference. About 670 bishops from 38 provinces worldwide have contributed to the document after meeting in African-style indaba, or discussion, groups during the 2½ week conference at Kent...

Homosexuality is a disordered behaviour that must be condemned, a Vatican official said yesterday.Walter Cardinal Kasper made the remarks during an address at the Lambeth conference, the once-a-decade gathering of the world's Anglican bishops in Canterbury.Kasper, who is president of the pontifical council for promoting christian unity, reminded delegates of the catechism of the Roman Catholic church on homosexuality: "This teaching is founded in the Old and New Testament and the fidelity to scripture and to Apostolic tradition is absolute."Quoting from a key document on Anglican and Catholic relations he said: "Homosexuality is a disordered behaviour. The activity must be...

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has challenged an American woman bishop to produce evidence to back up her claim that bishops beat their wives. Other bishops also criticised the US Episcopal Church's Bishop Catherine Roskam after she said at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury that men beat women "because they can". She said: "We have 700 men here. Do you think any of them beat their wives? Chances are they do. The most devout Christians beat their wives... many of our bishops come from places where it is culturally accepted to beat your wife." About 670 bishops, nearly...

Cardinal William Levada Blackwood, Jul 30, 2008 / 05:24 am (CNA).- An exchange of letters between Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Archbishop John Hepworth, Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion shows warming relations between the two Churches as they begin to consider proposals for corporate reunion.Archbishop Hepworth, writing in the Messenger Journal, has announced that he has responded to a letter “of warmth and encouragement” he received on July 25 from Cardinal Levada. The archbishop said the entire Traditional Anglican Communion should be encouraged by Cardinal Levada’s letter, which was...

It’s not just about the filioque or the Immaculate Conception, folks. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have encouraged Catholics to reach out to Orthodox Christians, to respect them and learn their traditions. Catholics by and large have accepted that the Orthodox really are very close to Catholicism in many areas. But many would be surprised to learn that some Orthodox hierarchs (and Oriental Orthodox hierarchs) are soft, even permissive on the issue of abortion–soft like Anglicans.His Holiness, Patriarch Karekin I of Etchmiadzin of Armenia (Oriental Orthodox) who came on a pastoral visit to the US had this...

The Vatican has assured a group of traditionalist Anglicans that it is seriously studying their request to be welcomed into the Roman Catholic Church as a group. Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, also linked the issue of corporate unity for the Traditional Anglican Communion to larger issues within the Anglican Communion. "The situation within the Anglican Communion in general has become markedly more complex," Cardinal Levada said in a letter to Archbishop John Hepworth of Blackwood, Australia, primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion. "As soon as the congregation is in a position to respond more definitely...

CANTERBURY, England, JULY 28, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The archbishop of Westminster says he is not skeptical about the ecumenical dialogue going on between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor affirmed this Friday when he addressed the Lambeth Conference -- the Anglican once-a-decade meeting under way through Aug. 4. The cardinal looked at the history of the dialogue between the two groups, focusing on the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. He acknowledged that the initial progress made by that commission brought greater expectations than successive steps have elicited. "The initial hope had been that some concrete...

In 1850, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman wrote his fellow-Englishmen from Rome, announcing that Pius IX had restored the diocesan hierarchy in England and that he, Wiseman, would be cardinal archbishop of Westminster. “From Out the Flaminian Gate,� a pastoral letter longer on baroque rhetoric than ecumenical diplomacy, caused a perfect storm in Protestant England. Queen Victoria wondered whether she remained the sovereign. Lord John Russell, the prime minister, said he would rely on the good sense of the English people, who “looked with contempt on the mummeries of superstition.� The Anglican archbishop of York warned that Rome was plotting Anglicanism’s “captivity...

For several years reports have been floating around the Internet about an independent group – The Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) – seeking full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Some within the Roman Catholic Church as well as other Anglican groups quickly dismissed the seriousness with which the Holy See would be viewing this. The TAC recently released a letter they received from Cardinal Levada of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office responsible for such relationships. The communiqué made it very clear, without going into specific, that the request from the TAC is being seriously scrutinized....

