Burn the Paper Tigers
Investigating Catholicism II
Two generals make final preparations to meet on the battlefield within a day. The first enjoys superior positioning, numbers, and supplies. His troops are in high spirits and expect a sure victory. The second, however, is crafty, craftier than all the generals that God had made.1 He orders his soldiers to construct tigers out of paper and scatter them through their ranks. When the time for fighting comes, the approaching troops see from a distance that their confidence has been misplaced. On top of blade and bludgeon, they’d have to face a horde of nature’s most brutal hunters. They turn and flee, not because of insurmountable challenges or an untenable position, but because of lies. They lose to paper tigers.
It is much the same with Catholicism. Our opponent the devil is prowling about like a paper tiger, seeking to confuse, mislead, and distract whomever he may, to hinder our progress in the pilgrimage of this life. He lies, and lies, and lies, and all of his lies together lie in wait for the unwary. The secret blessing of paper tigers, though, is that they hardly ever survive a good solid kick. Once you’ve put your foot through two or three, you’re well on your way to being free of them forever.
Since I wrote my original essay, I have spent hundreds of hours talking to non-Catholics about Catholicism, including non-Christians and Protestants (plus the occasional Orthodox for variety). Through long discourse and longer reflection, I am ready to make an observation: almost every objection to Catholicism, especially from Protestants, is based on a conception of Catholic beliefs that the official teaching of the Church, along with all her best theologians, is at great pains to reject.
Take for example one of the all-time classic polemics, that Catholicism is a works-based religion. Thanks to Jefferson Bethke’s well-intentioned but thoroughly confused slam poem “Why I Love Jesus, But Hate Religion,” this is a double-whammy, since “religion” in Evangelical circles is usually defined as “man’s attempts to earn salvation.”2 It’s so deeply ingrained in the Protestant view of Catholicism that it’s an instinctual mantra, one of the fixed points and guiding stars in a world of so much theological uncertainty: “Catholicism is works-based.” I remember chatting with a woman working for Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a ministry that focuses on discipling high schoolers. In the course of conversation, I asked out of curiosity whether they worked with any Catholic churches in the area, or just Protestant ones. She seemed both confused and taken aback by the question, and (I swear I’m not hamming this up) stammered, “No—no no, nothing works-based here!” I passed on to less disorienting topics.
Meanwhile, the Church’s teaching throughout the centuries is clear and consistent. One only need glance at Augustine, or the Council of Orange, or Aquinas’ treatise on grace, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, to see it. We are, after all, the ones who condemned Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism. (If you don’t recognize those words, the formal terms for the heresies of works-based salvation, you have all the more reason to be grateful to the institution that squashed them, preventing their spread through Christian lands the way the Prosperity Gospel has through Pentecostalism.) The great irony of the paper tigers is that they’re fashioned from the very articles the Church has loudly and publicly condemned for centuries, millenia.
Another way to grasp this phenomenon is to consider the nature of converts between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Catholics who become Protestant typically share the same story: they grew up going to Mass but never really understood what it was about and didn’t feel a connection to the Faith. They were just going through the motions. Then they are invited to a Protestant Bible study, and for the first time encounter what Alvin Plantinga calls “the great truths of the Gospel,” that Jesus died and rose for them so they could receive forgiveness of sins and personal friendship with God. They catch fire for the Lord and emotionally connect with the Christian life for the first time. Then they come to see their upbringing through Protestant eyes, retrospectively discovering that it was full of Mary worship, superstition, and empty rituals.
Protestants who become Catholic have their own profile. They grew up in serious Christian homes, knew the Bible from a young age, and had a deep personal relationship with Jesus for as long as they can remember. They’ve always had a passion for evangelism, and a hunger to learn more about theology and Scripture. Eventually, they came into contact with serious Catholics for the first time. Once they’ve gotten over the initial shock, they dig deeper to find a beautiful, rich, and alarmingly persuasive understanding of the Gospel, far more profound than anything they’d encountered before. After much thinking, praying, reading, and agonizing, they decide to “lay down their arms”3 and seek entrance to the Church.
