Topic: Catholicism

Quotes

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• On the same grounds on which Calvinism rejected Rome’s theory concerning the world, it rejected the theory of the Anabaptist, and proclaimed that the Church must withdraw again within its spiritual domain, and that in the world we should realize the potencies of God’s common grace.#
• The effect of every clerical interposition invariably was, and must be, to make religion external and to smother it with sacerdotal forms. Only where all priestly intervention disappears, where God’s sovereign election from all eternity binds the inward soul directly to God Himself, and where the ray of divine light enters straightway into the depth of our heart-only there does religion, in its most absolute sense, gain its ideal realization.#
• I not only deplore that one stake [at which Servetus was burned], but I unconditionally disapprove of it; yet not as if it were the expression of a special characteristic of Calvinism, but on the contrary as the fatal after-effect of a system, grey with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself.#
• Rome perceived very clearly how liberty of conscience must loosen the foundations of the unity of the visible Church, and therefore she opposed it. But on the other hand it must be admitted that Calvinism, by praising aloud liberty of conscience, has in principle abandoned every absolute characteristic of the visible Church. #

Luis Lugo, “Caesar’s Coin Revisited (comments on Man, Society, and the State)” (1996)

• The Vatican in its social thinking throughout most of the modern period did not sufficiently understand the varieties of liberalism with which it was dealing. Being based on the continent, it saw a more militantly secular type of liberalism with a whole metaphysics it correctly found to be offensive, and it did not appreciate until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century how the Enlightenment project had been moderated significantly in the Anglo-American tradition by pre-existing Christian sources.#

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• Those who first broke the yoke of what called itself the Universal Church, were in general as little willing to permit difference of religious opinion as that church itself. But when the heat of the conflict was over, without giving a complete victory to any party, and each church or sect was reduced to limit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it already occupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battle field, almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. #