This denial of the supernatural as a factor in the physical world seems
to us alone sufficient to make the position of the Modernists in the
Roman Church untenable. That form of Christianity stands or falls with
belief in miracles. It has always sought to bring the divine into human
life by intercalating acts of God among facts of nature. Its whole
sacred literature, as we have said, is penetrated through and through by
the belief that God continually intervenes to change the course of
events. What would become of the cult of Mary and the saints if it were
recognised that God does not so interfere, and that the saints, if
criticism allows that they ever existed, can do nothing by their
intercessions to avert calamity or bring blessing? The Modernist priest,
it appears, can still say 'Ora pro nobis' to a Mary whose biography he
believes to be purely mythical. At any rate, he can tell his consultants
with a good conscience that if they pray to Mary for grace they will
receive it. But what is the good of this make-believe? And, if it is
part of a transaction in which the worshipper pays money for assistance
which he believes to be miraculous and only obtainable through the good
offices of the Church, is it even morally honest? The worshipper may be
helped by his subjective conviction that his cheque on the treasury of
merit has been honoured; but if, apart from the natural effects of
suggestion, nothing has been given him but a mere _placebo_, is the
sacerdotal office one which an honourable man would wish to fill?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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