This is about to give me whiplash of the cortex.
I’m seeing something that I’m having a hard time shoe-horning into words. The accusations and arguments that are being made against the Church are not merely incorrect: they are incorrect in a way that renders them difficult to rebut. This is not to say that they can’t be rebutted. I mean that it would take a great deal of time, effort, and typing to do so.
But no, that’s not exactly what I mean, either.
Take, for example, the statement that “There are NO Catholics in the earliest Church in the Bible.” This is wrong in a way that gives me vertigo. Is the basis for this statement the fact that the word “Catholic” does not appear in the Bible? I hate to assume that, for such an assumption would appear to lack charity.
If we start with Our Lord’s statement that “thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven,” and follow that Church forward in history, we find that the road leads without interruption to Benedict XVI.
While it is true that Scripture does not tell us that Our Lord used the English word “Catholic,” of what significance is that? The thing is what it is, regardless of the words we men choose to use. To say that “There are NO Catholics in the earliest Church in the Bible,” then, is not merely meaningless: it is misleading. Was a horse something other than a horse before the English word “horse” was coined and applied to it? Are we to think that there were no horses in antiquity, because they were not called “horses?”
Do you see my point? One cannot rebut the statement that there were no Catholics in the earliest Church by simply saying, “Yes, there were,” and proving it. One must take the time and trouble to explain why the premise itself is dizzyingly flawed, and that’s not always easy to do in a way that is easily understood by everyone.
It reminds me of this passage from an article on physics: “The worst models are not the ones that are wrong, they are the ones that cannot be wrong. As Pauli noted about a model proposed by Heisenburg, ‘that’s so bad it’s not even wrong.’ ” That is the type of argument we so often see from those who attack the Church, and we’re seeing a lot of them here.
Exactly.