Catholic Church -- Controversial literature; Catholic Church -- Doctrines; Catholic Church -- History
When, therefore, we Catholics meet, as we do daily and in a thousand
forms, such objections as: “If this dogma were true, it would be
universally apparent”; “If that doctrine were part of the universal
truth, it would not be arrived at by special conclaves of particular
men fulfilling highly defined functions and even dressed in a peculiar
manner of their own”; “This elaborate definition of the Real Presence
jars with true devotion to the Eucharist, which is a thing of the heart
and a mystery beyond analysis,” and so forth, in a myriad different
forms of objection, we reply: “If, of mysteries such as the Eucharist
or the continued life of man after death, or of the more familiar
mysteries of personality, of time, of eternity, we have no definitions,
then falsehood can be present and received as truth. There is indeed no
need to define, so long as all are implicitly agreed; but the moment
one says (of the Eucharist, for instance), ‘There is a Presence here
but it is spiritual only; the bread remains,’ then must, of necessity,
the claimer to infallible truth (unless she is to nullify her own
claim) lay down whether that proposition be true or not: whether the
bread remains, or does not remain, after consecration. Otherwise
two members of a society existing to teach true doctrine will, on a
fundamental and essential doctrine, be holding two contrary views, one
of which at least must be false.”
It would be easy to point to any number of other cases of more interest
to the average modern man than the case of the Eucharist, in which he
has lost all communion; for instance, to the mystery of immortality,
and the discipline rather than the doctrine of our attitude towards
the dead. Two members of this society claiming infallibility are
faced with the practice of necromancy, the calling up of the dead (a
favourite pastime of our day among the wealthy). The one feels in the
strongest fashion that in this exercise he is upon the confines of
positive evil. He smells the Pit. The other is convinced that it is
indeed the blessed dead who visit him and with whom he is in communion.
Which is right? The infallible authority cannot abdicate in such a
crux without denying its own claim. There is no reconciliation of such
a contradiction: it is Hell or Heaven. It must define and it does
define; and we know on which side its definition lies. Necromancy--or
Spiritualism as its modern name goes--is of Hell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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