The Protestant Superstition

...Make it even simpler...

...At the same time, the fact that I can thus go and come has brought me some very rich rewards...

...My respect for its essential greatness has steadily increased through years of observation...

...Of course a large part of the great anti-Catholic superstition rests upon the assumption, rarely either proved or disproved, that both the councils and the counsels of the Church are forever barred to outsiders...

...But even as the critic may be wedded to the charm of his special field without any impulse to become an actor, so I have remained outside the communion of the Church of Rome...

...It also has been a valuable experience to come naturally by an insight into the fact that Catholics are freely and intelligently critical, on occasion, of their own Church, and to realize what scope it offers to varieties of intelligence, these being attributes which the antagonistic outsider absolutely refuses to concede...

...There is a distinctly non-Catholic type of mind and temperament which evolves along its own paths into true saintliness—and which could see nothing but darkness in the other camp, just as there is a beauty of holiness which belongs essentially to the Catholic heart and mind, and finds far too scanty nourishment in the non-prelatical pastures...

...The most restrained and tactful effort on the part of a priest to interest some non-Catholic in the Faith is cited as a felonious and sinister sign of the great popish plot to rope in converts after the manner of a giant octopus seizing and squeezing his prey...

...It was a series of duties which reached a climax of significance as well as of hard work when "death came for the Archbishop," and in the tasks attendant upon the installation of his successor, Archbishop Austin Dowling...

...As for the Five Points of Calvinism, those august bulwarks of the traditional faith, they simply fill five of the pigeon-holes in the limbo of forgotten things so far as the rank and file of the church's membership is concerned...

...For one thing, I recognize in the priesthood an academic and philosophical outlook that is interestingly different from the type with which I early became familiar through the many contacts with Protestant clergy incidental to my background and training...

...Indeed, he makes a sort of virtue of the fact that he is uncontaminated by an intimate knowledge of the thing he condemns...

...The answer is, of course, that the complainants don't explain it...

...One thing leads to another around newspaper offices, and before long I found myself reporting all manner of Catholic dedications, consecrations and other programs, as well as interviewing numerous Catholic dignitaries, local and imported...

...So they are, in every technically ecclesiastical sense, but it should, I think, be somehow made more plain that there is no more reason why an honestly inquiring Protestant should not visit and hold discussion with the ablest priest in his vicinity than why a Catholic should not feel at full liberty to ask information of a Protestant clergyman...

...My own experience has shown me a discouraging amount of it...

...In fact, after more than a dozen years of intensive experience, I have come to know the local Church in its many manifestations much as a seasoned dramatic critic knows his theatre...

...Between its covers is a sermon preached by my grandfather, a gracious and saintly divine, back in the days when every clergyman in the presbytery of Philadelphia was expected to devote one discourse each year to an indictment of the Papacy and all it stood for...

...This situation had its inception back in the days when Archbishop John Ireland was ruler of the ecclesiastical province, and I was supposed, by virtue of certain family contacts of long standing, to have easier access than the average reporter to His Grace's presence...

...The general tone of these accusations might well lead an innocent bystander to infer that the situation is wholly different with Protestants, that each and every one of them is able to give clearly the reason not only for the faith that is in him, but also its theological, historical and philosophical pedigree—which is, after all, pretty far from the truth...

...It thickens the air like steam emanating from some witch's cauldron in which are seething musty remnants of Inquisitorial legends mixed with the halfremembered cliches of illiterate nursemaids, and the irresponsibly propagated jibes of the schoolroom, the whole permeated with that fear common to all great religious divisions: that their adherents may find some other fold too attractive to resist...

...In fact, to ask of almost any Protestant what he knows about the present-day Catholic Church is, nine times out of ten, to draw either a complete blank, or some exaggerated, when not actually vituperative, generalizations...

...very few could outline the genesis of the Westminster Confession of Faith, or describe how the Longer and Shorter Catechisms came into being...

...All the chances are that the applicant in either case is due to meet with courtesy, and with a genuine human interest in his purpose such as are not in the exclusive custody of any one faith...

...It would, of course, be senseless to imply that the Catholic Church, on its side, is guiltless of bigotry, or to deny that it has a corresponding mass of unintelligently antagonistic feeling to answer for...

...You doubtless know already what the chances are of getting an intelligent response...

...However, as a spectator who, for years, has been in a position to watch both the stage and the audience, I can speak on one matter with knowledge and almost unlimited emphasis: the abysmally dark superstition which colors the average Protestant view of the Catholic Church...

