Introduction:

  False Black Legends and Real Catholic Failures
 

          The following pages contain a set of reflections on the History of Catholicism, based upon lectures given for the Roman Forum at Lake Garda in Italy between 1993 and 2004. Like the talks from which they emerged, these reflections are rooted in the conviction that the essential issues and fundamental difficulties of Catholic History can only properly be grasped with reference to the irrepressible, unending and ever more global war that the birth and growth of the Catholic Faith has provoked.

What, exactly, is the nature of this war? As various nineteenth century Catholic apologists were perhaps the first clearly to note, it is a conflict waged by those who fully accept the Way, the Truth and the Life brought into the world through the Incarnation against others who furiously reject it. That clash is rendered inevitable and permanent primarily due to the existence of the Mystical Body of Christ---the Church---as an organized, active agent of the Incarnation and its message. For the Church is a force which has proven to be a powerful, effective, rage-provoking “sign of contradiction” to all the many opponents of Christ.

Basic Church power and effectiveness come from the fact that practicing Catholics understand their need to struggle for individual salvation through her living, authoritative reality, which continues Christ’s presence and work upon the earth. But the Church’s especially provocative potential varies in proportion to the seriousness of her commitment to the two most significant goals of the Incarnation. One of these aims is the supernatural correction of sinful men and the flawed natural order in which social beings of flesh and blood must live. The other involves an infinitely more conscious, profound, wholehearted dedication of both man and nature to the exalted task of giving glory to the God who created them; a sacralization of the entirety of Creation; a transformation of all things in Christ.

When the Church intensifies examination of the significance of the Incarnation, she more vigorously proclaims the fact that her supernatural, mystery-steeped, God-centered Faith, which is primarily focused on the work of salvation, nevertheless also works to perfect the whole of nature. The fully conscious Bride of Christ more exuberantly rejoices in the truth that Catholicism puts all the diversity and riches of the universe at the service of individual persons; that it enables them to obtain everything that life offers temporally, upon the earth, to the greatest degree that its mortal, dependent character permits; and that in sacralizing an incomplete nature she aids rather than hinders men in sharpening their yearning and skills in laboring for a complete, eternal life with God in Heaven.

Increased celebration of the treasures of the Catholic path is then accompanied by a much more firm assertion of the fraud and uselessness of any determinedly anti-incarnational message. That message, represented most clearly in modern times by a man-centered naturalism, is shown to cheat and diminish the individual. Naturalism is condemned for accepting the earthly status quo marred by sin as though it provided a self-evident, “practical” guide to life; for thus putting men to sleep regarding the complete potential and multiform character of the universe that God intended individuals to inhabit and enjoy. Closed to transformation in Christ, naturalism---along with all the other anti-incarnational visions taught throughout the ages---ends not only by shutting off the human person from a proper use of Creation helpful in obtaining eternal life, but also by encouraging the individual to embrace earthly “goods” which unfailingly turn out to be peripheral, ephemeral, or utterly meaningless and repulsive shadows.

A sleeping, inactive Church is already an irritant to the supporters of the natural status quo. After all, even such a half-dead body still suggests the possibility of an alternative to the guidelines for human existence that they wish to remain totally unquestioned. A truly awakened, militant Bride of Christ, however, is a much more threatening phenomenon. A force of this kind must inevitably be viewed by the defenders of nature “as is” as an intolerable assault on the good life. Thus it is logical that they feel the call to meet an active Catholic challenge by unleashing a total war to eradicate this intrusive and unnatural monster, or, failing that, to subvert and radically dilute the Church’s discernible, “depraved” sociological influence.

Mars has not been friendly to the Church and to Catholics, at least not in recent centuries. All the strong points on the battlefields of this endless conflict seem to lie in the hands of their well-outfitted opponents. Much of the explanation for the enemy’s overwhelming strategic advantage can be found in two factors: the character of the arms that he carries into the fray, and the unwillingness of Catholics both to open their eyes to the weak points in their own line of defense as well as to employ many of the most powerful weapons at their own disposal.

The best of the arms shouldered by the anti-incarnational enemy are not the ones that directly draw blood. For, potent as the swords and guns aimed against the Church throughout the ages have been, such weapons pale in long-term effectiveness next to the damage which has been inflicted through written and spoken words. I am referring here to the words shaped by gifted enemy rhetoricians into “Black Legends” aimed against the  Mystical Body of Christ and Catholics. So important is the broad role of these Black Legends and their rhetorical manipulators in the union of imposing elements battling the Faith through the centuries that the entire clash of the opponents and supporters of Catholic Christianity can legitimately be discussed as this book treats it: as a War of the Words Against the Word.

