The Catholic Church and conversionChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Catholic Church and conversion
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Conversion -- Catholic Church
The real reasons are almost the opposite of the recognised reasons. The
real difficulties are almost the opposite of the recognised
difficulties. This is connected, of course, with a general fact, now so
large and obvious but still not clearly comprehended and confessed. The
whole case of Protestantism against Catholicism has been turned clean
round and is facing the contrary way. On practically every single point
on which the Reformation accused the Church, the modern world has not
only acquitted the Church of the crime, but has actually charged it with
the opposite crime. It is as if the reformers had mobbed the Pope for
being a miser, and then the court had not only acquitted him but had
censured him for his extravagance in scattering money among the mob. The
principle of modern Protestantism seems to be that so long as we go on
shouting “To hell with the Pope” there is room for the widest
differences of opinion about whether he should go to the hell of the
misers or the hell of the spendthrifts. This is what is meant by a broad
basis for Christianity and the statement that there is room for many
different opinions side by side. When the reformer says that the
principles of the Reformation give freedom to different points of view,
he means that they give freedom to the Universalist to curse Rome for
having too much predestination and to the Calvinist to curse her for
having too little. He means that in that happy family there is a place
for the No Popery man who finds Purgatory too tender-hearted and also
for the other No Popery man who finds Hell too harsh. He means that the
same description can somehow be made to cover the Tolstoyan who blames
priests because they permit patriotism and the Diehard who blames
priests because they represent Internationalism. After all, the
essential aim of true Christianity is that priests should be blamed; and
who are we that we should set narrow dogmatic limits to the various ways
in which various temperaments may desire to blame them? Why should we
allow a cold difficulty of the logician, technically called a
contradiction in terms, to stand between us and the warm and broadening
human brotherhood of all who are full of sincere and unaffected dislike
of their neighbours? Religion is of the heart, not of the head; and as
long as all our hearts are full of a hatred for everything that our
fathers loved, we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever
about what there is to be hated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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