Quaint Heresies and Current Troubles

Most Catholic schoolboys study Christian heresies with philosophical rigor, carefully parsing their genesis and implications. However, it may take decades and even centuries to observe the pernicious consequences of violations of Catholic orthodoxy.

Most of us are aware of the relativism of Modernist heresies. In addition, we are living the consequences of the confluence of the old-style Protestant heresies and the inferiority complex Catholic Americanist heresy. As a result, Americans—including most American Catholics—rarely invoke the supremacy of God’s law in the public arena.

In the Midwest, there is a Catholic seminary on beautiful acreage. Its glorious Romanesque architecture testifies to its proud allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. In adjacent acreage stands a very large metal warehouse building that serves as a house of worship for a Protestant denomination. That building is painted red, white, and blue, the colors of the American flag.

The symbolism is unambiguous. The Catholic structure represents surrender to a foreign sovereignty. Protestants, in contrast, are loyal Americans.

In some respects, the Protestants have a valid point. In 390 AD, Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, confronted Theodosius I after the emperor ordered a brutal retaliation for a city riot. Thousands of civilians were killed in what became known as the Massacre of Thessalonica. Ambrose condemned the massacre as a grave sin and refused to admit Theodosius to Communion until he publicly repented.

The emperor eventually repented in sackcloth and ashes. God’s law is supreme.

The Spanish Inquisition’s reputation was amplified by the anti-Spanish Black Legend propagated by England and other Protestant powers. The Inquisition targeted conversos, Protestants, and heretics, whom Spanish authorities regarded as threats to the religious and political unity of the kingdom (much like those who perjure themselves when swearing to uphold the U.S. Constitution). But the roughly 3,000 to 5,000 executions over three centuries, although one is too many, pales in comparison to modern forms of population extermination.

Perhaps in response, American history is replete with anti-Catholicism. Catholic attempts at religious freedom in the American colonies often failed. Maryland’s 1649 Edict of Toleration, permitting Catholic worship, was soon overturned by Protestants. Anti-Catholic legal restrictions and sentiment were widespread. When the colonists sent Catholic priest John Carroll, along with Benjamin Franklin, to enlist French Catholic Canadians in the American Revolution, the Canadians rejected the overture. In part, they didn’t trust the Americans to match the English toleration of the Catholic Faith.

In the Nineteenth Century, the Know-Nothings, a nativist movement, persecuted Catholics, fearing that a foreign entity—the Pope—would rule the country. The Philadelphia Anti-Catholic Riots erupted in 1844. Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes threatened to respond with violence if Protestants harmed the New York—and largely Irish—Catholic population.

The great Baltimore Archbishop Cardinal James Gibbons confronted widespread Protestant anti-Catholic sentiment. On the eve of the Great War, he said: “The primary duty of a citizen is loyalty to country.” Wait—is this Catholic teaching? Catholics served—and died—in large numbers during World War I. A decade later, Protestant anti-Catholicism undermined Catholic New York Governor Al Smith’s presidential bid in 1928. In God’s providence, a Catholic president could not be blamed for the Great Depression!

Many conservative Protestant leaders and activists opposed John Kennedy’s presidential bid. In response, JFK’s famous speech in Houston confronted malignant Protestant objections and said: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute….” He added, “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic…” He added: ‘I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.”

But his comments lacked theological precision. The First Amendment of the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The moral precepts of every faith inform—or should inform—every secular law in every democratic republic from the ground up, through the people and their leaders. Indeed, the Church’s natural law tradition is reflected in the original United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, to whose intellectual foundations the Catholic French philosopher Jacques Maritain made an important contribution.

Nevertheless, in our time, Catholic embarrassment over the Church’s natural law moral precepts has become increasingly evident. Some Catholic politicians say they are “personally opposed to abortion” but will not “impose their morality” on others. (But doesn’t every traffic law or law against theft “impose” morality?) Priests are often reluctant to preach God’s moral law. And when they do, they often hear everyday Catholics complain their priest is “preaching politics from the pulpit.”

Should we be ashamed of preaching the love of God and neighbor of the Decalogue? How do these precepts violate human dignity: worship according to the dictates of conscience, obedience to parents, patriotism, hatred of murder in all its forms, rejection of adultery, theft, lies, and defamation of character?

But our casual neglect of the Ten Commandments from the pulpit and in the public arena has allowed another Protestant heresy to fester as a strong undercurrent in American foreign policy: premillennial dispensationalism. Protestant dispensationalists, at high levels of government, hold that we are in the final chapter of the history of mankind. Christ will return to “rapture” out “true belivers,” ushering in seven years of tribulation, before ruling for a thousand years with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The heresy is compounded by “once saved, always saved” theology, which tends to reject mortal sin. Many born-again Christians hold that salvation, once genuinely received, cannot be lost through subsequent sin. Under some versions of this theology, even grave post-conversion sin (such as the indiscriminate killing of non-combatants) cannot forfeit salvation once genuinely received.

Know-Nothing American Protestants worried that Catholic immigrants would bring papal rule to America. Ironically, the heretical dispensationalist heirs of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Protestants have no scruple in allowing modern-day Israel to influence American foreign policy, assisted by some unwitting conservative Catholic collaborators.

God’s law critiques and judges every individual and every nation. Heresies kill. Jesus puts it succinctly: “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” We need not be embarrassed Catholics.

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