A tweet I once saw (and now cannot find) puts it harshly but succinctly:
Protestants hate Catholic doctrine because they don’t understand it. Catholics hate Protestant doctrine because they do understand it.
For all the discomfort the word “hate” evokes, the statement rings true. Step back for a moment from the trees, and the forest asserts itself. Across many individual theological debates played out time and again, a theme emerges. Protestant and Catholic polemics are necessarily asymmetrical because the Protestant must always first prove that the Catholic position is something other than what the Church’s doctors and theologians, councils and popes, constitutions and catechisms say that it is. Only once it has been shown what Catholics “really” believe is the position sufficiently vulnerable to attack.4
There is an appropriate version of this. It may come about in the course of history that some view emerges with internal contradictions, as its various commitments pull it in different directions, until it devolves into something unrecognizable, usually the very evil it was incepted to fight. Thus the Puritans, so named to “purify” the Church of England of Catholic influence (not least the alleged salvation by works) became the harshest, most rigorous, conformity-driven variety of Christianity in history. Calvin, seeking above all else to impart a sense of confidence in one’s salvation, cannot but own that he is also the legitimate theological father of William Cowper, an 18th-century poet convinced that God had revealed his own reprobation to him. Perhaps Catholicism is merely inconsistent, the seeds of its corruption hidden in the very teaching it claims with magisterial authority. Perhaps, but I think not.
When intellectual excavation is performed on the Reformers, it invariably turns out that their very best insights are but recoveries (often genuine!) of Catholic teaching. Furthermore, the mistake that finally turns their movement against its stated purpose will always be the admixture of an idea that the Catholic Church has long since exposed and rejected.5
Catholicism, on the other hand, gives just the opposite result. Notice that while Protestants constantly accuse Catholics of Mary worship, trusting man-made institutions and empty rituals, or “superstitious” practices like making the sign of the Cross, I have never yet been accused of flat-out inconsistency. I have been told that Purgatory attempts to add human effort to Jesus’ free gift of salvation—I have not been told that I believe this in spite of the Catechism, which says that “All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” We know that only the redeemed are friends of Christ, so it follows that whatever Catholics think purgatory is, it must not be something that adds our effort to Christ’s work. Rather, it presupposes the sufficient work of Christ in our redemption. Given that the official teaching is publicly available in black and white, read every day by Fr. Mike, and reiterated by a small army of theologians and Catholic YouTubers, how is it that we are not accused of intellectual inconsistency on top of heresy? The simple answer is best: because when the clear, consistent teaching of the Catholic Church is acknowledged, the paper tigers go up in smoke and ash. Appropriate, given that the word “purgatory” comes from “pyros,” or “fire,” per 1 Corinthians 3.
One possible reply at this point would be this: “Sure, maybe your top theologians have this stuff straight. But I’ve met plenty of common people who don’t understand these subtle distinctions, and they at least are definitely falling into Mary worship, etc.” This objection has some initial plausibility to me, seeing as I once made nearly this exact comment at a Catholic theology reading group. (I remain grateful for their patience with me.) But Catholicism is not like gnosticism: the practices of the many are the practices of the few. Our theologians pray the same Rosary as everyone else, submit to the same Catechism, ask the same saints for intercession. It is possible to double down here and say that the intellectuals are deceived right along with the public, but this seems a reach. History shows the greatest part of common sense to be with the common folk, and in any case, the sheer philosophical incompetence this would require of Catholic theologians is staggering. Before such a charge could be credible, much effort would have to be expended showing that luminaries such as St. Anselm simply missed the fact that vast swathes of his beliefs were so wildly inconsistent with one another that it boggles the mind to imagine him honestly believing all he claimed to. And it would have to be vast swathes, because this phenomenon isn’t an isolated feature of one or two Protestant-Catholic debates. It’s the one thing that can be relied on no matter what particular issue is under discussion.
