When things get a little crazy in the Catholic Church (Synodality!!!) and we start suspecting that the Church is run by either incompetents or subversive enemies of the Church, I think that this is all the evidence necessary to prove that the Church is protected i by the Holy Spirit.
November 16, 2023 at 7:33 am
Cardinal Ratzinger once said (not a verbatim): “an evidence of the divinity of the Church is the fact that the faith survives to millions of Sunday homilies”
November 16, 2023 at 7:49 am
I dislike this Belloc quote, as it appears to make sin (rather than holiness) a mark of the true church. The church that sins the most must be the true one, by this formulation. I wish Catholics would think more and recite less, and stop relying on these old apologetics chestnuts.
November 16, 2023 at 10:01 am
No, it makes Divine protection the mark of the Church overcoming the universal sinfulness of man which has led to the destruction of lesser institutions.
I wish Catholics would think more too. 🙂
November 16, 2023 at 8:51 am
Your perception of Belloc misses a central truth. The truth of Christ and his church penetrates and survives, even strengthens, through the adversity created by it’s own leaders. It is it’s sustainability that point as to it’s holiness and guidance of the Holy Ghost.It is mind’s such as Belloc that remind us to think and pray.
November 16, 2023 at 10:49 am
SO funny. So true. I used a similar thought when an adventist was trying to convert me… He was clearly not expecting me to acknowledge the struggle of being Christ’s presence on earth. Perhaps, he thinks we Catholics view ourselves as perfected already and was going to take me down a peg…no. We understand the battle we are in.
November 17, 2023 at 8:07 am
I think you are mistaken to take comfort in Belloc’s words.
I see nothing at all to suggest that the Roman Catholic Church is, in any way, immune to the convergence, hollowing-out, “skin-suit” fate of all the other large Western institutions. Its trajectory is identical with – say – that of Oxford University, which is also very long-lived (nearly 1000 years) and yet has (with remarkable swiftness and completeness) become an academy of lies and evil.
Of course, your confidence that the RCC will last ‘forever’ (i.e. last as a faithful church and not as merely a mask for totalitarian materialism) is actually rooted in your assumptions, and not in evidence; yet most people would regard the scriptural/ theological/ traditional grounds for these assumptions as both slender and ambivalent.
In sum, it would be a stronger position for the RCC if those (many) real Christians who are yet present in it, would regard the *true* church as something vulnerable to human corruption.
If that church is to be saved from becoming assimilated to the demonic agenda of the globalist totalitarians, it will need members to locate the true church in their own hearts (in communion with the Holy Ghost) rather than *somewhere* present in the increasingly corrupted bureaucracy.
(Recall how the actual RCC abandoned centuries of dogma and theology almost overnight in 2020; when the church willingly, enthusiastically agreed to its own closure for an undefined time period – which in practice for many people lasted many months during which there were no sacraments. Lourdes – the premier place of spiritual healing – was actually Closed… Just think what That implies about the RCC.)
If the true and mystical church is located somewhere in the actual institution of the RCC, it will still require personal discernment to find that mystical-true church, among the great outnumbering mass of fifth columnists, demonic servants, and time-servers.