Strictly speaking, the term “Black Legend” refers to the complex of stories invented in sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch, English and German circles to defame the Spanish Hapsburgs in general and King Philip II in particular. I am employing it in a much wider sense here, to indicate the entire body of myth-like tales that has been used throughout the ages to attack the Catholic Faith and Catholic believers. This arsenal of rhetorically effective cannon balls already began to be assembled in pre-Christian times, in the midst of the battles of the Sophists against the Socratics. It was augmented, bit-by-bit, even through the seemingly most Christian of centuries. Modern naturalism ultimately filled it to repletion in the period stretching from the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 down to the present. Different cannon ball varieties---and there are a truly extraordinary number of them--will be investigated in depth in the following chapters. My task at the moment is briefly to introduce them by noting that they all fall neatly into two categories. For the Black Legends basically attack the Church and Catholics under the continuously intersecting charges of being either the enemies of God or the enemies of man.

How can the Mystical Body of Christ and the followers of the Incarnate Word be condemned as enemies of God? Opponents of Catholic Christianity have found multiple ways of fostering this accusation, though its varied elements can change, disappear entirely and re-emerge unexpectedly from any given period to the next. One segment of the overall indictment can frequently even stand in total contradiction to another. The Church and Catholics are often accused of blasphemy for inventing a single, universally valid, absolute, willful “god” riding roughshod over the true divinity---an impersonal “something” which manifests itself in the predictable laws of nature and the richness of natural phenomena. But Catholic blasphemy is also simultaneously attacked the other way round, as the product of a Blitzkrieg waged by the apostles of one all too specific, parochial divinity from a Near Eastern backwater; an act of aggression which has the impious “atheistic” consequence of abolishing the many valid gods and ritual practices of the other peoples and cities of the globe.

These anti-Catholic complaints slide easily into the related one of a blasphemy stemming from stubborn refusal to learn what really can and needs to be known about the “true” God. Catholic failure here is attributed either to a rejection of the hunt for God in that natural realm which alone can speak of His character, or, conversely, to the crime of actually finding Him in the earthly sphere---in a flesh and blood Jewish man from the first imperial Roman century, worship of whom diverts them from consideration of the totally spiritual and  “hidden” character of the truly divine. Furthermore, Catholics are said to mock God and cheapen his majesty through a nearsighted, parochial, dull-witted effort to imprison things godly in neat and petty dogmatic packages---but, interestingly and contradictorily enough, also in an unprecedented, revolutionary, Promethean storming of the Heavens; an outrageous attempt to allow fetid human hands to touch ineffable wisdom.

Finally, there are Christian-sounding envelopes into which the attack on the blasphemous Catholic Beast is stuffed as well. Here, the Church can often be found reviled as an overbearing, demonic Antichrist radically complicating true, simple, gospel religion. On the other hand, she may be seen to be condemned for the exact opposite offense, that of all too consistently and faithfully proclaiming the evangelical message. Her crime under these latter circumstances is that of preaching what is identified as an hopelessly literalist vision of things divine, encouraging a childlike naiveté and resignation. This then allows hypocritical strong men to pursue their cynical projects under the pious cover of God’s name.

What about denunciation as the enemy of man? Such censure can also take two separate forms, depending upon whether Catholic Christianity is chastised as being either too positive in its view of nature’s potential or not enthusiastic enough about what can be done with certain of the tools that the universe places at man’s service. The former critique may take on a spiritual flavor, one that laments the Church’s guidance of believers to their everlasting damnation by permitting them to think that they can work out their salvation in an intrinsically irredeemable natural cosmos. That world, for such commentators, is merely a jungle of total depravity guided by a war of all against all, whose degraded laws the “physical” man is doomed to follow, but cannot under any circumstances seek to reconcile with anything spiritual and good.

The latter reprimand, shaped by more hopeful observers of the universe, maintains that Catholicism’s Revelation-and-Grace-rooted efforts to correct and transform all things in Christ are horribly insulting and destructive to the natural realm’s integrity and dignity. For some such thinkers, Catholic visions of supernatural interference harm man by depriving him of the only channels for beneficial divine influence that he indeed does have at his disposal on this earth---those which come through institutions like the State or the powerful voice of inner human “feeling”, whose revelatory competence believers dangerously underestimate. For others, the Catholic outlook cripples man by cutting him off from the precise, measurable progress emerging out of purely secular, scientific studies, stripped of all such divine concerns. It dooms him by replacing the hunt for real wisdom with a superstitious, magical and ultimately insane pilgrimage to an unknowable or non-existent supernatural perfection.

