Does the Catholic Church Still Exist?
May 6, 2016
DAVID C. writes:
I hadn’t visited your website in quite a while but stopped by a few minutes ago to peruse your latest writings. I read “Feminist Jorge.” You are one of literally two people on the Internet who can be counted upon to write with incisive clarity on a regular basis. Always refreshing and always sad for being so rare.
As for feminist Whore-Hay, I actually left the Church some time ago because of his sort of nonsense. There is no Catholic Church and the beliefs you espouse, however beautiful, turn out simply to have no basis in reality. We both know the teachings of the Church cannot be meaningful if the Church itself is not real, and the wholesale abandonment of Catholicism by Catholic bishops proves that it is not.
Laura writes:
Thank you for writing, and for the praise.
Please let me compliment you for at least recognizing the widespread defection of the Catholic hierarchy. You raise an interesting question: Does the Catholic Church still exist? You say, no, it does not. I obviously reject your conclusion.
There are two ways of rationalizing the continued existence of the Church, aside from the general principle that Catholic truth is as unchanging as God Himself.
I write as someone who has no authority and who is not a theologian. I am following reason, common sense and basic Catholic doctrine. These positions can be understood by a sixth grader. To me they are clear as a bell, while the idea of following a warped and deformed Church violates good sense and logic.
One way of looking at the Church as real is that the Catholic hierarchy still exists materially but not formally. In other words, the bishops and pope are valid bishops and a pope but they possess no formal authority because they have defected from the Faith by promulgating false doctrine. They constitute a visible and real Church nevertheless.
The other way to view it, which is how I have come to see it, is that the Church is just as visible and real as those persons who adhere publicly to the Faith and are oriented toward Catholic authority, though the actual positions of authority are vacant. Would you say the Church did not exist temporarily if, by some strange coincidence, most of its bishops and the pope were stricken with a plague and died? Does a diocese not exist when a bishop has died and another has not yet been appointed or does the Church cease to exist between the election of popes?
Both these positions, the material/formal one and the second, are variants of the thesis of sedevacantism. They seem absolutely audacious to most people. But it is the Novus Ordo (Latin for “new order”) religion established by Vatican II that is absolutely audacious, a form of radical Protestantism, the most devastating form to attack the unity and holiness of the Church.
It is a mystery how this will all end, but we know it will end. Chaos has been foretold in various prophecies and, knowing that God works in wondrous ways, we await the return of order — and anyway, mystery is our thing! Mystery we can deal with, a new religion we can’t. The devil really does not have much interest in bringing about a spectacular disintegration of, say, Mormonism or the cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He concentrates on the real thing. What satisfaction there is to have brought it this far — and perhaps to have captured the likes of you!!
Congratulations for walking away from the false Church, but embracing another form of Protestantism isn’t the answer. The true religion remains there for you. One of the great things about today is that the Internet provides such a wealth of great material in apologetics and so many outstanding critiques of Vatican II, strengthening the position that Church is indeed very visible.
