Radio Replies Vol 4 - Catholic Apologetics Online

The New Testament describes the Church in its embryonic stage. One cannot expect to find there features which become manifest only with subsequent growth and development. That development began almost at once because of the claims of Gnostic heretics to have a secret transmission of strange doctrines from the Apostles. This made it most important to clarify the position and ensure the genuine apostolic succession in particular bishoprics. By the end of the first century there was a clear demarcation of Bishops, Priests and Deacons. And St. Hippolytus, who lived from 160 A.D. till 235 A.D., shows that in his time "mon-episcopacy," or one Bishop as the only head of a diocese and not merely president of a single congregation, was an established fact. And that is the system which has prevailed ever since, except in some Protestant denominations which date at best only from the 16th century. These Protestant denominations make a fatal mistake in ignoring history and the development of the Church in post-apostolic times, and by considering only the embryonic stages of the Church as described in the New Testament. That mistake arose from the error that the Bible only is a sufficient guide in religious matters, and from the denial of a visible Church protected and guided by the Holy Spirit as Christ had promised. The appeal to New Testament terminology, then in a fluid state and not fully clarified until about the end of the first century, is not valid. Looking back over the centuries we can say: "By their fruits you shall know them." The actual emergence of the hierarchy of Bishops, Priests and Deacons within fifty years after the death of the Apostles cleared up all the ambiguity of the New Testament language—a development which would not have been possible save in accordance with directions from the Apostles. This development was the fruit of the inherent principles of the Christian ministry. As surely as the flower and the fruit eliminate all doubt as to the nature of the seed that was planted, so the hierarchy which developed in the Church indicated the true significance of the "Elders" and "Overseers" ordained and appointed in the earliest few years. The Protestant reformers, repudiating the authority of the Catholic Church and claiming to "go back" to the New Testament, were deceived by words into substituting their ministry of preaching for the sacrificial priesthood of the New Law, derived through the Apostles from Christ.

There is not a single doctrine of the Christian religion against which those unwilling to accept it would not be able to urge difficulties. And they will never be at a loss to find further difficulties as fast as those they have already proposed are shown to lack value. One can develop a frame of mind so absorbed in the search for difficulties that one has no attention left for the positive evidence in favor of the doctrine one does not want to accept. But bear in mind that men of the highest intelligence have fully adverted to the difficulties, have considered them closely, and have duly surmounted them, becoming converts to the Catholic Church.

Christ Himself thought so. For He undoubtedly established a visible Church, choosing visible Apostles, and forming them into a visible and authoritative teaching body, with St. Peter as their head. If the Church were not a visible society in this world no one who wanted to join it would be able to identify it. And Christ has not left this society without a visible head representative of Himself and exercising authority in His name. Deny that, and you offer men, not a real Church, but only an abstract and intangible ideal in which no final court of appeal is accessible to anyone. Moreover you deny the kind of Church the New Testament tells us Christ Himself established and commanded us to obey.

In that case they do not believe in the Holy Catholic Church as founded by Christ, as described in the New Testament, and as proclaimed in the Apostles' Creed. The true Christian says: "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," not "I believe in Regional Autonomous Churches"! "Regional Autonomy" means a series of independent Churches following the political divisions of different nations. The result is not one united Church, but an aggregate of distinct and independent Churches agreeing merely to be in friendly relations with one another. And where in the New Testament is it stated that men may decide for themselves what kind of a Church they prefer? Or that the test of the true Church is whether or not it better safeguards "personal freedom"? Christ commissioned His Church—not "Churches"— to "teach all men to observe all things whatsoever He had commanded them." Matt., XXVIII, 20. His religion is essentially one of duty and obedience. It demands the sacrifice of personal freedom to do what one likes, but offers that higher freedom which comes with submission to the Will of God as manifested by Christ and by the Catholic Church He commissioned to act in His name. Let us remember that there is no such thing as absolute freedom. There is only a choice between different kinds of freedom. One can be free from God and subject to the devil; or free from the devil and subject to God; free from virtue and subject to vice; or free from vice and subject to virtue; free from authority and the victim of anarchy; or free from anarchy and subject to authority; free from Catholicism and subject to all the uncertainty and contradictions of Protestantism; or free from all the uncertainty and contradictions of Protestantism and subject to Catholicism.

That is not true. Those words are used to support a particular constitutional aspect of the Church. But the actual claim that the Catholic Church is the true Church rests on a wealth of references from the beginning to the end of the New Testament, utterances of Christ and of the Apostles dealing with the foundation of the Church, its nature and prerogatives, conditions of membership, distinguishing characteristics, and much else. When all that the New Testament says about the Church has been carefully noted, it will be found that it finds its fulfillment in one Church only today—in the Catholic Church.

You are mistaken in this matter. In his book, "Church Unity," the Presbyterian Professor C. A. Briggs says that, besides the passage in St. Matthew where Peter is named as the rock, there are two others, one in John XXI where Peter is told to be the chief shepherd of the flock, and the other in Luke XXII where he is told to "confirm his brethren." And Dr. Briggs writes, on p. 205: "These three words of Jesus to St. Peter were all uttered on the most solemn and critical occasions in the life of our Lord. They may all be regardejl, therefore, as visions of our Lord, visions of His Kingdom and ideals of the Papacy." But add to these the change of Peter's name from Simon, the position of honor our Lord gave him time after time, the fact that his name always heads the lists of the Apostles as given by the evangelists, and Peter's activities as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. All these evidences leave no room for doubt.

That idea is quite out of date. Fifty years ago Dr. Gore, Anglican Bishop of Oxford, published his. book, "Roman Catholic Claims," in an effort to prevent Anglicans from becoming Catholics. Yet much as it would have suited his purpose to say what you say, he was too honest to do so. On p. 70 of his book he wrote: "It is difficult, I think, to feel any doubt that our Lord is here pronouncing the person of Peter to be the rock." Thirty years later another Protestant, Professor C. H. Turner, in his book, "Catholic and Apostolic," p. 181, issued the warning: "We of the Church of England and Protestant scholars in general since the Reformation, have failed to give its due weight to the testimony supplied by the New Testament, and in particular by the Gospels, to the unique position there ascribed to St. Peter." Another Protestant scholar, Dr. Trevor Jalland, writes on p. 55 of his book, "The Church and the Papacy," published 1944, "Petra (Kepha) literally denotes the Apostle himself as 'Rock,' and it is on Peter as on rock that the foundations of the new ecclesia are to be laid."

They were well aware of it and behaved accordingly. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that on Pentecost Sunday it was Peter who first promulgated the Gospel, preaching the first sermon in Jerusalem; it was Peter who wrought the first miracle to confirm that Gospel; it was Peter to whom the revelation was made that Gentiles were to be admitted to the Church. How could the other Apostles, amongst whom St. Peter so naturally took the lead, be unaware of his primacy?

He gave equally to all the Apostles some of the power He had given to St. Peter; but not the whole of it. In Matt., XVI, 19, He had said to St. Peter individually: "I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." These words, proper to St. Peter, were not said to the other Apostles. St. Peter was given the unique privilege, after Christ Himself, of being the principal foundation stone of the Church, and of possessing the keys symbolizing supreme authority in the Church. The other Apostles were to share as a group in the authority to teach and rule in the Church. But it was not given to them independently of St. Peter as it had been given earlier to St. Peter independently of them. Where they had it as members of the Apostolic body, he had it as head of the Apostolic bodyand where their universal jurisdiction died with them, his continued perpetually in the Church in the persons of his successors.

They naturally did so to a certain extent; but it was in a limited degree. Where all the Apostles had universal authority in the Church, the Bishops they appointed were given authority only over particular localities, as Titus in Crete and Timothy in Ephesus. Also these successors did not share in the personal and individual infallibility of the Apostles. It was otherwise, however, with the successors of St. Peter, the head of the Church, in Rome. And it is a remarkable fact that St. Irenaeus, writing in the 2nd century, declared that as a test of orthodoxy it was enough to enumerate the succession of the Bishops of Rome and ask whether or not any given Church was in communion with those Bishops. He then gave a list of those Bishops in order, from Linus, the first after Peter, to Eleutherius, the twelfth from the Apostles, who occupied the See of Rome in his own day. The succession from the other Apostles had not the same importance at all for St. Irenaeus; nor, of course, for anyone else in the Church. And the test laid down by St. Irenaeus in 185 A.D. is as valid in 1954 A.D. as it was then. If we want to belong to the true Church we must be in union with the living successor of St. Peter in the Bishopric of Rome in our own day.

