Being the Third Part of Reflections from a Protestant Library

or The Two Christianities

Very often people, particularly 'intellectuals' in the United States and Northern Europe forget that Christianity is not currently united and that there are two distinct camps of Christian thought. I see this most often when discussions of the intellectual nature of Christianity come up. Most 'intellectuals' deride Christians as 'dogmatic' and 'unthinking.' They accuse Christians of simple doing whatever the Book tells them to do.

This is, in many ways, Protestantism. In the aforementioned library, every other book seemed to be entitled something along the lines of The Real Meaning of the Old Testament or More Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, etc. Everything was centered around using the Bible (or the history that surrounded the writing of the Bible) to talk about the Bible. The works are, in many ways, self-reflexive and unable to draw any true conclusions for they refuse to acknowledge that not all Truth is in the Bible.

The Catholic position, of course, accepts that there is Truth outside the Bible, namely in the Magistarium. More than that, however, Catholics understand that Truth can be understood beyond simply that which is related to the Church. That is to say, logic and reasoning both are valids ways of examing Truth. The idea that the Enlightenment was a rebirth of reason is completely absurd. Reason was one of the foundations of Catholic thought, especially present in the person of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Likewise, the Catholic Church is in now way anti-science. For a thousand years the greatest discoveries were made by Catholic Scientists and still today many important things are learned by orthodox Catholics. The 'fight' of science and religion (espicially in the realm of creationism/evolution) is not being fought by Catholics, but by Protestants, but anti-Religion polemics fail to even consider a distinction.

The world has failed to grasp what Catholic means and this is simply another occasion when Catholics get lumped together with other groups to their own detriement.