Some Thoughts on the Weekly Standards Article "The permanent scandal of the Vatican"

The Weekly Standard has a excellent article on the latest event affecting the Catholic Church. More on that in a second.

When I read this I was struck my something I read sometime ago. The Threefold Witness of the Church-The Catholic Peter, the Orthodox John, and the Protestant Paul. Of course Catholics, as well as other Christians, would claim all three. However I thought he had some great insight. Here is just a part as to what he said about the Catholic Church

The Catholic Peter: Passionate Extremes
Central to the belief system of every Catholic is the identification of the apostle Peter as the first Pope, and in that first Holy Father we see displayed in full all the virtues and vices of the Church of Rome. Peter is a passionate man of almost violent extremes. Out of all the disciples, it is he (inspired by the Holy Spirit) who is the first to recognize Jesus as Messiah. In response, Christ praises him highly and even promises to place in his hands the “keys of the kingdom” (Matt 16:15–20). And yet but a brief time later the same Peter who boldly proclaims Christ’s status as “the Son of the living God” attempts to prevent him from fulfilling the Father’s plan. The confessing disciple now receives one of Jesus’ strongest rebukes: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men” (Matt 16:23; NIV throughout)..........

Throughout her long and bumpy history, the Roman Catholic Church has been the church that has most fully engaged the world around her. While Orthodoxy withdraws and Protestantism divides, The Catholic Church wrestles and grapples and gets her hands dirty. She makes mistakes (lots of them) but presses on nevertheless—ever struggling and yet ever maintaining her integrity and identity. Like Peter, she grows and learns without ever quite losing that rashness and impulsiveness that defines her. When God changed Jacob’s name to Israel (“he who wrestles with God”), he surely meant it as both a compliment and a criticism. The Israelites born out of Jacob’s loins proved (like Peter and the Catholic Church) to be wrestlers with God: now embracing his Word and with it setting the world on fire; now resisting that same Word and running after the world. When at her best, the Catholic Church (like Peter at Pentecost) stands boldly before the crowd proclaiming the message that is a stumbling block to the world. At her worst, she elicits the very rebuke that Jesus gave to Peter: “you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” Yet still, ever and always, she persists and remains herself— a rock thrown in the river to trouble the waters.............

One of the reasons that John Henry Cardinal Newman converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism was because he feared that the Bible alone was not enough to stand against what he called (in Chapter V of Apologia Pro Vita Sua) the “wild living intellect of man.” To combat this “universal solvent,” God ordained and appointed an institution (the Roman Catholic Church) “happily adapted to be a working instrument . . . for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect.” The non-Catholic attacks Rome for being stubborn and inflexible and slow to change, but to level this (often just) criticism is simultaneously to praise Rome for that inner, God-given nature which she shares with her first Pontiff.............

God has, I would submit, chosen the Catholic Church to keep alive the spirit and witness of Peter in all of its paradoxical extremes. If she is to complete her mission, if she is to continue to stand (to quote Newman again) as “proof against the energy of human skepticism,” if she is successfully to rescue the freedom of thought “from its own suicidal excesses,” then she is going to have to be a bit stubborn and stiff-necked. That is not to absolve her of guilt when her stubbornness falls into pride and sin and disobedience, but it is to assert that her flaws and frequent slips are part and parcel of that divine mission which she, and she alone, has been given the grace to fulfill. Just as every parish needs at least one Peter to be both its rock and its rabble-rouser, so the Universal Body of Christ needs its Catholic branch, which both centers and disturbs it................
I think there is a lot insight there.

Going back to The Weekly Standard article I again think it is excellent. See Anti-Catholicism, Again The permanent scandal of the Vatican

Here is how it starts:

The day the Antichrist is ripped from his papal throne, true religion will guide the world. Or perhaps it’s the day the last priest is gutted, and his entrails used to strangle the last king, as Voltaire demanded. Yes, that’s when we will see at last the reign of bright, clean, enlightened reason—the release of mankind from the shadows of medieval superstition. War will end. The proletariat will awaken from its opiate dream. The oppression of women will stop. And science at last will be free from the shackles of Rome.
For almost 500 years now, Catholicism has been an available answer, a mystical key, to that deep, childish, and existentially compelling question: Why aren’t we there yet? Why is progress still unfinished? Why is promise still unfulfilled? Why aren’t we perfect? Why aren’t we changed?
Despite our rejection of the past, the future still hasn’t arrived. Despite our advances, corruption continues. It needs an explanation. It requires a response. And in every modernizing movement—from Protestant Reformers to French Revolutionaries, Communists to Freudians, Temperance Leaguers and suffragettes to biotechnologists and science-fiction futurists—someone in despair eventually stumbles on the answer: We have been thwarted by the Catholic Church...............



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