If he is not sure whether there should be a visible head of the Church or not, he should make up his mind on that point first. As to where we should look for the visible head, since Christ mentioned no particular place to which such an office would be attached, but constituted a particular person as the visible head, namely, St. Peter, we should seek the visible head in whoever succeeds to the office of St. Peter. As St. Peter died in Rome, the visible head of the Church on earth will be the visible occupant of the Bishopric of Rome.

It would not matter if there were not. More than enough evidence would still exist elsewhere. However, the First Epistle of St. Peter clearly indicates that it was written by him, and from Rome. More and more Protestant scholars are following Dr. Hort, an Anglican Scripture authority of the first rank, that this Epistle was certainly written by St. Peter, and from Rome. Even those who stop short of absolute conviction modestly declare the matter doubtful.

They were deliberately avoiding the verdict of their own outstanding fellow-Anglican scholars. Bishop Lightfoot of Durham said that conclusive reasons to show that St. Peter visited and died in Rome yield "a body of proof which it is difficult to resist." I have already quoted Dr. Hort. Hasting's "Dictionary of the Bible" says that the evidences "form a solid body of proof which is practically irresistible." Dr. Kirsopp Lake declared the evidence "probably sufficient." Dr. B. J. Kidd, at the Malines Conferences, said on behalf of Anglicans that the evidence has been so much increased and so generally accepted that it was now a matter of "universal agreement."

The tradition of St. Peter's presence and martyrdom in Rome was unquestioned by any of the early Christians. All writers treated of it as an established and generally acknowledged fact. The first denial of it came in the 16th century from the Protestant reformers. Modern historians, working on strictly scientific lines, have said that the actual historical evidence available from the first three centuries was enough to justify acceptance of the early Christian tradition as being most probable, but that there was not yet enough evidence to give absolute certainty from the viewpoint of purely scientific history.

Most decidedly. It must be noted, however, that not the actual grave, but the Shrine or Memorial built by 2nd century Christians in honor of St. Peter has been discovered by archaeological research under the Basilica in Rome. That this marks the actual site of his grave is most likely. But in itself it is enough to lift the presence of St. Peter in Rome from the level of a high degree of historical probability to that of an established fact.

Because the office of the supreme head on earth of the Catholic Church is inseparably linked with Rome. As Christ has promised that the Catholic Church will endure till the end of time, and that He Himself will be with her till the consummation of the world, it follows that the diocese of Rome, as the episcopal city of the successors of St. Peter, will also last as long as the world continues to exist.

There is no need to do so. It is enough that He made St. Peter head of His Church on earth. He made no conditions as to where St. Peter should reside, but left that choice to him.

It did belong to that See whilst St. Peter was there. And it would have continued to belong to the See of Antioch had St. Peter died still as Bishop of Antioch. But St. Peter transferred to Rome and the Primacy went with him, remaining with his successors in the Bishopric of Rome after his death in that city. It is worthy of note that St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch from 69 A.D. to 107 A.D., far from claiming the Primacy for his own See which St. Peter had held, definitely ascribed the Primacy to that of Rome because it was occupied by St. Peter at the time of his death.

The language of the writers of the first two centuries can admit of no other interpretaation. In their lists of the Bishops of Rome they number them from St. Peter, as when Eusebius says: "First after Peter, Linus obtained the episcopate of the Church of the Romans"; or as Hippolytus writes: "Victor was thirteenth Bishop of Rome from Peter." If I said: "Henry V was the thirteenth King of England after William the Conqueror," there could be no doubt that I was ranking William the Conqueror also as a King of England.

The Anglican Bishop Lightfoot answered that difficulty by pointing to the differences of life and, vocation in the case of St. Paul from those of St. Peter. He says that St. Paul was essentially a wandering missioner, always traveling from city to city, founding Churches wherever he went and appointing Bishops to rule them while he himself moved on. Never did any of the Churches he established, as at Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus and elsewhere, claim him as its first Bishop. When he went to Rome it was as a prisoner; and he wrote, both to the Philippians and to Philemon, that he intended to leave Rome as soon as he could. In his Epistle to the Romans he said that in coming there he had no .intention of building upon "another man's foundation." As soon as he was free from his first imprisonment there he set off on other missionary journeys, until arrested once more and sent back to Rome for his trial-this time to his death in Rome together with St. Peter. There is no room for doubt that it was St. Peter, the head of the Church, who was Bishop of Rome in the full and adequate sense of the word.

I am quite willing to admit that much was not so clear in earlier aees as it has since become. It would be surprising indeed if centuries of thought had not made many things clear which were implicitly contained in the original Christian revelation but which were not from the first explicitly realized. There is a legitimate evolution or development in the knowledge and understanding of the Christian religion which is not refuted by the mere assertion that, historically, things were not so clear in earlier ages as they have since become. What our opponents have to show is not the fact that the later claims of the Bishop of Rome are the result of doctrinal development, but that the development itself has been, not in harmony with but opposed to the implicit principles of Christianity as originally revealed' That the opponents of the supremacy of the Pope will never succeed in accomplishing.

No one holds that, before the end of the first three centuries of the pagan persecutions, the primacy of the Pope was everywhere understood and acknowledged as a public fact in its full significance. But Duchesne himself admitted that the principle giving rise to such a public and historical acknowledgment always existed. Commenting on the famous 2nd century passage from St. Irenaeus concerning the supremacy of Rome, Duchesne wrote, in his book, "The Separated Churches," p. 119, "It is difficult to find an expression more precise, firstly, of the doctrinal unity of the universal Church; secondly, of the supreme and unique importance of the Roman Church as witness, guardian and organ of the Apostolic tradition; and, thirdly, of its pre-eminent superiority over the whole community of Christians." Those words show that Duchesne was concerned merely with the degree in which the principles affecting Papal supremacy had attained to an external manifestation in the 4th century, not with the principles themselves. Those he never denied.

The Celtic Church was founded by St. Patrick whose mission was authorized by Rome and who ever inculcated loyalty to Rome. Though local customs developed among the Celts to which they were very much attached and reluctant to abandon, these variations, as Professor James has pointed out in his "History of Christianity in England," were devoid of any doctrinal significance, unlike the innovations of the Protestant reformers in the 16th century. The Celtic Church ever remained one with the Church throughout the rest of Christendom. St. Columbanus himself wrote to the Pope: "We Irish, though dwelling at the far ends of the earth, are all disciples of St. Peter and St. Paul. The Catholic Faith, just as it was first delivered to us by yourselves, the successors of the Apostles, is held by us unchanged. We are bound to the Chair of Peter."

John IV, Patriarch of Constantinople, had claimed to be the only Bishop in the full sense of that word. Pope Gregory denounced that claim, declaring that even St. Peter, though chief of the Apostles, was not the only Apostle; and that the Bishops of the Catholic Church as successors of the Apostles are all truly Bishops. But that Pope Gregory the Great did not thereby repudiate the doctrine of Papal supremacy is evident both from his action in correcting the Patriarch of Constantinople, and from his words expressly^ declaring: "All Bishops are subject to the Apostolic See."

What are known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals was a collection of documents, some genuine, some false, which was compiled in France, not to support Papal claims, but the rights of local Bishops in France. Pope Nicholas I, who knew of their existence, never made use of them, though he claimed all on other grounds that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals maintained on his behalf. The Anglican scholar, Dr. Trevor Jalland, in his book, "The Church and the Papacy," makes it quite clear that the Papal claims are in no way dependent on the so-called "False Decretals." If any of the later Popes after Nicholas I quoted the "False Decretals" without bothering about a critical discrimination between the genuine and the false documents the collection contained, that would have no bearing on the fact of Papal supremacy and the reasons for it.

