The Catholic View of Church Federation
By L. A. S.
A ROMAN CATHOLIC view of the movement for federation which has sprung up in the Protestant churches, is given in a recent issue of the Catholic Mirror. The writer speaks in a sympathetic way of the desire for union which gave rise to the movement, and quotes a number of Scripture texts showing the fundamental importance of unity in the Christian church, but passes from this to the unscriptural and papal idea that Christian unity is to be secured by submission to human authority. He notes clearly, however, the difference between real unity and the federation which has been inaugurated. He says:— The different Protestant sects are trying to unite by suppressing or ignoring differences of doctrine, and by making prominent their common professions of conduct and charity. For a long time they have been preparing for such a union by either giving up definite beliefs or ceasing to ascribe any importance to them. Union on such lines will hardly result in much more than we already have. It will be a little more comprehensive Y. M. C. A., taking in old men and boys and all women. It will be a benevolent association, such as the United Charities. It will be a union whose creed will affirm the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and perhaps the divinity of Christ, but no member will dare to tell us what these terms mean. Such a union, too, will not produce the good effects that are so prominent in the proposals. Any Protestant who may have thought that Rome would at this day consent to any other basis of union than that which she has put forward in the past—that of full submission to the papal see—would have his impressions corrected by noting the statements of this spokesman of the Roman Church. “The road that leads to union,” he says, “is one that goes back to where disunion began, back to authority and obedience to authority.” “Christ’s way of union is the way of obedience to the voice of authority. Schismatics and heretics, all who bear the name of Christian, once heard that voice. They fell away from unity by disobedience. They will come back to unity by obedience.” “Private judgment is strongly entrenched in the Protestant mind. It must be given up if there is a real desire for union. . . . Submission to authority is the opposite of private judgment.” “Let us, then, have a union of Christian churches through . . . complete submission to the living voice of Christ speaking in the one true church.” All Protestants, so called, who desire to include the Catholic Church in their scheme of church union, may know from recent utterances of representative Catholics upon just what ground Rome will be willing to unite with Protestant “schismatics and heretics.” It is not the Scriptural ground of the “unity of the faith,” in which the Word of God is supreme and the human mind submits to that Word as interpreted by the Holy Spirit, but the old pre-Reformation ground of the submission of men to the will and authority of their fellow mortals who have set themselves in the place of God in the church,—a submission in which union is secured by the surrender of soul liberty, and spiritual and mental death produce a quiescence which is heralded as Christian unity. The issue is between the Word of God and the word of man, and true Protestantism upholds the Word of God as the supreme and only spiritual authority, and the Holy Spirit as the divinely appointed interpreter of the Christian faith. It declares that the authority of the church is not independent of the Word of God, but is only the authority of that Word as proclaimed to men by the church.