History and Apologetics

Father Dwight Longenecker makes a number of dead-on points about the anti-catholic use of historical scandals in the Catholic Church:

One of the things that impressed me in my own journey to the Catholic Church is that the dirty laundry was out there for everyone to see. There was no big cover up about the Borgia popes. There was no secret history about the shameful history of the papacy in the seventh and eighth centuries. There was no massive whitewash of the sins of Catholics. The history was all there.

Two things impressed me about this: first of all, the slanted history, the half truths, the lies and the 'secret history' was all produced not by Catholics, but by anti-Catholic forces. It was the Protestant propagandists who produced all the dark, dirty, nasty stuff about Catholics. Of course they built on some terrible events, exaggerated, told the story one sided and twisted things (usually from a sincerely wounded perspective) and made stuff up. The Catholics didn't for the most part. They behaved like the kid with caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Yup. Fair cop. You got me. Not good. Sorry. Try not to do it again." In the face of this wrong doing it was the Protestants who were all uppity and self righteous about it all. The Catholics were just ashamed.

The second thing that impressed me was that the spotted history of the Catholic Church was actually just what you would expect of a two thousand year history of a religious organization. The history of the Catholic Church read (if you like) like the Old Testament. It was one long soap opera of human sin, repentance, divine punishment, shameful pride, lust, ambition, vanity and folly all mixed up with miracles, divine intervention, saints, holy men and women, and through it all God's amazing providence winning through.

So when I read the history of the Catholic Church the very sinfulness and awfulness of some Catholics' behavior rather confirmed the whole thing as being authentic. What would have been very suspicious indeed is if every Pope was a Leo the Great, every priest a Cure d'Ars, every bishop a Robert Bellarmine, every Catholic a St Francis or a Therese of Lisieux. Now that would definitely have been smelling of rat.

So when I therefore read about 'secret Catholic conspiracies to cover up the truth' (Let's say about 'Pope Joan' or some such) it's laughable, because the Catholic Church just doesn't do that. It's not because Catholics may not wish to do that, but because the Catholic Church isn't the all powerful, megalomaniacal organization that its critics make out. When you read the history of the Catholic Church you get the impression, therefore, that this is real history.

You got saints. You got sinners. You got triumph. You got defeat. You got ups. You got downs. You got crimes. You got heroic sanctity.

It's just what you would expect. It's down to earth. It's simple.

It is an interesting phenomenon that the people who work themselves into the thickest lather over the dastardly Catholic Church, or the threat of priestly pedophiles, are those people with the least to fear. For example, the LDS troll on Pastor Jan's very ecumenical site has really outdone himself this thread with his conspiratorial view of the Catholic church, even to the extent of absurdly arguing that the reason for the pedophile priest scandal of recent years was the fact that Aquinas somehow taught that rape was a far less serious sin than masturbation. [Search for "Gecko."]

For the record, this anti-catholic trope is apparently a bit of conventional wisdom in some circles and is completely bogus. Aquinas's comments were directed toward the technical issue of whether rape or masturbation was "worse" as regards the vice of lust, and since rape sounded more in injustice than lust, as a matter of measuring lust, masturbation worse. This analysis clearly had nothing to do with (a) which was the worst sin with respect to injustice or violence or (b) which was worst in some over-all sense.

But as Father Longenecker points out, it's all out there to read. Nothing has been hidden, redrafted or lost from the corpus of Aquinas' writings. It's there, warts and all, for anyone to read.