A River and Its Source

[Wong Soon Peng Adrian]

[ Article crossposted from nus.talk.christianity ]
[ Author was Wong Soon Peng Adrian (law5...@leonis.nus.sg) ]
[ Posted on 10 Jul 1996 11:01:43 GMT ]

On Tracing the River Back to Its Source

An Interview with Gerry Matatics

During the latter half of the 1980s, Holy Mother Church welcomed into her
fond embrace several wandering sons who, hitherto, had been her
self-styled enemies, determined to destroy her. News of these conversions
brought great joy and encouragement to faithful Catholics throughout
America, especially to Traditional Catholics laboring in the stultifying
atmosphere of false ecumenism which permeates the Modernist establishment
in the Church of today.

The striking thing about these conversions is that they were not prompted
by aggressive evangelizing on the part of any Catholic. Such missionary
zeal, it seems, is actually frowned upon by the "Rahnerites" who now
control the Church.

The converts of whom we speak were Protestant Evangelical ministers who
set out to prove, once and for all, the "falsity" of the Catholic Faith.
On their own, they learned the truth of the Church and her doctrines, and
then were courageous enough "to tear themselves out of that state in
which they could not be without fear regarding their eternal salvation"
(Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis).

The most promising of these young men is Gerry Matatics. We say "most
promising" because he alone, as of this time, seems to have an accurate
understanding of the problems confronting the Church, inside and out.
Early last year (1994), he consented to a telephone interview with our
Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M.:

Brother: To acquaint our readers with your background, Gerry, would you
tell us what you were before becoming a Catholic? What was your religious
affiliation?

Gerry: Before becoming a Catholic, I was very definitely an anti-Catholic
Protestant, but had not always been one. For the first 14 years of my
life, I professed no religious affiliation whatsoever. I was raised in a
completely irreligious home. We never went to church. We never read the
Bible. We never prayed before meals. There was never any mention of
Jesus, even at Christmas or Easter.

It wasn't until I was a freshman in high school that I accidentally
encountered a Billy Graham telecast one night and heard, for the first
time, a presentation of the Christian message. From my present Catholic
perspective, I would now find his presentation very deficient, but at
that time, it was the first I had heard of the good news of Jesus Christ.
That embarked me on a career in fundamentalism which lasted for the next
14 years.

So, for 14 years I was no sort of Christian at all. Then, from the age of
14 to the age of 28, when I came into the Church, I was a Protestant of
various persuasions; Episcopalian, Assembly of God, fundamentalist
Baptist, and finally, conservative Presbyterian. I went to Phillips
Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire for my junior and senior years of
high school. From 1975 to 1977, I went to the University of New Hampshire
and majored in classical, New Testament, and patristic Greek. In January
of 1978, I entered Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton,
Massachusetts, and was there from 1978 to 1981 getting a Master of
Divinity degree, with a concentration in systematic theology. At that
time, then, began the process which led to my ordination as a minister in
the Presbyterian Church of America, the largest of the evangelical, or
more conservative, Presbyterian denominations in the country - not the
mainline United Presbyterian Church, which is quite liberal, but the
largest of the conservative ones.

Brother: So, you were then a Calvinist?

Gerry: Oh, yes, very much so! I had become a Calvinist through reading
the writings of John Calvin. I was a Calvinist even before I went to the
seminary, while I was still a Baptist; I was what is called a "Reformed
Baptist," or Calvinistic Baptist, because I accepted John Calvin's
theology. But most Calvinists are Presbyterian in that they believe in
infant baptism, and, while I was working on those issues at the seminary,
I came to see the importance of infant baptism, so I switched from being
a Calvinistic Baptist to being a Presbyterian. But I took Calvin's
theology pure and undiluted. I wasn't interested in watering it down or
being more easy on dissenters than he was.

It was really by reading the writings of John Calvin and Martin Luther,
and other Protestant "reformers", that I developed a real hostility to
Catholicism - not to Catholics per se. I wasn't hateful of Catholics, but
I hated Catholicism because I was convinced it was a clever counterfeit
for the genuine article; that it was this demonic delusion that was
intended to fool people into thinking they were Christians, when they
really weren't.

And so I was out to fight it tooth and claw, and I said - along with a
friend of mine at the seminary, Scott Hahn - that we needed to make
preaching against Catholic doctrines a hallmark of our Protestant
ministries. I couldn't get much support from any other Protestant
ministers because they had become too ecumenical, but I was convinced
that Catholicism was this insidious evil that had to be eradicated from
the world once and for all, and I was quite happy to have Scott helping
do that in my lifetime.

Brother: Now, how long were you a Presbyterian minister?

Gerry: Well, I was licensed in January of 1982, and was ordained as
pastor of a church in January, 1983, and then came into the Catholic
Church at the Easter vigil service in 1986. So I would have been an
ordained minister from 1983 to 1986. Obviously, as careers in Protestant
ministries go, this wasn't a long time. I'm still a young man. I'm only
36.

The Conversion Begins

Brother: Let's look at the actual conversion process: When would you date
the original impulse that maybe Catholicism is the True Faith, compared
to the time when you actually were received into the Church, which was
Easter of 1986?

Gerry: Well, I probably need to break that into two stages, the first
divided from the second by a fateful phone call, which I will discuss in
a minute. But it is important for your readers to understand that, prior
to that call, although I knew of Roman Catholicism, I only knew it in
caricature. As I say, I had read the writings of the reformers, and it is
obvious to me now, as a Catholic reading their writings, that they had
lost the grace of faith and were not able to understand the Biblical
nature of the Catholic Faith. And so they condemned it as this horrible
paganism masquerading as Christianity.

So I only knew of Catholicism from the writings of anti-Catholics. I had
read those Jack Chick comics, those anti-Catholic pamphlets. I had heard
anti-Catholic sermons. I had preached anti-Catholic sermons. As far as I
know, I had never known any real orthodox Catholics. Or at least, if I
ever did meet any, they never did indicate that they were such. The only
Catholics I knew were cultural Catholics who were sort of drunk all the
time, and swore, and never talked about Jesus Christ, or acted like they
were His followers.

So, the thing that started me on the road to studying Catholicism from
the lips of its own proponents, was a phone call I got late one night,
shortly after I had started pastoring this church in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania. The caller was my seminary classmate, Scott Hahn. He
started to read to me from a book that he was finding quite persuasive.
It presented a very different perspective on some doctrinal problems that
Protestants wrestle with, a point of view I had never encountered before.
I found this perspective intriguing, but it sounded very different. So I
said: "Well, Scott, who wrote this book?"

At that point, Scott became very hesitant. He hemmed and hawed, but
wouldn't give me the name of the author. Finally, I dragged it out of
him. I didn't recognize the name. I said: "Is this fellow a
Presbyterian?" (It was Louis Bouyer, by the way) "No, he's not a
Presbyterian," was the reply. "Well, then, is he a Lutheran?" "No, he's
not that either." Well, then I told him I didn't want to play the game of
20 Questions, or 20,000 questions through all Protestant denominations.
Scott said, "Well, that wouldn't get us anywhere." And I thought that
that was a peculiar statement for him to make.