Arnold Toynbee is, of course, a Protestant. But as an historian he should rise above his Protestant prejudices and keep them out of hisi "history." To declare the Pope merely the "self-styled" Vicar of Christ is merely to deny the divine origin and prerogatives of his office. That theological denial was not necessary for the historical point he wanted to make. Again, it is not history to declare the Papal authority "irresponsible." Various Popes may even notoriously have misused it at times. They could have done that with a sense of responsibility even if mistaken in their judgment as to the needs of the temporal order and general welfare. But far more often than Toynbee suggests, their authority was exercised with wisdom and a supreme sense of duty. He could have said simply that the Conciliar Movement was an effort to make the authority of a General Council superior to that of the Pope, putting aside value-judgments based on his own religious outlook. It is only from a non-Catholic religious outlook that such an effort could be called "constructive." From the Catholic religious viewpoint it would be destructive of the very constitution of the Church as appointed by Christ Himself. The very idea of "ecclesiastical parliamentarianism" is a Presbyterian notion, and it arises from thinking of the Church as a natural and not as a supernatural institution at all. To write in such a way is not to write history, but to continue the Protestant tradition in the writing of history.

Never has any Pope claimed such a title. The nearest expression to such a title in the whole of history is the utterance of Pope Innocent III who said: "The Roman Pontiff acts on earth, not with a merely human authority, but in the name of the true God." Many Protestant writers have distorted those words into a claim to be the true God. How absurd such a charge is ought to be evident. Amongst the millions of Catholics through the centuries no one will deny that there have been many exceptionally intelligent and holy men. One has but to think of a St. Thomas Aquinas or a St. Thomas More. Could these men be guilty of such folly or blasphemy as to acknowledge the Pope as God? Conscious of his Apostolic authority, the Pope may say, as did the Apostles: "It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us," (Acts, XV, 28), but he no more claims to be God than did the Apostles.

do not wish to deny it. I firmly believe it. But notice that the claim to be Vicar of Christ is not a claim to be Christ Himself. The very term supposes someone less than Christ, but commissioned by Christ to act in His name. The Governor General of Australia is not the King. He acts vicariously on behalf of the King in Australia. In the same way, if you wish, Christ is the one true Head of the Church, of which on earth the Pope is the Governor General appointed to act in His name.

The Pope does not arrogate any such title to himself. One is said to arrogate a title to himself when he assumes it without any right to possess it. But, as the rightful head of the Catholic Church in this world, the Pope succeeds to an office whose occupant is rightfully regarded as the "Vicar" or "Agent General" of Christ Our Lord on earth. But I am afraid you do not understand what the word "Vicar" means. It means one who has authority as the delegate of another, not one who has authority over the superior who appoints him. Thus, in writing of the King of England, Carlyle says: "The authority of the King is that of law or of right, not that of wrong. The King, therefore, should use the authority of law or right as being the vicar and servant of God on earth." But if the King, who holds supreme authority in the State, may rightly be termed the vicar of God—as he may—surely the term is still more justified when we speak of the one who holds supreme spiritual authority in the Church.

Rightly understood, that is true. For, although the Pope is not Christ, he speaks with the authority of Christ. Once, when Queen Victoria disapproved of a measure Gladstone was determined to put through Parliament, she said to him angrily: "Sir, I am the Queen of England." Gladstone replied: "And I, Madam, am the people of England." Gladstone merely meant that he was commissioned by the people of England to express their will.

The election of a Pope does not confer any authority upon him. The authority is attached to the office and is conferred by Christ Himself in virtue of His having established the office in the first place. As for the fact that the Pope is chosen by ballot, you will read in Acts, I, 26, Matthias was chosen by ballot to succeed to apostolic authority in place of Judas who had forfeited the privilege. Our Lord ratified that choice, and the authority conferred upon Matthias was conferred by Him.

Christ conferred upon St. Peter an office that was holy by its very nature. For He appointed him as head of the Church which the New Testament describes as the "household of the faith." The Church is likened to one great family of the spiritual children of God. §t. Peter, as father of that household, the members of which are called in the New Testament "saints" or officially God's "holy people" whatever they might be like personally, was indeed the "holy father." And we Catholics rightly give to the Pope as his successor that title.

There is no law in the Catholic Church to that effect. Before the Greek schism in the 11th century and the Protestant reformation in the 16th century there were many non-Italian Popes. Since the break-up of the unity of Christendom the Popes have all been Italians by force of various circumstances which it would take too long to explain in detail here. But the nationality of the Pope is not of vital importance to the Church.

On the death of this present Pope (Pius XII), should the Cardinals decide to vote for an Australian or an American Pope there would be nothing whatever to prevent their doing so.

No Pope, of whatever nationality he might be, would be representative of the majority of living Catholics. For Catholics belonging to all the nations other than the one to which he belonged would far outnumber those of his own nation. But you are working on the wrong idea that the Pope is elected as representative of the members of the Church. He is not. He is elected as Vicar of Christ to rule the Church in the name of Christ. His authority is not from "below" but from "above," even as the authority of Christ Himself was a divine authority, and not derived from the disciples who were subject to it.

That is nonsense. The Popes have never acknowledged themselves subject to the jurisdiction of the Italian Government. Before the Concordat of 1929, by which the Italian Government formally acknowledged that Vatican City was not Italian territory, the Popes voluntarily remained prisoners in the Vatican, refusing to acknowledge the temporal rule of the Italian Government by so much as leaving the premises. At no time, had the Cardinals chosen to elect a non-Italian, could the Italian Government have done anything about it, even had it wished. But all this is much ado about nothing. There would be no particular advantage in the election of a non-Italian Pope from the viewpoint of the administration of the Church. A new Pope, once elected, would lose his nationality from that moment. And a non-Italian Pope could not behave differently from one who was Italian by birth. He could not favor the nation to which he had formerly belonged at the expense of other nations. He would have to be the common spiritual father of all without exception. These difficulties result from thinking only in terms of narrow national limitations. Religiously, to the Catholic, there are no national distinctions, no foreigners, no strangers. In the Catholic Church you will find realized St. Paul's words to the Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus." Gal., Ill, 28. Spiritually, every Catholic is equally a member of Christ. All are one in Him. And national differences disappear in the presence of the unity of the universal Church.

I do. Until the end of time the Catholic Church will ever exist in this world. In different localities enemies may succeed in liquidating its Bishops and Priests, and in destroying, banishing or perverting its laity. But the Catholic Church will still continue somewhere in this world as a living institution.

In Matt., XVI, 18, we have the words of Christ: "I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." Again, in Matt., XXVIII, 20, we have His words: "Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." In Jn., XIV, 16, we read: "I will ask the Father and He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you forever." St. Paul, speaking of the Last Supper, says, in I Cor., XI, 26: "As often as you do this you shall show the death of the Lord until He come." The Church Christ founded, therefore, despite all hostile forces, will continue till the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ.

Surely one would have to be blind not to see some force in that belief. The establishing of the Catholic Church, her expansion without loss of unity in herself however many have broken away from her, her preservation with unbroken succession from the Apostles, and her fruitfulness in virtue and good works—these are striking facts; and they are facts the more difficult to explain when one realizes the poor humanity, so liable to frailties, of which the Church is composed. No merely human society, without divine help and protection, would last through 2000 years under the same conditions,,and spread through the whole world with the same results.

They have not. They have catalogued the natural causes that have contributed towards the survival of the Catholic Church; but those natural causes, whilst contributing towards her survival, do not explain it. What needs explaining and cannot be naturally explained is how the factors making for the survival of the Catholic Church were always at hand at the opportune moment, and were always successful against other forces bent on destroying her. During the first three centuries the Church had to get established in the midst of continued persecution. Later ages brought the barbarian invasions; the desertion of schismatics and heretics; efforts by political power to absorb the Church; the frailties and crimes of Catholics themselves, even of Popes and Bishops and Priests; revolutions and civil disorders; the Protestant reformation; the hostility of materialistic philosophers; and the printing presses of the world, with their flood of books and periodicals propagating so much antipathy against her. These are only some of the forces pitted against her. But they alone make it impossible to explain the survival of the Catholic Church as the greatest single united body in the world today.

