"Converting Protestants During the Great Apostasy"
Converting Protestants to the Catholic faith has never been an easy task; but today, in this age of the Great Apostasy, it is an even more daunting adventure. The Protestant, as Orestes Brownson most aptly informs us, must be convinced that the Church is infallible, or he will not advance in his mental journey toward Catholicism. But today the traditional Catholic must first convince his Protestant friends that the liberal popes since the time of Paul VI,- and yes, every pope since Paul VI has been an avowed liberal,- have not exercised the charism of infallibility. The last pope to exercise infallibility was pope Pius XII in 1950 in his encyclical Munificentissimus Deus on November 1 (defining Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven).
The traditional Catholic today is forced to explain to the Protestant, once he has been convinced that the Catholic Church is true, the following:
“Well, at my church we are traditional Catholics. Our priest celebrates the Mass in Latin, like it was done 1,500 years ago. The Catholics at my church do not practice birth control. We do not endorse abortion or same-sex marriage or the Rainbow Revolution. The women wear chapel veils and must wear an appropriate skirt, and the men must wear pants, no shorts. We are traditional Catholics.”
In the late 1840’s, when Orestes Brownson converted to Catholicism, the distinction between traditional and modernist Catholics was a non-issue. There were not, as it were, two churches, one traditional and the other Novus Ordo (New order). There were no L.G.B.T. Catholics; no pro-choice Catholics; no socialist, card-carrying, commie Catholics. The Jew Karl Marx did not publish his Communist Manifesto until 1848. The commie Catholics would only come later. The traditional Catholic today is forced to admit to the Protestant that he is not an apostate Catholic masquerading as a true Catholic; rather, it is the modernist Catholics who parade as orthodox.
But the Protestant must nonetheless be convinced that the Catholic Church is the true Church established by Christ, and that she is infallible. Orestes Brownson said in Brownson’s Quarterly Review for January, 1845:
There is no use in attempting to win Protestants to our faith by pointing out its internal beauty and glory; for to Protestants it has, and can have, no form or comeliness that they should desire it. To them it is intrinsically repulsive, and all the pride of their natural hearts revolts at it, and will, let us place it in the most attractive light we may. They are in no state to perceive its beauty, or to appreciate its worth. They have eyes, but they do not see, ears, but they hear not, hearts, but they understand not. The only door to the catholic faith is through the infallibility of the Church. No man is a Catholic who does not believe this infallibility, whatever else he is; and this infallibility once admitted, the various articles the church teaches present no difficulty. The whole controversy with Protestants really turns on the question of the infallibility of the Church, because no Catholic would recognize his Church as an authoritative teacher, if he did not believe it to be an infallible teacher. The infallibility is the ground or reason of the authority. We insist on this point, because we are confident, from our own experience, that conversions effected by clearing away the difficulties of the articles of faith, and explaining them so as to adapt them as much as possible, without sacrificing their truth, to Protestant modes of thinking and feeling, are no real conversions at all.
The great matter to be considered is, that on Protestant principles it is impossible to elicit an act of faith. No Protestant can have any sufficient motives or grounds of believing the articles of faith he professes. The articles of faith concern matters which pertain to the supernatural order, and which are, therefore, intrinsically inevident to natural reason. They can be only extrinsically evident; and, if believed at all, they must be believed on extrinsic authority,- that is, the authority that vouches for the fact that God has revealed them. Now, if this authority is not infallible, it may both deceive and be deceived, and, consequently, they who rely on it can never have an infallible assurance that God has really revealed what it alleges that he has revealed. But without this infallible assurance there is doubt, and doubt excludes faith. Consequently faith is impossible without an infallible authority, witnessing to the fact that God has revealed the article in question. The Protestant, then, if he has the courage to be consequent, must admit that either there is this infallible extrinsic witness for God, or that there is and can be no faith in the revelation God has made. Evidently, then, the great question, as we have said, concerns the infallibility of the Church. Is the Church, the ecclesia docens, infallible or not? If it be, and it can be proved to human reason to be so, then whatever it teaches as the word of God must be received as the word of God, and we have the most satisfactory reasons for receiving it. It is idle, then, to go into any discussion on the truth or falsity of this or that article of faith. The whole discussion should be on the authority of the Church to teach.1
All that Brownson says is most correct, but he could not have foreseen that the “infallible assurance” which the Protestant seeks today is today an apparent contradiction. The Church seems fallible; and she certainly seems to be not assured of anything, especially here in America. The bishops, because they have lost the faith, have allowed every form of corruption and immorality to run amuck. They have cajoled with pro-abortionists, had their clown masses, failed to condemn contraception, rejoiced in their alcoholism, and allowed their parishioners to act like fools, many of them dressing like prostitutes. The only thing we can be sure of today is that the entirety of the bishops allow the grossest behavior, inside and outside their churches. Today we must convince the Protestant that the Catholic Church is a remnant church, much like the early Christians who had hidden themselves in caves and homes, practicing religion. The outward face of the Mystical Body of Christ has been bloodied, it is covered in spittle and dust. And the bishops, the priests, and the laity, have made it so.
At least me might convince our Protestant friends of the truth of St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 when he says, “Let no man deceive you by any means, for unless there comes a revolt (discessio) first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth, and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, so that he sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God.” A “discessio” is a separation, a dividing into two; a separation of married persons. It was St. Jerome, who, in the Latin Vulgate translated discessio for the Greek apostasia, from the Greek verb apostanai, “to stand away from.” We traditional Catholics, in the eyes of Protestants, seem to be apostates because we “stand away” from the New Age Catholics. And in this we sympathize with Protestants, because just as they must stand away from their Protestant sects and join the Church, we traditional Catholics stand away from the “new” priests. We pray that the Protestants in America pray and find the true Church, outside of which, in the words of the Council of Florence, “no one is saved.”
Brownson’s Quarterly Review. January, 1845. “Literary Notices and Criticisms.” pp. 134-35.