Q: What do you think of Catholics?

A: I presume that by this you mean Roman Catholics. I do not wish to offend you, but I think that your question is meaningless. It is a bit like asking me what I think of human-beings! First of all, which Roman Catholics? Those in Poland or those in Uganda? Those in Brazil or those in England?  Old or young? Rich or poor? Black or white? Traditionalist or modernist? Papist or anti-Papist? I have met some very devout and righteous Catholics who would never harm anyone and also love our Church. But I also know of Catholics in the far west of what is for the moment called ‘the Ukraine’, who go around carrying a portrait of their fellow-Catholic, Hitler, commemorating their grandfathers who were in the Waffen SS and slaughtered Jews, Poles and Russians, and today beat up Orthodox grandmothers and steal Orthodox churches. Why the Vatican tolerates such people who totally discredit it, I have no idea.

We could turn your question around and ask: ‘What do you think of Orthodox?’ I can think of Orthodox who go to church every day and others who only go three times in their life, if that. The apostle Paul was Orthodox, but so was Stalin. Of course, I would never compare them. However, if your question really concerns Roman Catholicism, then I can answer you.

Roman Catholicism is an offshoot of Christianity, often called Orthodox Christianity, which is the faith of the (Orthodox) Church. Roman Catholicism split away from the Church and Christianity 1,000 years ago and soon began to split into various other protesting sects, the best known of which are indeed called ‘Protestant’. Roman Catholicism was founded on two novel ideas:

The first novel idea, which appeared in the eighth century in what is now Germany, but was rejected officially in the ninth century, and then finally accepted in the eleventh century, was that the Holy Spirit, the source of truth, inspiration and authority can come from human nature. This was the beginning of humanism, the worship of fallen humanity and so of sin. In its religious form, this led to the morbid worship of suffering human nature, blood, death and guilt, and the intolerant condemnation of others. Later, in its secular form, it led to the deification of all who confess this humanism and so to atheism (the extraordinary superstition that man was created and exists without God!). It inherently rejected the Church and (Orthodox) Christianity, attempting to make them irrelevant by reducing them to some mere exotic, ‘eastern’/‘Byzantine’/ ’Greek’ folklore or else to an offshoot of Platonism.

The second novel idea, resurrected from Roman paganism, was that the Bishop of Rome had universal power, being the infallible replacement for God (‘vicar’) on earth! In other words, both Christ and the Holy Spirit were replaced by a sinful man. Extraordinarily, this concept of the automatic deification of a man by his office was enforced and some people actually believed it! Later, in it secular form, during the sixteenth century, this led to the deification of anyone who took on himself the mantle of Roman paganism, resulting in assorted exploitative Atlantic European empires, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, British etc. All these fell, having failed to become completely global, and today have been replaced by the American Empire. Centred in the White House in Washington, facing the Atlantic and Europe, with its purely pagan architecture, it is the first attempt to create a truly global and unopposed empire.

Roman Catholicism, the ultimate source of atheist secularism, continues to exist. However, this is only outside the Western world, which it gave birth to and has since rejected it, in Western colonies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Philippines. As for atheist secularism, its illegitimate grandchild (a grandchild through Protestantism), it thrives.