Thursday, December 27, 2018

Ross Douthat On Staying Catholic at Christmas

From The Deacon's Bench:
The case for remaining Catholic in this moment, then, is basically that all this has happened before and will happen again — in what G.K. Chesterton once called the “five deaths of the faith,” the moments across two thousand years when every human probability pointed to the church of Rome passing into history, becoming one with Nineveh and Tyre.

For American Catholics at least, this era feels understandably like another death — in which the saints seem hidden, the would-be prophets don’t agree with one another, the reformers keep losing. And it is all-too-understandable that people would choose to leave a dying church. But it is the season’s promise, and in the long run its testable hypothesis, that those who stay and pray and fight will see it improbably reborn. (Read more.)

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