Depending upon which of these two approaches is emphasized, the Church and Catholics are anathematized as the opponents of everything of value to human beings: a palpable sense of fulfillment, social peace, the fraternity offered in rich and diverse ways by different peoples in diverse cultures, freedom, the intellect, creativity and economic development. Catholicism, in short, is the enemy of life and of all attempts to enjoy that power over existence which determinedly “practical” men are said to be definitely capable of exercising--- if only they would listen to the clear voice of nature around and inside them.

Such critical logoi have marched into battle against the message of the Incarnate Logos from crisis to crisis and from age to age throughout the history of Christianity, with no final settlement of their quarrel ever being reached. Even at the apparent nadir of their anti-Catholic fortunes, the Black Legends have always maintained a basic strength and potential for vigorous counterattack.  Unfortunately, their periodic successes in the past, and their continuous and ever more widespread victories in modern times, are to a large degree due to the very great credibility the lies they perpetrate seem to possess.

One crucial reason for this credibility is the extremely clever manner in which the Black Legends are presented: simultaneously high-minded and grand in scope while starkly simple and popular in form. High-minded grandeur is achieved by “seizing images” evoking the nobility of an anti-incarnational spirit contested tooth-and-nail by the base and wicked Catholic enemy; gripping, magnificent images of enduring significance, such as the Struggle for Freedom and Dignity against Catholic Slavery and Human Self-Debasement. Simplicity is added to grandeur by incarnating this eschatological battle of obvious good versus palpable evil in easily-recognizable and contrasting stereotypes: e.g., noble, persecuted, naturalist philosophers and scientists or crusading journalists and freedom fighters on the one hand; stupid, obscurantist, often insane, conspiratorial, tyrannical, persecuting popes, priests, monks, mother superiors, mystics, scholastics and all their lay slaves or cynical masters on the other. Popularity is then pursued by promotion of the grand, seized image, incarnated in simplistic, embattled stereotypes through a mixture of demonstrably appealing tools: in song, novels and pamphlets; on stage; in rabble-rousing, press-guided causes célèbres; through the bons mots of upper class salons translated by their influential habitués into grounds for dealing decisive socio-political blows against the Catholic Sect; by means of a brutal ridicule which avoids substantive argument the more that it hammers the believer into the dirt. Points are even effectively scored and high-minded lessons popularly taught through a selective silence, which subtly shows that Catholics and Catholicism are not to be mentioned by rational men when topics of political or social importance are under serious discussion.

 Responses to Black Legends constructed in this fashion are terribly tedious and time-consuming. After all, the meaning of familiar words which teach the wisdom and goodness of the enemy and the idiocy and evil of Catholics have themselves been consistently seized and battered into acceptable shape along with the particular image which the mythmakers have embraced. Catholics entering the fray after the damage has been done find that they need to convince the population to reexamine the way in which each and every term has been defined by their enemies in order to uncover the game that they are playing. The public’s mind already has been molded according to the anti-incarnational spirit, and thus takes the existing, anti-Catholic meaning of words like “freedom”, “dignity” and “love” for granted as being the absolutely obvious dictate of common sense.

If one argues that any given “seized image” is founded upon historical inaccuracies, its artisans may well claim that it is not the literal meaning of a specific event which ultimately counts, but the absolutely valid Mission Statement which the rhetorically-reconstructed historical pictures embody. After all, only obscurantists would adore all the particulars of a dead past! If the Catholic apologist still refuses to surrender, and boldly attacks the fundamental truth of that Mission Statement, its “real” historical foundation will be reasserted and ennobled. Rational refutation of the veracity of both the Mission Statement as well as its historical reference points will once again be buried under heaps of familiar, dubious, exaggerated, stereotypical illustrations of Catholic stupidity and brutality of proven popular appeal. Even men and women without firm views on the issues in question will be entertained by the dramatic “historical” wrapping in which the Black Legends are presented, and pass by their scholarly denial with a deep and drawn-out yawn. They will instinctively draw from the legendary well whenever called upon to make some passing comment on historic or contemporary Catholic thought and activity.

