The Divid­ing Line of May 21, 2013 is all the evi­dence I need  that Dr.* James White is so pre­dis­posed to see lack of intel­li­gence, seri­ous­ness, cred­i­bil­i­ty (fill in your noun of choice) in Catholic apol­o­gists, that he will let him­self be played on like a pipe. No need for Catholic apol­o­gists who engage the good Dr.* White to wait for him to invent straw men. You can hand him one of your own mak­ing: He will grab it, tear it to shreds, stomp upon it, and cack­le in tri­umph. Mean­while, you can pro­ceed with your seri­ous apolo­getic, and he won’t both­er to touch it.

Accept­ing as giv­en the fig­ure of ca. 33,000 for 2001, I have searched, for some time now, for a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate for­mu­la for deter­min­ing the exact num­ber of Protes­tant sects on any giv­en day in his­to­ry from 1517 for­ward. The Encyclopedia—any ency­clo­pe­dia — can only give esti­mates; but what the Catholic apol­o­gist should desire is pre­ci­sion. That way, when con­front­ed by a rabid Protes­tant, he can be deal­ing in sci­en­tif­ic fact, not dis­putable con­jec­ture. I gave the begin­nings of such a mod­el in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle. How do my esti­mates fare in com­par­i­son to oth­ers?

Reformed Chris­tians have a very high doc­trine of the Gospel, but not a very high doc­trine of the Church. The rea­son that is trou­bling is because Paul claims no less an exclu­siv­i­ty for the Church than he does for the Gospel. I am used to hear­ing Protes­tant apol­o­gists take a page out of Pla­to and say things like, “There is an invis­i­ble Church which is man­i­fest in local bod­ies.” But St. Paul doesn’t use the plur­al, he uses the sin­gu­lar: body. I nev­er hear Protes­tants say things like, “There is an invis­i­ble Gospel which is man­i­fest in local books.”

Here­in is the Protes­tant par­a­digm: They are very good at scrip­tur­al exe­ge­sis (albeit with­in their own hereti­cal frame­work), and they are very good at ana­lyt­i­cal homilet­ics. But they have lit­tle sense, in their the­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, of won­der or mir­a­cle or the super­nat­ur­al. To the super­nat­ur­al, such as they accept it, they bring mere cold rea­son and emp­ty white rooms. They do not know what Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins meant when he wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And that is why they — and espe­cial­ly the Calvin­ists in their midst — are mad.

It did not take long. Nor did I sus­pect it might. Yes­ter­day I pre­dict­ed that it would not only be dis­senters with­in the Church, but also dis­senters out­side the Church, who would be stirred to ver­bal hand-wring­ing over this homi­ly by Pope Fran­cis. The key sen­tence in the homi­ly — the source of said hand-wring­ing — is this one: “[I]t is not pos­si­ble to find Jesus out­side the Church.” And lo! but a few hours after I made my pre­dic­tion came this post from the famil­iar and pro­lif­ic Tur­ret­inFan — known on this blog as Mr. X. He has four main points of cri­tique for us to sort through.

All the nuance aside, the key thing for those out­side the Church to under­stand is this: You are liv­ing a life that is less than what Christ intend­ed. Christ intend­ed for grace to be poured out through the sacra­ments; you don’t have them. Christ intend­ed for us to encounter Him — body, blood, soul, and divin­i­ty — in the Eucharist; you haven’t received it. Christ intend­ed for us to be led into “all truth” — those were his words: all truth—within the Church. But you are being led, and you admit it, by fal­li­ble teach­ers. Talk about Christ until you’re blue in the face, you don’t know him.