Our reliance is upon the promise of Christ. The survival of the Church until today merely confirms us in our reliance upon that promise.

The Jews were chosen by God to preserve the true religion until the coming of the Messiah, who would establish a universal religion of righteousness to which all nations would be invited. When Christ came, even though He amply proved His claim to be the promised Messiah, the Jews rejected Him. From then on, they have survived rather as a race than as a religion. Their priesthood, sacrifice and temple are no more. They are divided religiously into Orthodox, Reform and Conservative Judaism, where they have not drifted to neglect of religion altogether. The Jews have survived racially, though scattered throughout the world. But the integrity of their religion has not been preserved.

The present state of the world has nothing to do with the matter. Christ promised that the "gates of hell" would not prevail against His Church. If not all the forces of hell, certainly not all the forces of this world will succeed in prevailing against the Catholic Church. No fluctuating conditions of human society can upset the confidence of Catholics, a confidence based on the promise of Christ. He is God; and can and will fulfil His promise.

For other Churches I do not speak. I admit that they show no signs which would warrant a prediction of their indefinite survival. But with the Catholic Church it is different. That Church has a guarantee of divine protection. In 1874, but four years after Pope Pius IX was made a prisoner in the Vatican, and when the world could be expected to discount the prospects of the Catholic Church, Disraeli said in the British Parliament: "I cannot disguise the fact. The Catholic religion is a powerful organiza^ tion; and, if I may say so, the most powerful today." Yet the position of the Catholic Church is immensely stronger now than when Disraeli spoke. All that, of course, is from the merely human point of view. Those who have the Catholic faith know that God Himself has guaranteed to preserve the Church till the end of time.

What of it? Such things have come and gone all through history. The Catholic Church can scarcely have worse things to survive in the future than she has survived in the past 2,000 years. Her enemies have come and gone. They are but a memory; but she is a living fact and a reality. There are no reasons based on either past or present conditions why the irreligious should hope, or Catholics should fear, that the Catholic Church will not continue till the world itself comes to an end.

The New Testament leaves us in no doubt as to the outstanding characteristics which the true Church must possess. Christ founded but one Church. Its members were to form the "New Israel," or to be God's "Holy People" in this world. These members were to be called, not from one nation only, but from all nations. And those charged with the official duty of preaching the Gospel were the Apostles and their successors till the end of time. This means that the true Church must be one united body, holy, catholic and apostolic.

That impression arises from your confusing the Catholic and the non- Catholic Churches as if they were all equally accredited representatives of the Christian religion. That the Catholic Church denies. And if you consider the Catholic Church in herself you will find quite absent as far as she is concerned the diversity and contradictions of which you complain. Go to any Catholic Priest in Sydney, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Capetown, Tokyo, Madrid, or in any section of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, or Oceania, and every one of those Priests will tell you exactly the same thing where it is a question of essential doctrinal or moral teaching. That other Churches differ from her and differ amongst themselves is not surprising, for truth preserves unity whilst error inevitably leads to diversity.

When you speak like that you show that you are thinking the Christian Church to consist of all the Churches in the world which profess to be Christian. If that were right, no one could deny your contention. Also, far from defending the Christian Church, could it rightly be understood in such a way, I would abandon it and join with you in pointing out its fallacies. But all the conflicting Churches claiming to be Christian cannot rightly be regarded as constituting the one Christian Church. The unity of Christ's Church cannot be that of a mere aggregate of different Churches lumped together like a heap of stones. Its unity is essentially an organic unity. The one true Church is undivided in itself, and divided from all substitute Churches.

The Catholic Church does not deny such differences. She denies that they concern the essential things of the Christian religion. Consisting of people belonging to all nations, she knows that each nation will have its own special racial characteristics which are bound to color its religious as well as its social customs. And whilst she demands essential unity she does not demand uniformity in secondary and external manifestations of religion. I lived for some years in Italy, and I can assure you that in very many things, even religiously, their ways were not my ways and never will be my ways. On the other hand, my ways in equally many things would have no appeal for them. There is no reason why such differences should not exist, and no reason why we should either condemn or adopt the ways of others just because they are the ways of others. Essentially and constitutionally, however, all Catholics the world over form one united Catholic Church.

The "seven Churches of Asia" consisted of groups of Christians at Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea— all towns in Asia Minor. These were not independent Churches, but local communities belonging to one and the same Catholic Church. Christ established only one Church and bade it go and teach all nations. The Post Office is one Government Department, but it is represented by local post offices in different towns and suburbs. In dealing with local post offices you are dealing with the Post Office itself. So the seven Churches of Asia Minor were local foundations of one and the same Catholic Church. The New Testament knows nothing of separate Churches recognizing no common authority and not united with one another.

They were not independent Churches. Christ intended one Church only, extending its activities to all places and peoples. He said* "I will build My Church," not "My Churches." His teaching leaves no room for independent Churches. Non-Catholic Churches set up independently of the Catholic Church, whether to suit some individual's personal religious preferences or to suit the national aspirations of a given people are quite opposed to the will of Christ and not part of His Church.

No. What is known as the "Great Western Schism" lasted from 1378 till 1417. It was not strictly a schism at all. During that period besides the lawful Pope, there were two others who unlawfully proclaimed themselves Popes, each having a following convinced that his claims were riVht By 1417 things were straightened out, and one lawful Pope was acknowledged by all. The unity of the Church as a Church was no more affected by this than the unity of the Kingdom of England was affected by the fact that at various times there were Pretenders to the Throne with followers convinced of their rightful claims.

However confused Catholics might have been as to which was the true Pope, all admitted the truth of the one Catholic Church, all acknowledged Papal authority, and all agreed that there could be but one true Pope. They held no schismatical principles, and were not schismatics.

It is explained by the liability of the human judgment to arrive at wrong conclusions, above all when people are not familiar with all the facts of the case. In quite good faith people can support wrong causes. The essential unity of the Catholic Church is not affected by the fact that all Catholics are not individually infallible in such matters.

It did not. It was but a transitory historical episode; and as I have said was not really a schism at all. The confusion was ended by the Council of Constance in 1417 when the lawful Pope Gregory XII resigned, the two Pretenders were declared not lawful Popes at all, and Pope Martin V was elected and acknowledged by everybody as the one true Pope. Over five hundred years have elapsed since then without any recurrence of such confusion.

That is impossible. There can be no real schism in the Church. There can only be schism from the Church. Christ, who warned us that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, took good care that His Church would ever retain its essential unity. Take an analogy from the relationships between England and the United States. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America and founded an English colony there. But eventually the colonists repudiated the authority of the British Throne, declared their independence, and became a new nation, the United States of America, ceasing to be part of the British Empire. Your Anglican Bishop belongs to a Church which in a somewhat similar way ceased to belong to the Catholic Church to which it previously belonged. Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries to England to establish the Church—the only Church those missionaries knew, the Catholic Church—in that country. Nearly a thousand years later Henry VIII, with the British Parliament, repudiated the authority of the Pope which all Englishmen had till then acknowledged and which all Catholics in France, Germany, Spain and other countries continued to acknowledge. Henry's new Church of England was no more part of the Church previously acknowledged than the United States of America, after the Declaration of Independence, was part of the British nation.

"Unity of spirit" is not the unity of the spirit of which St. Paul speaks. He is speaking of unity in one Church, given by the Holy Spirit. It is not enough to have a unity of spirit in the sense of Christian respect and courtesy for one another whilst remaining in actual fact members of separated Churches. We must, of course, keep that respect and courtesy for one another; or get it if we haven't got it already. But more than that is needed. After the very words you quote, St. Paul tells us that we are to be "one body" and he wrote to the Corinthians: "Let there be no schisms amongst you"; I Cor., I, 10, that is, no divisions of one from another. As the Holy Spirit is one, so the Church must be one; and all should make sure of being in the unity of Christ's Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That is why the Catholic Church is insistent on unity, refusing to accept the idea that different denominations are lawful. Unity is a sign of the true Church, and it is found in the Catholic Church.

