Writing About Protestants
A conservative Protestant, I am kept well-supplied by a Catholic friend with the literature of Catholic protest against the modernists who now infect his church in all its parts. Despite temptations to Schadenfreude against triumphal converts, I regard the plight of traditionalist Catholics sympathetically, for I have been where they are, and believe that in their part of Christendom they uphold the fundamental doctrines of the faith and the ethical imperatives that accompany it.
Unlike Protestants who see Catholicism as without remainder an anti-church and Catholics as false Christians, I believe a Catholic might be as much a Christian as a non-Catholic, just as a Catholic might think of a Protestant, although one must grant there are many of both tribes for which Dante could find a warm place. My attitude comes less from the liberality that accompanies “mere Christian” conviction than from what I have found from early youth, before I read C. S. Lewis, to be inescapable evidence of living faith among serious Catholics, so that if Catholics cannot be believers, neither can I. Lewis simply reinforced intuitions I had before I read him.
Roomism & Its Antithesis
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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