Moreover, seized images and their Mission Statements, caricatures and the popular tools used to drive them home, all have an accordion-like flexibility. They can readily be changed, based upon what temporarily works most effectively against the hated Catholic enemy. By the time believers finally realize how historically and intellectually false one particular assault upon them is; at the moment they understand the exact way in which Catholics are stereotyped through caricatures cleverly disseminated; just when they discover a workable means of popularly and successfully answering (and ridiculing) their opponents themselves, the seized image and the Mission Statement its stereotypes embody are changed: sometimes slightly, sometimes drastically. Catholics are then left to direct their artillery against a fortress which their enemies have completely dismantled and abandoned.

Thus, to take but one example, while the faithful, armed with painstakingly accumulated historical, philosophical and theological proofs, all finally packaged in an effective rhetorical envelope, advance to fight the repeated charge that they are enemies of technology, the myth makers will have radically altered their tune. Now they will dedicate themselves to demonstrating that Catholics are actually the main cheerleaders for applied science’s ruthless, technologically advanced rape of the natural environment. As Catholics lag behind clumsily to lay siege to the empty enemy citadel of technological progress, the artisans of the Black Legends will have calmly constructed a new environmentalist one on different terrain. In fact, they will, by now, have denied all memory of ever having defended technology at all. They will have now begun chastising their obscurantist opponents for yet another manifestation of that psychological immaturity which prevents them from achieving “closure” on any given matter and “moving on” to deal with “fresh, contemporary problems”.

From a Catholic standpoint, the success of all these maneuvering can be said to reflect the strange but demonstrable appeal of sin to human beings, all of whom possess a free will highly susceptible to a rhetorical call of the wild. This ultimately inexplicable “mystery of iniquity” guarantees that men are sorely tempted to consider the truly rational and the good to be pointless and insipid, while ignorance, lies, and downright filth are welcomed as wise, valuable, beautiful and almost irresistibly attractive. Through the influence of the mystery of iniquity, serious refutations of the lies of the Black Legends and demonstrations of the miserable results of their fraudulent alternatives to the Faith are deeply suspected of being nothing other than obvious, reprehensible, ecclesiastical propaganda. Under its hideous aegis, bewitched populations are regularly led to reject the mythmakers’ responsibility for evils that can easily be attributed to them, and with ever greater vehemence the more patent and blameworthy their role and the disasters they perpetrate actually become! Due to the mystery of iniquity, whole nations open themselves happily to new and still more dubious explanations of why human woes are actually caused not by the true villains behind them, but by the Word, His message, His Church and Catholics in general.

But there is a second explanation for the successes enjoyed by the supporters of the Black Legends which is an infinitely more distressing one: the Catholic contribution to their triumph. The very many factors entering into this strange assistance which believers give to their enemies’ cause will be explored in painful detail in the following chapters, all of them dedicated to uncovering the complexity of the Truth refuting the legendary record. At the moment, I should like merely to introduce a discussion of this suicidal aid to the victory of the Reign of Myth with reference to the extremely serious problem of the neglect of history.

Such neglect is a widespread modern disease, especially in countries that pride themselves on their “newness”, like the United States. That illness has badly infected Catholics as well, many of whom treat study of the Church’s past as something positively frightening and intrinsically dangerous. Rather than viewing the complete record of an historically grounded Faith as a jewel-box filled with invaluable treasures, they are sometimes so repelled by it as consciously to build a thick wall between themselves and all profound consultation of the entirety of their own tradition. Construction of this wall has had disastrous repercussions on their ability effectively to fend off the assault of the Black Legends. It is a wall to which militant Catholics can come only to wail over the loss of past glories.

Catholic nervousness regarding history is partly due to terror over potential side effects of exposure to the sheer volume of historical data chronicling human errors and stupidities, as well as the endlessly insane reactions to them from age to age. All that that historical data appears to do is to offer infinite nuances and caveats unacceptably diverting minds away from the clear supernatural truths taught by the Word active in time. Moreover, it also seems capable of creating a sense of existential pointlessness, depicting life as a peculiar Hegelian dialectic of twisted idiotic theses, antitheses and syntheses, with no sure exit from its dead end of false alternatives visible on the horizon. If nothing else, a visit to Data Mountain can look like an enormous waste of time better spent on the study of pure theology. Why, for example, bother to rummage through the experiences and developing ideas even of the Fathers of the Church, whose path to truth was filled with the inevitable potholes accompanying all groundbreaking work? Are not the polished dogmatic treatises of the great systems of the medieval scholastics who inherited the Fathers’ achievements, but purged of all their errors, immeasurably superior?

