Devin Rose is writing about the battle between the Church and secularism and the predicted, some even say inevitable, defeat coming the Church's way:
The Church has thus far held out against the rising tide of secularism: moral relativism, the liberal
agenda regarding same-sex “marriage,” female clergy, and all the rest. But surely she cannot hold out much longer? It feels to most people that there is an ineluctability to the secular storm that has successfully swept the West and much of the rest of the world.
It wouldn’t take much. Just one pope getting in there and changing one dogma. The Church has old men and something called “Tradition,” but so what? The Anglicans appeared for centuries to have that too, and look at them now. Folding faster than a bad hand of cards. Human tradition isn’t strong enough to stop the progress toward Utopia that secularism is promising to bring the world. Neither are old men. Because they die, and younger men take their place, eventually men formed to understand how good secularism is for people, how true it is.
Yet the Catholic Church says No to divorce, No to contraception, No to same-sex acts, etc. She says No to these because of course she says Yes to life-long marriage, Yes to life-giving love, Yes to fruitful union and gift of self. Ridiculous anachronisms, says the secular world. Laughably archaic and even viciously hateful.
All it takes is one pope to get in there and reverse dogma. Not hard to do, as all Protestant denominations have fallen in one way or another. If Catholicism is false, as secularism knows it must be, then it will fall, too. If it is only human, as it must be, it will cave.
The stage is set. The battle lines drawn. A new opportunity opens before us with the retirement of Pope Benedict. A new pope will be elected. And while he may be “conservative” like Benedict, it is only a matter of time, secularism knows, before one will be an “enlightened” man, a man like President Obama for instance.
As Willy Wonka says, “the suspense is terrible; I hope it’ll last.”
But, the Immovable Object has not moved yet. Been about 2,000 years. When I was a Protestant, and anti-Catholic, I recall hearing the ridiculous doctrines about the Church not erring on faith and morals. I started looking into it, reading the anti-Catholic websites about this or that pope over the centuries.
But each case where the pope or Church had allegedly taught heresy as truth, was flimsy, weak. I knew there had to be an airtight, obvious example of the Church reversing dogma, or the pope officially teaching heresy, somewhere in history. Not just a pope or bishop privately holding some heterodox belief, but the Church proclaiming it with her full authority.
Alas, I never found it. And I was disposed to believe any credible example that I could find. I wanted to find such a case. Yet I didn’t. And the more I looked into them, the more I realized that the Catholic claims held up, even though I didn’t believe in the Catholic Church’s teachings. This was a question of self-consistency, not whether or not I believed in the Marian dogmas or not.
The Church’s self-consistency alone did not move me to Catholicism. But it disturbed me enough to keep looking.
Outstanding read, finish it.
You can fight the Church all you want but in the end, you'll not prevail.
Think twice indeed.
