The Catholic World, Vol. 05, April 1867 to September 1867Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 05, April 1867 to September 1867
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
If there is any name which a genuine ritualist really hates it is that of
Protestant. The avowed purpose of the advanced school is to unprotestantize
the Church of England; and the writer just quoted speaks of having found
comfort at a time of spiritual doubt and trial, in the belief that the
English Church was still a part of the Catholic Church, "unless she sinned
sufficiently at the reformation to justify Rome in cutting her off." "Our
place is appointed us," says the same essayist, "among Protestants and in a
communion deeply tainted in its practical system by Protestant heresy; but
our duty is the expulsion of the evil, and not flight from it, any more
than it is a duty for those to leave the Roman Church who become conscious
also of abuses within her system." The Church of England indeed, has but a
weak hold upon the faith or affection of the ritualists of this school.
{65}
We find the XXXIX. Articles spoken of as "those Protestant articles
tacked on to a Catholic liturgy, those forty stripes save one, as some have
called them,
laid on the back of the Anglican priesthood;" and in the same book we are
told that "the universal church, and not the Church of England, is becoming
the standard to which doctrine and practice must be conformed, and the
advantages in many respects of other divisions of it over our own are
becoming recognized." Prepared as many of these men are to accept the
doctrines of the church in every particular except the supremacy of the
Pope and the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, and to follow her
discipline even to clerical celibacy, religious vows, and sacramental
confession, can we doubt that there is hope of their overcoming the
remaining obstacles to their conversion, and that the London Weekly
Register is right when it calls this "the most important religious crisis
that England has witnessed since the so-called Reformation."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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