Then, again, many Catholics have also turned against history because of the influence of historicism. Historicism can be attacked on similar grounds as data mongering, for its unacceptable introduction of the principles of endless flux and changeability into our appreciation of the unchanging God and His purposeful Providence. Historicism naturalizes and perverts all theological and philosophical efforts to reach the unquestionable, bedrock meaning of life, and in a much more open fashion than mere data grubbing. Why open an examination into something such as the development of eucharistic worship when historicists would only use it to feed the impression that the doctrine of the Real Presence emerged through a process of natural evolution rather than from a meditation upon a direct teaching by the God-Man?

Far be it from me to downplay all the potential perils of my own discipline. Historical data-peddlers who calmly bark out their giddy little catalogues of seemingly pointless human stupidities, oblivious to the deep feeling of futility and ultimate meaninglessness this anecdotal chatter may evoke in their hearers, do indeed exist. I am myself quite conscious of a personal professional temptation to indulge in blithe, data-rich recitations of the errors, sins and madness of clergy and laity which do not disturb my cocktail hour, much less my Faith, even as they send some of my historophobe Catholic comrades straight into the nearest alleyway to slit their wrists. Also, there is no denying that history can reflect that modern penchant for wasting attention on petty detail which swallows up all time for devotion to more noble tasks. And, finally, the fear of a very real, very seductive, naturalist, Faith-killing historicism is no idle one indeed.

Nevertheless, Catholic suspicion of history has to be approached with a psychologically awakened spirit that recognizes that life affects different people in different ways. Those men and women who experience real perils to their souls when exposed to intoxicating spirits, films or novels should be encouraged in their desire to avoid them. Similarly, it may honestly be the case that the spiritual well being of certain Catholics actually does compel them to headlong flight from all prolonged contact with data-rich historical accounts of the truth and development of the Faith in time. But palpable and negative as this historical influence can sometimes be, I still insist that it reflects a problem affecting individuals; not a dilemma which can be turned into a universal guideline for eliminating history from the education of the Catholic faithful---especially from the instruction of the Catholic clergy and Catholic lay activists.

Construction of an iron curtain between Catholics and their history inevitably leads them both to underestimate their own weaknesses as well as to disregard that full corrective and transforming mission of the Incarnation which provides them the best weapons in their divine arsenal. Catholic failure to plumb the depths of their history thus amounts to a disguised, voluntary, unilateral disarmament, leaving believers with only crippled arms to deploy against the supporters of nature “as is”; second class arguments which hide the opposition’s profound errors and Catholicism’s innate strengths. Enemy stupidities and contradictions thereby pass substantially unanswered, giving the foe a semblance of superiority which he does not really deserve. And the infinitely more brilliant position of Catholic Christianity is artificially and unnecessarily cheapened in the process. Let us examine the side effects of this pathetic disarmament in some further detail before moving on to the main work before us.

Yes, history does reveal man’s seemingly insane record of comical and tragic disaster; his failure to harmonize his actions with his stated aspirations. But why should Catholics, in general, fear exposure to this chronicle of disfunctionalism? A record of failures should simply confirm, drive home and draw for them the consequences of one of the Church’s dogmatic central teachings: that individuals are unique; that they all possess a free will which prevents their being approached as mechanically predictable automatons; that their actions may be conservative or innovative, good or bad, logical or illogical, rigidly consistent or highly contradictory; that their reactions to fresh and often disturbing developments can be as flawed and unpredictable as the decisions provoking them; that “stuff happens” in history and has to be confronted with both courage and a great deal of humor.

Even before consulting the historical record, believers should thus know that any given Catholic’s path through life also cannot fully and accurately be either understood or foreseen through abstract, rational and scientific studies of theology, philosophy and the laws of nature alone. They should thus not be surprised to discover that the day-to-day effort of imperfect Catholics to understand how the perfect God works in time has never been scientifically precise and completely flawless. Neither have Catholic attempts to relate their understanding of God and His Economy to familiar as well as to changing historical circumstances. Nor applications of Catholic judgments to daily decisions involving the life of the Mystical Body of Christ.

The reality of freedom, sin and the mystery of iniquity guarantees an ample supply of individual members of an otherwise divine institution ready to commit every imaginable vile offense. And this, sad to say, also means that one can and does indeed find Catholics who may be attacked as the Black Legends attack them: as enemies of God and enemies of man. Many of these Catholics are not insignificant men. Many are figures holding positions of importance inside the Church and dominating her policies over long stretches of time in her history. Their crimes---the crimes not of the Bride of Christ but of her flawed children---have helped mightily to give the Black Legends just enough verisimilitude to survive.