He finally brought out that this guy was a Catholic, so I said: "A
Catholic! You're saying that you're reading a book by a Catholic - and
this is worth our time? This is a lot of nonsense!" And he said: "No,
I've been reading Catholic books for the last year, and I'm finding them
very compelling, Gerry, and I'm really scared because, if the current
trend continues, I might just become a Catholic."

I couldn't believe it. I was in a state of shock. I was horrified at the
prospect of this brilliant guy, whom I expected to be the great reformed
theologian of the 20th century, the great Calvinist of the 20th century,
all of a sudden going off and defecting to the enemy.

So I said, "Scott, this is ridiculous. Everyone knows that Catholicism is
just for idiots, and for old people who never read the Bible and don't
even know what real Christianity is." He said, "Gerry, you have got to
read these books." So, he sent me a list of the books to read, and all
the while I was waiting for the list to come, I was still convinced that
Catholicism was wrong.

But to answer your question, the first inkling I got - and I didn't get
it talking to Scott on the phone - the first inkling I got that
Catholicism just might be a long shot, just might possibly be right, was
when I got the list of books, acquired them, and read the first one.
Actually, I don't remember which of the books was the first one I read,
but one of them was a defense of the Church's teaching on the Eucharist -
that it is the actual Body and Blood of Christ. I was startled to
discover that they were making a biblical case for this. And as I picked
up book after book - on the Papacy, on Purgatory, on the various Marian
dogmas, Apostolic succession - I discovered, to my horror, that there
were scriptural arguments being mounted for each of these teachings that
I had never thought existed. I had always been committed to the authority
of the Bible, and if you could show me that the Bible taught a particular
thing, then I was willing to accept it.

When I was a Baptist, I didn't think the Bible supported infant baptism.
When I read Protestant arguments for infant baptism quoting the Bible,
which is the only authority Protestants would quote, I converted to a
belief in infant baptism. Here, I was encountering the same thing. I was
thinking, golly, if I really believe the Bible is true, and I've got to
believe whatever it says, then I've got to believe that the Catholics are
right on this point, or on that point. I still didn't think that
Catholicism, as a whole, was correct, but I thought that maybe they had
preserved the Biblical position just on particular items. But the more I
found that Catholics were right on individual doctrines, the more the
scales tipped in favor of Catholicism. And all the more did I come to
realize that the Protestant positions on these things were wrong;
therefore, the Protestant churches had no guarantee that they were right
on anything.

Brother: So, your conversion process took about 3 years?

Gerry: It took about 3 years of reading these books. And it was an
emotional seesaw for me. I read the first book and thought, boy, that
really makes sense! But there was an emotional backlash - a kneejerk
reaction. I thought, wait a minute! This can't be right! And it drove me
to go back and reread my anti-Catholic books, like Lorraine Bettner's
Roman Catholicism, and things like that.

So I read these anti-Catholic books again and thought, yeah, that's what
Catholicism is, all right! It's this horrible thing. But then I'd pick up
another Catholic book, and it would be very cogent and compelling, and
very scripturally sound, and that would throw me into doubt again. And
so, I'd pick up another Protestant book.

Now, you see, in the course of those years, I read over 500 books of
Catholic apologetics, Catholic books demonstrating the case for
Catholicism, and an equal number of anti-Catholic books or Protestant
critiques of the Catholic position. And I called up Catholic and
Protestant theologians all around the country, spending hundreds of
dollars in telephone bills, trying to get to the bottom of this issue.

It was a very turbulent time for me, because here I was trying to pastor
a church during this same time, and it was becoming increasingly more
difficult for me to get up in the pulpit and say this is what we
Protestants believe, because I was already becoming riddled with doubt
that Protestants were correct at all.

I actually got to the point where, although I could still preach certain
doctrines that I thought were true, I no longer believed that the
Eucharist - as Protestants celebrated it - was really the Eucharist. It
was a charade; it wasn't the real thing, because I had come to believe in
the Real Presence.

At that point, through a variety of circumstances, I found it expedient
to leave my pastorate and plunge myself full-time into my Ph.D. program
in Biblical studies at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia,
which is kind of the "Pontifical Biblical Institute" of Calvinism. It's
probably the most authoritative Calvinistic seminary, and I thought that,
by doing this full time, perhaps my doubts would be eradicated - but it
didn't work. It was while I was there that I entered the Church.

The Hinge Doctrine

Brother: You have mentioned several doctrines that you read about in the
Catholic books you acquired - the Papacy, Marian dogmas, the Eucharist,
doctrines like these. We all know that the Catholic Faith is integral, as
stated in the Athanasian Creed. So, to be Catholics at all, we must
believe everything the Church teaches. Now, in this process of conversion
you've been talking about, was there any one doctrine that you saw as the
obstacle to be overcome? Perhaps the Papacy? or Marian devotion? Was
there one big hurdle you had to get over?

Gerry: Well, by the way you phrased your question, I think you're asking
whether or not the authority of the Catholic Church was, for me, the
hinge doctrine. Yes, it was, and I will explain the steps by which I
gradually came to believe it.

When I was a Protestant, my authority was the Bible, which I accepted as
the infallible word of God. Scripture alone was the only rule of faith -
sola scriptura, as Luther phrased it.

Luther invented this idea of sola scriptura. Actually, it had been
attempted in the 14th century, preceding Luther, by John Wyclif, but it
never really took hold. Luther revived it as a way of destroying
Tradition, which, of course, many Catholics are involved in doing today
as well.

Let me jump ahead of myself for a minute here: Basically, what I see
going on in Catholicism today is just the Protestant Reformation being
done all over again, but being done from inside the Church rather than
from outside, and with far greater success than Luther ever could have
had. I mean, Luther would be slobbering with envy at the success that
people, masquerading as Catholics, are able to pull off today within the
Catholic Church. But that's another whole can of worms which should be
discussed separately.

Anyway, back to sola scriptura: Luther wanted to attack the authority of
both the Magisterium and Tradition, and exalt Scripture alone as the only
rule of faith. The big problem here is that it is the infallible Bible
being interpreted by fallible individuals only - and that just won't
work. That's why we've got thousands of Protestant denominations.

So, the first step in my progress toward the truth was made when I came
to see that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura was, ironically
enough, a man-made doctrine, a tradition of men. You see, I had rejected
Tradition with a capital "T" - sacred Tradition - because I thought that
the Bible rejected it. I had misread what Our Lord says in Matthew 15,
verses 1 through 9, and also Saint Paul's condemnation of human
traditions in Colossians 2, 7 through 9. The only things the Bible
condemns in these passages are man-made traditions. But the Bible does
use the word "Tradition" in a positive sense in II Thessalonians 2:14,
where Saint Paul urges them to hold fast to all the Traditions, whether
they came by word of mouth or by letter, and when he praises the
Corinthians in I Corinthians 11:1, or the Thessalonians in II
Thessalonians 3:6, for holding fast to Tradition. Thus I saw that the
Bible itself testifies that what Jesus and the Apostles taught was handed
down in two ways - in a written way in the Bible, and in an oral way.
Both of these ways, in fact, are Tradition.