Who benefits from these papers tigers? Has chance alone multiplied them, though they multiply not indeed at the rate of tigers so much as rabbits? No doubt, they accumulate in part from the accretions of 500 years of protesting—protests need someone to point the picket line at, after all. But even the most rabid anti-Catholic, endowed with the enormous creativity required to equate the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church with the Whore of Babylon could surely not inflict such a longstanding and grievous wound to Christian unity on his own. As it happens, there is a super-intelligent, untiring, invisible enemy of the Church who benefits greatly from this arrangement. And there, I think, we have our real culprit.
It is time to quote C.S. Lewis. This passage is from That Hideous Strength, just after the protagonist, Ransom, has awakened the long-sleeping Merlin to help Britain in its hour of need:
Suddenly the magician smote his hand upon his knee.
“Mehercule!” he cried. “Are we not going too fast? If you are the Pendragon, I am the High Council of Logres and I will counsel you. If the Powers must tear me in pieces to break our enemies, God’s will be done. But is it yet come to that? This Saxon king of yours who sits at Windsor, now. Is there no help in him?”
“He has no power in this matter.” […]
“But what of the true clerks? Is there no help in them? It cannot be that all your priests and bishops are corrupted.”
“The Faith itself is torn in pieces since your day and speaks with a divided voice. Even if it were made whole, the Christians are but a tenth part of the people. There is no help there.”
“Then let us seek help from over sea. Is there no Christian prince in Neustria or Ireland or Benwick who would come in and cleanse Britain if he were called?”
“There is no Christian prince left. These other countries are even as Britain, or else sunk deeper still in the disease.”
“Then we must go higher. We must go to him whose office it is to put down tyrants and give life to dying kingdoms. We must call on the Emperor.”
“There is no Emperor.”
There is no Emperor, and the Faith itself is torn in pieces. If the most common, most formidable arguments against Catholicism, those that nine in ten Protestants would cite as the reason they aren’t Catholic, are based on misconceptions, perhaps it’s time for us to stop fighting against flesh and blood, and instead turn our prayers against the powers and principalities of darkness. Then we might heal our nations even as they sink “deeper still in the disease.” In one visible communion, we would make war on the Prince of this world, together going “forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”
< Investigating Catholicism I | Back to the Guide | Further Reading >
In fact God hates war, so I doubt He made any generals. But the allusion sets up a clever parallel that will pay off momentarily.
Usually, and insanely defined this way, I might add. It’s as absurd as defining taxes as theft, and then arguing from the definition of taxes that government is based on stealing. Remember that John Calvin, one of two fountainheads of Protestant theology, named his systematic theology “The Institutes of the Christian Religion.” In fact, religio names a virtue, the virtue by which we render fitting worship to God. Or the gods, even—it is because early Christians abandoned the pagan religio that they were branded “atheists.” For more on the virtue of religion, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae, Q81.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 2.4 “The Perfect Penitent.”
Alternatively, they might argue that while Catholics “believe” one thing, they practice another. But take it from someone who’s spent time with some of the most theologically erudite Catholics in the English-speaking world: this is not the case. Catholics champion, insist on the idea that “Truth is a Synthesis,” that our worldview should be coherent, that truth is one. They display none of the cognitive dissonance, aversion to difficult questions, or resistance to seeking consistency that one would expect from a tradition warped by incoherence. Pope Francis, Jaques Maritain, and St. John Henry Newman are a few examples from relatively recent history reminding the world of the imperative to coherence, though an endless number of witnesses could be adduced. Then there’s the Summa Theologiae itself, the most consistent, complete, well-developed system of thought in human history.
Let me acknowledge, on the other hand, that many Catholics in American pews remain deeply confused about their own faith. We are here dealing with the actual dogmatic teachings of the Church and the character they impart. Another article will have to take up the question of how the West got to the sorry state it’s in.
These are grand claims, to be sure, and defending them properly would require a book-length argument. Luckily, that book has already been written. I cannot recommend highly enough The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer. You will not find a more penetrating, charitable, and compassionate treatment of the Protestant Reformation than Bouyer offers, not least because he was a Lutheran priest before he became Catholic.