Raving Religious Rants

At the moment I am enduring a crisis of conscience and faith because I find it impossible to reconcile what the Catholic Church has taught on doctrinal matters in the last forty years with what it had taught in the previous nineteen hundred years.

Take for instance the Church's position on its "seperated brethren", who like the prodigal son took their inheritance and threw it all away. In a strange twist, instead of the prodigal returning to be reconciled, it is his father who is chasing after him and seeing that he has squandered everything, decides that he must do the same. Yet according to Cardinal Newman, the invisible peritus of the Second Vatican Council, "Now Protestant and Catholic are not both right and both wrong: there is but one truth, not two truths; and that one truth is in the Catholic religion."

Another case in point is evangelisation. Once Catholics were zealous for both the salvation and sanctification of souls. Of course to be sanctified required God's grace and the Catholic Church alone held the full treasury of grace, including the most effectual source which is the Mass. Thus it was important not only to believe in Christ but also to be a member of His mystical yet visible body. Today the Catholic is faced with a dilemna because though encouraged to evangelise, he must also respect religious liberty, which often means letting non-Catholics and non-Christians remain in error and peril. Membership of the Church seems to be out of the question because it is merely a human institution which shall soon give way to the kingdom of God, therefore the only prerequisite is to live a good life, although that in itself is subject to interpretation.