The Catholic Church and history

When, therefore, we Catholics meet, as we do daily and in a thousand forms, such objections as: “If this dogma were true, it would be universally apparent”; “If that doctrine were part of the universal truth, it would not be arrived at by special conclaves of particular men fulfilling highly defined functions and even dressed in a peculiar manner of their own”; “This elaborate definition of the Real Presence jars with true devotion to the Eucharist, which is a thing of the heart and a mystery beyond analysis,” and so forth, in a myriad different forms of objection, we reply: “If, of mysteries such as the Eucharist or the continued life of man after death, or of the more familiar mysteries of personality, of time, of eternity, we have no definitions, then falsehood can be present and received as truth. There is indeed no need to define, so long as all are implicitly agreed; but the moment one says (of the Eucharist, for instance), ‘There is a Presence here but it is spiritual only; the bread remains,’ then must, of necessity, the claimer to infallible truth (unless she is to nullify her own claim) lay down whether that proposition be true or not: whether the bread remains, or does not remain, after consecration. Otherwise two members of a society existing to teach true doctrine will, on a fundamental and essential doctrine, be holding two contrary views, one of which at least must be false.”

It would be easy to point to any number of other cases of more interest to the average modern man than the case of the Eucharist, in which he has lost all communion; for instance, to the mystery of immortality, and the discipline rather than the doctrine of our attitude towards the dead. Two members of this society claiming infallibility are faced with the practice of necromancy, the calling up of the dead (a favourite pastime of our day among the wealthy). The one feels in the strongest fashion that in this exercise he is upon the confines of positive evil. He smells the Pit. The other is convinced that it is indeed the blessed dead who visit him and with whom he is in communion.

Which is right? The infallible authority cannot abdicate in such a crux without denying its own claim. There is no reconciliation of such a contradiction: it is Hell or Heaven. It must define and it does define; and we know on which side its definition lies. Necromancy—or Spiritualism as its modern name goes—is of Hell.

In general, then, the moral arguments against the Church as drawn from History—that is, from the record of its action—fail from one of two causes: either they misconceive the nature of the Church (what it is that speaks with Infallible Authority; on what it has spoken with Infallible Authority), or they are confused as to the implications of religion, not perceiving that, if you are to admit any criterion of truth other than that of common experience, you must admit external authority; and that, once you admit an external authority in the final and all important questions, you admit a Church.

Such considerations do not establish the claim of the Catholic Church, but they destroy certain particular objections to that claim, drawn from the supposed clash between the moral character of the Church’s claim and the historical record of the Church making such a claim.