There is a post on the Ignatius Press Blog this morning that I found confusing. Essentially they were discussing what to call protestants. The consensus seemed to be that it was appropriate to call them "fellow believers."
I converted from atheism and nihilism, and my conversion was very philosophical. I became convinced that either the divine Logos, the very principle of truth, existed and had descended and become one of us, and that this communication of the divine reason continued unabated, or we had no way to get out of our own heads.
My thinking went something like this: All the universe is a thought. Either our own, as the post-modernists would have it, or God's. If it's our own than there is no truth, there is no way out of the thought. If it is God's there is still no way to know what is true and what isn't unless God's thought and the world we perceive are one and the same. But we have no way of knowing this unless God affirms it. This happened in Christ. But if it was a one-time event, if the divine Logos descended and then re-ascended, we are again left in the same predicament: how can we know who Christ was, how can we know what parts of the universe as we perceive it are affirmed and what parts denied? If the incarnation was the whole story, are not we in the same epistemological fog as the generations before the incarnation?
My conclusion was that either the thought of God continued to directly affirm the existence of the world and of us as individuals in it or we could know nothing. But how could the affirmation of God touching the world be communicated to us without the problem of our own minds popping up again. How could the truth be communicated to us in a way that it defeated the sceptical argument? My answer was that the communication could not be verbal or symbolic or in anyway limited; it had to be total and to the entire person, it had to transcend the labels and categories of language and thought: in short there had to be a soul and grace that touched it, but this grace had to be communicated to us in a manner that reaffirmed the existence of the universe and our existence as distinct persons in it. I became convinced that the incarnation of the Divine Logos either bestows grace on us perpetually through the sacraments of the Catholic Church or the only philosophically consistent option was nihilism. I realize this may sound convoluted and unconvincing, and actually as I reconsider it I find much less necessary than I once had, and I have since learned to love and to pray and have developed a faith that views my previous ideas as somewhat adolescent. But nevertheless, to me Christianity continues to be, in its essence, a sacrament.
And so the assertion that protestants are fellow believers in confusing to me. It seems to me that protestantism most certainly denies “central mysteries” of the faith, namely the sacraments. The denial that the incarnational mission of Christ continues directly through the sacraments is no small departure or fine theological point. In his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, St. Thomas went so far as to assert that the establishment of the Eucharist and the priesthood that confects it was the reason for Christ's incarnation. To deny that God continues to touch man directly and materially and in a manner no way diminished from when he actually walked and died among us, in favor of a religion that understands man's relationship with God as being purely spiritual is, it seems to me, to revert to Judaism. The sacraments are not Catholic “bonuses” that are tacked on to the essentials of Christian faith and “separated” believers are rightly considered protestant to the extent that they deny the essential, sacramental nature of Christianity. This would suggest that the more protestant one is, the less Christian. But I’m no theologian; maybe I’m wrong. If so, could someone please explain to me my error.

When I was reflecting on the upcoming presidential election, and the pleading of many Republicans that conservatives and Christians be “reasonable,” I was reminded of something that Henri De Lubac, S.J., one of twentieth century’s greatest theologians, wrote:

"…He is not an extremist, nor a biased man. He is a wise man, fair. He is wary of all passion. Moreover, he has experience, he knows that in all matters there is wrong on both sides and that nothing is to be gained by looking too closely. He knows too that you have to live and that life is impossible without mutual concessions and a certain ‘happy medium.’ In all controversies he suffers at seeing two men ‘attacking one another.’ It is also one of his maxims that there is always a risk in running foul of any accepted opinion whatever. Therefore people often have recourse to his arbitration. Of two adversaries who take him to witness, if one says that two and two make five, and the other that they make four, he prudently inclines toward the middle solution: two and two, he suggests, more or less make four and a half." Henri De Lubac, S.J.

I am afraid that conservative Catholics have made some of the very same mistakes concerning American politics as did the liberals in the sixties and seventies. During the 60s and 70s, in their desire for peace and justice, many faithful Catholics, including the greater part of the episcopate, aligned themselves with the political left. The political left seemed to be allied with the Catholic Church in matters economic and political. In their alignment with the political the left, these Catholics allowed partisanship and loyalty to their “friends” to blind them to the fact that the philosophy of the left is diametrically opposed to the truths of Christianity—now the left has definitively shown it’s true colors: it hates Christianity and Christians. The Christian allies of the left have in recent years either stopped being Christian or drifted away from the left-- Just look what has happened with the bishops. Peace and Justice Christians who are serious about their Christianity are only now beginning to realize what a terrible mistake they made when they threw in with the progressive crowd—but it’s too late. The damage has been done. The Church is on the verge of demographic collapse and general persecution. I’m afraid the conservatives in the Church are making the same mistake with the political right. Free-market capitalism, majority-rule government, the spread of Enlightenment ideology—these things are not Catholic. It pains me to see Catholics embracing American nationalism, and talking about protecting “American culture” as if the pornography, moral relativism, individualism, and greed that our culture mass produces and exports all over the world are things worth defending. We can already see that the so-called neo-cons are annoyed with the religious hang-ups of their allies in the Church. The conservatives in the Church who think they have made a home in the Republican Party are going to be in for a surprise similar to that the liberal Catholics in the Democratic Party have experienced, when their children, raised to defend American bigotry, capitalism, and war, decide that the Catholic Church is not where they belong. They will either leave the Church and become non-denominational individualists, or they will become secular Wall-Street conservatives, or neo-con hawks.
We need to hunker down, regroup, learn from our mistakes, and start to re-evangelize. We need to realize that the world, has rejected Christ, and the world will reject us. We can have no home in American politics.