Hypocrisy, Abuse, and Truth in the Catholic Church

Hypocrisy and abuse are no proof of error; they are proof of weak, sinful human beings. To point to hypocrisy or abuse in argumentation is an ad hominem fallacy, a fallacy that many dissenters to and enemies of the Catholic Church employ over and over again.

The distinction between abstract/absolute ideas and and individual actions is crucial to the acceptance of the Catholic faith (or any belief system for that matter). Yet many people are unable to understand or unwilling to accept this crucial distinction. 

If the saints of the Church are not proof of the truth of Catholic doctrines, then neither are corrupt clergy proof of the error of Catholic doctrines. Doctrinal truth is not dependent on the character of individual men and women but upon the Holy Spirit acting through the offices of pope and bishop, who declare what is true doctrine (1 Tim 4:11, 6:2-5; Titus 1:13, 2:1, 15).

St. Peter and St. Paul were both sinners and hypocrites, as Scripture tells us. Peter is rebuked by Paul because of Peter’s hypocrisy in declaring no food unclean and circumcision unnecessary at the Council of Jerusalem yet drawing away from the Gentiles in fear of “the circumcision party” (Gal 2:12-14; Act 11:1-18, 15:6-14). Paul too showed himself to be a hypocrite to Christian teaching in his trivial quarrel with Barnabas over John Mark and in his other sins (Act 15:37-40; Rom 7:14-25).

Did the sins of Peter and Paul make their teachings any less true? Of course not!

Truth does not cease being truth just because an individual acts sinfully and in contradiction to truth that he knows to be true and has preached to be true. This truth about truth is true even in the case of popes, bishops, and priests.  The sins of clergy or individual lay Catholics have not and cannot change Catholic truths, which Catholic clergy, esp. the popes, have merely preserved and passed on since the time of the original apostles.

So it doesn’t matter how many times you bring up the Crusades, Inquisition, adulterous popes and clergy, individual Catholics complicit in the Holocaust, leftist Catholics like Nancy Pelosi, pedophile priests, abuse of annulments, or any other scandal, whether real or false: NONE of these things have changed Catholic doctrine over time. Nor could they.

That this is an historical fact is a tangible testament to the unique work and presence of the Holy Spirit in the Roman Catholic Church, which has preserved correct doctrine without change for about 2000 years. Jesus was not lying when He said that His Church built upon the Rock of Cephas would not fail.

The Roman Catholic Church is holy, not because its leaders and members have been or are sinless but because by the power of the Holy Spirit it possesses certain and true doctrines without error, doctrines that can be traced historically through Church history back to the beginning. “If the root is holy, so are the branches” (Rom 11:16).

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Were the early Church fathers corrupted by paganism?

What former evangelical Protestant and apologist Mark Shea calls the “Pagan Creep Theory” is the standard Protestant retort (if any) that rationalizes away at will anything the early Church fathers say about Scripture that the Protestant wants to reject.

But this theory is unreasonable and can be reduced to absurdity. This theory only begs another question: you must really think Our Lord Jesus and the Twelve (and the Holy Spirit) were terribly incompetent in accurately spreading the gospel to these earliest Christian leaders, no?

As Shea correctly puts it, this theory means:

believing that everywhere the apostles went they–all of them–appointed successors who perverted their teaching on a dozen subjects as badly as modernism said that the apostles had perverted Christ’s. It meant that for sixty years of blood, sweat, and toil, the apostles made thousands of disciples so stupid that they could not grasp the most elementary teachings of their faith. It meant believing that their churches–all of them in north, south, east, and west– paganized Christianity (and paganized it everywhere in the same way) the instant the apostles died. It meant that these churches, together with their overseers who had been handpicked by the apostles, were constantly engaged in a schizophrenic campaign of deliberate pagan perversion of the Faith while simultaneously dying in droves for the purity of that Faith. It meant believing that the immediate successors to the apostles (and the flocks they shepherded) were both martyrs against all pagan compromise and punctillious observers of Scripture, and yet simultaneously secret devotees of  Mithra, Isis, and the mystery cults. It meant believing that in some fantastic fashion quite unparalleled in history, this outburst of amnesia, heresy, and schizophrenia (beginning well before the death of the Apostle John and spanning the length of the Roman Empire) managed to completely pervert the Faith once given to the saints without one of those saints taking notice at all–the very same saints who were willing to be burned alive for Christ rather than offer a tiny pinch to Caesar.

If we can’t trust the beliefs and practices of the Christians whom the original apostles taught and laid hands on (conferring the Spirit), then we can trust no one’s supposedly Christian beliefs and practices!

Corruption Causes and Maintains Global Poverty

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=15091 

Fighting poverty is a popular cause these days.  But if do-gooders are serious about reducing global poverty, fighting corruption is one of the best places to start, says the Wall Street Journal.