Replies

There were eighteenth different Baptist congregations in my community of town and environs of about 20,000. Many of them were just “free lance”operations. A guy would just rent a building and gather a congregations, which would grow or die depending on his gifts. Sometimes, a congregation would split because a faction would become dissatisfied with the founder, and they would either just go to another preacher, or just scatter. My grandmother joined a “Bible Baptist” Church—just a small building down the street that had held several congregations. A new young preacher came in and began to preach. His congregation grew and after a while he started collected money for a new church building. After about a year, he suddenly split, telling now one where he was going. According to the deacon on, he had splt with the money.

Now with a ,little investigation, one could multiple instances of such things. Also of sexual shenanigans, of quarreling in the churches, of eloquent preachers with no morals, of good men of decent morals who nonetheless found temptations in women/the bottle/ of in the church till. But with no central authority, there is no blame to be attached to the name “Baptist.”or “Pentecostal,”of whatever. But with the Catholic Church there is this ancient hatred that goes back to the Reformation and which wishes only to look at the bad things that Catholics have done. Yes. we have the Inquisition, and we have had also the religious wars. We have “Bloody Mary.” and Foxe’s martyrs.
But we have also had tens of thousands of Christian monks moving all over Europe bringing the Gospel to pagan peoples. We have seem the evil that conquistadors perpetrated. But we have men like De Las Casas who walked tens of thousands of miles over Latin American and doing his best to call these men to account, and at long last persuading the king of Spain to set up imperial laws that for the 16th Century were models of just rule for a conquered race. Millions were claimed for Christ hundreds of years before Protestants began their missions abroad and bergan circulating their Bibles. Spain did much evil in the world but also did much good, and at Malta and Lepanto and Vienna held back the Turks, the strongest power in Europe, and kept them from subjugating the Christian West. Now Europe no longer acknowledges its debt to the Church and some American Protestants villify her, and exhibit almost joy at the exposure of unfaithful priests. THAT, they believe, is the REAL face of the Church. And what about the faithful majority?

Better to turn your attention to the collapsing mainline Protestant churches. If the Catholic Church has been ill-served, betrayed by homosexuals, the mainline Protestant Churches are tell us that homosexuality is God's willing, that the Bible is a child's fancy, that marriage is no more than a contract to be broken if the two” partners”do not get along, and find its restraints unfulfilling. “Speck in the other’seyes, or the beam in your own.