CANTERBURY, England -- Gene Robinson's bodyguard didn't have to worry this time. The 40-year-old man who rushed over to Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican church, just wanted to shake his hand. "Thank you for bringing the church into the 21st century, for moving things forward," said Martin MacCiarrain, a government employee. The bodyguard, a retired policeman who trails the American bishop because of death threats, eased back. On Sunday during a sermon Robinson delivered in London, a long-haired man had suddenly leapt up screaming at the American bishop: "Repent! Repent!" Since Robinson, 61, was consecrated...

...by Mary Eberstadt,  a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a great article in the August/September issue of First Things and is available online. I'll get you started: That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention...

The Bishop of Rochester Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, one of just two bishops in the Church of England to boycott the Lambeth Conference entirely, insisted today that he is being true to biblical authority. Explaining a decision that he admits has been painful for a man who sought refuge in Britain from persecution, and who has been at the heart of the two previous convocations at Canterbury – first as Coordinator in 1988 and then as a Member of the Steering Committee in 1998 - he said it was a matter of ‘conscience and logic’. He said that ‘persistent false teaching’...

History's humongous wheel turns and turns and turns again. Over time, mud and sludge accumulate on even the sprucest institutions. Take the 500-year-old Anglican family of churches, Christianity's third-largest, after Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy. With Anglicanism's biggest family event under way - the every-10-years gathering of bishops and archbishops in England - what the world sees, accurately or not, is a family in moral and spiritual disarray. --snip--For all that, Anglicanism's public troubles proceed from the takeover of Western Anglicanism by theological activists whose purpose is the remolding of Christianity into something less like the old-time religion than like the...

We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12). “This combat rages fiercely even today, aided and abetted by well-known secret sects, Satanic groups and New Age movements, to mention but a few, and reveals many ugly heads of the hideous anti-God monster: among them are notoriously secularism, which seeks to build a Godless society; spiritual indifference, which is insensitive to transcendental values; and relativism, which is contrary to the permanent tenets of the Gospel. “All...

The Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan today declared that Gene Robinson, the openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire, "should resign for the sake of the church." In a press conference at the decennial Lambeth Conference, the Most Rev. Dr. Daniel Deng Bul said that homosexual ordination "is not what is found in the Bible" and that it is "not the norm of the Anglican world."

A Statement from the Virginia Annual Council of the United Methodist Church July 11, 2008 On June 27, 2008, the Circuit Court of Fairfax County declared constitutional—as applied to the case before it—a Virginia statute which gives ownership of church property to breakaway congregations of a church denomination, which for years had held the property in trust for the purpose of worship within the denomination, according to denominational doctrine. The statute, known as the “Division Statute,” was enacted by the Virginia legislature only a few years after the end of the Civil War, and was used then as a vehicle...

The gay bishop of New Hampshire should resign in order to save the Anglican Communion, a senior African archbishop said today. The call came from the Rt Rev Dr Daniel Deng, the archbishop of Sudan, and followed a strongly worded statement that accused the US Episcopal church of exposing Anglicans to ridicule and damaging their credibility in a multi-religious environment. African bishops who signed the statement rejecting homosexual practice said they could not accept it as part of their church. They reiterated their opposition to developments in the US and Canada, where gay clergy are ordained and where same-sex relationships...

July 2008 In view of the present tensions and divisions within the Anglican Communion, and out of deep concern for the unity of the Church, we consider it important to express clearly the position of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan (ECS) concerning human sexuality. We believe that God created humankind in his own image; male and female he created them for the continuation of humankind on earth. Women and men were created as God’s agents and stewards on earth We believe that human sexuality is God’s gift to human beings which is rightly ordered only when expressed within the...

It's about a hundred degrees and getting hotter in the Big Top at Lambeth but the £1 million black hole in the budget at the Lambeth Conference means they can't afford air conditioning. Expect fainting bishops to be ferried out by ambulances any moment now, if they don't start shooting each other first. The press conference this morning was a farce. Communications officers declined to comment on who is here for reasons of 'security' but declined to say what the 'security' issues were. Apparently there are some Nigerian bishops at the conference but we are not allowed to know who...

