I grew up in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. When I was around 10 years old, that denomination went through a nasty dispute. As with most human disputes, it quickly expanded from the initial question, which in this case was the questioning of the mechanism by which God communicates to people through Scripture. Eventually a large number of people took the Protestant tack and left to start their own denomination. The oddity about this dispute was that it was the “moderates” that left, leaving the “conservatives” with the pre-existing institution.

Even so, there were some folks who thought the purge didn’t go far enough. They’d write things that boiled down to their own 19 points as to why your ostensibly conservative LCMS church would smell like sulfur and look like a handbasket because of the latest outrage – such as a seminary professor suggesting that the book of Jonah may have been a parable rather than a description of actual events.

Many of these prophets of gloom seemed to take delight in the idea that those who were wrong would be condemned. When they said “Many are called, but few are chosen”, they seemed equally happy for the damnation of their opponents as they were for their own (oh-so-certain) redemption. They described themselves as the truest of Protestants, and they were as they seemed duty-bound to denounce their own ecclesiastical authorities and light out on their own, as a “remnant” church.

That didn’t seem to fit with the picture of Jesus I saw in the gospels. That Jesus welcomed repentant sinners, even when to do so scandalized those who were conspicuously righteous. The Jesus of John chapter 3 talked of redemption as a gift for everyone and even rejected the notion of condemning “the world”.

Many years later I found myself in the Anglican church. I saw the institutional leadership of the U. S. Episcopal church running away from most of the historic moral teachings of Christianity. I started to explore the “continuing” Anglican groups. Again I saw some of that sense of delight at the thought that the misguided would eventually find themselves in eternal perdition. They claimed, as had the original Protestants, that their church had fallen into such apostasy that it was necessary to separate themselves from it for the sake of maintaining what they deemed to be the only pure doctrines and practices.

By the grace of God, today I find myself in the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Sadly, I see some people who have that same attitude I noted among the ardent Protestants. Now I’m less surprised by it than I had been, of course.

This bit of reflection is brought to you courtesy of Christopher Ferrara of The Remnant. Even the name of the publication conveys the basic idea. Here, though, the stakes are a bit different. Protesting from a Protestant background is intellectually congruent. Protesting that the entire hierarchy (or very near the entire hierarchy) of the divinely instituted Church has gone astray is the initiating act of Protestantism.

Ironically, the people who make themselves out to be the most faithful of all Catholics, by virtue of their fervor for what they perceive to be the true doctrine and practice of the pre-conciliar Church are by their actions separating themselves from that holy body founded by Christ Himself.

Our Church faces many pressing problems (as it always has and, so long as it is on this earth, it always will). May God grant us all the grace to contribute our efforts more to the solving of those problems than to their exacerbation.