A quote from St. Augustine uttered during the 4th century Donatist controversy is haunting me. Roughly translated from the Latin, it is a statement that says, “wherefore the entire world judges out of security, they are not good who separate themselves from the entire world, in whatever part of the entire world”.

It was the discovery of this Augustine quote, and his subsequent fervent meditation upon it, that led John Henry Newman, noted 19th century Anglican and leader of the Oxford Movement, to realize that the Church of England was, in reality, no less schismatic in its relationship to the historic Catholic faith than the Donatists and the Monophysites were back in those formative years of the Church in the late 3rd-early 4th centuries.

I have to say that, unlike my view going in to reading Vincent Ferrer Blehl’s fascinating book about Newman’s journey from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, “Pilgrim Journey”, I’m pretty impressed – and not a little persuaded – by Newman’s subsequent view that the Christian faith as practiced by the Roman Catholic Church, even given its own historic excesses and corruptions (which, BTW, all churches inevitably fall into in their own time), remains the closest in terms of spirit, doctrine, teachings, and traditions to the church of the Apostles and the early Church Fathers.

You can see the power and underlying sense of Newman’s view looking not just at the Church of England today and the total mess the worldwide Anglican Communion finds itself in after decades of slipping and sliding away from the historical teachings and traditional doctrines of Christianity, but in the way each of the various mainline Protestant churches that emerged out of the Reformation have continued to fracture and splinter out of disputes – some significant, others arbitrary – into churches and denominations of diminished importance and doctrinal irrelevence in their attempts to be more or even less Catholic.

None of this should come as any surprise, for what all these churches have in common is a continual, ongoing act of reformation constantly at the mercy of the times and increasingly at odds with the ancient traditions from which they themselves originated. Paul Thigpen, in Patrick Madrid’s book “Surprised By Truth”, writes of his own revelation in this regard:

…I saw how Rome has remained the spiritual center of gravity for the churches that have separated from her. However much they try to distance themselves, they keep finding their way back: when the arid, rigid predestinationism of Calvin grew at last intolerable, they turned to Wesley for a more human – and more Catholic – view. In the Holiness movement they recaptured something of the Catholic traditions of asceticism and works of mercy; in the Pentecostal movement they recovered a sense of sacrament and mystery.

Meanwhile, even our now-secular society – itself spawned in many ways by the logical conclusions of Protestant views – still attempts to make up for the useful Catholic traditions it has repudiated. As G.K. Chesterton once noted, whatever Catholic elements the Protestants threw out of their churches, the modern world eventually reintroduced because they couldn’t live without them. But they always brought them back in a lower form. Instead of the confessional, for example, we now have the psychoanalyst’s couch, with none of the safeguards of the confessional. Instead of a glorious communion with the saints who help us on our pilgrimage to heaven, we now have spiritualists who frolic with demons that seduce us into hell. p. 29

Like Thigpen and Newman found in their own spiritual journeys, to re-discover the Bible as THE BIBLE is to discover that the Catholic Church does, in fact, have it right. Look at all the Psalms that speak of how we are known and loved by God even while we are still being formed in our mother’s womb (BTW, this is not hard to do, just find The Pslams in any Bible concordant or Internet website and search for the word “womb”), and then you tell me what faith is correct in its stand on the sanctity of life. Unlike the mainline Protestant faiths who go out of their way to encourage us to celebrate being who and what we are – after all, that’s what worship at the altar of diversity, inclusiveness, and tolerance is all about – the Catholic Church calls its members, more than anything else, to holiness. One look at the cross behind a Catholic church altar will remind you of the burden we all share our waywardness and sinfulness. Read John chapter 6 and tell me which faith teaches the sacrament of the Eucharist in its most authentic and historic form of truth.

How I have come to arrive at these mysteries after all these years is difficult to comprehend in my own mind, and the truth is, I’m still grappling with it all. But, just as Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem” (Jn 4:21), each of us has to find, in our own way, that living stream that leads us to where we can be united with the living God both “in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:24).

It’s all baby steps thus far, but I’m beginning to understand Newman’s comment, “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant”. As it was with Newman, it is becoming more apparent to me that, as Thigpen writes, “Veritatis Splendor – the spirit of truth, as the Holy Father has so aptly called it, blazes forth from Rome.” And while that fire for me still remains a curious glow on the horizon, with each day the glow gets brighter, and the waters towards the Tiber start to run all the swifter.