He would have some kind of point, considering the shape in which Catholicism is today.
Pope Michael I* (who never endorsed CCC and considered Wojtyla a formal schismatic, on top of already a heretic, since July 16 1990, that is before Wojtyla endorsed CCC) considered on one of his youtubes a Catholic in the Vatican II Sect as usually a displaced soul.
But he would not have as much of a point if we discussed Protestants and Catholics back in 1860. In Cologne, that year, a local Council reaffirmed Biblical creation of Adam and Eve in a formal resolution. But in Church of England, Bishop Wilberforce cannot get a condemnation of Darwinism, he can just polemise against it. As if he were just a writer, not a pastor. If you know 1260's and 70's some, you will know that St. Thomas Aquinas polemised against Averroism, as a writer, but Bishop Tempier condemned Averroism.
From the 1860's to 1880's French Catholicism was gliding from a preference for Six Literal Days to a preference for Day Age ... but never accepted an evolutionary origin of Adam, that only came way later, because of Teilhard de Chardin and his friends. Meanwhile, in the South of the US, it was not uncommon to hold that Adam was created way later than the first men on day VI, and that Adam wasn't ancestor to Black people. Perhaps not the Baptist thing, but I presume it was mostly Episcopalians there who held this.
So, historically, as a Young Earth Creationist, I do have a home in the Catholic Church.
Keaton Halley, however, knows this too well to make the kind of remarks I imagined in the title. Well, perhaps not the part of my adhering to Pope Michael I and now Michael II, rather than to Wojtyla, Ratzinger, Bergoglio and Prevost.
Now, Allie Beth Stuckey made a similar remark, but on the Abortion question. Here is a caption from** Politico:
White evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t initially care about abortion. They organized to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions — and only seized on banning abortion because it was more palatable than their real goal.
I disagree with the last part. Since then, banning abortion has become a real goal, I know there have been real celebrations, and racial segregation doesn't seem to be a real goal any more. But the first part is not fake news, it's not false history. Precisely as in 1830, it was easier to deny Six Recent Days and no Gap before that in the Church of England than in the Church of Rome.
Meeting in St. Louis in 1971, the messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 — a year after Roe — and again in 1976.
My mother was Evangelical at this time. But when we visited the US next year, like partly for me to start learning English, partly for mother to get me a few months out of European social services, especially Swedish ones, but also Austrian, which is where we were living at this time, she didn't go to Southern Baptists. We spent so much of my initial time as a Christian believer in one particular environment, the sect or if you prefer denomination "The Walk" ... unlike much of White Evangelicals at the time, my mother was already pro-life, and at the very least The Walk was not openly promoting this kind of position.
How were the Catholics at this point?
The history of that movement, however, is more complicated. White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue.
By 1973, not every Catholic was actually Catholic. If you rehearsed the tambourine to take it to a guitar mass, where everyone present pronounced the words of consecration, that's what some did to Catholic liturgy, when the actual text of the new liturgy wasn't enough. The family of one David Bawden (born in 1959, on Hobbit Day) was among those preferring to stay home and to find out where there was a Catholic priest disgraced for actually being faithful to the liturgy, and then get them to say the Mass in Latin.
Those who were actually Catholics, not always as radical as David Bawden's youth, sometimes even coinciding with the kind of "devoutly Protestant Catholics" I described, were the ones the Evangelicals back then considered as the main opponents of Roe v. Wade.
When I was 15, I was offered the opoportunity to join a "secret society" and given that Freemasonry is for adult men (except Zonta lodges), that would not have been a Lodge, it would probably have been sth like the De Molay's. I didn't feel it sat quite right, so, I decided to phone my mother about it.
Her words are worth noting.
No, Franco banned secret societies, and abortion was forbidden in Franco Spain.
Knowing her, and knowing the faith which I owed partly to her, I didn't need to ask if banning abortion was a good or a bad thing. If there is a downside to Dobbs, it's that it only allows states and doesn't oblige the union to ban abortion, and in Franco's Spain, abortion was banned all over Spain.
I did not become a De Molay. I did not become a Freemason. I do not intend to become a Freemason. I did become a Catholic, and the kind of Catholic who has, with or without reservations, a deepfelt admiration for Francisco Franco Bahamonde, por Gracias de Dios Caudillo de España.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Zita of Lucca
27.IV.2026
Lucae, in Tuscia, beatae Zitae*** Virginis, virtutum et miraculorum fama conspicuae.
* Own site: Welcome to the Vatican In Exile Website. POV of a non-adherent: Morn is Approaching
** The article is here:
The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth
By Randall Balmer | 05/10/2022 03:24 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480
*** I could obviously have taken St. Peter Canisius SJ as saint of the day, a Geocentric and YEC by the way, like St. Zita of Lucca, but I'm also very pro-Habsburg and she is patron saint of the last Emperor's widow.