The second step in my progress was made when I saw that the Bible not
only shows that the Word of God is passed on in oral, as well as written
fashion, but that the Church is the custodian of the Word of God, oral
and written. It's the Church which is the final arbiter of the meaning of
the Word of God. Otherwise we're interpreting it according to our own
fallible likes and dislikes. It became clear to me that the Bible
envisions a Church which is authoritative, as in Matthew 18:17, where Our
Lord said that a Christian must heed the Church, or be treated as a
heathen or publican, which means being excluded from the Church, not
being a Christian at all. When I saw this I realized that, if the Church
can err, if the Church cannot pronounce a definitive sentence, then
Christ would not have commanded Christians to heed it, or be thrown out.
It also makes nonsense of Saint Paul's statement in I Timothy 3:15 that
the Church is "the pillar and ground of the truth." How can a Church
formally teach error and yet be the pillar and foundation of the truth?
And not to mention that Matthew 16:18 states that the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it. Now, Satan's prime stratagem is to lead people
astray. He's a liar and the father of lies. So, if the Church could teach
falsehood, the gates of hell could prevail against it.

I also saw that the Bible teaches that there is a trinity of rules or
authorities for us. There are the two Remote Rules of Faith which we
Catholics call Scripture and Tradition, and there is the Proximate Rule
of Faith, which is the Church mediating to us Scripture and Tradition.
This is the biblical pattern for the Word of God. It's not just Scripture
alone.

The third and final step came when I saw that there must be not only an
authoritative Church, but a Church that comes down from Christ, through
the ages, lineally descended from the Apostles. I saw that Saint Paul was
conscious of an apostolic authority which he could transfer, let's say,
to Saint Timothy and Saint Titus. When we read the pastoral Epistles, I
and II Timothy and Titus, we see that he invested these two men with
authority to function as bishops of the Church in Ephesus and in Crete,
respectively, and he says to them, in effect, "Look, you teach, to the
faithful, those things that I passed on to you, and you teach them to
others who will teach them after they do" (II Timothy 2:2). And he
expects people to heed Timothy and Titus with the same submission of mind
and heart that they heeded him, Paul. And in heeding him, of course, they
were heeding Christ. As Jesus said, "Whoever hears you, hears Me" (Luke
10:16).

So once I saw that Our Lord founded an authoritative Church, and that
whatever that Church teaches is true, and whatever it teaches is
consonant with Holy Scripture, that was all I needed. That was the key
doctrine for me.

Believing other doctrines of the Church became a simple matter of
clearing up a few questions. I thought, well, whatever the Church teaches
on Purgatory, for instance, must be right. The Athanasian Creed says that
I must hold the Catholic Faith whole and entire and intact, so I believe
everything the Church teaches because it is the Church teaching it. But I
still knew that, in the days to come, after I became a Catholic, people
would ask me how I could swallow something like Mary's Immaculate
Conception. Doesn't the Bible speak of Mary as a sinner? *Or, how can you
swallow her perpetual virginity? The Bible says she had other children,
doesn't it?* And I knew that I couldn't answer them just by saying that,
well, because the Church teaches it, it must be true.

That argument is certainly a sufficient reason for a Catholic to believe
these things, but it will not satisfy a Protestant. So I felt obligated
to embark on a full investigation of all the questions I had. How does
the Church vindicate its teaching on this doctrine or that? That is what
took up my time for the bulk of those three years, hunting down the
biblical support for each of these Catholic dogmas. Although I realized
that the Church is not required to mount a complete biblical defense, I
thought that if I can prove a doctrine just from the Bible, without ever
quoting Church Fathers or Papal encyclicals, then I am going to be able
to come up with arguments that will persuade Protestants. That's what I
did, and that's what I do now. That's what Biblical Foundations
International is all about.

Brother: Didn't the Church Fathers most often quote the Bible when they
were trying to defend the Faith against early heretics and
non-Christians?

Gerry: Exactly. I believe that many Catholic apologists today sell the
Bible short. Too many of them are quick to say, "Well, not everything we
Catholics believe is explicitly taught in the Bible." That's absolutely
true, but they don't even try to develop the expertise to show implicit
proofs from Holy Scripture. On something like Mary's bodily assumption,
for instance, they will simply start from Tradition, the extra-scriptural
tradition, but I think it is far more powerful if we build our case from
the Bible also, and meet Protestants on their own ground. I can make a
case for the bodily assumption of Our Lady from Scripture alone, not only
from the types of Mary in the Old Testament, such as Elijah and the Ark
of the Covenant and Enoch, and so forth, but even from understanding
statements in the New Testament, such as the visions that Saint John sees
at the end of Revelation 11 and the beginning of Revelation 12 -the Woman
clothed with the sun, seeing that as a prophecy of Our Lady's Assumption

Brother: I see. So the main barrier was the question of authority, but
once you accepted that authority, it became simply a matter of learning
the various doctrines and adding them to the list of things you believe
as a Catholic.

Gerry: You're right. That was the main intellectual barrier. Once the
Protestant principle of authority, sola scriptura, is shown to be false,
you cannot be a Protestant any longer. You cannot walk around saying that
you are going to believe only what the Bible teaches. Even if that by
itself were true, you have no way of being sure that you, in fact,
understand correctly what the Bible teaches, because you have only to
look at the fact that countless Protestants read the same Bible you read,
but come to totally different conclusions on such matters as infant
baptism, speaking in tongues, women ministers, type of church government,
and on and on and on it goes.

So that was the principal hurdle. But that doesn't mean that, once I had
overcome it and began to wrestle with issues like Purgatory and praying
to Mary, I still did not have big emotional hurdles ahead. It was very
difficult for me to see any place for Mary in my devotional life. Even
after the arguments for praying the Rosary made sense on paper (the
intellectual hurdle), the first time I prayed a Hail Mary, I was
completely petrified. I expected the roof to be ripped off the house and
a huge hand to swoop down from heaven and pick me up by the scruff of my
neck and fling me into the flames of hell. I really felt like I was doing
something blasphemous, because it is so culturally awkward for a
Protestant, who was raised one way, to do something like that, something
totally contrary to what has been ingrained in him. You feel very, very
uncomfortable, and self-conscious, and awkward. It's only with the
passage of time that you acquire the habit of Catholic virtue, of praying
the Rosary, or praying for the souls in Purgatory, or what have you.

Brother: When you finally understood that Marian devotion made sense,
that it was indeed in keeping with the religion of Jesus Christ, what was
your primary impulse? Was it intellectual, or was it inspirational or
spiritual?

