People don’t really hate the Catholic Church.

They hate what they’ve been taught is the Church, most of which is untrue. This quote from Fulton “the quote machine” Sheen sums it up:

There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing. These millions can hardly be blamed for hating Catholics because Catholics “adore statues”; because they “put the Blessed Mother on the same level with God”; because they say “indulgence is a permission to commit sin”; because the Pope “is a Fascist”; because the “Church is the defender of Capitalism.” If the Church taught or believed any one of these things it should be hated, but the fact is that the Church does not believe nor teach any one of them. It follows then that the hatred of the millions is directed against error and not against truth. As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do. If I were not a Catholic, and were looking for the true Church in the world today, I would look for the one Church which did not get along well with the world; in other words, I would look for the Church which the world hates… Look for the Church that is hated by the world, as Christ was hated by the world. Look for the Church which is accused of being behind the times, as Our Lord was accused of being ignorant and never having learned. Look for the Church which men sneer at as socially inferior, as they sneered at Our Lord because He came from Nazareth. Look for the Church which is accused of having a devil, as Our Lord was accused of being possessed by Beelzebub, the Prince of Devils. Look for the Church which, in seasons of bigotry, men say must be destroyed in the name of God as men crucified Christ and thought they had done a service to God. Look for the Church which the world rejects because it claims it is infallible, as Pilate rejected Christ because He called Himself the Truth. Look for the Church which is rejected by the world as Our Lord was rejected by men… If then, the hatred of the Church is founded on erroneous beliefs, it follows that basic need of the day is instruction. Love depends on knowledge for we cannot aspire nor desire the unknown. (Fulton Sheen on Radio Replies)

The Church that is rejected by men is a Church they rarely know or understand. The attackers have not read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is clear because most of the attacks don’t even make sense once you crack the cover of that book.

Thus, it’s useless for me to feel offended by atheist attacks any more that it is to feel offended by Protestant attacks. Yet I do feel offended sometimes. Why? Because I fail to fully surrender to God and his Church, hence the need for daily conversion, to fight the spiritual fight, and to submit my will and intellect completely to the care of God’s grace. His will, not mine, will be done. This blog is just a journal of my reasons for believing, and if I didn’t feel such a need to express these words, I wouldn’t do it. Jesus commanded us to tell the story of the Gospel, and that his sheep would hear his voice. Seems like a small task for me to at least tell of my reasons for faith, with the hopes that perhaps someone else will undo their own Herschel Walker trade.

Now, Protestants did not make the full trade, abandoning God, but they did abandon the Mother Church, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the barque of Peter (and any other pseudonyms you like). In Luther’s defense, he was living in and around a period of time when frauds like the Donation of Constantine came to light, which called for questioning, correction, and improvement, and the Church was under heavy attack from all sides. It is also under attack today, from all sides. In Luther’s time, the New World had been discovered, science was advancing, and there were three concurrent Popes at one time not long before. Add a few greedy clergy using “salvation for money” schemes that would make Bernie Madoff blush, and only a match it need to start a conflagration. It’s just too bad Luther’s exit ended up watering down the doctrines instead of shoring it up, because he really wanted to protect doctrine in the beginning - even the Eucharist. After all, he was an Augustinian monk, and the most “Catholic” Protestant there ever was, at least in the beginning, until Zwingli and the hoards came after him.

I haven’t come to bash Luther as much as I have come to bash Voltaire and Jefferson and the fruit of their legacy of unbelief. I routinely bash the 19th century German scholarship that tried to elevate Biblical scholarship and instead cut the trunk out from the tree.

Even though things look bleak, I have to think of Joseph, Jacob’s son, in Egypt. After getting tossed in a well, then sold into slavery, then living in prison after being falsely accused of seducing a powerful man’s wife, Joseph had a winning streak. When he met his brothers again, many years later, he said, “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20) All of this, all that has happened in the past 500 years is part of God’s plan, even the awful parts. We just don’t know how yet, but we do know that the name of the game is adhering to Christ, his words, his commandments, and imitating him, which means sticking to the doctrines and not affirming every sin that feels good or sounds good. It means saying, “No,” to the culture, to popular opinion. Slavery was once popular opinion thanks to sola scriptura. Why? Because you can make the Bible be whatever you want it to be with “scripture alone.” The Church put out anti-slavery documents and statements early on. Just like today, that doesn’t mean every person adhered to the teaching. Consider how poorly the laity adhere to birth control and admonitions of greed. There were hardly any Catholics in America until the Irish came, which was around the Civil War, and guess what? They were hated, too.

It’s almost a guarantee.