There is not a single teaching of the Catholic Church which sanctions anything morally wrong, whilst her doctrines and worship are a constant inspiration to virtue and holiness. Moreover, She has the power to enable people to live up to the highest Christian ideals, provided they yield to her influence. This power is amply attested to by all the Saints of the centuries.

They mean that if any religion when put into practice leads to obviously evil results it proves itself wrong. For example, take the non- Catholic principle that the Bible only, interpreted privately by each man for himself, is the guide for Christians. That principle has resulted in a multitude of conflicting non-Catholic denominations which even their own members have to deplore. Judging by such results the principle is obviously wrong. For the very principle itself, put into practice, led to such results.

She is more than content to do so. For the fruit of her teaching when it is applied in practice, and of her Sacraments when they are fervently received, is the holiness of the Saints. Any moral failings at all on the part of her members is not the fruit of their Catholic religion, but the fruit of their own neglect of the ideals they have been taught, or of the means of grace their Church puts at their disposal. If a man lives right up to the teachings of the Catholic religion and then is bad, one would be justified in declaring the Catholic religion bad. But if he can be bad only by violating those teachings, it is he himself, not the religion, that is bad. The Catholic religion is true, even though not all professing it are true to it. Of its very nature it is calculated to bring forth good fruit. In so far as it is applied in practice it cannot bring forth any other fruit. You must not imagine "By their fruits ye shall know them," Matt., VII, 16, to mean that no one with the true religion will ever behave badly. One might as well point to Judas and say: "By their fruits ye shall know them," and then condemn Christ Himself as a religious Teacher!

What was the mind of Christ concerning His Church? It is true that He wanted all is members to be good. He said: "For them do I sanctify Myself, that they may be sanctified in truth." Jn., XVII, 19. But He quite understood that, in a Church composed of human beings, there would be human failures. He therefore said: "The kingdom of heaven is like to a man that sowed good seed in his field- But his enemy came and oversowed cockle among the wheat." When the cockle appeared the servants asked: "Wilt thou that we gather it up?" But he said: "Suffer both to grow till the harvest. Then I will say: Gather first the cockle to burn, but the wheat gather into my barn." Matt., XIII, 24-30. According to the mind of Christ, it would be quite wrong to expect to find in any age that there were no weeds growing together with the wheat in His Church.

I am glad you realize from my explanations that Catholic teachings are good and would result in ideal conduct were they rightly understood and practiced. But you overlook the fact that there are some who profess to be Catholics but who have not been taught their faith properly nor trained in its practice. Others who have been brought up well as Catholics have deliberately chosen the wrong path in life, violating the ideals of the religion they profess. Their religion is not to blame for that.

To all their ideals, and perfectly, no. One who did would be a Saint, fit for canonization. And Saints are rare individuals. The majority of Catholics are faithful to their basic religious duties. If they have not heroic virtue, they are at least of ordinary virtue, with occasional lapses into their own particular faults and weaknesses. Of these they quickly repent, trying once more to serve God according to their capacity. Whilst this is true of the majority of Catholics, there is a minority who profess to be Catholics but who neglect Mass and the Sacraments, and make little or no attempt to live up to their religion. These are bad Catholics, and would be the first to admit that they are a disgrace to their religion.

Proportionately there may appear to be more scoundrels belonging to the Catholic religion than any other. For Catholic scoundrels continue to profess the Catholic religion and practice it as far as they can, refusing to believe that their religion is not true merely because they are not true to it in some things. But non-Catholic scoundrels tend to drop their religion and ignore it altogether. A non-Catholic criminal's religion is seldom mentioned in the press. It just doesn't matter. But let a criminal be a Catholic, and the fact seldom fails to be recorded. As for God not discriminating between one religion and another, at the last day He will do so, holding- Catholics to be the more guilty than others precisely because they had the true religion whilst others did not; and more was expected of them.

Such gangsters as happen to be Catholics are a condemnation of themselves, not of their religion. After all, the same faith that is professed by the Catholic gangster is professed by the Nun in a hospital ward who is actuated only by the highest spiritual ideals, and whose whole being radiates love of God, innocence of life, charity towards her fellow human beings, and sympathy above all for the sick and suffering who need here ministrations. Why do you choose the gangster who does not pretend to live up to his religion as an advertisement for it rather than the good and holy Nun who exemplifies it and who would tell you that she owes her ideals to its inspiration and her courage to the spiritual help it affords her?

Were people logical they would not judge in such a way. Christ did not intend His religion to compel people to be good in spite of themselves. The influence, even of the Catholic religion, must ever be proportionate to the degree in which each Catholic will allow himself to be influenced by it. This explains the bad example given by some Catholics. It does not justify that bad example. Christ knew that, because His religion depended on voluntary cooperation and not on compulsion, some would fail. Therefore He said: "It must needs be that scandals will come." Matt., XVIII, 7. Yet He stressed the guilt of those responsible for their own failure when He added: "But woe to him through whom they come."

It is true that if a Catholic violates some particular commandment of God he still remains a Catholic. He does not believe that because he has broken one commandment he is exempt from attempting to keep others. He must still fulfill such religious duties as are possible to him in his unhappy state, as those of prayer and attendance at public worship. However, he cannot receive the Sacraments until he has repented of his sins and determined to do his utmost to avoid them for the future. The obligation to repent and recover the grace of God, of course, ever presses upon him. Since no one ever has a right to be in a state of sin, if he is in a state of sin, he is obliged to get out of it.

It is not hypocrisy to go to church even whilst living a sinful life in other ways. A hypocrite pretends to be good in some particular way, though he knows that he is not. But the Catholic who goes to Mass on Sundays has no intention of pretending to be a model of every virtue. He goes from a sense of duty to offer religious worship to God. If he sins in other ways, it is not because he goes to Mass but in spite of it. So we can put aside his attendance at Mass. Is he a hypocrite because of his sins? Not necessarily. If he does not pretend that his sins are virtues, if he admits that they are faults and reproaches himself with them, then he may be a sinner, but he is not a hypocrite. I am not justifying his sins. They should be remedied. But the charge of hypocrisy is due to your own confused ideas on this matter.

The Catholic Church is not content with that; nor did Father Devas suggest that she is. Ever she is drilling into her people that their religion obliges them not only to die well, but also to live well. She can never be really content unless her members aim at both a good life and a good death. But granted that some individual Catholic goes right through life with little effort to live well, then the Church can but hope that, in God's great mercy, he may die well. Always it remains true that conversion is better late than never.

It is true that Catholics are unable to see any flaw in the arguments for the truth of the Catholic Church. But that does not mean that they cannot see any fault in "anything even vaguely connected with their Church." They know quite well that all through history, from the betrayal of Christ by Judas, there have been those who have not lived up to Catholic ideals, whether the disloyalty has been that of unfaithful popes, bishops, priests or laity. But they are clear-sighted enough to realize that such infidelity on the part of individuals does not affect the essential truth of the Catholic Church as such.

That statement is refuted by its own extravagance. Take a Cardinal Newman. If ever a man knew the history of the Catholic Church through the ages, he did. If ever there were a good and conscientious man, he was. To this day Protestants sing with fervor his hymn: "Lead, Kindly Light," and they kn6w that a bad man never wrote that hymn. Yet Newman, aware of the facts of history, accepted the Catholic religion, becoming a convert to the Catholic Church from Protestantism. Ever afterwards he maintained that prejudice was the basis of most of the objections to Catholicism. Illogically the corruption of . some who have professed to be Catholics is transferred to the Catholic Church itself. Antipathy has magnified charges against any evidence available. And prejudice has made multitudes blind to anything save the evil they have wanted to see; blind to the beauty of Catholic teachings, to the sublimity of Catholic ideals, to the immense contributions of the Catholic Church to Christian civilization, to her charitable work through the ages, and to the holiness manifested by her Saints in every century. If an appeal is to be made to the historic record of Catholicism, let it be an appeal to the real record of history, and not to a prejudiced distortion.

