The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1902-08-16

of England, Charles le Mauvais, and
Pedro the Cruel, were not obedient, but
most disobedient, sons of the church,
Professionals before Luther, who made
war on her and incurred her anathema.
They oppressed her and their subjects
in spite of reclamations. AS a general
rule, the civil authority, even in Cath
Ole states, has always been jealous of
the ecclesiastic authority, and restrict
ed as much as it could it's free and full
exercise"
Dick, apparently not satisfied with
his uncle's explanation, puts the in
quiry which begins this weeks INSTALL
ment Of the conversational
CONVERSATION V-(Concluded)
But you evade the point of my OBJ
lection, Uncle Jack. If your church
be what she processes to be, how hap
pens it that there are SO many wicked
princes and other persons in her bos
ON? Why did she not reform them,
make them good and docile Catholics?
| admit all you say; but these very
persons to whom you charge all the
evils l find recorded in the history of
Catholic nations had all beep baptized
and brought up as Catholics 1 do not
deny, but assert their wickedness. My
difficulty is, how, if the church be as
powerful for good as she pretends, and
affords all the helps needed to virtue,
they could be so wicked. I have read
your Catholic histories of the reform
ers. According to these histories the
reformers were a set of as great ras-
Gals as ever lived, and 1 have no doubt
of the fact. / think that you fully
prove it. But this relieves not the diff
ficulty. The more wicked and unprin-
cipled you prove them, the more to
my mind you prove against the church,
the more completely you establish her
inefficiency, her inability to effect what
is avowedly her purpose. These re-
formers had all been reared in her
bosom; they had all, according to you,
been regenerated in baptism, had been
born again, received the gift of faith,
the grace of the sacraments, and been
elevated to the plane of a supernatural
destiny They had received all your
church had to give. How, then, if she
is able to fulfill all her magnificent
promises, could such a set of men
come out of her communion, or pos
sibly become so grossly depraved as
they most undeniably were before they
openly abandoned her? Here is my
difficulty which you do not meet. Is
not the existence of such men, of such
men as Achilles and the Gavazzis, in
the bosom of your church a practical
refutation of her claims?"
"I understand from the outset your
difficulty, or the point of your OBJ
lection, my dear Dick, and had no in
tention of evading it. The objection,
though fatal to Professionalism as re-
ligion, is in the non Catholic mind,
practically the grayest objection to the
church that can be urged and I well
recollect that 1 found it, after having
rejected Professionalism, the greatest
and last obstacle in my own mind to
be overcome in embracing the church.
I had lived as man of the world, as
a non-Catholic man of the world, not
infreuuently lives, and strayed far
from the path of virtue, and fallen lar
lower than / care to state. | tried to
recover myself, but L found myself too
weak. I was sinking, and I had no
strength to arrest my fall. I wanted
help. something to breathe life into my
soul, give strength to my soul, give
strength to my will, and light to my
understanding. The church proffered
me this help, and told me that in her
sacraments, which were the channels
of grace, 1 would find precisely what
T wanted. But could l trust her? Ii
she communicates through her sacra-
ments. the graees she alleges, how
comes that so many that have received
these graces have lost their faith and
virtue, and become the vilest and most
abandoned of the race, as apostate
Catholics usually are? These undenia-
bIy wicked men who have been reared
in the bosom of the church, who must
have approached her sacraments, and,
therefore. received all needful super
natural help, if such helps the church
has to give, were to me long time
real stumbling block, for their exist
ence seemed to me an unansWeraDle
proof that the church does not and
cannot give the assistance which
needed and which she promises. But
became able finally to understand
that nv objection grew out of her
Protestant and Puritan education.
which had taught me that grace is ir-
resistible and inadmissiable. Your diff
ficultv is, given the church as me-
dunn of supernatural grace, Which SUI
pernaturalizes and sanctifies, how can
one of her members fall away, or lapse
into iniuuity and unbelief? Or how
can one baptized and reared in the
bosom of the church ever be a bad
catholic and a bad man? The answer
is easy. Man was created and intend
ed to be free moral agent, and khe
church was never intended to take
away his free agency, or TO deprive
him of his free will. Man in the
church as out of her, retains hin free
will. and therefore the faculty OF obey
ing or disobeying, as he elects. This
free will the church respects, and,
therefore. whatever assistance she
renders. it must be assistance which
| is compatible with it. She can aid,
but not compel, the power of resist
ance is always retained by the Cath
olic. Consequently, the question, How
can there be a bad Catholic? is not
other than the question, How can
! there be a bad man or a sinner at all ?
There is then no special difficulty in
| the case. There is only the general
| difficulty with regard to the origin of
| evil. which we have already considered
and disposed of.
You do not really see this, because,
having been reared Protestant, you
| have no conception of grace that does
not operate irresistibly, or of grace
that aids and assists free will without
| s11perseding it. Sufficient grace that
| is inefficacious strikes you as an alb
surdity. and you relish Voltaire's ridi-
| Guile of it. But grace can always be re-
| sisted. To concur with grace, indeed,
| demands grace, but to resist grace does
not. We are always competent to do
! that of ourselves alone. The grace that
! we receive in baptism imparts to us
the habit of faith and justice or sane
1 tity, but the habit is not the act, either
1 of faith or justice. 1t gives us, as a
faith, the power to elicit the act, OF
actually to believe what God has re-