US News and World Report on "St." Augustine

[StubbleSpark]

I do not subscribe to US News and World Report, but it sorta comes to my mailbox anyway. If they are having so much trouble with keeping subscriptions that they got give them away, then maybe they better rethink their content.

On page 64 of the May 23 edition, there is an article titled “What He Did Not Confess” about a new biography on St. Augustine by James O’Donnell resident stain-on-the-reputation-of-Jesuits at Georgetown (Catholic) University.

The supposed relevance of the article comes from the fact that Pope Benedict XVI’s favorite saint is Augustine. According to USN&WR, O’Donnell thinks:

1. Augustine’s “theological notion” of original sin “defies logic on various points.”
2. That original sin was “concocted” to justify infant baptism (the point being that it would otherwise be unjustifiable).
3. Augustine’s assertion that true Christianity started in AD 33 is not true and not “strongly grounded in the New Testament itself.”

The article also talks about St. Augustine’s dealing with the Donatists as if it was a shameful episode that he covered up. It depicts the Donatists as affable, grass-roots Christian rustics who stood up to evil cosmopolitan Rome.

Poppycock! The Donatists were elitist snobs who denied sacraments to those who were coerced by Roman soldiers during the persecution!

My question is: does James J. O’Donnell even know how to read? The things he says are so obviously not at all true. Could it be that he never read the CCC or the history of the heresies?

Yet there it is in black and white, ready for a prejudiced world to accept it unquestioningly. 'Cause that is what prejudice means: “to judge beforehand.”

I spent some time perusing his stuff online at Georgetown U’s web site and he is so obviously full of himself he can do no wrong – even when he is painfully, clearly, blatantly wrong philosophically, factually, morally, theologically.

But again, the timing of the article is suspect. It ends with the foreboding paragraph:

“From happy, hopeful Christian to embattled warrior fighting to preserve the absolute doctrines of the one, true, and universal church (sic): Augustine’s brilliant career may indeed tell a lot about the man who is now the supreme pontiff and vicar of Rome.”

Get it, America? Popeses are wicked, evil, FALSE! We must stops out their eyeses!!

 

[StubbleSpark]

Here is another quote about what Augustine did not confess:

"… The most striking omissions were qualities that would have added up to a full and accurate picture of the youthful Augustine, whom the authors of the handful of accounts that surive recall as a nerdy, calculating do-gooder. ‘The Augustine they knew,’ O’Donnell says , ‘had much more in common with the later Augustine, who was known as the scheming, self-promoting hammer of Donatists.’

Donatists? Another omission. Augustine does not mention the strong rivalry between the two main groups of African Christians, the Donatists and the Caecilianists. The doctrinal differences between them were mostly minor but ultimately came down to one point: The (sic) former accepted the practice of rebaptism for those believers who felt they had relapsed into sin; the latter insisted on one and only one baptism. More significant were social and political differences, O’Donnell explains, the Donatists being the back-country rustics and the Caecilianists the highly Romanized coastal elite …

… [Augustine] back[ed] Rome’s favorites as the true Catholic Christians and eventually helped secure their absolute victory. (One ironic result of this triumph is that it might have so weakened grass-roots Christianity that Islam easily prevailed in North Africa a few centuries later.)"

 

[Scott_Lafrance]

James O’Donnell graduated from the same school of theological research as Dan Brown.