Ignatius Insight Author Page for Monsignor Ronald Knox
The Four Marks of the Church | Ronald A. Knox
The Mind of Knox | Preface to The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox | David Rooney
Monsignor Ronald Knox: Convert, Priest, Apologist | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh
Experience, Reason, and Authority in the Apologetics of Ronald Knox | Milton Walsh | From Ronald Knox As Apologist
Review of The Belief of Catholics | Carl E. Olson
A Lesson Learned From Monsignor Ronald A. Knox | Carl E. Olson
Ronald Knox, Apologist | Carl E. Olson
Do Catholics (at least most Catholics) even know what dogma is? Do they know what to believe and what not to believe?
In 1927?! There really is nothing new under the sun.
But the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy.
In 1927?! There really is...oh wait, I just said that.
. It is the common assumption of all these modem prophets, whatever their school, that religious truth is something not yet determined, something which is being gradually established by a slow process of testing and research. They boast of their indecisions; they parade their dissensions; it shows (they say) a healthy spirit of fearless inquiry, this freedom from the incubus of tradition. Such sentiments evoke, I believe, no echo of applause outside their own immediate circles. The uneasy impression is left on the average citizen that "the parsons do not know their own business"; that disagreements between sect and sect are more, not less disedifying when either side hastens to explain that the disagreement is over externals, rather than essentials; that if Christianity is still in process of formulation after twenty centuries, it must be an uncommonly elusive affair. The average citizen expects any religion which makes claims upon him to be a revealed religion; and if the doctrine of Christianity is a revealed doctrine, why all this perennial need of discussion and restatement?
This did not, and does not currently come about by accident.