That is not true. What is true is this. There never has been a time when every single member of the Catholic Church was holy. And there never will be such a time in this world. Always there will be bad Catholics. Christ Himself predicted that His Church would be like a net holding good and bad fish. But however many bad fish there may be, now more, now less, that doesn't make a bad net. The Catholic Church is holy in her Founder, Jesus Christ. She is holy in her teachings and worship. She is holy in her Saints through all the ages. Bad Catholics, whether clergy or laity, are those who do not submit in practice to her influence. It would make them also holy if they did. For the Catholic Church herself is holy, however wayward some of her members may be.

We all without exception experience within ourselves a tendency to evil, a tendency which has to be watched and controlled, and which unhappily we do not always succeed in controlling as we should. But that does not mean that no human beings succeed in controlling their evil tendencies to some extent. In varying degrees all people do so. A few do so in an heroic degree. Most people do so at least sufficiently for ordinary average virtue, despite occasional lapses. Many only manage to do so in so poor a degree that their lives seem to be mainly lapses with only occasional outbreaks of virtue. You must remember, too, that besides evil tendencies all human beings have good tendencies to which they also yield in varying degrees. We cannot, therefore, brand all human beings as corrupt without qualification, as if all without exception were utterly depraved and without any redeeming features at all. You take too gloomy a view of human nature.

Rightly understood, that is true. It does not mean that a Catholic is more "liable" to evil, as you apparently think. It means that "if" a Catholic becomes a bad Catholic he is likely to become a much worse man than a bad non-Catholic. The guilt of a man's sin is proportionate to the nobility of the moral code he violates and to the means at his disposal to avoid such a lapse. It follows that that man is capable of the greatest evil who has the highest concept of the moral law and the most efficacious means at his disposal to observe it. A person who does not know any better may do a wrong thing and not be a sinner at all; whereas a Catholic doing the same thing would certainly be acting maliciously. So, too, the means of grace are so much greater in the Catholic religion than in any other religion that the responsibility of a Catholic is correspondingly greater than that of other sinners. The axiom is, therefore, a tribute to the nobility and efficacy of the Catholic religion. It took an angel to become a devil; but whilst the angel was capable of becoming a devil, he could have remained an angel. Catholics may be more capable of evil than others who have never known the truth and blessings of the Catholic religion; but they are not more liable to evil, being capable, with the grace of God, of living up to their religion as good Catholics.

Did she succeed in doing so with a St. Benedict, a St. Francis of Assisi, a St. Bernard, a St. Teresa, a St. John of the Cross, a St. Augustine, a St. Vincent de Paul and the thousands of other Saints through the ages? The Catholic Church has never wished to divorce religion from morality, has never attempted to do so, and has never done so. Often she has been blamed for demanding too high a standard of morality. Where other Churches have been willing to compromise moral principles, she has never yielded. No man can point to any utterance of the Catholic Church declaring that morality does not matter. If people sin, she refuses to let them say that it is not a sin. Day in and day out she pleads with people to abandon sin and urges them to live a life of Christian virtue.

That is not proof of greater immorality. It is quite possible for a country to be far more immoral with fewer illegitimate births, preventing such births by the use of contraceptives or by deliberate abortions. Everyone knows that the Catholic Church is absolutely rigid in her condemnation of contraceptives, and that she declares abortion to be murder, excommunicating those guilty of such a crime. The statistics of illegitimate births would therefore be proportionately higher in a Catholic country than in a country like our Australia where contraceptives are sold by the million and where there are over half a million abortions performed yearly. No argument against the morality of Catholic countries can be based on such grounds.

Not many; though of course one would still be too many. However, there were five or six bad Popes, men whose lives were quite unworthy of their office in some aspects of their conduct. That is shocking, more so to Catholics than to anybody else; but it is not surprising when we realize that a man is not confirmed in virtue merely by being elected Pope. The Pope remains a human being. He has to labor to make sure of his salvation just as anybody else, denying himself, resisting the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil, and seeking to serve God according to the duties of his state. That out of some 260 Popes five or six have failed to be what they should have been is surely not surprising, human nature being what it is. Out of the 12 Apostles chosen by our Lord Himself, Judas was a failure. Compared with that proportion of 1 in 12, the number of unworthy Popes works out at but 1 in 40.

It does not. The "Cambridge Bible," in its notes on this subject, says: "It is most unjust and unreasonable, in fact hardly less than blasphemy, to treat the Papacy as the representative of Antichrist. In fact, the identification of the Papacy with Antichrist admits of direct refutation. "He is Antichrist," says St. John, "who denies the Father and the Son." Now, whatever the errors of the Papacy and of the Roman Church, it is certain that no Pope has ever denied the truth of the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation." That verdict of a Protestant Cambridge scholar, who obviously has no leanings towards Rome yet rejects absolutely charges prompted by ignorance and prejudice, should suffice for any thinking person.

The best Protestant commentator say that St. John designated by that symbolical expression the pagan city of Rome, which he describes as "drunk with the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus Christ," clearly referring to the persecution of the early Christians by the pagan Roman emperors. This explanation is given by Professor Crafer, of Queen's College, London, in "A New Commentary on Holy Scripture"; by Professor H. T. Andrews, of London University, in "Peake's Commentary"; and also in J. R. Dummelow's "One Volume Bible Commentary."

The pagan city of Rome as it existed when St. John wrote the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation. The city itself spread out over seven hills. But St. John symbolically linked the seven hills with seven heads or rulers of whom he said, "five are fallen, one is, and the other is not yet come." Professor Crafer says that the five in the past are the pagan emperors Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.), Tiberius (14-37), Caligula (37-41), Claudius (41-54), and Nero (54-68). The "one that is" was Vespasian (69-79); and the one to come was Titus (79-81). Then was to come the eighth, Domitian (81-96), who is described by St. John as "the beast which was, and is not," and is "of the seven." This is because the persecuting ferocity of Nero was to come to life again in Domitian.

No. In "The Letters of Evelyn Underhill," published in 1943, there is one written by her in 1910, describing her audience with Pope Pius X. Though she was a Protestant, she was deeply impressed. Here is what she wrote to her husband, Hubert Stuart Moore: "The Papal Guard came in; and then the Pope in his white things, and ascended the throne so quietly and simply that he was there before one had noticed him. He has a beautiful voice, and gives an intense impression of great holiness, kindness and simplicity. He made a little speech in Italian, saying that he thanked everyone for their kindness in coming to see him, and that he blessed us, our families, and friends; but we must remember that only those who were trying to live Christian lives were capable of receiving the blessing. . . . It was enormously impressive, not on account of any state or ceremony, but entirely by reason of his personality. I never received such an impression of sanctity from anyone else before." Do those words from this Protestant writer sound like the description of an audience with the "Beast"?

There is no evidence whatever of immorality on the part of Pope Stephen VII. Yet his behavior was disgraceful enough. He had been elected some thousand years ago, in 896 A.D., under pressure from the then ruling faction in Italy, and he exhumed and publicly desecrated the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, who had resisted the political ambitions of that ruling faction. This infuriated the Roman populace, who threw Stephen into prison and strangled him. Probably he richly deserved that fate. But whilst his conduct says little for the personal virtue of Pope Stephen, it says nothing against the holiness of the Church. That a man is Pope does not render him personally impeccable in his conduct; and certainly in his official capacity Pope Stephen VII never taught any principles of behavior incompatible with the ideals of the Church.

Rightly you speak of his having disgraced himself, which is a tribute to the ideals to be expected of one elected to the Papacy! Benedict IX was Pope from 1032 A.D. till 1045 A.D. He was about twenty years of a°-e, not eleven, when elected; and if ever an election was simoniacal, his was.' His father, Alberic, had indulged in wholesale bribery to secure it. As Pope, Benedict lived an immoral and dissolute life until at last he resigned in consideration of a large sum of money which a good priest, John Gratian, had collected as the only way of ending the scandal given by the profligate Benedict. But here again, God preserved the Church from any erroneous official teachings by Benedict on matters of faith or morals which could conflict with the prerogatives of his office.

The accusation that Pope John X led an immoral life is without sound historical foundation. Such stories about him depend upon the authority of Liutprand, whose writings on this subject cannot stand up to critical investigation. Should you appeal to an authentic case of immorality, such as that of Benedict IX above, then the way to account for it in view of the law of celibacy should be obvious. The guilty party broke the law of celibacy.