Freedom, sin and the mysterious attraction of iniquity also ensure that flawed Catholics have themselves often been seduced into intellectual errors; even into actually believing the teachings of the Black Legends and thinking that their recipes for the good life according to the guidelines of nature “as is” are reconcilable with and beneficial to the Faith itself. This explains why clergy and laity all too frequently seem to be nothing other than drugged actors in a two thousand year performance of theater of the absurd. Time after time they trot in and out of history to play a role worthy of Ionescu. There they are, again and again chastising zealous defenders of Christ’s mission as traitors to God; praising purveyors of false but alluring words as the real heroes of the Faith; demanding modifications of Christian thought to accommodate their deadly opponents; pursuing policies which are detrimental to the short and long-term profit of the Church, nature as a whole, and the individual in particular. Horrible as it is to admit, there are some points in their history, when so many Catholics have given such credence to the lies of the Black Legends that little further reason for the successes of their enemies’ fairy tales need be given. The reality of such twisted assistance has played its part in rendering The War of the Words Against the Word the highly baffling conflict that it often is.

In sum, no believer should really be shocked to learn that Catholic History is replete with perhaps the most extraordinarily comic and tragic figures of them all. Any fall from the ascent of Mount Carmel must inevitably be more ridiculous or horrible than those from the heights of human aspiration identified even by the greatest or the Greek dramatists and Socratics. Ironically, Catholics who are shocked by this knowledge and react by disdaining study of the reality of the vast number of  “curveballs” which individual believers have thrown to human history allow for the victory of precisely that evil which they insist they are fighting: the distortion, naturalizing and minimizing of the effects of  supernatural Truth and Grace operative in time. For unwillingness to probe the many bad and often unpredictable things that are done by fallen Catholics in fallen nature is an open invitation blindly to accept the really grotesque use of Christ’s message by clever strong men whose hypocritical or illogical hosannas to the Son of God masquerade their erroneous or self-interested purposes.

A true supporter of the Word Incarnate needs to be sure that he is getting the substance of obedience to His Savior’s wishes as opposed to a purely outward song of praise. Pointing solely to a man’s recitation of the Creed or his adulation of passages from the Summa does not give the loyal soldier of Christ all the information he requires to make a proper judgment regarding past or present reality. It is an honest study of history which most helps in identifying whether he is dealing with men who are, in practice, what they say they are. My fellow B.A. recipients in 1973 all sang hymns praising the crushing of heresy which, on the surface, made them sound like several hundred St. Athanasiuses. But anyone who knew their daily history understood that they had no interest in Christian doctrine at all, and that they were belting out their song only because they had been told to do so by the authorities, who made it a condition for awarding them their degrees.

What bothers me most today about neglect of such serious investigation of the past crimes and intellectual seduction of erring believers is the way it has blinded many contemporary Catholics to the means used by the modern naturalist enemy who dominates their lives to forge his path into the heart of Christendom. For naturalism’s dangerously anti-incarnational argument to a large degree sneaked onto center stage in disguised form, using seemingly faith-filled, nature-friendly language to make its ultimately harmful case. Many erring Catholics were lulled by familiar-sounding words into giving their support to a set of beliefs and practices which actually aimed to destroy the message of the Word. Many surrendered the citadels of the Faith to their deadly foes before they had any real sense of what was happening to them. Most still do not realize that truth, and hence have little idea of what ails them. Catholic man cannot live by sloppily defined words alone. It is through an historical examination of what naturalism does, in practice, rather than what it blithely says and wants to have unquestioningly accepted that its anti-Catholic path character is most easily revealed and combated.

But there is much more to be gained from a study of Catholic History than just an instructive guide to human perversity and what can be gleaned from it. A plunge into the record of the Church’s past offers yet another powerful means for introducing otherwise earth-bound souls to the most profound music and harmony of the spheres. I am certain that this is the case, because it performed such a service for me.

