Coming Back Home

   There is published in America annually a kind of church statistic yearbook, and it’s always interesting to peruse it.  For most Christian groups in this country, the news is not so good, and not so good now for years.  All the mainline Protestant churches saw another decrease, some of them, especially the Episcopal and Presbyterian  (USA) churches, a hefty decrease.  Even the Southern Baptists saw little or no growth.  There were only a few positive signs, and one of the most positive and strongest in growth was that of the Catholic Church.

      At first this puzzled me.  For marriages and baptisms in the Catholic Church in the USA and Canada continue on a modest decline.  (Catholics too are staying single often or longer and are having fewer children.)  And there are those dire reports – with some truth to them – of a lot of people leaving the Church, for whatever reason, usually because the Church refuses to stop condemning certain beliefs and lifestyle choices that some people cherish, and so they go in search of a religion that agrees with them.  I saw this first hand growing up in a Protestant denomination, a phenomenon that by the time I was a teenager brought me little confidence in that denomination:  for so many of the “converts” I ran into were former Catholics, who almost always stated the reason for their change of religion as a disagreement on one or more moral issues with their former communion; even at that early age I had an inkling that these people were giving up ancient Christian beliefs.  And the news media often hypes the “warnings” of different dissident groups, claiming to be Catholic, of how the Church will soon implode unless she “updates” her teaching on these issues so as to bring them into conformity with the zeitgeist.  But that’s what some of the mainline churches have been doing for decades... and they are dying.

      So, in Canada and the USA, birthrates among Catholics are down, and so then baptisms.  Where, then, is the growth in the number of Catholics coming from?  Some may suggest immigration, and surely that accounts for some, but most Hispanics, who are Catholic, at least nominally, are not figured into these statistics, since most of them are undocumented and prefer to stay that way.  If one investigates, he will find out that Catholic growth in North America is, at least for now, from conversions, and some surprising conversions at that.

      This past Easter Vigil, for example, Francis Beckwith, made his peace with the Catholic Church he was baptized into and abandoned in early adulthood – not that unusual these days, except for the fact that he was also the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, a rather staunchly Protestant group that has a real suspicion of all things Roman.  Beckwith, of course, resigned from membership in the ETS, and was rebuked by a former fellow member, in an open letter, for abandoning the “truth”; or, as he phrased it,  

This is a sad day for all true sons and daughters of the Protestant Reformation, for all who lived and died for its truths.  Having abandoned the distinctives of the Reformation (which are deeply rooted in Holy Scripture), you are embracing serious theological error. I wish I could say otherwise, but conscience-bound, I cannot. By joining Rome, you are putting an institution above God; you are putting men... ahead of the pure gospel of Jesus Christ (See Galatians 1:6-11). 

      However, the central “distinctive” of the Protestant Reformation, sola scriptura (the Bible alone as the authority for Christians) is not only not “deeply rooted in Holy Scripture,” it is not there at all.  And that’s a profound irony that a number of Protestant leaders are waking up to.  They are waking up to the reality that the “Bible alone” is the reason why there are now some thirty thousand different Christian denominations, all claiming the Bible as their authority (and some even denying that authority and all authority, except the spirit of the times), and that these different denominations change, over time, what they claim the Bible teaches.  A text, even a sacred one, is defenseless in the hands of the interpreter, who is guided by nothing more than his or her own wisdom (as impressive as that may be, since there are and have been numerous great Protestant scholars); but who decides when there is a disagreement over interpretation?  What’s the standard one appeals to when interpretations contradict?  Fortunately, a number of the Reformation churches decided to maintain the ancient creeds and formulated some of their own standards of belief and catechisms, and much of this was garnered from that which the Catholic Church refused to abandon.

   That is, her Apostolic Tradition, maintained over the centuries by the Church’s hierarchy of bishops in communion with each other and all of them together in communion with the Bishop of Rome.  It is even by that Tradition, that standard that is Apostolic, that the books that now make up our New Testament, were judged as to their authenticity and the canon of Holy Scripture decided, by the Church, “the pillar and support of the truth,” as St. Paul described her (1 Timothy 3:16).  So Beckwith has not put “an institution above God” by returning to the Catholic Church; he has, rather, realized that the Church is his home, the place, all through time, where the Tradition of the Apostles, what St. Paul described as having been handed down from Christ Himself to His earliest followers – where all of it has been preserved for him, for us, for everyone.  That’s the meaning of the word Catholic. 

      Another liturgical year has culminated in the Easter Season, especially in the Easter Vigil six weeks ago, and thousands upon thousands of Americans have been baptized into the Catholic Church or received, as Christians, into full communion.  That accounts for much of the growth.  Yes, people leave the Catholic Church because she refuses to re-interpret the Bible and her past so as to accommodate the present, but many, many more join her because she is so resolute in preserving the faith “once delivered to the saints.”  Holy Mother Church will not change her teaching, not because she is stubborn, but because she is faithful, and that is why more and more Christians of other ecclesial communions, like Beckwith, are being attracted to her.  They have become wary of present-day religion’s tendency to take its cues from the culture.  We Catholics too have to struggle with that temptation; but the Church will not abandon her mandate from Christ, her Founder.  And yes, she is in this world an institution, because she has been instituted by Christ as the means of His sharing His teaching and life with us, giving us a home to really live in, and, as the need may be, to always come back to.