Why zeal for false religious systems provokes the persecution of Catholics
Zeal for false religious systems—Pharisaic, Pagan, Protestant or Modernist—has always driven persecution of Catholics and the Church.
Zeal for false religious systems—Pharisaic, Pagan, Protestant or Modernist—has always driven persecution of Catholics and the Church.
Editor’s Notes
In the previous part, Fr. Coleridge explained how the persecution of the Church arises from five main sources:
Promptings of the devil
Jealousy and hostility of the temporal power
Public calamities blamed on Christians
Corruption and sensuality of mankind
Zeal for false religious systems.
This section deals with the last of these five.
Coleridge tells us:
How this zeal drives fierce and lasting opposition to the Church.
That even good men, like St. Paul, can persecute truth in the name of religion.
Why false systems hate the Church’s light, law, and witness to conscience.
Coleridge discusses the varying but similar effects of zeal for the Judaism of the Pharisees, Roman Paganism, and for Protestantism. We cannot help but notice the similarities between what he describes, and the zeal of many for the self-styled Conciliar/Synodal Church.
Today, Catholics who believe and worship as their forefathers can find themselves on the outside of this religious system; and few oppose them so fiercely as the partisans of this new Conciliar/Synodal Church. This is evident in various ways, from the suppressions of the traditional Roman rite of Mass, to the obnoxious treatment of those who have refused to embrace a new religion of sentimentality, naturalism and modernism.
And yet, as discussed in the introduction to Part I in this series, this opposition is itself a “quasi-mark” of where the truth lies—and it is not with the Conciliar/Synodalists.
Hatred of the World
Passiontide, Part III
Chapter III
St. John xv. 11-27.
Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
Why did Christ say his people 'hated both me and my Father'?
Why does Christ say the Holy Ghost 'shall bear testimony of Me'?
What are the forces that drive the persecution of the Church?
Why zeal for false religions provokes persecution of the Church
St Paul on the false creeds
The last cause of the hostility which has always waited on the faithful teachers of the Church from the Apostles downwards, is, as we are told by Toletus, the zeal of men for false religions and forms of worship.
The religion of our Lord was indeed the legitimate growth and development of the original revelation of God to mankind, and in that sense it was the oldest religion in the world. But it came into the world in the ‘fulness of time,’ as the Scripture says, not at the beginning, and it found mankind enslaved by a number of spurious systems of belief and worship which had sprung up in the intermediate ages in various parts of the world, and were then in full possession.
None of these false creeds or systems of life were without some shreds and fragments of ancient and traditional truth, but all of them, with the exception of the Jewish religion, had more or less hideously disfigured the portions of the original truth which they may have inherited, and they had overwhelmed those portions beneath a multitude of foul and degrading inventions, in which the Christian mind has no difficulty in tracing the handiwork of human passion and of diabolical hatred of God.
This may be what St. Paul speaks of as ‘detaining the truth of God in injustice.’1 Men were given over by the just anger of God to these false beliefs and rules of life, which were steeped in the lowest moral degradation, for their ingratitude and inexcusably wilful ignorance of Him, and of the truths concerning Him which were taught by the visible creation, which, as well as the primitive traditions of the race, witnessed continually to Him, while man was always conscious of the guiding voice of conscience within himself, which was a perpetual appeal to the sovereign judgment of God.
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