Chapter 15 of the book Talking with My Evangelical Friends by José Miguel Arráiz
Miguel: Joseph, I still doubt the reason why you don’t think that is possible that the Catholic Church has become corrupted.
Pauline: Me too.
Joseph: This is definitely a very interesting topic for me because there was a point of my life when I really considered that hypothesis and there were two important things that caught my attention.
Miguel: What things?
Joseph: I was able to see that the Catholic Church has many detractors and among them there are two big groups that stand out from the others and that accuse it precisely of the opposite thing.
Pauline: Really? How is that?
Joseph: On one hand, there are those who say that the problem of the Catholic Church is that it doesn’t change, it doesn’t have the ability to adapt to the times, because even when it can modify some external elements, it remains substantially the same. They constantly complain that the Church continues to reject certain things that the world has already accepted, such as abortion, euthanasia, dissolution of marriage, female priesthood, sex before marriage, gay marriage, etc. I identify them as “modernist” or “progressive” current and people of almost any ideology can be found in this group: non-Catholic Christians, atheists, agnostics and even people who call themselves Catholics, but who either don’t know their faith or they don’t profess it.
On the other hand, there are those who think that the problem is precisely the opposite, that the Church changes and has changed throughout history in becoming corrupt and pagan because of its contact with other cultures. Among these people, I have found mostly non-Catholic Christians of protestant ideology.
If I was honest, I consider that the people of the first group I mentioned is correct when they say that the Church doesn’t substantially change, but they have the problem of being affected by relativism. They assume that nothing is universally true or false, but that it depends on the eye of the beholder. When it comes to faith and morality, a true Christian can never think in that way because the Christian Revelation is eternal. Jesus said it very clearly: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” (Matt 24,35) What is objectively morally wrong today will also be morally wrong tomorrow: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isa 5, 20).
Unfortunately, I have seen how many non-Catholic Christian denominations have changed their moral values and have come to accept aberrations such as abortion1, euthanasia, gay marriage2 and other things that could never be on the mind of protestant reformers3.
Miguel: In my Church, we strongly reject these things, but what happens is that these denominations are not really Christian or evangelical.
Pauline: In my Church, we don’t accept any of that either, at least we agree on that.
Joseph: I know because you are not precisely among those who criticize the Church because it changes, but you do think like the second group, that the Church has changed and has become paganized. I don’t think so, because as I said in our last conversation, I don’t think that there has been a substantial change but a development of the Christian doctrine.
Now, I have come to this conclusion through two avenues of study: the biblical way and the historical way.
Miguel: I’m interested especially in the biblical way.
Joseph: Of course, and at another time we can discuss it.
Miguel: With pleasure.
Pauline: See you then.
Footnotes
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In the matter of abortion, the Protestant Churches are divided. In 1968, the Baptist Convention of America issued a verdict where it was argued that abortion should be a problem dependent on a personal decision. They asked for legislation that would allow abortion before the end of the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and also a mitigation of the laws to allow it later for these causes: danger of death for the mother, defects in the fetus, pregnancy for rape or incest.
Currently, the Lutheran Church ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) openly accepts the abortion for almost any cause, while the Lutheran Church LCMS (Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod) condemns it. The same thing happens in many other evangelical denominations (Methodists, Presbyterians, Waldensians, etc.), some of them accept abortion and other don’t. Fortunately, most non-Catholic Christian denominations still reject it. Most of the Church’s detractors when it comes to the abortion case recognize that “the strongest position against abortion and contraception is maintained by the Pro-Life organization, whose leaders come primarily from the Catholic Church. According to them, life begins at the moment of conception and therefore the fetus is worthy of rights and protection. For these groups, an important goal is to reverse or stop the laws that legalize abortion” (Rafael Castillo Vargas, Article: Position of the different religions on the subject of abortion and contraception, Ilustrados.com).
- Regarding homosexual relationships, the Episcopal Church (a branch of the Anglicanism) was the first to have an openly gay bishop that lived with his partner, and currently the Anglican Church has accepted gay marriage. The same thing has happened with several Lutheran evangelical denominations, such as the Lutheran Church of Sweden that in 2009 began to celebrate homosexual marriages. In that same year, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America approved that gays and lesbians could accede to the pastorate and Spain inaugurated its first evangelical church. The next year, it was approved that the evangelical gay pastors of Bavaria could live with their partners according to an absolute majority agreement of the synod of this Church. Currently, not only in countries such as the United States, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, the marriage and ordination of homosexuals among evangelicals is already common but also in Latin America, it has begun to occur. The United Evangelical Lutheran Church (IELU) of Argentina has recently accepted blessing the homosexual relationships of men and women couples and has proposed that other evangelical churches in Uruguay to do the same thing.
- The reformer John Calvin categorically rejected abortion as an abominable crime: “If a woman expels the fetus from the uterus by means of drugs, she commits a crime considered to be inexpiable with reason” (Calvino,Opera quae supersunt omnia , Brunsvigae, 1863-1900, XXII, 495).