No.

It is a common-place of history that Pope Alexander VI, who reigned from 1492 till 1503 A.D., led an immoral life as a Cardinal and had the illegitimate children you mention. To people ill-disposed towards the Catholic Church this is a very interesting revelation when they come across it for the first time. To Catholics, who love their Church, it is a source, not of joy but of sorrow; and even after the lapse of four centuries, they cannot but condemn such reprehensible conduct on Pope Alexander's part in his earlier days. Not that he was a model Pope in his personal behavior even later. But he was at least not as bad as he had been as a Cardinal.

One could not do so, from the viewpoint of his personal vices. Those could fill one only with disgust. But one could have a supreme reverence for the office such an unworthy man holds. And the greater one's reverence for the office, the greater would be his disapproval of unbecoming behavior on the part of the one appointed to it. As for being a representative of Christ, again we must distinguish between the man and the office. Such a Pope in his personal life would not be representative of the virtues of Christ; but he would hold the authority attached to the office by Christ. Official authority does not fluctuate with the good or bad personal character of officials. Even in our Law Courts a judge of greater personal virtue has not more authority than a judge of less personal virtue. Each judge is the mouthpiece of the authority of the State. So Christ exercises His authority through variable human instruments, the authority remaining always that of Christ. He Himself sanctioned this principle when He faced the same difficulty as you are now putting to me. The behavior of the Scribes and Pharisees was not in accordance with the requirements of their office. And Christ said: "The Scribes and Pharisees have sitten on the chair of Moses. All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do; but according to their works, do ye not; for they say and do not." Matt., XXIII, 2-3.

No. That he .had to meet statesmen on their own ground does not mean that he himself was merely secular in his outlook. And not all diplomacy in dealing with intrigue is itself to be branded as intrigue. But even were your charge true, what of it? It is no argument against the holiness of the Catholic Church to point to the deficiencies of individuals which are not in accordance with her ideals. One of the very Apostles, Judas, had little piety and showed a decided "talent for intrigue." But you do no accept that as an argument against the religion of Christ, nor against the reality of the authority He bestowed upon the Apostles. This type of argument is really a waste of time. You may ransack history, and succeed in blackening the character of people who lived in past ages. But you make no headway by doing so towards disproving the truth of the Catholic religion. I repeat, however, that your verdict of Julius II is inaccurate. You have not got your facts right.

I am glad you realize that unworthy conduct of any Pope, or Bishop, or Priest, or of any ordinary Catholic for that matter cannot be reconciled! with the teachings of the Catholic Church. All I maintain is that such unworthy conduct on the part of anybody else is no reason why one should doubt the truth of the Catholic Church. The good Catholic realizes that ' the more the infidelity of others, the greater his own obligation to be faithful. He is not so foolish as to say: "Such and such a man was unfaithful to his duty, therefore I will be unfaithful to my duty!" Rather, he feels an additional obligation to be doubly fervent and exact.

Man's nature has not improved. But circumstances have very greatly changed, and the Church has not been blind to the lessons of history. She is much more exacting now than she was in times past when selecting candidates for the priesthood. She gives them a longer training intellectually and spiritually before their ordination, and there is much more assurance that they will be true to their ideals. Of course there is always the possibility that some individual Priest will turn out badly; but failures are rare. The great body of Catholic Priests has been faithful, and generations of good Catholics have not been mistaken in their confidence in the fidelity and holiness of their Priests. And since the Bishops are chosen only from among Priests who have given proof of their integrity during many years, and the Popes from among good Bishops, it would be impossible that such a type as Alexander VI should ever again be Pope.

Catholics are not taught that. They are taught that every Pope and and every Bishop and every Priest occupies a holy office in the Church and has holy duties to fulfill. And they know, without being told, that Popes and Bishops and Priests should be personally holy in keeping with their sacred duties. Moreover they know they can take it for granted that the vast majority of them try to be holy. Where virtue is normal and vice is exceptional, one is justified in taking virtue for granted until an exceptional individual proves unreliable, rather than believe all to be vicious until individuals prove their integrity. Because there are some criminals in America you don't believe that all Americans are criminals until each has given definite proof that he is not. You take the integrity of all for granted until individuals give cause for lack of confidence. If you do not, you are both uncharitable and unjust. In all this I am really asking only for a balanced outlook on such matters.

Surely you must find it strange that what you call one of the "worst criminal incubators" has produced all the great Saints of the ages! Just look at things reasonably. If the Catholic religion tends of its very nature to produce criminals, then the more one yields to its influence the greater the criminal he is likely to become, and the less he does so the more likely he is to be good. According to that, the better the Catholic the more criminal his tendencies will be; the worse the Catholic the greater his prospects of virtue. Do you really believe that criminals are not bad Catholics who neglect their religion, but good Catholics who live up to it?

Your pretence at a detached impartiality which goes to Catholic, and not to anti-Catholic sources for information, won't work. You betray bias by your very statement that "the majority of hardened criminals have been hatched and raised" by the Catholic Church. Those words are inspired, not by evidence, but by prejudice and the will to believe evil of the Catholic Church. Statistics giving merely percentages of people in prison say nothing about the quality of the prisoners. And that any criminals at all have been hatched and raised as criminals by the Catholic Church is a calumny not to be justified by any statistics. If a Catholic becomes a criminal, it is in spite of, not because of his religion. When I myself became a Catholic I did not find that my new-found faith was one long temptation to become a criminal! Quite the opposite. The ideals put before me were those of the Saints—those of heroic virtue who can indeed be said to have been "hatched and raised" by the Catholic Church.

No sound argument can be based on prison statistics. The "Encyclopaedia Britannica" rightly says: "Many writers on crime have been betrayed into taking prison statistics as a basis for their arguments, but these figures depend solely upon the efficiency of the police and the criminal courts." In other words, law-breaking cannot be estimated from prison statistics. There are thousands who never go to prison, riot because they are better at observing the law, but because they are better at evading detection.

It is not due to any influence of their religion. You must remember that, however divine a religion may be, the response of human beings to its influence will be conditioned, not only by, their individual temperament and characters, but also by their social environment. Now most of the Catholic minority in Australia are descendants of those exiled to this country with little or nothing, to live and work for the Protestant majority. Few Catholics had the capital, or were given the chance, to attain to wealth and comfort. The odds were against them; and by sheer force of circumstances Catholics have remained proportionately more numerous among the poorer classes. Check up the wealthier suburbs and the poorer suburbs in our big cities, and you will find Catholics under-represented in the former and over-represented in the latter. And people in an underprivileged environment encounter more temptations to lawlessness than wealthy people who have all they want. If we restrict our survey to those subjected to underprivileged conditions, I deny that Catholics are more given to law-breaking than non-Catholics.

That is guess-work on your part; and false. Jail chaplains know more about it than you; and they find that prisoners who are, or who have put themselves down as Catholics, have for the most part never been in a Catholic school and know little or nothing about the Catholic religion.

They are not absolutely reliable. In its issue of Nov. 17th., 1949, a newspaper in Sydney, N.S.W., complained of undue Catholic influence in the Prisons Department, declaring that Protestant prisoners often gave their religion wrongly as Catholic because they found that by doing so they got much better treatment from the Catholic officials! The charge that Catholics run even the Prisons Department was quite unjustified, but it suited the paper for the time being. A few years earlier the Commissioner of Police in New Zealand, in an official report, admitted that many non-Catholic prisoners wrongly gave their religion as Catholic because they preferred the religious provision made by prison regulations for Catholics to that made for non-Catholics. But there is no need to fall back on such considerations; for prison statistics are of no value in a discussion of the truth or otherwise of the Catholic religion, or of any other religion.

Prison statistics are not a reliable test of virtue, nor respectability a reliable test of spiritual value. There is more vice which never comes before a court of law than that which does. As for respectability, remember that it was to the respectable Pharisees that Christ said: "Amen I say to you, that the publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before you." Matt., XXI, 31. But your whole approach to this subject is wrong. To get a right estimate of the Catholic religion it should be studied in itself and in the fruits it produces in those who have fully lived up to it; not in those who fail through human weakness or malice to allow it to control their lives as they should.

