As all properly catechized Catholics know a salvation which is secured by believing that we are saved, and a Bible interpreted to suit its reader, has lead non-Catholic Christians to regard even Protestant churches as irrelevant to salvation, although they continue to be gathering places for hearing the Word, Sunday school classes, Bible study, and the all important fellowship.
continuing
Why the all important fellowship we may ask? The severance from and repudiation of the Church, tantamount to throwing the divine plan for our spiritual and social needs back in the face of Christ, breeds terrifying, subterranean loneliness which characterizes the world of the non-Catholic Christian. He inhabits a desolate terrain, resembling the site of some colossal explosion. Each soul is isolated from every other. Each believer holds a set of beliefs differing in particulars from every other set of beliefs held by every other believer even in the same sect, and often differing even from that which he believed only yesterday. Held, in the main, only by strong social ties, but dissatisfied inside, he may go to this denomination this week, and to that next week, or perhaps nowhere, until maybe next year, when he hears of some new doctrine, some new preacher. He is unable to conceive of the unchanging nature of Catholicism, because it is outside his experience. He can never feel that he is part of something larger than himself, because inexorable Protestant imperatives ensure that there is nothing larger than himself.
He accepts many divinely revealed truths, but those tenets which identify him as a Protestant are the denials of Revelation originating with the Protestant Reformation. His most cherished beliefs are disguised as negatives: “faith alone” is a denial of everything else; “I am saved,” its formal expression. He establishes contact with his fellow believers not through subscribing to a creed of apostolic origin, or joining them in a worship service prescribed by Christ, in use by the apostles before the Bible was written. He joins them through the recitation of the negatives of his oral tradition - the list of what he does not believe - and the reiteration of Luther’s “I am saved.”
The unremitting repetition possibly offsets a deep, probably unconscious malaise, proceeding from an unrecognized apprehension that the Catholic Church is the Church, after all, and the consequent need for an excuse. The gnawing uneasiness manifests itself by a continual, seemingly daily, apparently compulsive justification of his inability to accept the Church. The explanation of why he is not a Catholic is preferably made to a Catholic, who has not asked, nor even wondered. It must be put forward, nevertheless, if only to another Protestant
It is a phenomenon which has no Catholic parallel. There is the frequent cataloguing of the myths furnished by his tradition: The Church forbade the reading of the Bible, the Church was founded by the Emperor Constantine, transubstantiation was never heard of before 1215 A.D., and so forth. He may be attacking Catholic beliefs, and maligning the Church, but he is the one who needs to hear, and hear continually, that the Catholic Church is not, and cannot be, the Church established by Christ.
The non-Catholic Christian who can detach a Catholic from the Church is vindicated in his own rejection of the truth. Driven by the need to prove that he has been right all along, he is alert to any and every opportunity to enlighten Catholics. He may be surrounded by people who are divorced and remarried, procurring abortions, tubal ligations and vasecomies, watching pornographic movies, telling and enjoying filthy jokes, and committing adultery at every opportunity. It is the Catholic he will “witness to” and attempt to “save.”
Why would Ralphy want to do that?
