My Ongoing Slow Motion Conversion to Catholicism

Well, I seem to have entirely lost the thread here. Which is not surprising. Things just don't cohere anymore. Any effort at extended concentration is a defeat from the outset. Compounding the aforementioned complications is the fact that I tend to change my mind about things pretty much day to day.

So I'll just start again.

There has long been a serious view expressed among Catholic historians that Martin Luther made a big mistake in encouraging a separation from the Catholic church, rather than taking up his objections with the authorities and working toward reforming the church from within.

To me, this seems rather callow. Either that, or intentionally obtuse. Given the corruption at the heart of the Catholic church at the time, and the love of money at the heart of the corruption, it hardly seems likely that the powers that existed would have been amenable to a friendly tea and exchange of ideas with Luther. More likely they would have boiled him in tea.

As the Catholics see it, the sins of separation are apparent, now more than ever, as manifest in the resulting confusion of Protestant denominations, the fragmenting of the one faith, the divergence of doctrine and practice.

And I agree.

Protestants, having left the mother church, then proceeded to fracture within their own faith, dividing again and again, becoming this and that and the other subset, each possessing, of course, the truth.

Is has been said often enough that this was the devils plan for the overthrow of Christ's church on earth.

Is that right?

I wonder why, then, the devil was not happy with the shambles that had already existed in the form of the Catholic church before Luther? Herein, as it seems to me, was a pretty thorough corruption of the body that had been intended by Christ--a magnificent vessel of greed, robbery, violence, war, persecution, intolerance, and deceit masquerading as the house of God--certainly not an accident, no, but a careful calculation of the powerful corrupt.

This, therefore, is the sin of the Catholic church--that it caused the very rebellion that it came to bemoan.

Why the devil? And how can the devil work other than through men? We do not possess what is holy, but rather are possessed, and the Spirit will ever seek his own.