...its ancient splendors, its vastness and its obvious operability command my amazement and admiration...

...But that is for the Catholics themselves to arraign and correct...

...At the same time, inconsistently enough, it is regarded as not only beautiful but dutiful on the part of Protestant churchworkers to gather in all and sundry possibilities, and to do it in any way that promises success...

...I am not arguing the value to spiritual life of a ready knowledge of these things: I am merely meditating in print on the old warning to dwellers in glass houses...

...THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITION By FRANCES BOARDMAN A PRESBYTERIAN by tradition, training and at least nominal identification, my profession, that of newspaper writing, has brought it about that I am something of a specialist in the knowledge of affairs in the local Catholic Church, which is very influential, numerically and otherwise...

...The enormous care that must be exercised in handling ecclesiastical technicalities under all such circumstances has naturally called for extensive appeals for help from experts, hence I have a rather wide acquaintance among the clergy and the sisterhoods, and am really at home in many diocesan institutions...

...Ask the ordinary Protestant layman just what he himself subscribed to when he joined the church, and then ask him to quote the scriptural sanctions for his creed...

...But the extent and depth of mutual misunderstanding—a misunderstanding which grows, on occasion, into a malignant disease such as disfigured American history during the most recent presidential campaign—this, it seems to me, should be unnecessary, as it certainly is disgraceful, in a day when honest information is accessible...

...I have my own suspicion that if he had enjoyed my opportunities of visiting across the line, and of contemplating the adversary's spiritual face rather than his fighting front, he might have found some dignified way of compromising with the presbyterial injunction...

...I like to think so...

...Ask him to give you a merely fragmentary list of important Catholic publications and their outstanding contributors...

...This outlook can be a highly valuable ingredient of the social scene as such—I know I should miss it sorely were it to leave my own arena of socio-mental activity...

...It is easy to guess the probable nature of his response...

...It still seems to me, though, that certain of its fundamental premises are rather hopelessly at odds with the temper of my mind, and the light by which it moves...

...I have often wondered how these people explain the entirely obvious fact that the public schools, state universities, secular colleges and technical institutions have thousands and thousands of Catholic students enrolled with the others, and granted the same privilege of research, investigation, and general accessibility to the codified knowledge of the world, and that they somehow remain Catholic after these academic adventures...

...It is a prime article of the anti-Catholic belief that Rome dictates every mental, political and spiritual move, and that dire punishment falls upon any of the faithful who dare cavil at priest, bishop or pope...

...Ask almost any presumably well-informed antiCatholic of your acquaintance what is going on these days in the great educational and social institutions of the Church of Rome...

...There is nothing particularly novel in the spectacle of human perversity and prejudice, but the case at issue becomes conspicuous in view of the fact that the July 16, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 301 very commonest platitude from across the fence has to do with what are invariably described as the deplorable ignorance and superstition prevailing in the Catholic Church, and the never questioned dictum that these conditions are deliberately fostered for purposes of hierarchical exploitation...

...As for reasoned, detailed, substantiated support of the claim that the Catholic Church consciously encourages ignorance, try, as the vernacular has it, and get it...

...I honestly have no prejudices in the matter...

...One other respect in which wholly unsportsmanlike lines are drawn between the parties of the first and second parts has to do with efforts at proselytization...

...It is not through any special grace that I have been able to go and come through Catholic doorways official and unofficial, sacred and secular, without feeling either virtuously emancipated or hopelessly alien—the alternative attitudes, truth compels me to remark, of countless Protestants...

...Inquire what he knows about leaders of Catholic thought in his own community...

...it is because I happen to be a Protestant that I "speak that I do know" about the common Protestant attitude, and the strange fact that it is nearly always flaunted under the guise of superior enlightenment...

...Very few of the Presbyterian laity, one confidently ventures to assert, could intelligently orient either John Calvin or John Knox...

...Your anti-Catholic bigot is never, generally speaking, in a position to explain anything connected with his prejudice, for the reason that it never occurs to him to acquire an informational base of operations...

...On a nearby book-shelf stands a thin little black volume labeled Boardman on Romanism...

...I cannot believe that Christian humanity will ever gather itself en masse under the aegis of one church...

...And yet I know presumably sophisticated people who speak as though to enter a priest's house were to invite the visitation of nameless horrors vaguely associated with trapdoors and poison...

...Close by hangs the author's portrait as it was painted by Rembrandt Peale, and it is hard to reconcile the sensitive beauty of the face with the stern temper of the sermon...

...It is for me an inexhaustible source of historic and esthetic interest, and of social speculation...