Gerry: Not all conversions are alike, I want to emphasize that. I'm not
saying that one would have to go through the same hoops that I went
through. But my conversion was always very intellectually driven. It was
more than intellectual because we are not intellects alone. There is the
whole emotional and mystical, and habitual side of the Catholic Faith,
and it is absolutely necessary.

But for me, the intellectual core was always the most prominent. I never
fell into anything because of an emotional impulse. I didn't fall into
praying the Rosary because I had just seen a movie about Fatima and it
seemed so neat! Or, you know, I wandered into some Gothic cathedral and
had some great aesthetic experience. It was never that way for me. I had
to really fight my way, tooth and nail, to each conclusion, such as
"praying the Rosary is OK." And even after I became completely
intellectually convinced of that, there was a certain amount of mental
excitement stemming from the knowledge that I had learned the true
doctrine here, but with the emotions, there was always a lag time.

As I said, the first time I prayed the Rosary, I knew intellectually that
what I was doing was not praying with vain repetitions, as denounced by
Our Lord in Matthew, chapter 6. That's the verse I always used against
praying the Rosary, but now I know that I was misrepresenting what the
verse says. Jesus wasn't saying that all repetitious prayer is vain,
because the Bible is loaded with repetitious prayer. The Psalms are
nothing but prayers which faithful Jews repeated over and over again. So
did Our Lord. He prayed the same prayer three times in His agony in the
garden, the exact same words, as Saint Matthew tells us. So I knew that
what I was doing was sound and scriptural, but still, emotionally, I felt
very uncomfortable doing it until it became a habit, and then it became
second nature, and a great joy.

The Bible and the Papacy

Brother: When you talk about the authority of the Church, there comes to
mind immediately the person who represents that authority, and is that
authority personified - our Holy Father, the Pope. Now, how did a
hardcore, diehard Protestant minister like you become a Papist?

Gerry: Again, it was Holy Scripture that forced me to that conclusion.
The more I dug into the New Testament doctrine of the Church, the more I
began to see that the primary term Jesus used in referring to His Church
was "the Kingdom of God." So, we are to look upon the Church, then, as a
hierarchically structured organism, and monarchical to boot. And Jesus is
the King of the Kingdom of God.

Now, I never had a problem with that. When I was a Protestant, I always
referred to Jesus as King, but I never stopped to think about how a
kingdom operates. Kings always have officers, and I saw that Jesus
appoints the Apostles that they "may sit upon thrones, judging the twelve
tribes of Israel" (Luke 22:30). He calls them to be the officers of His
Kingdom, to exercise His kingly reign. They are His regents, His
ministers. The Bible uses the word "steward" for minister, and of the
stewards that every king had, one would be in charge of the treasury,
another of the vineyards, another of internal affairs, and so forth. And
there is always a chief steward, what we would call a prime minister, as
the monarchs of England have today. Then I saw that the evidence was
overwhelming that Peter was that prime minister. For instance, if you
simply made a study, from a concordance, of the frequency with which
Peter is mentioned in the Bible - he's mentioned 196 times in the New
Testament, and the second most-frequently referred to Apostle is Saint
John with a mere 29 references - you would see what I mean. It's not even
a close contest.

And I saw that, throughout the Gospels, the group of the Apostles is
often described as "Peter and the Twelve," or "Peter and those who were
with him." He is always shown to be the spokesman of the group as a
whole. The group addresses Jesus through Peter. Jesus addresses the
group, almost invariably, through Peter. There is an inner circle of
Peter, James and John, and even in that inner circle, Peter is the lead
spokesman.

Jesus does things to Peter and for Peter that He does for no other
Apostle. He is the only one given the privilege of walking on water. He
is the one who pulled, out of the sea, the fish with a coin in its mouth,
that's sufficient to pay the tax for Jesus and Peter. The two are united
in one coin. And there are all kinds of symbolisms in that coin which I
won't get into, but over and over again, Peter is definitely singled out.
He has a headship. Even a Protestant scholar like Oscar Cullmann admits,
in his book, Peter: Disciple, Apostle and Martyr, that Peter was the head
of the Church.

Actually, there were three questions that I had to answer before I would
accept the Catholic doctrine on the Papacy. The first was, is Peter the
head of the Church? Does the Bible teach that Peter was the head of the
Church? I saw that the answer is absolutely yes. He is the one who calls
the meeting to elect a successor to Judas; he is the one who opens the
Kingdom of God to the Jews on Pentecost (Acts 2); he is the one who
performs the first miracle in Acts 3; the one who speaks to the Sanhedrin
in chapter 4; the one who causes Ananias and Saphira to fall dead in
chapter 5; he is the one who goes with John to bring the Samaritans into
the Church in chapter 8, and the Gentiles in chapter 10; and so on. So,
the first question was answered: Peter definitely was the head of the
Church at the time of the Apostles.

The second question was, what happened when the Apostles died? Did their
offices then cease to exist? No, they did not. There is Apostolic
succession. The Bible teaches it. I referred earlier to the evidence that
can be drawn from what we call the pastoral Epistles of Saint Paul - two
to Timothy and one to Titus - in which he addresses these two men as "my
true sons in the Faith." Here he implies a dynastic succession of office.
Paul is their spiritual father. They are his sons. They inherit his
mantle. In similar fashion, in the Old Testament, Elisha refers to Elijah
as "my father." He is Elijah's spiritual heir. He gets a double portion
of Elijah's spirit; he is his first born son. So, the fact of a dynastic
succession coming down from the Apostles is clearly indicated in the
Bible.

The third question was: who in the early Church was - and who is today -
the successor to Peter, and what is his role in the Church? The answer to
this question deserves thorough consideration.

There are several texts in the New Testament that lead us to the answer.
Three of them, in particular, are most amazing to me, but I never looked
at them carefully when I was a Protestant. Let me give them to you in
reverse order:

First, John 21:15 to 17: Here, Jesus as the Good Shepherd addresses Peter
three times, and hands over His flock to him to be His vicar. He says to
Peter, "You take care of My lambs; you feed My sheep; you tend My flock."

Next, Luke 22:31 and surrounding context: After speaking of the twelve
thrones the Apostles are to sit upon, Jesus says to Peter, "Simon, Simon,
Satan has desired to sift you (in Greek, 'you' is plural, meaning 'you
Apostles') like wheat, but I have prayed for you (singular, meaning
Peter) that your faith will not fail. And when you are turned around, you
will be a source of strength to your brethren." Peter is the point man
for the Apostolic college.

And last, Matthew 16:17 to 19: This is the most powerful text. Jesus
makes three astounding statements about Peter which come right on the
heels of Peter's confession that Jesus is the Christ, that is, the
Messiah, the Anointed One, the Son of God. First Jesus says, "You are the
blessed one, Simon, son of John." Notice the parallel structure to the
two acclamations. Peter first says you are x, son of y; and Jesus says
you are x, son of y - you are blessed Simon, son of John, or Jonah.