Catholicism is the punk rock of all ages, because it is always a counter-culture. But unlike punk rock, Catholicism has a shelf-life that lasts longer than a decade. All of the fad counter-cultures disappear like smoke, like figdet-spinners and rolled jeans and pet rocks, they are passing fashions that mean nothing to the next generation. But Mary and Joseph do not fade. The impact of the saints and martyrs carries on. The Gospel does not fade, even if the books and scrolls wear out over time. The printing press was not necessary for Christianity any more than the internet is now. Only Jesus and a community of believers was required: Jesus and the Mystical Body of Christ was needed. It’s also quite nice that the Church has a way to settle disputes with the Bishops as time and history introduce new issues regarding faith and morals. No other Church has that capability but the one that Jesus founded on a rock named Peter, who happened to setup shop in Rome.

Somehow the faith starts a new fire every few years. And the fire always irritates the culture, and oddly enough, what irritates American culture is not the same as what irritates African culture, where in America the Church is hated for it’s sexual teaching on chastity, and in Africa it’s appreciated for it’s sexual teaching on chastity. Americans, in classic form, just assume Africans are childlike. This has not changed, folks. Progressives in America preach sermons that treat Africa as less advanced because they adhere to traditional marriage and family arrangements. The condescension toward Africa today is as bad, if not worse, than it was from the 1500s through the Enlightenment. So which nation is more lost? Is it Nigeria or Uganda? Is it America? The answer is: all of them. America is a sheep that’s fallen into a gorge in need of being found. But it’s not special in that sense; every nation has its sins, just like every person does.

If anything feels good, it is to be counter-cultural. What teenager doesn’t want to rebel? But what is odd is that obedience to God is the ultimate rebellion, but it’s against sin and the world. Rebellion against God is easy, undemanding, cliche. Rebellion against the flesh and the devil? That’s freedom. That is timeless. To remain fully alive, body and soul, and seek union with the Creator is a fad that never dies because at the root, we desire God like we desire food. Jesus and his Church have been the unlikely underdog from the beginning and these two still are today. God has set things up this way. Why? I don’t know, but what a joy to be a part of the team that calls itself sinners, who eat and give thanks together, who receive the Eucharist, the Body of Christ.

The Reformation, the Enlightenment, the German anti-Catholic culture war, French existentialism, Americanism, Marxist atheism, Postmodernism, and technocratic utopianism - these are all different versions, different ways, of rejecting God. Our desire to eat from the tree of knowledge manifests in many ways, with each generation in competition with the prior one. They are various sides of the same set of dice.

In my own confused journey through the chaff of modern ideas, of all these, I find that the Enlightenment did more permanent damage than anything else. Why? Because that is what killed our idea of the soul and all things mysterious. It denies the supernatural. At the very least, the Reformation still held on to the soul and God, but the unbelievers told us there was no soul, and it’s hard to argue with dead people and academic scholarship that preaches more than it teaches. The bias in academia becomes glaringly obvious as we shove off from the shore further from the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a laziness in academics now that assumes historical and textual criticism is unassailable, that tradition has nothing important to say. The Reformation’s disgust with tradition led to the dumping of all capital-T “Tradition,” and if I learned anything at all from Fiddler on the Roof, it’s that Tradition is valuable.

The death of wonder and enchantment is the greatest tragedy of the last five hundred years of human history. Death of belief in the soul is tragic for atheists because even if you fell for the lie, you still have a soul and just need to get back in touch with God to have him pull the string and turn your light on again. You have to get your soul out of coat-check and write a bad review of the devil’s bar service. Recall that the devil is allowed to tempt and test us, and it is on us to muster the courage to leave the casino. That is what God wants us to do: to ask for help, to fight for faith, goodness, and truth.

If you haven’t experienced soul death, or the perception of soul death (because your soul is there even if you don’t believe it), consider yourself blessed. You are blessed with the gift of faith. Literally. You are in cooperation with God’s grace, and he has chosen you, and you have answered. Faith is the greatest gift we can receive, but it requires surrender and action.

The good news, really, the greatest news, is that soul death is not a real thing. Just as atheists mock God as a kind of Santa Claus, I mock atheists’ unbelief in the soul, because the joke is actually on them. It’s just not a funny joke, it’s sad.

You have a soul. You may not believe it. But that’s because much time is spent in convincing you that God and the devil are not real. You may accept the idea of a soul, but reject God and the devil. But all three exist.

Losing your sense of the soul is the greatest tragedy of a life. If you’ve already lost that connection, I’m sorry. Start today in earnest to get it back, beginning with the simple prayer of request: “God, help me be willing to be willing.” Or you can say, “God, I want to believe, help my unbelief.” In your de-programming from the modern cult of unbelief, that’s the diet you have to start on in order to get you back on solid spiritual food.

