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There are sects,
and then there
are sects!
by Christopher A. Ferrara
Ecumenism—whatever that word means—gets sillier by the day. On May 2,
2001, Zenit.org reported the remarks of a South American Cardinal who accuses
the evangelical Protestant sects in his country of being “an unbridled
industry determined to exact a tithe” in Honduras.
The problem with
these evangelicals, says the Cardinal, is that “they don't have to account
to anyone; they have no hierarchy. ... These types of Protestants are an
industry, because any person who is accredited as pastor receives a tithe from
his followers, just because he is anti-Catholic.”
So, the
evangelical sects are a problem because they don’t have a
“hierarchy” and don’t answer to anyone. But of course that is
true of every Protestant sect, including the Anglicans, the Lutherans
and the Presbyterians. Each Protestant is his own Pope, because the mainline
denominations lack any kind of Magisterium which can compel belief in a given
proposition under pain of heresy. Anglicans, Lutherans and Presbyterians can
believe whatever they please, and there are as many “flavors” of
Protestantism as there are disagreements among Protestants. And if a local
Anglican, Lutheran or Presbyterian minister does not wish to go along with his
fellow sect members, he simply starts a new version of the religion. In fact,
the constant division into sects, evangelical or otherwise, is a basic feature
of Protestantism. Hasn’t the Cardinal from Honduras noticed this?
The Vatican
too has issued more than one statement condemning the Protestant sects in Latin
America, even as it engages incessantly in “ecumenical dialogue” with
the Protestant sects of Europe and North America. Ecumenism, you see, can be
practiced with some sects but not with others. There are sects, and then there
are sects. (Are you following this?)
The great irony
here is that the members of smaller evangelical sects are far closer to
Catholic moral teaching and traditional Catholic theology than the mainline
sects engaged in “ecumenical dialogue” with the Vatican. The
hard-core evangelicals are not promoting abortion or ordaining women, and many
(with some of whom I am personally acquainted) even reject any form of
contraception. The reason the evangelical sects are generally not interested in
“ecumenical dialogue” is that they actually believe in
something strongly enough to consider it sacrosanct and beyond discussion. That
is why the evangelical wing of the Southern Baptists in America recently called
a halt to ecumenical dialogue.
What does it say
about “ecumenism” that is best practiced with the more corrupt
mainline Protestant denominations which stand, in the end, for absolutely
nothing? That question answers itself.
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