The Anti-Catholic Bible

Not so long ago people were saying that anti-Catholicism was going the way of the
dinosaur. If so, it looks like the dinosaur has made an unexpected comeback,
because anti-Catholicism is healthier and more widespread now than it has been for
years.

Since the late 1970s several new anti-Catholic organizations have been founded,
and some older ones have been revitalized. A partial lineup includes Chick
Publications, Mission to Catholics International, Lumen Productions, Research and
Education Foundation, Osterhus Publishing House, Christians United for Reformation
(CURE), Harvest House, and Bob Jones University Press. Combined they turn out more
anti-Catholic tracts, magazines, and books than ever before—millions of copies
each year.

When one reads enough of this material, one becomes aware that the same points
tend to be made by different writers in the same way, even in the same words. Who
is borrowing from whom? It doesn’t seem that any of these groups relies very
heavily on any other. Instead, they all fall back on one source, Loraine
Boettner’s work, Roman Catholicism, a book first published in 1962 by Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Company of Philadelphia and reprinted many times since.

This book is the origin of much of what professional anti-Catholics distribute. It

can be called, to use a phrase that might rankle some, the "Bible" of the anti-
Catholic movement.

At first glance Roman Catholicism seems impressive. Its 460 large pages of text
are closely packed with quotations. The table of contents is broken down into
dozens of categories, and the indices, though skimpy, at least are there. But a
careful reading makes it clear that the author’s antagonism to the Catholic Church
has gravely compromised his intellectual objectivity.

He Swallows Them Whole

The book suffers from a serious lack of scholarly rigor. Boettner accepts at face
value virtually any claim made by an opponent of the Church. Even when
verification of a charge is easy, he does not bother to check it out. If he finds
something unflattering to Catholicism, he prints it.

When the topic is the infallibility of the pope, Boettner quotes at length from a
speech alleged to have been given in 1870 at the First Vatican Council, where
papal infallibility was formally defined. The speech, attributed to "the scholarly
archbishop [sic, bishop] Strossmeyer," claims that the "archbishop" read the New
Testament for the first time shortly before he gave the speech and found no
mention at all of the papacy. The speech then concludes that Peter was given no
greater authority than the other apostles. The trouble is that the speech is a
well-known forgery. Bishop Strossmeyer did not make that speech, and, in fact,
when it was being circulated by a disgruntled former Catholic, the bishop
repeatedly and publicly denied that it was his and demanded a retraction by the
guilty party. A glance at the Catholic Encyclopedia or a work like Newman
Eberhardt’s A Summary of Catholic History would have clued in Boettner.

This gross error has been repeated by many of the anti-Catholic groups that rely
on Boettner. None of them, apparently, became suspicious, though the speech reads
as though it came from a stereotypical "Bible thumping" Protestant rather than a
"scholarly" Catholic bishop.

Sometimes Boettner’s mistakes are just juvenile. He calls All Souls’ Day (November
2) "Purgatory Day," a term never used by Catholics because the feast is not in
commemoration of purgatory but of the souls there.

He argues that the book of Tobit cannot be an inspired book of the Bible because
its "stories are fantastic and incredible," and it includes an account of
appearances of an angel disguised as a man. Boettner does not seem to realize that
such an argument could be used against, say, the book of Jonah or Genesis. Is
living in the belly of a great fish any more incredible than meeting an angel in
disguise? And then there’s the more basic problem that other books in Scripture—
books Boettner and all Protestants accept as inspired—also contain references to
angels appearing disguised as men (cf. Gen. 19; Heb. 13:2).

When he writes about the definition of papal infallibility, Boettner says that a
pope speaks infallibly only "when he is speaking ex cathedra, that is, seated in
the papal chair." He then points out that what is venerated as Peter’s chair in
St. Peter’s Basilica may be only a thousand years old, implying that since Peter’s
actual chair is not present, there is no place for the pope to sit, and thus, by
the Church’s own principles, the pope cannot make any infallible pronouncements.

Boettner entirely misunderstands the meaning of the Latin term ex cathedra. It

does translate as "from the chair," but it does not mean that the pope has to be
sitting in the literal chair Peter owned for his decree to be infallible and to
qualify as an ex cathedra pronouncement. To speak "from the chair of Peter" is
what the pope does when he speaks with the fullness of his authority as the
successor of Peter. It is a metaphor that refers to the pope’s authority to teach,
not to where he sits when he teaches.

Notice, too, that the term ex cathedra, as a reference to teaching authority, was
not invented by the Catholic Church. Jesus used it. In Matthew 23:2–3 Jesus said,
"The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat (Greek: kathedras, Latin:
cathedra); so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do;
for they preach, but do not practice." Even though these rabbis did not live
according to the norms they taught, Jesus points out that they did have authority
to teach and to make rules binding on the Jewish community.

Where Did You Get That?

Boettner’s Roman Catholicism contains a mere two dozen footnotes, all of them
added to recent reprintings to reflect minor changes in the Catholic Church since
the Second Vatican Council. Within the text, biblical passages are properly cited,
but references to Catholic works are so vague as to discourage checking by making
it difficult or impossible to locate the work or the reference. Many times there
is no reference. A certain pope will be alleged to have said something—but there
is no citation given to support the claim. A Catholic author of the seventeenth
century is alleged to have claimed something—but again no reference that can be
checked. Sometimes there may be mention of a Catholic book, but no page number or
publication information given.