Then, Jesus says the three things about Peter that show that Peter
participates in Jesus' special office. For if Jesus is the Christ, the
Anointed One, it means that He is Prophet, Priest and King, all rolled
into one. These were the three anointed offices of the Old Covenant. At
the beginning of their ministries, prophets and priests and kings were
anointed to show that their authority came from God. The prophet brings
truth, the priest brings life, and the king brings righteousness. And
Jesus announced Peter's participation in each of these special offices of
the Christ.

In verse 17, He tells Peter that he is blessed because he didn't arrive
at the knowledge that Jesus is the Christ through his own flesh and
blood, but it was revealed to him by God the Father in Heaven. So, Peter
is the one upon whom God has bestowed a special prophetic function, an
insight. He sees the truth about Who Jesus is, even though the others
shared some false ideas; for instance, that He might be one of the
prophets reincarnated. So, by His sovereign choice, God has singled out
Simon Peter to be the authoritative teacher of truth about Who Jesus is.

In verse 18, Our Lord continues, saying to Peter: "You are rock, and upon
this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it." Now, I don't have time to go into detail here, but the image
of rock is a Temple image. There was a rock - it was referred to in the
Old Testament as the foundation stone upon which the Temple of Solomon
was built - that sealed the gateway to the underworld. So Jesus is
saying, "Peter, you are going to be the rock upon which I am going to
build My Temple, My Church, the New Covenant Temple." In the Old
Covenant, it was the High Priest alone who could stand upon that rock,
because upon that rock was the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies.
So, Peter is singled out implicitly as having this high priestly and this
rock-like function.

In verse 19, Jesus concludes: "And I will give to you the keys to the
Kingdom of Heaven. And whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, it shall be
bound in Heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, it shall be
loosed also in Heaven." Here, Our Lord quotes the language of Isaias
22:22, where Isaias describes the Old Testament office of prime minister,
or what was then called "chief steward," and speaks of a man named
Eliacim, son of Helcias, who becomes chief steward after another man,
Sobna, is deposed. Speaking through the prophet Isaias, God says several
things about the office of prime minister, which I paraphrase:

God says, "I will put the special vestments on him, and fasten the sash
of authority around him." So he wears distinctive garments.

God says he will be a father to the inhabitants of the land. So he has a
patriarchal office. The word "pope" simply means "father."

God says, "I will lay the key of the house of David upon his shoulder, so
that when he opens, no one can shut; and when shut, no one can open."
These are the words of Isaias which Jesus Himself quotes.

And then God says that he will have a seat of honor. So he has an
episcopal see.

And the fifth and final thing God says about the prime minister, the
chief steward, is that it will be an office of dynastic succession, that
it will descend to his offspring, and offshoots, just like the king's.
So, the king's office passes on to his son, and the prime minister's
office passes on to his son, if only at least his spiritual son.

By invoking the Old Testament testimony of Isaias, by borrowing his
language and concept of the chief steward, or prime minister, Jesus, in
effect, is saying to Peter: "The Church I will build is the Kingdom of
God. I, the Son of David the King, will be its King. But I must have My
officers, My ministers, My stewards. You are going to be My chief
steward. So, I'm going to give you the keys the chief steward carries."
And, since the chief steward's office is one of dynastic succession, Our
Lord intended Peter's office and authority to be transmitted to
successors.

And so we come to the final consideration: historically, who, in fact,
inherited Peter's office and authority? There's only one candidate -the
Bishop of Rome! I saw from early Church history that all Church Fathers
who talked about where Peter went, talked about his going to Rome. It's
as historically documented as any fact we know about the early Church -
that Peter went to Rome, that he died in Rome, and that the next bishop
of Rome acted confidently as the possessor of his authority, which the
early Church sought and accepted.

For primary source documentation on this subject, I read an anthology
entitled Documents Illustrating Papal Authority from A.D. 96 to 451,
edited by Edward Giles. It's a Protestant book. It's an anthology of all
the patristic writings and sermons during the first five centuries, which
bear on the authority of the Bishop of Rome, beginning with the first
letter of Clement to the Church at Corinth. As you read them, there is a
cumulative effect which reaches its climax when you get to the Council of
Chalcedon in 451, when Pope Leo sends his Tome to the Council. All the
Fathers present had been perplexed about whether there are two Natures or
one Nature, two Persons or one Person, in Christ, and Leo spelled it out.
And they all stand up spontaneously, and chant unanimously, "Peter has
spoken through Leo! The matter is settled. Rome has spoken."

By the year 451, the issue of the primacy and authority of the Bishop of
Rome had been decided very clearly. There had been a very slow, organic,
but sure development of an understanding that the Bishop of Rome calls
the shots. He is the final authority. And so, for me, embracing the
Papacy was just another matter of following through on my original
commitment to believe whatever the Bible teaches.

Protestant Disregard of Church History

Brother: Now, you have discussed history, and the fact that the Fathers
of the Church provided strong arguments in support of the existence of
the Papacy. Did you study Church history in your seminary training?

Gerry: First let me say that the patristic writings fill in the picture.
I believe that you can make the argument from the Bible alone, but
history fills in the picture. The Bible sketches the outline, but history
provides the extra evidence. And I would say that history is the biggest
blind spot that Protestants have. I think that any Protestant with an
open mind, who would study the history of the early Church, and read the
writings of the first Christian leaders, would become convinced that the
early Church was Catholic. It was not Protestant.

As to your question about studying Church history in the seminary, I
would answer, yes and no. We did look at it, but I stand by my statement
that Protestants are notoriously and characteristically weak on history.
They may study Church history, but they do it very selectively, and they
do it with such a heavy filter imposed on their minds that they filter
out all the data that would lead them to Catholic conclusions. They don't
really look at it with an impartial or objective or open mind.

The typical course in Church history that you get in a Protestant
seminary covers the first 15 centuries of the Church almost at a
whirlwind pace, and you read a few excerpts here and there from Saint
Augustine or Saint Thomas. Half the time you're reading what the
Protestant author considers to be the deplorable degeneration of the
Church. Every time statements are made about the authority of the Pope -
how it grew, for example, under Saint Leo the Great and Saint Gregory the
Great - they are made in a manner that presents this growth as something
terrible, a horrible usurpation by a tyrant. But there is no attempt to
look at the actions of the Pope sympathetically, with an open mind, to
try to learn what his rationale was. There is no real attempt to
investigate this question of authority, to put oneself inside the
Catholic mind to see if its reasoning is correct, or convincing, or at
all defensible.

The course goes over that period very, very quickly. Functionally
speaking, to the Protestant, Church history almost comes to an end with
the death of the last Apostle. You're in this terrible twilight zone for
1400 years, when people were all stumbling around in a dusky gloom, in
which they had only the faintest sense of what Christianity was - just
enough, maybe, to get by. Most Protestants simply do not want to believe
that there weren't any real Christians during that time. They'll say that
there were some Christians here and there, almost despite Catholic dogma,
because there must have been some people who didn't really swallow all
that nonsense.

