S.M. Miranda, Catholic layman who has dedicated a website to the evangelization of the Catholic faith in defense against modern skepticism, heresy and unbelief, has presciently written:
The Church has always been beset by evil and false teachings for as
long as she has existed. There are three
main reasons why division and discord have always threatened (but never sapped)
the foundation of the Church. The first
and primary reason is that the Church stands as a lamp set on a hill for all to
see and hear. She proclaims the message
of her master, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and condemns the evils of the world while
offering healing and forgiveness to all evildoers. The visible Church’s mission of healing and
teaching does not go unnoticed by the Prince of this world: the devil. The Catholic Church stands as the ark of
salvation and a very real threat to his domain.
Hence the devil attempts every kind of attack on the Church by use of
external forces (violence, persecutions, and natural disasters) along with
internal discord (heresies, schisms, apostasy, and temptation of the clergy and
laity). If not for Our Lord’s guarantee
that the Church would never fail (Matthew 16:18), there is no way the Church’s
members and hierarchy could resist the devil perpetually. The second reason heresy and discord are
always found within the Church, is that certain men find the teachings and
expectations of the Church burdensome.
Very often, these men find that doing the right and moral thing is
painful and often requires much suffering.
It seems easier for many people to either ignore part or all of the
Church’s teachings or substitute doctrines into the Faith that are more to
their liking. Finally, the Church has
always been assailed by heresy because men have often had a hard time accepting
the limitations of their own nature.
Pride often besets men (especially scholars and philosophers) and
convinces them that they have no intellectual limitations. The result of intellectual pride is a
continuous attempt to rationalize the mysteries of God. Some things (such as understanding the true
nature of the Trinity) are beyond the nature of man’s intelligence. But because prideful men cannot accept that
the nature and acts of the infinite God are beyond the reach of men, these
philosophers either reject God or rationalize the faith to fit their human
philosophies. In the end, a fully
rationalized faith has no room for miracles, the divinity of Christ or many
other core tenets of the Faith. What
results from undue rationalizations are nothing less than heresies and a
watered down faith. Thus the attacks of
Satan, man’s dislike of the moral life, and prideful rationalizations of
Christian mysteries account for the continuing presence of false teaching in a
world that has been given a divinely instituted and visible teaching Church.
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