Those who engage in debate with Roman Catholicism in our day and age may be pardoned for giving their reasons for appearing to stir up old and unwelcome controversies. The age in which we live has little or no grasp of the issues which are at stake in the debate which has taken place between Catholic and Reformed writers since the Reformation, and it has little heart to enter into them. Our age is one in which most prefer peace to the labour and toil of tracing out for themselves the lines of thought and belief which led men to stand up for and to suffer for their convictions in the past.

There are further reasons why the debate with Roman Catholicism has no appeal today. To many it has the appearance of being stale and irrelevant. For 'the man in the street' religion is only a matter of personal opinion. In his judgment, formed admittedly without knowledge of the Bible, of theology or of the history of the church, nothing in religion is substantial because nothing can be objectively verified. 'Science', he thinks, is the only trust­worthy and safe guide to an understanding of life because it weighs and measures but does not theorize. How far from the mark this popular view of 'science' is he will never know unless he begins to enquire. Then he will find that the variety of opinions on matters of religion among the scientific 'experts' is as great as among other groups of men. 'Science' cannot settle matters of faith.

To churchgoing people the debate between Catholic and Reformed is often unwelcome because it threatens to re-open sores which time and the modern world are supposed to have healed. The average church-person nowadays sees no threat from Rome. 'We are all Christians', he feels, and so whatever differences existed in the past must now have been reconciled. 'Better any faith than none in this modern secular world', he says. 'Those who are Christians ought to stand together against the common foe of religious indifference'. But what the average churchgoer does not recognise is that what was originally preached in his own church — once Reformed in creed and worship — is poles apart from what he hears in the pulpit today.

Then too there are changes in terminology which contribute to the current complacency. Where the debate over Catholic and Reformation questions goes on in academic circles in these days it uses a vocabulary so much its own that the importance of the issues at stake is barely visible behind the terms which are used. Ecumenical 'newspeak', to use a well-coined phrase, makes it very hard for ordinary Christian minds to grasp the points which are currently in debate. Who, for example, can be sure what is meant in recent ecumenical documents by 'the Tradition' as over against 'traditions'? Or who can say all that is implied by the distinction between revelation as 'personal' rather than 'prepositional'?¹ Modern ecumenical spokespersons would do well to recall the words of the old Greek proverb: 'The language of truth is simple'. When long and ponderous terms are minted to explain what are often only basic Christian ideas, the average person must be forgiven for becoming indifferent. The fact of the matter is that the old differences between Catholic and Protestant theologians have not been resolved. They have simply been buried under a heap of ambiguous or else unmeaning terms: 'traditionary process', 'transmission', 'eucharistic action', 'magisterium', 'transformist view' (of justification), 'apophatic method' and the like.

The use of such specialist language has led to non-comprehension or else sheer boredom on the part of most people in the Christian world. The apparent splitting of hairs and drawing of fine and subtle distinctions has meant that ordinary Christian people feel they could never begin to understand the issues at stake in the controversy between Catholics and 'non-Catholics' (a modern term). Perhaps that was partly the intention of the new vocabulary. It has certainly added to the impression that the old religious debate is now nothing more than a trivial academic pursuit.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The old disagreements between the Roman Catholic religion and the religion of the Reformation are as great as ever and they will remain so till the end of time.

At vital points the religion of Catholicism and the religion of the Bible are essentially opposite and therefore antagonistic. Both cannot be true for they define the fundamental truths in opposite ways. The task of those who are attempting to join together real Catholicism and real Protestantism is as impossible as the attempt to mix oil and water. All that the ecumenical movement can do in the end is to mix together a genuine Catholicism with a spurious form of the Reformed religion. The use of opaque language in their present discussions gives away the fact that they have hitherto found it impossible to weld together truth and error, light and darkness. Progress towards church unity has only been made by dressing up old disagreements in unfamiliar clothing. If ever people come to understand the points at issue the disguise will fall off at once.

We have said that at vital points the religion of the Bible and that of Roman Catholicism are opposites. Let us consider some of the evidence for this statement and particularly as it relates to the subjects of God, original sin, redemption, the church, the ministry and the sacraments. These doctrines do not exhaust all the areas of difference, but they lie at the centre and on no one of them does Roman Catholicism agree with the Word of God.

According to the Bible, God is uniquely different from all other beings, who ought never to be associated with Him in our worship. Yet this is what official Catholicism does in its magisterial pronouncements and what every devout Catholic the world over does day in and day out. The Catholic object of worship is God together with Mary and canonised saints. ²No amount of juggling with religious vocabulary can ever bridge the gap between Catholic worship of the creature and biblical worship in which the creature is excluded absolutely.

