The Religion of the Last Man

IN May, 2000, the writer Lawrence Auster wrote a letter to the pastor of St. Thomas Church, the Anglo-Catholic parish on Fifth Avenue in New York where Mr. Auster was then a parishioner. Mr. Auster, who was raised Jewish, was baptized in 1998 and converted to Catholicism shortly before he died in 2013, made some important observations in this letter. They apply not just to Episcopalianism but also to the Vatican II religion that has taken over Catholic churches. This is an excerpt from the letter:
Dear Fr. Mead:
If you were wondering what I was talking about with Bishop Sisk in the narthex after Sunday services, this is what I said to him: “Where in the Bible does it saw that we discover the meaning of Christ’s resurrection by ’embracing our particularity?'”
He replied, “That’s my interpretation.”
When I objected to his interpretation, he clarified that he did not mean that it’s about all of us just going off in our own direction (which had been my impression), but that we live “in Christ.”
I was glad he said this. Combined with his evident sincerity of manner, it mollified me somewhat. However, that’s not what he said in his sermon. In his sermon, he said nothing about living in Christ. In his sermon he threw out an endless series of rhetorical and sophomoric-sounding questions (there must have been about twenty of them), such as “How do we know what the meaning of the Resurrection is?,” “How can we tell that Christ is risen?” and so on and on. They were questions that led nowhere, questions that to my mind betokened a lack of genuine engagement with the Gospels. They were posed not in the spirit of a man who is looking for truth, but in the spirit of a man who is saying that there isn’t any truth. (more…)

