Counter-Polemics

In England last week, it was the Roman Catholics' turn. They spoke up to answer the Archbishop of Canterbury and his church's new pamphlet on Roman Catholicism (TIME. Oct. 26), and they used words like "shrill," "juvenile," and "uncharitable."

The Anglican pamphlet drew most of the fire, but Father Thomas Holland, vice-superior of England's Catholic Missionary Society, had a term for the Archbishop of Canterbury too, "The Strange Samaritan." The archbishop's rebuke to Roman Catholics, noted Father Holland in the Catholic Herald, had come just after some highly sympathetic remarks by the archbishop about the plight of the church in Poland. "Against the background of the Polish persecution. The Strange Samaritan has gently poured in acid."

Sharpest counter-polemic came from Jesuit Father Joseph Christie, preaching in London. Answering the archbishop's complaints of aggressive Catholic proselytizing. Father Christie said: "We do not need to seek converts; they are driven to us by Communists and modernist clerics within the [Church of England] itself.

"[The Anglican pamphlet] is not so much an attack as an expression of interior distress. It is an attempt, resulting from distress, to create unity by negative means. The authors are expressing not so much what they believe as their wish to say: 'This is what we dislike.' The pamphlet has little to add to ancient arguments beyond a certain bitterness of tone."

In the U.S. this week, Presbyterian Life renews an old charge against Roman Catholics, to wit, attempted grand larceny of the word Catholic. In an article for Presbyterians titled You Are a Catholic, the Rev. Paul Austin Wolfe writes: "There has been persistent propaganda to apply the word Catholic to the Roman Church alone. On our town and city streets you will often find a sign saying 'The Catholic Church--Masses 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.' It is a sign put up by the Roman Church. In the armed forces chaplains are classified as Protestants, Catholics and Jews . . .

"The word Catholic comes from two Greek words meaning 'according to the whole' or 'universal' . . . The Roman Church has been eager to have the American public believe that it is the 'one universal and true' Christian church. Thereby other churches become mere sects, their Christian teaching at least partial and probably false, and all of them in rebellion against the true church founded by Christ . . .

"If the word Catholic is to be used, it should be preceded by the word Roman ... If our denominations were named as the Roman Church is named, we would be known as Presbyterian Catholics or The Catholic Church (Methodist) or The Lutheran Catholic Church . . . If we omit the word Catholic when referring to our own churches, however, it seems logical that we should also omit it when we mention the Church of Rome."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.