Bonds of Love, not of Servitude.
People to whose mind Catholic thinking is foreign will never be able to appreciate the energetic activity of the Church authority.
On close examination, however, they will not deny that, if the Christian treasure of faith is to be preserved undiminished, if in the hopeless confusion and the unsteady vacillation of opinions in our days there is to be left anywhere a safe place for truth and unity of faith, this cannot be accomplished otherwise than in the shape of a strong authority that has the assurance of the aid of God.
The Catholic theologian may be permitted to point in exemplifying this fact to the recent history of Protestantism and of its theology. Protestantism does not acknowledge a teaching authority: its theology [pg 397]demands complete freedom of research and teaching, making the most extensive use of both. The result is the demoralization of the Christian faith, which is speeding with frightfully accelerated steps to total annihilation. The very danger which Modernism threatened to carry into the Catholic Church has overwhelmed Protestant theology: the metaphysical ideas of a modern philosophy penetrated it without check, and killed its Christian substance. The measures against Modernism were sharply criticized by many Protestants who, at the same time, laid stress upon the fact that nothing of the sort could happen among themselves. Indeed it could not, at least not consistently with Protestant principle. But there is not a single fact in all history which demonstrates more clearly the necessity of the Catholic authority of faith, than just the condition of Protestantism at the present time. On the part of believing Protestants this is admitted, if not expressly, then at least in practice. To stem the destructive work of liberal theology they resort to authority; invoke Evangelical formulas of confession, the traditional doctrine, sometimes even the aid of the state; neological preachers are disciplined by censures, even by dismissal, against the loud protest of the liberals. Such action is easily understandable; one cannot hear without sadness the cry for help of pious Protestantism, a cry that grows more desperate every day; one cannot help regretting its forlorn situation in view of the millions of souls whose salvation is jeopardized, who are in danger of being despoiled of the last remains of their Christian faith. Yet it must be admitted that this cry for authority and obedience signifies the abandoning of the Protestant principle, and the involuntary imitation and therefore acknowledgment of the Catholic principle—for the Catholic an incentive to cleave the more closely to his Church.
Many to whom the Catholic way of thinking is foreign, look upon the duty of obedience which ties the Catholic to his Church as a sort of servitude; to the Catholic it is the tie of love, uniting free people to a sacred authority. Many look upon the Church of Rome as a tyrannical curia, where Umbrian prelates are cracking their whips over millions of servile and ignorant souls; to the Catholic the Church is the divinely appointed institution of truth, that possesses his fullest confidence. He knows that history has given the most magnificent justification to the Catholic principle of authority. Opinions have come and gone, systems were born and have died, thrones of learning rose and fell; only one towering mental structure remained standing upon the rock of God-founded authority in the vast field of ruins with its wrecks of human wisdom. And its ancient Credo, prayed by all nations, is the same Credo once prayed by the martyrs.
Chapter II. Theology And University.
“He is not for our turn, and he is contrary to our doings”; thus spoke in bygone ages the children of this world. “Let us therefore lie in wait for the just.... He boasteth that he hath the knowledge of God and calleth himself the Son of God” (Wisdom ii, 12 seq.). Centuries later the children of the world treated in the same manner God's Son and His doctrine. And in these days, when the science of the faith is to be driven from the rooms of the school, let us recall that in olden times the children of the world planned similarly.
In the days when the private and public life of Europe's nations was permeated with the Christian faith, and their ideas were still centred in God and eternity, then the science of the faith was held to be the highest among the sciences, not only by rank but in fact.