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Despondent and angry, I wrote a letter to The Remnant.  I've seen no reason to recant a word.

 

A Letter to The Remnant on

Our Deplorable Estate

 

May 23, 2000

 

Editor, The Remnant:

In The Might of the West, Lawrence Brown wrote: “Not the comforting satisfaction of inward belief, but the potential humiliation of outward fact has been the last standard of truth in the West.”  Your “Statement of Resistance” marshals the humiliating facts.  You fail, however, to draw the conclusion they imply: the Roman Catholicism you quixotically uphold is dead.

Some Catholics won’t believe that the infestation of their Church has rendered Matthew 16:18 null and void until they hear a pope deny ex cathedra the existence of God or the deity of Christ.   Yet the Adversary need not make such a frontal assault on Heaven’s gates if craftiness and deceit can yield the same result without rousing the sheep.  Hell’s gates remain perpendicular.

To cope with papal and episcopal treachery over the last forty years Catholics have doped themselves with Matthew 16:18.  In our hallucinatory state, reinforced by our anti-empirical faith, we assisted in our own fleecing.  The enemy may have leveraged our authority structure against us, but the lever’s fulcrum was our own self-inflicted blindness to upsetting facts and what they entail.

Only a non-Western contempt for facts can sustain belief in the traditional understanding of the Matthean metaphors.  Our deplorable estate discon-firms belief in a Holy Spirit-protected Church.  If you resist that inference it is because the worm of Eastern idealism, called “faith,” has eaten away your hereditary respect for the falsifying fact and its power to overturn cherished belief.  Rather than give up the latter, you embrace “mystery.”

The alternative we face is between a realism that concedes defeat and revises a worldview in its light and an idealism that cannot bear too much reality.  You will opt for an idealism.  With a heavy heart I elect realism.

  Sincerely,

  Anthony Flood

 

This letter received no reply.