Just Like Us
A Protestant Quibble with Fr. Mankowski
by S. M. Hutchens
I have just read with immense satisfaction the late Fr. Paul Mankowski’s trenchant and scintillating blog contributions collected by Philip Lawler in Ignatius Press’s Diogenes Unveiled. At Touchstone, we have always regarded Fr. Paul as one of our guys, but I must say his remarks about Protestants draw blood. These days, we find ourselves all too typically vilified, especially among conservative Catholics like Cardinal Mueller, who use us as noisome examples of what Catholics are in danger of becoming in a collapse into liberalism, which might happen if they didn’t possess the Ultimate Immunity of being members of the one, true Church, in living communion with Pope Francis.
Such remarks are found in some abundance in Catholic publications, where it is less likely that we will overhear the hauteur and contempt, which ranges from snide digs to best wishes for a short stay in Purgatory, such as Joseph Pearce bestows on C. S. Lewis. Fr. Mankowski, for example, writes:
In the years following the [Second Vatican] Council many [Catholics] were enraptured by the image of the Protestant minister, seated on the lawn with a Bible open on her lap, reading and expounding God’s word in Pauline simplicity [women ministers might be the best example of people who cannot expound Paul simply]. By contrast, incense and Gothic vaulting and liturgy itself, seemed to them impure. . . .
Ouch. By that and similar accounts, there is no fundamental difference between Protestant liberals and those within Protestantism who have worked tirelessly to keep that uncatholic scenario from happening and who, like J. Gresham Machen (and myself), deny that there is any such thing as liberal “Christianity” any more than there are “gay Christians.” But why be too careful, when Protestants are by virtue of their protest against one or more Catholic beliefs heretics and schismatics to begin with, so that the theological difference between Billy Graham and Bishop Spong is merely one of degree.
But with a few words, the brilliant Fr. Mankowski blackens Protestants, here and elsewhere, with his potent brush, and makes us into the fools that he, at least technically, believes we are—which is especially surprising when he quotes C. S. Lewis, a firm and unapologetic Protestant, as theological authority on nearly every other page of this book.
There is, moreover, this: here he provides with horrid abundance reasons for being something other than a Catholic, for Protestants and Orthodox do not disagree on this Augustinian point:
The reliability of the teaching church is not contaminated by the perjury of her individual ministers. . . . the divine governance of the Church can coexist with appalling human frailty in her ministers.
If this were not so, there has never been a church on earth. What Fr. Mankowski furnishes, however, is very strong, first-hand proofs for his Diogenes that a church whose ministers fall in such significant numbers so far short of the constitutional requirements laid down for them in the Pastoral Epistles appears to lack sufficient evidence that it can, or ever could, make the absolute claims for itself that the Roman Church has for centuries, and must look outside itself for corroboration of what it believes—for the teaching ministry of the church.
The Protestant believer, when he reads what Fr. Mankowski writes here, does not necessarily need to conclude that the Catholic Church, as some of his old confessions hold, is the Whore of Babylon, the church of Anti-Christ, but, feeling the same weakness within himself, he may settle for the more modest and charitable opinion that the great congregation of Rome is another part of the visible Church, just like us.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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