It was history which gave me the living examples of great and holy Catholic men, any one of whom could win even secular laurels in a truly fair fight with the Voltaires and Franklins of the naturalist camp. It was precisely history which indicated to me that I had to look elsewhere than to the flux of experience for the ultimate source and seat of an eternal wisdom which placed the daily ecclesiastical vaudeville-cum-horror show in its proper, subordinate perspective. It was history that fueled an unexpected longing for deeper instruction in the superior disciplines of philosophy and theology which in and of themselves at first both bored and repelled me. It was history that unwrapped for me the priceless gift that Christianity offers: a life-and joy-filled, body-and-spirit-exalting phenomenon; a Faith that gives the lie to its cheapened, parochial, and often scurrilous depiction by men who have no “eyes to see or ears to hear”. It was history which also identified and denounced to me the impact that the age-old, rhetoric-drunk, anti-incarnational spirit makes: that of a strait jacket seeking to limit or crush the deepest aspirations of the human mind and soul, mine included; that of a permanently effective sleeping pill guaranteeing an existence equivalent to a life-long euthanasia. In short, history pointed the way far beyond its limited self, and for this I am forever grateful to it. It gave me three goods—history, philosophy and theology—for the price of one. And all three of these, working in tandem, form a mighty battering ram to break down the outwardly impressive house of cards built up by the Black Legends against Catholicism in se---not just against its erring children.

How could a study of Catholic History not at least potentially have this effect? Does it not aim the believer towards investigations of archeology, Scripture, Patristics, Councils, papal pronouncements and the like; towards the stuff of what is referred to as positive theology? And it is positive theology which provides the food guaranteeing speculative, systematic theology protection from mythmaking or pontificating in thin air. Does not Catholic History also direct the faithful to a careful reading of the complete record of all of the Church’s positive actions in history---our chief means of learning how Christ works in time? And examination of the roots and daily chronicle of the Church’s message, structure and actions shows them that there has indeed been a growth in Catholic understanding, defense and practice of the Way, the Truth and the Life; that the consequences of that grand intellectual growth translated into the formation of a highly sophisticated Catholic Christendom populated by many great and holy men and women in whom we can take deep pride.

More importantly still, at least for our immediate purpose here, the study of Church History illustrates how seriously and successfully the supporters of nature “as is” have contested this enormous Christian achievement, in a way that has involved Catholic loss of consciousness of the Incarnation’s mission to correct and transform in Christ not just man but the entire society and environment in which this intrinsically social being lives. Hence, it awakens the startled believer to the fullness and historical extent of the problem facing Catholicism. Most significantly of all, it then points him to where he has to look to regain that full knowledge of the meaning of the Incarnation which alone gives hope for ending the Reign of Myth. And it comforts him, in doing so, by showing that there were innumerable nineteenth and twentieth century heroes who already saw the evil before him, began the work of paving the road back to sanity and pioneered a Catholic Rearmament which he has the responsibility of completing.

Failure to investigate Catholic History in general cuts off one major path to belief and rearmament. Failure to investigate all of Catholic History, each and every one of its facets, condemns one to an arbitrarily limited self-defense and rearmament in the fight against the enemies of the Faith. Believers who think that it is sufficient to know the “end result” of Catholic History in 2007 without respecting the contribution made by the faithful in all past ages are infinitely more likely to fall prey to the particular temptations fought off so valiantly by the special efforts of previous bands of Christian soldiers. They deny themselves knowledge of what “experts in the field” did or did not do “back then” to parry unique shades of error with which they might not be so familiar in their own time. Should such problems reappear once again to trouble their own life---and this is always a possibility in a world inhabited by free men and artisans of Black Legends on the lookout for an “angle”---they would thus be sitting ducks for destruction by them.

Once again, allow me to assert that believers who do not want to plumb history for knowledge of the fullness of the Catholic vision condemn themselves to a second-class defense against their enemies. Two forms of this second-class defense deeply upset me, the first of which involves a hunt for protection behind a wall of rhetorically-bloated Catholic Legends, in no way rooted in the history of Christ and His Mystical Body: neither in the Gospel narratives, nor the Acts of the Apostles, nor the work of the Church Fathers, nor the hard-won teachings of Councils and Popes. Such legends can sound Catholic in their attribution of Catholic victories solely to supernatural interventions, or their willingness to link defeats with the seemingly superhuman evil actions of one particular “scapegoat” man or group. But insofar as these legends are totally untrue, severely flawed, or as marred by false stereotypes as anything their opponents produce, they cannot ultimately shield the Christian front from a sophisticated onslaught launched against it.