They'll admit that Augustine was a pretty good guy, but he was
schizophrenic. He said all those terribly Catholic things, but in his
better moments he was a real evangelical at heart. That's the way they
would pretty much read Augustine. And they would say, "Look at the poor
guy! It wasn't his fault that he was a Papist - he didn't have a choice,
he lived too soon." They would say that if Martin Luther and John Calvin
had been writing and preaching in Augustine's time, he would have joined
their side. He couldn't help not being Protestant, because it was a
product not yet available on the market. But once you get to Martin
Luther, and John Calvin, and John Knox, then you've got people standing
up who completely blow all the dust off what the New Testament really
teaches, and they restore the Gospel to purity, and then the true Church
was really cranked up again. So, they spend most of their time studying
the careers of the different Protestant denominations.

The Causes of the Reformation

Brother: Now, you have done a lot of talking about Protestantism. You
look at it now as a heresy you no longer believe. Looking back at the
history of the Protestant Revolt, how do you think it was possible for
such a mass apostasy to happen in one country after another, taking over
once-Catholic Europe? What was it that primed that continent to lose its
faith in such staggering proportions?

Gerry: I think Scripture shows us that the rise and ultimate success - if
we can call it that - of any heresy is always brought on by both internal
and external causes. And the Church always admits her own failures, but
sometimes she does it in the wrong way - today especially. So, I don't
think any Catholic, even the most triumphalistic, will deny that there
were weaknesses in the Church that made it easy for Protestantism to
amass such a following. In other words, the Church was not being faithful
to God in some areas, but not in her official teachings, obviously. As
God sees the Church, she is the Mystical Body of Christ, always
immaculate in her infallible teaching.

However, at that time, people in the Church were not living up to the
teaching of the Church. They were being disobedient. The lives of many
were lax. We know that the Church had just come off the Renaissance, and
many of the Renaissance popes were less than exemplary. They were not,
for instance, the calibre of a Saint Pius X at the beginning of our
century. And God chastises His people. In the Bible, we see this pattern
of chastisement over and over again. It's a pattern recurring all through
the Book of Judges. God's people became lax and lazy and indifferent to
their covenant obligations, so God allowed the Philistines to rise up and
harass them, and to attack and defeat them, and ultimately to carry them
away into captivity.

That is exactly what happened to millions of members of the Catholic
Church in the 16th century. Intellectually, they were taken prisoners of
war by the heresy of Protestantism, and lived out their lives in
servitude to this heresy. They were exiled from their proper homeland,
the Catholic Faith, and deported to a kind of intellectual Babylon, where
they were made to worship a false god by a false faith.

So there were problems within the Catholic Church, internal problems of
corruption among the clergy, going all the way up to the papacy. I think
also that most Catholic analyses of the era will admit that there was a
problem in the field of philosophy. In his book, The Spirit and Forms of
Protestantism, Louis Bouyer points out that the Church had failed to
remain faithful to the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which she has
always taught is the philosophia perennis - the perennial philosophy of
the Church.

At the end of the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII emphasized the need for
this constant return of the Church to a pure, unadulterated Thomism. And
because Thomism had fallen by the wayside in the late 1300s and 1400s,
the false philosophy called Nominalism rose up and became the dominant
philosophy taught in the seminaries. Nominalism posits a radical
distinction between the outward and the inward, between the spiritual and
the material, between the natural and the supernatural. In other words,
it's faith versus works, rather than faith and works. And it's water
Baptism versus inner reception of the Spirit, rather than being baptized
with water and the Spirit, as Jesus says in John 3:5. And Christ is the
Head of the Church, not the Pope, rather than Christ through the Pope. In
other words, Nominalism attacks the Incarnation which is the central idea
of the Christian Faith: that God gives Himself to us in embodied form;
that He gives His grace through the Sacraments; that we submit to Christ
in submitting to the Church; that we receive the Word of God through the
Magisterium of the Church; and so on.

Luther was trained in Nominalism, and so were all the reformers. They
ended up with warped perspectives. I am reminded here of what Our Lord
said: "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." God joined
faith and works together; Luther ripped them apart. He said one is
justified by faith and not by works, and he ended up actually having to
throw the whole book of James out of the Bible because James says in
2:24: "You see, my brothers, that we are justified by works, and not by
faith alone," and Luther was teaching sola fide, by faith alone. He said
that James' Epistle is wrong, and he wanted it out of the Bible. We are
saved by the Spirit, and not by Baptism, and on and on it went. Because
it was not policing its own, the Church's house was not set in order, and
all this sloppy thinking was going on. It laid the egg that Luther
hatched.

Let me move to the second point, the external factors. There is no doubt
that even when the Church is at its purest and most faithful, there will
always be heresies and heretics. The devil never sleeps, and he's out to
corrupt the Faith and lead people astray. So, there is a supernatural
dimension to the problem. The devil hates the Church, and he saw that the
times were ripe for a massive exodus of Christians out of the Church.

There were all kinds of political and economic factors at work, too,
although I don't want to follow the route of purely secularized analysts
and say that the Reformation was caused primarily by sociological
factors, that it was just people who did it. However, there is some
element of truth in that which should not be overlooked.

In other words, nationalism was on the rise, and some unholy people saw
that, if they could break up the unity of Christendom and create
independent national entities that had no allegiance to a higher,
overarching unity, there no longer would be a Holy Roman Empire. However,
there would have to be national, or state, churches, because if there
were a Spain, and an Italy, and a Germany, etc., all politically
independent but still loyal sons of the Pope as their spiritual emperor,
that just wouldn't do.

The Bible tells us the same thing. After Solomon died and his son,
Roboam, turned out to be a very poor ruler - like many of the Renaissance
popes were - the 10 northern tribes decided to form their own independent
nation. So the nation of Israel was formed, independent of the kingdom of
Juda in the south. For a time, all the Israelites in the northern kingdom
went down to Jerusalem for the appointed high holy days, similar to our
holy days of obligation. Then, the rulers in the north realized that this
was ridiculous. The people are going back to Jerusalem regularly; they
see the glory of the Davidic palace and the Davidic king's son sitting on
the throne, and it won't be long before they want to return to unity with
Juda. So, the rulers had to set up their own alternative religious
structure. They set up their golden calves, one in Dan and another in
Bethel, and they told the people that these were their gods. So they
reinstituted worship of the golden calf. The point is that exaggerated
nationalism tends to lead to religious independence as well.

Brother: So, the Protestant Reformation was schism degenerating into
heresy, similar to the Anglican schism.

Gerry: Yes. Although there was heresy - it's like the question, which
came first, the chicken or the egg? It wasn't simply a matter of schism,
with no heresy at the outset. I would have to say that the heresy came
first. Luther lost his Catholic Faith. He came to reject certain
teachings of the Catholic Faith and, as you pointed out at the beginning
of this interview, if you reject any of these teachings of the Church -
even just one of them - you reject the whole seamless garment. The Faith
is a seamless garment, so you believe all, or you believe nothing. So, in
rejecting some of the teachings, Luther, in effect, put himself outside
the Church altogether. Hence, it was this heresy that led to his schism,
and the schism, of course, put further heresy in its wake.

