I once had a Missouri Synod Lutheran man who was my client in his divorce case. At one court appearance, the judge was a sneering non-believer who was purposely antagonizing the client. It gave me the opportunity to tell the judge: It is an amazing situation where I, as a Catholic, am required to defend the faith of my client whose religious denomination was founded in protest against my own faith but I am proud to have had this opportunity to do so.
If I don't miss my guess, you and I share a firm belief that God has given to each of us the gift of free will.
May God bless you and yours.
Thank you for your post, BlackElk.
The Founding Fathers, by accepting the offered help of powerful Maryland Roman Catholics who correctly guessed they'd be treated better in an independent United States than as a British colony, and by actively seeking out the assistance of France, which at that time was still an officially Roman Catholic nation that had a not-too-distant history of persecuting Protestants, made very clear that the intent of the Constitution was to tolerate the religious freedom of Roman Catholics, at least in Maryland and other states which chose to do so.
In the civil realm, I believe our Protestant forebears were seriously wrong in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s in attacking the Roman Catholic Church. It wasn't too many years ago that Republicans were attacking the Democratic Party as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” That was wrong, and the split in the civil realm between Protestants and Catholics caused tremendous problems for well over a century. Things like the Blaine Amendment (barring state aid to “sectarian” schools) and all sorts of other laws, while originally intended to defend a mainstream culturally conservative Protestant consensus against “foreign” Catholic immigrants who were allegedly inculcating anti-American ideals in their youth, forged many of the legal weapons which secularists of a later generation used to attack not just Roman Catholics but believers of all types.
That stuff was wrong a century ago, it's wrong now, and we evangelicals need to own up to our own dirty laundry on this issue. Original intent counts, and we have no constitutional grounds to regard conservative Roman Catholics as anything other than belligerents against a dangerously aggressive secularism.
I believe our common battle against abortion in the pro-life movement, far from being a compromise of evangelical Protestant principles, is entirely appropriate for conservative religious believers, whether conservative evangelical Protestants, conservative Roman Catholics, or Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. All were represented in the Revolutionary War and the subsequent post-colonial government and commerce of the developing United States.
132 posted on Thursday, February 02, 2012 5:44:44 PM by BlackElk: “If I don't miss my guess, you and I share a firm belief that God has given to each of us the gift of free will. May God bless you and yours.”
I'm actually a Calvinist and a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, so my beliefs are specifically singled out for condemnation by the Council of Trent and subsequent Roman Catholic doctrinal statements. I raise that merely to avoid false pretenses — I routinely work with non-Reformed people in ecclesiastical and civil affairs and I'm not looking for a fight.
I have great respect for a church which upholds its own doctrinal standards and enforces church discipline. Far too often that is not the case. I'm a pretty strict confessional conservative, but I follow the political theories of Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper, who unusually for his day in the late 1800s and early 1900s, correctly saw the need to work with Roman Catholics in the sphere of civil government while maintaining strong confessional integrity within his own church sphere.
BTW, I did my senior thesis many, many, many years ago on John Henry Cardinal Newman; as a Protestant, I was very interested in learning how Roman Catholics responded to the assault of German liberalism on their churches when most Protestants lost the battle and were forced out of their former denominations. I realize you'll argue that Catholic bishops remained faithful because they remained in communion with the Bishop of Rome as Vicar of Christ; I would respectfully disagree at the same time that I compliment Roman Catholics for your success in running out left-wing liberals. It was far from clear a few decades ago that the American or European Catholics would win that battle, and John Paul II deserves considerable credit for seeing the dangers of what Communism would do the church.