Over on the aptly-named Daffey Thoughts, David Griffey attempts, ineptly, to deconstruct my blog post exposing some Catholics’ idolatrous attitude about Scott Hahn. “Most conservative Catholics I know,” Griffey blares in his headline, “do not believe Scott Hahn is the fourth member of the Holy Trinity.” Only “most”? Does Griffey mean to suggest that some conservative Catholics do think that Hahn is the fourth member of the Trinity? Fact is, I don’t know anybody who thinks that a trinity has four persons (that would be impossible), still less that Scott Hahn is one of those persons. Nor did I suggest any such thing in my post
On David Griffey’s inability to read a simple argument.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • October 28, 2021 • On Other Blogs
Its addiction to fake quotations is an indictment on pop apologetics. Did you know that St. Augustine never said “Roma locuta est; causa finita est?” It’s a handy epistrophe; it’s a fair enough paraphrase; but it was not what Augustine wrote. Here are Augustine’s exact words, from Sermon CXXXI. (The context is Rome’s condemnation of Pelagianism.) “For already have two councils [Mileve 
Mr. Steve Skojec, formerly of One Luther Five, is no longer bothering to hide his dissent from the dogma of papal infallibility. He’s not trying to nuance a distinction out between the rare occasions when an infallible statement is made and everything else a pope says. Anyone who tried to do that would need to explain why they worry themselves over what Pope Francis says at all, since he’s not exercised that charism as far as I can tell. But Mr. Skojec has integrity, casts nuance to the winds, and says that the dogma itself is a sham. Let’s peer — briefly, for it is painful — into his Twitter feed
Chaput, writing at First Things, is all wrought up by the thought that Pope Francis has surounded himself with toadies and therefore can’t handle constructive criticism from his loyal servant Raymond Arroyo. He would impress upon our minds a “little wisdom” from St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard wrote: “The most grievous danger for any pope lies in the fact that, encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it.” I suppose, though Chaput does not mention a little wisdom from St. Catherine of Siena.
And that’s false. Gaudium et Spes 27: “Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.”
Burke goes amiss when he imagines that a pope could teach error — that it’s possible to begin with — and when he speculates that the pope would have to be corrected in such a circumstance: “Therefore, any expression of doctrine or law or practice that is not in conformity with Divine Revelation, as contained in Sacred Scripture and the Church’s Tradition cannot be an authentic exercise of the Apostolic or Petrine ministry and must be rejected by the faithful. As Saint Paul declared: ‘There are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.’ ”
I used to mourn over what has actually been a blessing: that many of the apologists (and real-life friends) who were instrumental in my conversion only ended up disappointing me. But it was a blessing, because it’s a reminder not to idolize people. People will let you down. Only Christ does not let you down. Put not your trust in mortals who cannot save. God alone saves you. In fact, Leila Miller is right, but not in the way she intends. You do have to pick a side.
What if the pope suppressed what-if questions? But this one is easy, or should be: Of course the pope could suppress the Rosary. The question here is not would the he suppress it, or should he suppress it, but only could he. And of course the pope has the power to suppress a devotion. An obvious example of this is when, in 1959, John XXIII suppressed devotion to the Divine Mercy. (John Paul II later lifted the suppression, in 1978.) This kind of thing happens all the time. Now, the Rosary is so beloved, so traditional, so rooted and fixed in Catholic devotional practice that the chances of any such thing happening are all but zero; but there’s no reason the pope couldn’t do it.
Last month on Twitter, someone proposed a weird papal thought experiment in the form of a weirder prognostication. Mike Lewis had a screenshot and thread. Suppose, the unnammed twitster mused, that the next pope is Cardinal Burke, or Cardinal Sarah, or “anyone similarly-minded.” [Okay. And?] “Leftist extreme ultramonatanes [Head. Desk.] would have a hard choice: rally behind the pope without question (as they currently do), rethink their extreme [!] interpretation of ultramontanism, or break in some fashion.” Well, Monty, I’ll take door number one. And it’s not at all a “hard choice.”
A few people — responding to my post about Bishop Strickland and whether Nancy Pelosi gets to call herself a Catholic — have tried to split hairs between saying that Nancy Pelosi is “not a Catholic” and that she is “not a member of the Catholic faith.” But Alt! they cry. Strickland is not denying the indelible mark of Pelosi’s baptism. He’s just saying that her manifest grave sin means she’s no longer a member! One can lose their membership, you know, juridicially speaking and all, without losing the mark of baptism. People apostasize, they go into schism, they pack their bags and head for the Eastern Orthodox Church like Rod Dreher. Okay, well, this splitting of hairs only gets one so far.
Nancy Pelosi had an audience with the pope, and as sure as Old Faithful will blow, right-wing Catholics proved themselves faithful. Among them was Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas; who mounted his pulpit on Twitter and declared, with all the solemnity of an edict, that Pelosi was not even a member of the Catholic Church. “Claiming to be Catholic is easy,” he tweeted. “Living the Catholic faith centered in Jesus Christ is extremely hard. As long as Nancy promotes the slaughter of the unborn she is not a member of the Catholic faith centered in Jesus.” Stop there.
Luke 11:28 is a common anti-Marian prooftext, and our old friend TurretinFan — known on this blog as Mr. X — revives it in a recent blog post from July. In Luke’s gospel, a woman approaches Christ and says, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.” Jesus replies, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” The anti-Marian apologist claims that, by these words, Jesus rejects Marian veneration. According to Mr. X, “blessed is the womb that bore thee” is “the earliest record we have of something approach[ing] Marian veneration.”
Jason Engwer is a Calvinist who blogs over at Triablogue. He appears to now be the site’s main blogger, after the passing of Steve Hays. Mr. Engwer thinks he can break through all the misunderstandings about sola scriptura, and he sketches out a brief (the blog post is a mere one paragraph) action plan. Five centuries of schism and discord, and JE comes along on Tuesday, October 5, 2021, and ends it all in a paragraph. Shazaam.
A blog — any blog, including this one (maybe especially this one) — is only as good as the evidence. Blogs aren’t peer-reviewed and privately-run blogs don’t have fact checkers. (Even when they do, errors notoriously creep in — sometimes inadvertently, but sometimes from bias or, just as often, the writer’s blithe disregard for truth.) Any schmo can start a Catholic blog and call himself an apologist; it’s not like it’s a doctoral dissertation or anything, and there’s no such thing as an official apostolate of Catholic apologists supervised by some bishop. A Catholic apologist is accountable to no one.