Problems in the Church Today

Brother: OK. Let's turn our attention now to current happenings in the
Church, specifically to the matter of conversions to the Faith. There
have been a few Protestants with a backgound similar to yours -
evangelical reformed, fundamentalist, conservative Protestants - who have
converted to Catholicism in recent years. Do you see this as the
beginning of some sort of large movement back to the Church, a Catholic
counter-reformation in the 20th century?

Gerry: Up until a year ago, that is exactly what I saw - the beginning of
massive conversions back to the Church. But now I'm not so sure, and I'll
explain why

Ever since the Reformation in the 16th century, there has been a steady
stream of Protestants who, tracing the river back to its source, found
their way back home. Let's face it, there is some Christianity in
Protestantism. I don't want to water-down one bit the fact that it is a
heresy - and I am much stronger on that point now than I have been in the
past - but there is some truth in Protestantism, as there is in any false
religion, and it's because Protestantism lives off the borrowed capital
of Catholicism. The truth that Protestants do hold may prompt God to
bring about some motions of grace within them that are intended to lead
them, if the grace is not frustrated, to their final destination, that
is, back into the Church, outside of which, obviously, there isn't any
salvation.

But, since 1960, conversions have plummeted. According to the Kenedy
Official Catholic Directory, which comes out every year, up until 1960 we
always had a healthy number of conversions - especially in the United
States. Within the last year, I have come to look upon these statistics
with a more jaundiced eye than I did previously, and it's because of the
point I'll make in a minute about Americanism. But we do have some
conversions. The rationale given for the reforms of Vatican Council II,
and the changing of the Mass, was to bring back fallen-away Catholics,
and to augment greatly the number of conversions to the Faith. The
precise opposite has occurred. It has been a disaster - an ecumenical
disaster.

Protestants today, in general, don't respect Catholicism at all. To them,
the Catholic Church seems to preach indifferentism. They get the
impression that the average Catholic of today believes that anyone can
believe anything he wants. So, they think, why join this at all? There is
more moral fibre, they rationalize, in their evangelical and
fundamentalist sects, which have more belief in absolute truth than does
the average Catholic priest or parish. So, conversions have plummeted.

Now, within the last 5 or 10 years, we have seen several evangelicals
come back to Catholicism. I thought that these were probably the first
few raindrops of what would eventually become a real downpour of
conversions. I don't think that's going to happen now, but I was more
optimistic at that time because I was less critical of the state of
Catholicism in this country. I thought that, despite a few problems,
excesses, or abuses here and there, the state of spiritual health in the
average parish was, by and large, a pretty good one. So, the Catholicism
that these converts were coming into, could still save their souls.

Now, I have become extremely cynical, not in an emotionally unhealthy
sense, but in a realistic sense, because I think I have - hopefully by
God's grace - a far more accurate assessment of just how much real
Catholicism there is in this country. And that assessment is the result
of three discoveries:

First, discovering what the whole heresy of Americanism is all about. I
read Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae, which he wrote to
Cardinal Gibbons in 1899, on January 22 - the same date, by the way, that
Roe vs. Wade was promulgated in this country. I believe there is a
connection there. The first bishop in this country was Archbishop
Carroll. I have a big, fat book, The Life and Times of John Carroll. It's
amazing the way he sold the Catholic Faith down the river just so
Catholics could get along in a pluralistic, democratic society. I have
come to see that the American Church was not as pure as I thought that it
might have been at its best in this country.

Second, discovering what it means to be a Traditionalist by finding my
way to the traditional Mass and the traditional catechesis. I have moved
from being what is called a "Conservative" Catholic to being a
"Traditionalist" Catholic. But I deplore the adjectives. The word
"Catholic" should be enough to indicate that you love tradition, and that
you love all the dogmas of the Faith and everything about the Faith.
Within the past year, I've become completely a Traditionalist.

Third, discovering the dogma, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, which I was
not really aware of - at least in an explicit way - up until about a year
ago. It was through reading your books, Gate of Heaven, Bread of Life,
The Loyolas and the Cabots, and They Fought the Good Fight, and becoming
aware of Saint Benedict Center, both your group and the groups in Still
River, and beginning to study your periodicals, books, and tapes - it was
through these means that I came to see that, judged by the standard of
the answer to the question "Are they teaching this dogma?", the hierarchy
in this country, even those bishops who pass for conservatives, are - and
there's no other way to say it - grossly derelict in their duties. And
that bodes very ill for this country. In other words, if the hierarchy of
the Catholic Church in this country, and in the other countries as well,
is not teaching this truth, then God has given us over to a reprobate
mind. I mean we are handed over to what I ruefully conclude is almost
inevitable judgment.

Now, I'm not a fatalist. I believe that through faithful evangelism, by
teaching Extra Ecclesiam as defined dogma, by trying to catechize
Catholics to bring them back to the unity of the Faith - in other words,
by getting our own house in order - we can turn things around. I don't
believe it's a lost cause, but I realize that we are far further from
achieving our goals than I thought we were one year ago, for it was only
then that I came to understand the need to restore the traditional Mass
and the traditional catechesis throughout every parish in this land. We
need to restore the essential dogma, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, to its
clear, uncompromising meaning, and then we will be able to eradicate
Americanism from the thinking of even conservative Catholics.

Let me add two footnotes to what I have just said. First, I agree that
conversions are still occurring. They are the rain drops falling into the
glass, the Church. I used to think that the glass was maybe half full.
But now I see the real, true glass, and I see that real, true Catholicism
is growing just a tiny bit, and, although these few rain drops are
appreciated, they are far from bringing the water to the brim.

My second concern, my second footnote, is this: I don't want to be overly
critical of either myself or my fellow converts, and I thank God for the
grace He gave me to be able to see the three things I just mentioned, but
I am saddened, very saddened, by the fact that many of these converts do
not see these things. So, my enthusiasm over these conversions is
tempered by my concern - what are they converting to? If they are
converting to an Americanist, watered down, compromised Catholicism, then
it is not going to do any lasting good. They are going to be just like I
was a year ago. When I was out on the stump working for Catholic Answers,
people would put tough questions to me, like, "Are you saying that all
Protestants are lost?" Like a typical Novus Ordo, Americanist-influenced
Catholic, I would say, "No, I'm not saying they're lost, but I really
think they ought to become Catholic." I just did not see how imperative
it was that they become so!

Brother: Now, we at Saint Benedict Center obviously continue the
doctrinal crusade of Father Feeney, but we are also missionaries. We have
a two-fold goal. We want to convert America, and we want to bring all
Catholics - especially the hierarchy, whose primary responsibility is to
teach the truths of the Faith - to understand and proclaim the dogma,
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. As we see it, we have three main enemies:
Liberalism, Modernism, and Americanism. You have discussed two of them
quite thoroughly - Liberalism, which is the same as Indifferentism, and
Americanism. What is your assessment of the Modernist problem?