He did not say that those Catholics who were prisoners had been "trained in the faith and morals of Rome." He deplored their lack of such training. And that he declared the facts a hideous disgrace shows that, far from being the fruit one would expect from the Catholic religion, they were quite incompatible with it. But if their religion is not responsible for their delinquency, what is responsible for the sad record of Catholics in Liverpool? Poverty and environment are the two main factors. Here, though I am of purely English descent, you compel me to record the guilt of my own nation. Over the centuries England has made Ireland one of th6 unhappiest of countries. The English bled the country of its revenues and kept the Irish in a state of semi-starvation. Tens of thousands of Irishmen emigrated to America. Not all could afford that. So thousands of single young people, who could not find work in Ireland and whose people could not support them, crossed to England, to the nearest port of Liverpool. In that alien environment they drifted from their religion. They were down-trodden, and hounded into the slums. The sheer necessity of getting food forced many young girls to sell their virtue in the only employment Englishmen would offer them. Their children were told that they were Catholics like their mothers, but that is about all they knew of their religion. Brought up in the slums of Liverpool, marrying in the slums, dying in the slums, these Irish Catholics, drifted from their religion, provided one of the most tragic problems confronting the Catholic Church in England. But all this provides no argument against the truth and holiness of the Catholic religion in itself; and English people should be the last in the world to cast in the face of the Catholic Church those conditions in Liverpool which they themselves so largely helped to create.

If the Catholic religion were responsible for those criminals, then Father Kalmer, who has drunk in its "poisonous influence" far more deeply than any of the inmates of penal institutions, should be the greatest criminal, of them all! Instead of which, he writes a book deploring crime and urging upon Catholics the more fervent practice of their religion that there may be less crime. And he forces upon their notice prison statistics to show what comes of the neglect of their religion by Catholics in the underprivileged sections of society.

Religion - Yes or No

The Christian Church

"This Shall Be the Sign"

Dogmatic Authority of the Church

The Power-Complex Illusion

Life-Or-Death Social Problems

Those Exclusive Claims

Religious Liberty

Are Only Catholics Saved

Catholic Apologetics in Question & Answer Form

Religion - Yes or No

The Christian Church

"This Shall Be the Sign"

Dogmatic Authority of the Church

The Power-Complex Illusion

Life-Or-Death Social Problems

Those Exclusive Claims

Religious Liberty

Are Only Catholics Saved

QUESTIONS IN VOLUME 4

101. This matter is very important. In the New Testament, "Bishops" were not in charge of dioceses and only in remote control of parishes like your bishops today. They—and not one, but several—were in the local congregation.

102. Your teaching of the Supremacy of the Pope over the whole Church, as the successor of St. Peter, raises many difficulties.

103. Since Christ is its living Head, need the Church have a visible head on earth?

104. Anglican Bishops say that regional autonomy in one communion and fellowship is a better safeguard of personal freedom than subjection to one central authority like that of the Pope.

105. Ro me builds her tremendous claims only on a few words spoken to St. Peter!

106. How is it that there is only one passage to say that on Peter Christ would build His Church?

107. In the text: "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church99 (Matt., XVI, 18), the word "rock" refers not to Peter but to his faith in Christ.

108. As far as the New Testament records go the other apostles seemed unaware of Peter's supremacy.

109. In Matt., XVIII, 18, Jesus said to all the Apostles: "Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven," giving equally to all the power He had given to Peter.

110. How do you make out that the successors of the other Apostles did not inherit their authority?

111. A Protestant minister told me that if there should be any visible head of the Church on earth he should be at Jerusalem, or at Philadelphia where the model Church was.

112. There is no Biblical evidence that Peter ever visited Rome.

113. In 1929, in their book, "One God and Father of All," the authors, Eric Milner-White and Wilfrid Knox, say that, as regards Peter ever being in Rome, "the evidence, one way or the other, is too indefinite. All that can be said is that it is an interesting historical problem."

114. Is there enough evidence from the first three centuries to make it a certainly?

115. Does the recent discovery of the tomb of St. Peter in Rome alter the position in any material way?

116. Why is Rome called the "Eternal City"?

117. Can you produce any positive command of Christ that authority over His Church must forever be centered at Rome?

118. Since St. Peter ivas the first Bishop of Antioch, why should not the Primacy belong to that See?

119. Even if Peter did go to Rome that would not prove that he was Bishop of Rome.

120. As both St. Peter and St. Paul are regarded as founders of the Church in Rome, what proof is there that St. Paul was not Bishop of the Church there rather than St. Peter?

121. At least you have to admit that the modern claims of the Bishop of Rome to absolute supremacy were unknown in the early Church.

122. One Roman Catholic authority, Msgr. Duchesne, writing of the Fourth Century, said that there was then no central authority recognized to be in Rome| and that the Papacy such as the West knew it later on was still to be born.

123. Columbanus, who died in 615 A.D., reflected the bold, independent attitude of the Celtic Church towards the authority of Rome, both before and after his time.

124. Pope Gregory the Great repudiated what he termed the "diabolical usurpation99 of the title of universal Pastor or Bishop.

125. Papal supremacy was built up on the False Decretals which all scholars today know to have been forgeries.

126. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, says that the Popes frustrated the Conciliar Movement, which was a constructive effort to neutralize the irresponsible and often notoriously misused authority of the self-styled Vicar of Christ by the introduction of ecclesiastical parliamentarianism.

127. According to Brewer, one of the titles assumed by the Bishop of Rome is "Our Lord God the Pope."

128. You cannot deny that the Pope claims to be the Vicar of Christ.

129. It is the height of presumption for anyone to arrogate to himself the title of Vicar of God.

130. I have read in a book for Catholics that the will of the Pope is the will of Christ.

131. If Christ personally appointed the Pope it would be different. But wh$n one Pope dies another is chosen by ballot and thus he is a man-made Pope.

132. Why is the Pope called "Holy Father"? Christ never gave Peter that title.

133. Why must the Pope always be an Italian?

134. Why not have an American or an Australian Pope?

135. An Italian Pope would not represent the majority of Roman Catholics now living.

136. It is inconceivable that an Italian Government would permit a non-Italian to be enthroned in the Vatican.

137. You hold, of course, that the Roman Catholic Church, with its present constitution, is indestructible?

138. Where is it to he found in the Bible that Jesus ever said such a thing?

139. You see the divine protection in the survival of your Church till today?

140. You forget that historians have explained it by purely natural causes.

141. That your Church has survived until today is not proof that it will survive in the future.

142. No doubt the Jews had similar confidence that their Church would endure forever.

143. Do you think the present state of the world offers you room for hope?

144. Are not all the Christian Churches decaying and dying?

145. What of the growth of Communism?

146. The shepherds on the hills outside Bethlehem were given a sign by which they could recognize their Saviour. Surely there should be a sign to enable us to recognize the true Church!

147. Yet a host of different Churches give different and opposite versions of what we must believe and do.

148. At no time has the Christian Church, whether it be regarded as one or many, possessed complete unity.

149. The Roman Catholic Church is not undivided in itself. You have $ to admit that there is an immense difference between the Catholicism f in some European and in South American countries, and that of i the English-speaking world.

150. The New Testament does not require such unity. The Book of Revelation opens with letters to the seven Churches of Asia.

151. There were many different and independent Churches in early Christian times, one at Antioch, one at Jerusalem, one at Constantinople, one at Rome, one at Alexandria; and in later times, in England and Scotland and so on with other localities.

152. Did not the Great Western Schism disprove the unity of the Catholic Church?

153. Where was unity then?

154. How do you explain such confusion?

155. The Great Western Schism must have permanently injured the Church.

156. An Anglican Bishop tells me that the Christian Church is rent by schism and is divided even now.

157. I cannot feel that one united Church throughout the world is really necessary. Ephesians, IV, 3, warns us to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. Surely if we can keep unity of spirit we can forget the rest.

158. I admit that the unity of your Church is impressive enough. But it is a different matter when you appeal to the holiness of your Church.

159. Christ said: "By their fruits ye shall know them." What do you think those words mean?

160. Can the Catholic Church abide by that test?