By contrast, when non-Catholic authors are cited, the reference usually includes
title and page number. One suspects that Boettener took his alleged Catholic
quotations and citations from Protestant works and then deliberately failed to
reference them in order to conceal the extent to which he is dependant on
secondary sources. This is a common tactic among writers who have not done primary
source research and rely on second-hand sources.

What is even worse, Boettner seems to have no appreciation of the Catholic Church
from the inside. He seems to have made little effort to learn what the Catholic
Church says about itself or how Catholics answer the objections he makes. His
"inside information" comes from disaffected ex-priests such as Emmett McLoughlin
and L. H. Lehmann, or outright crackpots like the nineteenth-century
sensationalist Charles Chiniquy.

The bibliography lists more books by ex-Catholics with grudges than by Catholics.
Of the mere seven books he cites written by Catholics, one is an inspirational
text (by Archbishop Fulton Sheen), one concerns Catholic principles of politics (a
topic hardly touched on by Boettner), three are overviews of the Catholic faith
written for laymen (one dates from 1876), and the last is a one-volume abridgment
of Philip Hughes’s three-volume work, A History of the Church, from which Boettner
takes a few lines (out of context) because, in isolation, they look compromising.
These books are all fine in themselves, but refer to only a fraction of the topics
Boettner writes about, and none of them were written as a response to Protestant
arguments. On most issues he provides only a statement of the Fundamentalist
position, which he contrasts to a caricature of the Catholic position as set out
by one of the ex-priests he cites.

It may be that a man leaving one religion for another can write fairly, without
bitterness, about the one he left behind. John Henry Newman did so in his
autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. But some people have an urge to write about
their change of beliefs to vent their frustrations or justify their actions. Their
books should be read and used with discretion, and if they show signs of rancor or
bitterness, they shouldn’t be regarded as trustworthy, unbiased explanations of
the religion they abandoned. Alas, Boettner can’t keep away from such books. He
even uses works by the notorious anti-Catholic writer, Paul Blanshard, whose
writings were so contorted they were disavowed in the 1950s by other anti-
Catholics.

Do Your Homework First

When writing about his own faith, Boettner remarks that the Evangelical or
Fundamentalist position "came down through the ante-Nicene Fathers and Augustine,"
which suggests that he accepts as in some way authoritative Christian writings
prior to 430, the year of Augustine’s death. But Boettner shows virtually no
familiarity with the patristic writings of the first several centuries of the
Christian era. His book includes only six references to Augustine and nine to
Augustine’s contemporary, Jerome. There is one mention of Pope Gelasius I, who
lived a century later, and the next oldest writers cited are from the Middle Ages.

Boettner could have examined Patrology, Johannes Quasten’s four-volume work on the
writings of the early Church, composed in the decade before Roman Catholicism was
written; or Joseph Tixeront’s History of Dogmas, an older but standard Catholic
work on historical theology. Even a casual reading of these works would have
demonstrated to him that from the earliest years distinctive Catholic doctrines
were held and taught by the Church—belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the
Eucharist, baptismal regeneration, a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons,
the Mass as a sacrifice, the special authority of the bishop of Rome, prayers for
the dead—and he would have seen that the contrary Fundamentalist positions he
espouses are not supported. He thinks he knows what Augustine and the other
Fathers wrote, but he gives no impression that he is at all familiar with their
writings.

In the chapter on Mary he claims, "The phrase ‘Mother of God’ originated in the
Council of Ephesus, in the year 431." Boettner makes a score of blunders here.
Does he expect his readers to believe that the phrase "Mother of God" was never
used until the day it became a dogma? He presupposes that his readers trust him
with a blind obedience, never bothering to do the homework that he failed to do.

By suggesting that a doctrine is not taught until it is infallibly defined, one

could equally argue that no one believed that Jesus was God until the Council of
Nicaea defined the matter in 325. The divinity of Christ was taught centuries
before Nicaea, just as the phrase "Mother of God" permeated the writings of the
Church Fathers long before Ephesus. Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Cyril of
Jerusalem, Athanasius, Ambrose, Jerome, and numerous others took for granted that
Mary could rightly be given this title. Boettner curiously omits reference to
these, as they would decimate his argument.

In his introduction, Boettner boasts: "Let Protestants challenge Rome to full and
open debate regarding the distinctive doctrines that separate the two systems, and
it will be seen that the one thing Rome does not want is public discussion." The
curious thing is that many of the anti-Catholic groups that rely so heavily on
Boettner are unwilling to engage in public debates.

Many representatives of such groups will give talks at Fundamentalist churches to

stoke the fires of anti-Catholicism, and those in the audience will be sent to
stand outside Catholic churches and distribute tracts. But challenge any to a
debate and what happens? The people with the tracts will say they have to check
with their pastors. Besides, they say, they aren’t professional debaters and don’t
want to be set up. Their pastors refuse to sanction any public forums because they
say they "don’t see the need," or they worry about heat from their congregations
for consorting with papists. Is this the "full and open debate" Boettner calls
for?

Many Protestants—whether or not they realize how inaccurate and unscholarly

Boettner’s work is—look to Roman Catholicism for their arguments against the
Catholic Church. Catholics should prepare themselves for discussions with
Protestants by studying Scripture and Church history and by reading solid books on
apologetics. That way they will be prepared to heed Peter’s exhortation: "Always
be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope
that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence" (1 Pet. 3:15).

NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials

presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004

IMPRIMATUR: In accord with 1983 CIC 827

permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004