Dr. James Innell Packer, a noted Canadian theologian, author and a Board of Governors Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, as well as an executive editor of Christianity Today, recently addressed the contentious problem of homosexuality and same-sex unions in the Anglican church. The Anglican Church has come to a cross-roads because of the issue of same-sex "marriage," with a massive split in the Global Communion looking increasingly inevitable. Dr. Packer opened his remarks with a statement explaining why this issue is of such great importance in the Anglican Church today. "In brief," he said, "because it involves...

A leading Anglican bishop has condemned conservatives as "demonic" for using his church as a punch bag. The Bishop of Washington, the Right Rev John Chane, a leading liberal in the Episcopal Church in the United States, accused conservatives of leading the church in a "dangerous" direction. *** "I think it's really very, very dangerous and I think it's demonic ... the Episcopal Church has been demonised. It has been a punching bag and I'm sick of being a punching bag as a Bishop and I'm sick of my church, my province being a punching bag.

It hasn’t taken that many days to realize that the once-every-ten-years Lambeth Conference is again abundant in elaborate rhetoric. Last night’s sermon by the Bishop of Colombo, the Rt. Rev. Duleep de Chickera is a good example. We heard from the bishop that the Anglican problem is very simple, "The church is called to be an inclusive communion,” de Chickera stated, “where there is space equally for everyone and anyone, regardless of color, gender, sexual orientation, ability. Unity in diversity is a cherished Anglican tradition, a spirituality which we must reinforce in all humility for the sake of Christ and...

As many of the Bishops of the Anglican Communion meet at their Lambeth conference, Christians throughout the world pray and watch with deep concern. The global Anglican communion and its American expression, the Episcopal Church, has been beset with division arising concerning fundamental doctrinal issues which, to orthodox Christians whether they are Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, derive from the very heart of the Christian revelation. The late Servant of God, Pope John Paul II responded to the growing requests from priests, deacons and the lay faithful of the Anglican Communion, and its expression in the United States the Episcopal Church....

According to a friend, among the Anglicans now considering a corporate leap to Rome is a group of religious sisters called the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, who are located near Catonsville, Mayland about 10 miles from Baltimore.Their website introduction is refreshingly simple and straightforward:All Saints is a traditional Community desiring to uphold orthodox Christian faith and morality and to support the Apostolic tradition in ministry and practice. We are united by our common commitment to the One Lord Jesus Christ, and by the desire to live for Him. With that unity, and made possible by it, there...

Knife crime is at epidemic proportions in Britain's inner cities, with an attack of some kind taking place every four minutes. In London alone 21 young people have been stabbed to death this year. A church group has come up with a new solution. It's reported here. The suggestion is that church leaders should move into crime ridden inner city areas to work with the youths and become role models since most of the boys who stab each other don't have Dads. Whoops! problem is, since women's ordination the Anglican Church has been turned into a matriarchy remember? Nearly half...

CANTERBURY, ENGLAND — A quarter of the world's Anglican bishops boycotted a once-in-a-decade gathering of church leaders yesterday in a row over gay clergy. Church officials said that 230 of the 880 bishops in the Anglican worldwide communion were staying away from the Lambeth conference, being staged in the English cathedral city of Canterbury, spiritual home of the deeply divided church. Bishops from Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, who boast some of the fastest-expanding congregations in the Anglican Church, were among those who pledged to snub the conference. Liberal and conservative clergy have been brought to the brink of schism over...

Steenson as an Anglican BishopFormer Anglican Bishop Jeffrey Steenson is widely revered among Anglicans as a man of profound integrity and service in the Lord’s vineyard. Last week he spoke at the Anglican Use Conference. He spoke with his usual clarity and Anglican eloquence. Welcome home, Jeffery.His full address can be found here.It all begins with the conviction that the Catholic Church simply is. She is not one option amongst many. People who become alienated from their own churches will sometimes think that the next step is to go down to the marketplace and see what is on offer:...