In fact, when the Catholic seeks protection behind the Maginot Line of his own myths alone, he is sorely tempted to operate by the rules of naturalism as soon as he emerges from the citadel walls to confront “reality”. With little or no knowledge of how a man really rooted in the truths of the Incarnation should act and should defend his actions when dealing with nature, he is no danger to his sworn enemies. Supporters of an uncorrected nature “as is” can even praise the Christianity he represents, since, in practice, it is nothing other than the harmless, personal or group sport of a religious fraternity which demands precious little, if anything, of the world in practice. This is why one frequently finds firm believing Catholics basing whatever intellectual defense of the Faith that they are willing to make on eighteenth century “common sense” principles, or, barring that, on nineteenth century notions regarding the respect owed to the will of the “silent majority”. And this is why they can make political and economic alliances with individuals and groups who absolutely mock our principles. Less faith in legends and more willingness to consult the historical record would demonstrate that much of the Standard Operating Procedure of believers throughout the ages has been dictated by opponents of Catholicism, accords badly with substantive, true Catholic beliefs, and very much promotes the alternatives to Faith provided by the Black Legends.

Another second-class defense of the Faith is offered by those believers who do, at least, have the merit of clearly recognizing the seductive evil of the rhetoricians’ Black Legends and the mistake of relying on Catholic mythmaking to respond to them. Unfortunately, such militants often fight the enemy either by condemning the use of rhetoric and things beautiful in general, or by terribly underrating their potential positive value when employed for the good. They want an unadorned theology and philosophy to do this job alone, and are contemptuous of “stories”---including history, which inevitably draws from the rhetorical heritage to put its dramatic tale together---playing any serious role in the defense of the camp of the saints.

How could such a reaction—understandable as it admittedly is-- be anything other than harmful in the long run? To begin with, it, too, makes a heretical statement about human personality and freedom, treating men as though they were pure intellect, unmoved by the manifold messages of a world of flesh and blood and the innumerable envelopes in which they can be sent; as though they were creatures somehow incapable of believing and saying one thing while doing another; as though they were beings whose free actions for good or for evil did not need to be carefully examined for the sake of measuring the Church’s practical credibility and grasping what is required in her pastoral work of evangelization. Catholic man cannot live by syllogisms and dogmatic formulae alone. The Son of God came to redeem, raise and “divinize” the entirety of created nature. Created nature involves human communication, which has an enormous and demonstrable impact on the individual. A talented, aesthetic development of the rational use of words is, in the long run, as natural to man as efforts to perfect his mind, and often much more immediately important. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the arbitrary exclusion from this redemptive mission of rhetoric, rhetorical tools and disciplines like history which benefit from them, would run counter to Christ’s wishes? That such an approach would be unnecessarily self-limiting and bring many painful problems and opportunities for the enemy in its train?

In fact, the Christian battle can never be with the talented, rhetorical use of the spoken or written word as such. The enmity of the faithful must be directed only against that form of rhetoric which seeks to “close life down”; to put men to sleep regarding a full understanding of its meaning; to prevent attempts to grasp the True, the Good and the Beautiful; to manipulate words to bury the profound longing of the human soul for definite, eternally-significant knowledge under one, large, oppressive, but golden-tongued wet blanket. A rhetoric used in union with good philosophy and theology is, on the other hand, a weapon of nuclear force.

For a Catholic who cannot under any circumstances overcome his distaste for history, The War of the Words Against the Word may appear to offer nothing more than another near occasion of secularizing, intellectual sin. For an opponent of Christianity shaped by those Black Legends and ideologies whose nefarious influences I am attacking, this book may seem to be doomed from the very outset by its dogmatic leitmotif and an irresistible temptation to twist historical data to its service. Even the indifferent may be tempted to join in the critical fun, noting that the author of a general, meditative history, whatever his sense of having satisfactorily researched his work, regularly stands in need of the corrections provided by experts in specialized fields. Believers, non-believers and uninterested observers alike could well join hands in a one-time display of camaraderie to toss my tome into the rubbish heap without permitting it the slightest chance to work its magic on them.

Once again, I admit that all the dangers outlined above are real ones. But my abandonment of this work would be an indirect admission that recounting the experience of Catholic Christianity’s impact on my life plays no legitimate role whatsoever in explaining the influence that that Faith has had on human history in general. My running away from this book would also entail a parallel acknowledgment that the only writers permitted to interpret Christianity’s significance are those whom I firmly believe to have arbitrarily closed themselves off from seriously grasping its effects and import. And acceptance of both such false theses would be a morally repugnant choice which simply cannot be accepted. So let us allow the words to flow and the chips to fall where they may.

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