The Roman Catholic dogma on original sin is that fallen man is com­parable to a man who has lost his clothes. This was the illustration used by Cajetan at the time of the Reformation and it is a very good way of stating the official Catholic view on the condition of man in sin. From that day to this the Roman Catholic view of sin has not altered. Man has lost his 'clothes', that is the alleged 'supernatural gifts' which Adam had at first. But the biblical view of the matter is that fallen man has lost far more. He has lost his ability to will or do what is spiritually good. He is wholly inclined to all evil and that continually. The two views are utterly different and incom­patible.

On the subject of Christ's redemption, the apparent similarity of Rome's view with that of the Bible evaporates on close inspection. The Bible teaches that men are saved by the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on the Cross; the Catholic dogma is that men need the continued and repeated sacrifice of Christ in the Mass. The one sacrifice is over, the other ongoing. The one is perfect, the other never. The one is a sacrifice in which man has no hand, the other is a bloodless sacrifice on the altar of the Catholic Church performed by the officiating priest. The two views are about as different as they could be.

The same must be said of the Catholic and biblical teachings on the way in which salvation is made personal to sinners. According to the Catholic view, human merit plays a part; ³ in biblical teaching, there is no place what­ever for human merit, but all is of grace and through faith alone.

This radical difference is seen also in the respective attitude towards the church, the ministry and the sacraments. In Catholic thought, the church is synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church; ⁴in the Bible it is the body of true believers eternally elect in Christ. The ministry, in Catholic thinking, is the priesthood and the hierarchy, who are all subordinate to the pope. In biblical teaching, the ministers of the church are the faithful preachers of the gospel and teachers of the flock of Christ, whose consciences are captive to nothing but the Word of God. At no point does Catholicism here keep to the teaching of the Word of God.

To multiply examples would be tedious. But the same result would come clearly to light. The Reformed churches have one source of authority; the Roman Catholic Church has two. The Bible teaches two places after death; the Roman Catholic Church teaches three. The Bible has one head of the church, Christ; the Catholic religion has another, a 'visible' head of the church, the pope. This last point needs to be looked at more fully.

It would be a salutary exercise for all who in our day are eager to return to the Roman Catholic Church to study the precise nature of the power which the pope claims to have (we refer, of course, to the office of the pope and not just to the individual popes). It is a very extraordinary claim and yet one which ecumenical Protestants seem unable to see.

The powers which the successive popes claim to hold and to exercise are nothing short of the powers of God Almighty. The argument by which such a claim is advanced is very simple. It runs as follows: Christ is the vicar of God and as such exercises all the powers of God. But the pope is Christ's vicar on earth. Therefore the pope exercises all the powers of God. If it is enquired by what authority the pope has become Christ's vicar, the answer is in this text: 'Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church' (Matthew 16:18). This is the basis of all the pope's power and authority. It is a very slender foundation indeed, but upon it have been built all his immense claims. The precise nature of these claims needs to be fully appreciated. The pope professes to be both the spiritual head of all the church and also to be the temporal head of all governments in the world. His power extends over heaven, earth and the world beyond the grave. This three-fold lordship is symbolised by the triple-crown, or tiara, which he receives at his coronation. The possession of both spiritual and temporal headship is symbolised by keys and swords.

It is naive in the extreme for present-day churchmen to pretend that all these papal pretensions have been swept away by the new broom of Vatican II ecumenism. If evidence to this effect is insisted on, let the enquirer read an account of the papal ceremony which took place on the opening day of the Second Vatican Council in September of 1962. The facts speak for them­selves. This is how observers from non-Catholic churches were impressed as they sat in the basilica of St Peter's on the opening day of the Council, which is claimed to have altered so much in the attitude and practices of the Catho­lic Church. Two and a half thousand people had their eyes glued on the Altar of Confession where was seated Pope John XXIII laden with vestments and symbols of his superhuman powers. Organs, choirs, pageant and ceremonial were all used to maximum effect to impress on the non-Catholic spectators the supremacy of Rome and of the papacy. John XXIII was carried high on the shoulders of his damask-clad bearers, while fan-shaped standards hovered above his canopy. This was the aesthetic feast which fed the eyes and ears of the delegates of other churches as they sat in their places while the papal majesty passed by them. ⁵

Those who want evidence still more recent should consult the authorised Catechism of the Catholic Church where we read:

The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter's successor is the perpetual and visible source and founda­tion of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful. For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire church has full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered. ... The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office.

It is the insistence upon the infallibility of the papal office, and therefore of all teaching authorised by the pope, which makes Roman Catholicism's motto, Semper Eadem (Always the Same), essential to her distinctive exist­ence. The Vatican is unreformably committed to the view that the pope is God's vicar on earth. Every claim rests today — as surely or as precariously as ever it did since the time of Leo — on the words of Christ in Matthew 16:18. And it matters practically nothing to those staggering claims that the 'rock' was taken, even by many of the Church Fathers, to be not Peter but Christ himself!