Because God has a sense of humor, if or when you reconnect with your soul, it will be the greatest awakening you can possibly have. With all spiritual physics, you have to do down to go up. You have to die to be reborn. This is how it works.

The non-believers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Whitman, and Jefferson severed the soul from the body. For many years, they kind of pussy-footed around the issue, with people like Descartes still clinging to belief while he killed the soul. Then later Hume and others just came out and said, “There is no soul!” That’s why we have bold atheists today just declaring it, like Yuval Harari and every middle schooler on TikTok.

If there was ever a “spirit murder,” as anti-racists like to talk about today, it is not what happens in public school with white male teachers. But it did happen by white men. They are right about that. Truly, the modern scapegoat, a.k.a. White Males, performed the greatest spirit murder of all time. But I’m not talking about what modern atheists are talking about when they talk about “spirit.” I suspect that most modern people don’t even know what a spirit is (to find out yourself, listen to this Lord of Spirits episode).

No, the real “spirit murder” happened from the white guys of the Enlightenment. The “death of God” declarations from the 19th and 20th century all came from white Europeans and Americans and Russians, so as far as I’m concerned, a spiritual genocide happened that is still being felt across the West.

But then there was a “body murder” as well, which happened in the Reformation. What do I mean by that? I’m talking about the idea of “faith alone.”

When “faith alone” became the basis for salvation, the body was cut off from the soul. So we had one group deny the soul in the Enlightenment, and the Reformers kill the body with faith alone.

How? What am I talking about?

Because we no longer needed a body. God was all in our head and heart. We can be saved just by laying on the couch. A brain in a vat kept alive by electrodes can be saved by “faith alone.” A software program can emit a string of text that fulfills the requirements of “faith alone.”

With “faith alone,” our soul doesn’t have much need for this lump of fat, muscle, blood, bone and cartilage. With faith alone, religion moved out of the physical world and took up residence in the ether, the mystical mind. There is much I’d like to go into right here about the Eucharist, but briefly, let me just say that the reason Protestant churches are dying is quite different from the drop in attendance from Catholic churches. The reason Protestant churches are shrinking is because they have always just been “Four walls and a sermon,” and if there is one thing that the internet has shined a light on is that, “sermon alone” does not make a church. It makes for a show. It’s just entertainment. Whereas physical Sacraments, like Confession and the Eucharist, require the body to come along. But faith alone requires no works, so why leave the house? Why bother, when you can watch the best preacher in America from your house? Literally, a brain hooked up to a computer can do all that is required of a Protestant. I’m sorry if it sounds cruel, but we’re not that far away from brain-vats and wetware, so let that by my prophecy. See, a brain cannot consume the Eucharist, which is why Jesus is so amazing - no matter how we try to box him in, he always rises over us.

However, let me back up from bashing the Protestants. The Reformation axe caused less damage than the Enlightenment. Again, I have not come to bury Luther, nor to praise him. To me, the loss of the soul was far more damaging, because as soon as the soul is gone, so is God, along with the devil, and so is the meaning of life.

After I had moved on from Catholicism, I wandered about, but the situation felt precarious, as if I were living on a ridge, with infinitely steep sides. Along the ridge I saw a tiny table and a chair at a mysterious little two-dimensional restaurant. The menu had two options. The first option on the menu was simple. Atheism. It had some fancy garnishes, like agnosticism or positivism, but atheism was the entree.

The second option was Faith Alone, but it came with a million options, none of which appealed. I could see other people at their little tables, trying to decide, and trying not to look into the Big Empty that was on both sides of the ridge. Many wanted to choose Faith Alone, but the description of it went on for miles. A scroll rolled out of the menu and dangled over the cliff edge. It wasn’t clear what Faith Alone was. It seemed like it could be whatever you wanted it to be, and I never saw any food delivered to those who ordered it.

Eventually, I realized that there was nothing to eat. It was a trick. There was no food. This was a two-dimensional restaurant. There was no bread at all. Everything on the Faith Alone menu was a symbol, not real food. Some people were pretending to eat from empty plates, laughing, and taking drinks from empty cups. Many ended up ordering Atheism because of the confusion, and then the waiter just came and dumped the people off their chair, over the cliff into the Big Empty. That, too, provided no food. At least falling into the abyss provided an initial thrill. But there was still no food, there was just waiting to hitting bottom and feeling lost.

It took me a long time to realize that there was a second restaurant, one with art on the walls and music, even statues (again, not for worshipping!) and there was actual food, real food there. There were four walls and a sermon, but also a meal. It was three dimensional, too. Actually, it was four dimensions. Maybe five. Honestly, I don’t even know how many dimensions there are yet. That’s the exciting thing about it. There’s just so much to discover, and it’s timeless, endless, eternal. It’s better than any drug. It’s wholeness.

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