Gerry: I think that Catholics, in general, are more Modernist in their
thinking than they themselves realize. Many of my conservative Catholic
friends would be insulted and offended if I accused them of making even
the least concession to Modernism, which they obviously have done. There
is a right-wing of Modernism, you might say. Even many of the authors
whose books were recommended to me before I came into the Church -
authors like Henri de Lubac, Louis Bouyer, and Hans Urs von Balthazar,
theologians with whom many conservatives are comfortable - I now see as
Modernists. They are relatively conservative Modernists, but Modernists
nonetheless. Even many of the prominent cardinals in the Church, many of
the prominent occupants of Magisterial sees, are Modernists.

Brother: That's right! Let me read to you an excerpt from a pamphlet that
Saint Benedict Center published some years ago. It's called "A Statement
to the Catholics of Boston and of America." It begins:

A quarter of a century ago, a strong voice was raised in the Catholic
Archdiocese of Boston and was heard all around the world: the voice of
Catholics from Saint Benedict Center accusing Boston College of joining a
worldwide conspiracy to weaken, or at least to silence, the most
fundamental dogma of the Catholic Faith, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus,
which is in plain English, Outside the Church there is no salvation.

We warned at the time that, unless the persons vested with the authority
to guard the Holy Faith were to smite the nascent heresy with their
God-given sword of the spirit, dire consequences would fall upon the
Church and upon the Faithful...

The dire consequences of this deplorable state of affairs have since come
upon us, as every Catholic now knows, in Boston, and in America, and in
the whole world. The missionary life of the Church is almost dead.
Religious Orders have been dissolved. Priests and religious in unheard of
numbers are deserting their sacred commitments. Catholic education is
bankrupt. Vocations approach the vanishing point.

There is a whole list of these consequences, and one of them is the
replacement of the Holy Mass, given to us by Our Savior Himself, by a
Protestantized parody of it. The letter ends:

We still profess the same Faith, out of which no one at all can be saved,
as we did a quarter of a century ago.

This statement was published in 1973. In the late 1940s, in trying to put
his finger on the source of these emerging problems, Father Feeney had
concluded that they were the result of the ever-increasing denial of
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. He had perceived back then that there was a
serious problem in the Church in America, because so many priests were
very lax about converting people, and about preaching the hard truths of
the Faith. He knew all about Americanism and Liberalism and
Indifferentism, and how dangerous they were to the Faith.

So, my question is: Do you agree with us that the problems in the Church
did not begin after Vatican II, but that they date back well before the
Council, and not just in this country, but throughout the world? Even in
Ireland in the 1950s, a Jesuit wrote a biography of Saint Francis Xavier,
and he denied the dogma right in that biography; he criticized Saint
Francis for thinking that Buddhists were going to hell if they didn't
convert.

Gerry: Oh, absolutely! I agree absolutely. And, as I said earlier, I
think in terms of what happened in this country, the problem here goes
all the way back to the 1700s. I make a distinction between Catholicism
in this country prior to 1776, and after that. I think of the great
Jesuit missionaries who came over here and who certainly believed the
dogma. I think of Our Lady of Guadalupe appearing to Juan Diego in 1531.
She wanted this whole continent consecrated to her Divine son as King,
and to herself as Queen. She wanted the New World to be unabashedly
Catholic, in part as reparation for those souls leaving the Church via
the Protestant Revolt, which was going on in the Old World at that very
time.

But the Catholicism that made peace with Protestantism, when this country
was founded in 1776 as the United States of America, already looked upon
itself as just one among many optional religions. Look at the Maryland
experiment. Many people will say that it was wonderful for Maryland to
grant this toleration to Catholics. But that's just the point! This
toleration was set within the larger context of pluralism. In other
words, it meant that there are many faiths, and Catholicism is just one
of them. And the Catholics thought that was just wonderful! At that
point, they denied, in effect, that they were the One True Church, and
that they held the One True Faith.

When I read about churches being shared by Protestants and Catholics
having services in the same building, although other Catholics may think
that's really neat, I think it's deplorable. I say that that chapel or
church should be consecrated to the True Faith, and that Faith alone.
Heretics and schismatics should not be allowed to use it. So I think that
Catholicism in America, going all the way back to that time, was already
compromised.

Coming up to the last century, I think Cardinal Gibbons was a liberal.
Years ago, when I first came into the Church, I loved his book, The Faith
of Our Fathers. But as I have grown in my Catholic Faith, I have come to
see that there are serious problems with it. There are places where he
betrays the absolute truth of the Catholic Faith.

Brother: In his Bread of Life, Father Feeney strongly criticized this
book.

Gerry: I think Cardinal Gibbons once boasted that he had written a book
that Protestants would not find offensive at all.

Brother: And about 60 years later, we have Archbishop Cushing boasting
that he never made a convert in his life.

The interview ended with this strange boast by a Prince of the Catholic
Church in America. One can only wonder "what might have been" had
Archbishop Cushing used the power and prestige of his office to support
Father Leonard Feeney, not to silence him. Imagine the huge number of new
sons of the Church, sons with the zeal of Gerry Matatics, who would now
be the glorious fruit of fifty years of solid missionary activity
throughout this country, and what a great blessing that would be for the
Church, America and the world!

Gerry Matatics continues to do great work addressing both Catholics and
non-Catholics through his ongoing lecture apostolate and his apologetical
writings. Were there more courageous apostolic men like him, America
could quickly make up for lost time and, in a matter of a few years, be
well on its way to becoming a Catholic nation.

We hope that this interview will be of spiritual benefit to any
Bible-believing Protestant who wishes, at least, to know his "enemy," the
Roman Catholic Church. Accompanying a "die-hard" evangelical, such as Mr.
Matatics once was, through this cursory resumé of his journey of faith
should be an eye-opener, a light to the soul for anyone searching for the
true Christian revelation.

Especially convincing are the penetrating analyses of the Petrine
passages of the Bible, and the Old Testament references which Gerry uses
to support them, in his irrefutable defense of the succession of divinely
constituted authority in the bishops of the Catholic Church, and
principally in the infallible Bishop of Rome.

Thank you, Mr. Gerry Matatics, and may Our Lady continue to enlighten you
and give you the "increase" promised by Her Divine Son through the Power
of the Holy Ghost.

*It should be noted that in no way does the Bible lend support to the
notion that Mary was a sinner, or that she has other children (except in
the spiritual sense). Many argue that, since in the Magnificat (Luke 1:
46-5), Our Lady calls Jesus her Savior, she must be a sinner. This is not
true. Our Lady was redeemed and saved in a unique fashion. She was
redeemed "preventively," before the stain of sin touched her (cf. From
the Housetops #36, page 49-50, wherein this argument is given in more
detail). As for the "other children," the Bible only mentions the
"brethren," of Our Lord, which was a reference to Our Lord's cousins.
Scripture often refers to cousins, nephews, and other relations as
"brethren." - Editor