Catholic Apologetics Online

Choose a topic from Vol 3:

God

Man

Religion

The Religion of the Bible

The Christian Religion

A Definite Christian Faith

The Problem of Reunion

The Truth of Catholicism

The Church and the Bible

The Dogmas of the Catholic Church

Moral Teachings of the Catholic Church

The Church in Her Worship

The Church and Social Welfare

The Church of England as a "Bridge-Church"

243. When reunion comes, do you not think that the Anglican Church will have a contribution of great value to make to the reunited Church?

We Catholics cannot accept any suggestion that the true Church is divided, and that it needs reuniting. The Catholic Church is obliged to insist that there is but one indivisible Church according to the will of Christ, and that she is the one indivisible Church. Those who rebelled against her authority and left her are simply outside the Church and no longer part of it. There can be no question of uniting divided fragments of the Church. Those whose forefathers wrongly left the Catholic Church must return to her. Many Anglicans are beginning to see this. Recently the Rev. Spencer Jones, an Anglican clergyman, published a book pleading that the Church of England should return to Rome. "It is plain," he wrote, "that the power formally to change her position, which is denied to the Church of Rome, is a conspicuous characteristic of the Church of England." Another Anglican clergyman, the Rev. T. Whitton, M.A., speaks in the same way. "On the Roman Catholic side," he writes, "there is their dogmatic position which they cannot give up if they would. If Rome were to admit that even the most Romanizing Anglicans were Catholics, she would admit the division of the Church, and commit suicide." This is not pride on Rome's part. It is fidelity to the truth that Christ founded but one Church and guaranteed to preserve its unity. To say that He did not preserve its unity is to renounce belief in His Divinity, and throw Christianity to the winds. Rome will never do that.

244. Anglicans are working harder than any others for the reunion of all Christian Churches.

The return of all separated Churches to the one Catholic Church they left in years gone by is greatly to be desired. But reunion will never be accomplished by dream-solutions based on wrong premises--solutions which can never be realized, and which, if they were realized, would mean the destruction of the Christian religion.

245. Is not the Anglican Church an ideal "Bridge-Church," belonging both to the old and the modern Churches?

The Anglican Church does not belong to the ancient Catholic Church. It commenced its existence with the Protestant Reformation some four hundred years ago, and has no connection with the previously existing Church in England.

246. The Anglican Church is distinguished from other branches by having thrown open its doors to fresh revelations of good that came through the advancing scholarship of its great divines.

The Anglican Church is not a "branch" of the true Church. What distinguishes it from the genuine branches of that Church is that all true branches are still in communion with the parent tree, and at one with the Pope as successor of St. Peter and supreme head of the universal Church. Anglicanism is an independent Church founded by Henry VIII. in 1534, when that earthly king broke away from the Catholic Church to set up his own religious body in England subject to his exclusive control. The Anglican Church is a Protestant sect, distinguished from other Protestant sects by the fact that its founder differed from the founders of other forms of Protestantism. It does not differ from the others by having thrown open its doors to fresh revelations of good from advancing scholarship. All, more or less, have been infected by that peculiar form of "religious rationalism" called modernism. Modernism accepts as fresh revelations of good the latest deviations from the Christian Faith. But they are not revelations. Revelation is not the fruit of advancing scholarship, the product of human thinking. The Christian revelation is essentially the teaching of men by God through Jesus Christ. His Son.

247. In Anglicanism the pre-Reformation and post-Reformation periods of the Christian Church can be used to bring together all the broken branches of the Church.

The Anglican and the other Protestant Churches have no pre-Reformation period of which to make use. They are not branches, even broken ones, of the true Church. They are independent Churches, set up by men who had no authority to do so, at various times centuries subsequent to Christ. And if they all unite amongst themselves, they will be no nearer to unity in the one universal Church - the Catholic Church - than the uniting of the independent states in America restored the U. S. A. to unity with the British nation they abandoned. There is a fundamental fallacy underlying all such talk of reunion. The true branches of the one universal Church do not need bringing together. The geographical distribution of those branches has not affected their unity. The Catholic Church in America, or the Catholic Church in England, or in Italy, or Germany, or the scattered Islands of the Pacific, or anywhere else in the world, all these branches form but one Church in unity with the Pope as its supreme head on earth.

248. You think Anglicans are following a will-o'-the-wisp in holding out the hand of friendship to both sides?

I am certain that Anglicans will never induce all other Churches to accept a unity such as they specify. It involves an acceptance of Anglo-modernism. Catholics can have nothing to do with it. The Greek Orthodox Churches cannot accept it. Nonconformists would have to unsay the whole of their history in order to yield to it. The dream that all other Churches will merge with Anglicanism is a fond thing vainly invented.

249. By holding out its hand, the Church of England has actually succeeded in drawing together many members of the old and modern Churches.

The first question that arises is this: Which hand did the Church of England hold out? It held out an Anglo-Catholic hand or High Church hand to the Greek Orthodox. And at once there were violent protests from Low Church Anglicans that the beliefs of the Church of England had been completely misrepresented to the poor deluded Greeks, who had no idea of Anglican variations. When the Low Church hand is held out to Nonconformists, there are equally indignant protests from the High Church section. So, for example, when a Nonconformist preacher was invited to preach in the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, uproar resulted.

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MORE FROM VOLUME 3

• About the Author
• Preface
  - Msgr Fulton J Sheen
• Author's Foreword
  - Dr Rumble, MSC

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