The Original “Cancel Culture”

Way back in history, when information traveled much more slowly (and in fact, when it was compiled much more slowly than it is today), to “cancel” someone may have simply involved “not re-copying the manuscripts” (which were initially created, by hand, on animal skins and later papyrus). The writings would simply disappear on their own.

Some time later, “canceling” someone involved things like cutting out tongues or cutting off fingers and hands. Yes, the Roman Catholic Church did this. See the story of poor “Greek antipope John XVI (997–998), who, unfortunately for him, did not die from the removal of his eyes, nose, lips, tongue and hands” (from Eamon Duffy, “Saints and Sinners”, a history of the papacy, p. 104).

Later versions of “Cancel Culture” were perfected by the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, “which had enshrined such a practice for centuries.”

In describing how we have come to know about the genuine writings of Nestorius, for example, (long considered to be a heretic, but now not so much), Friedrich Loofs wrote, “The church of the ancient Roman Empire did not punish its heretics merely by deposition, condemnation, banishment and various deprivation of rights, but, with the purpose of shielding its believers against poisonous influence, it destroyed all heretical writings … a similar fortune was prepared for Nestorius.” (Loofs, “Nestorius,” 2-11)”.

Here is a selection from one of my early blog articles on Roman Catholicism, entitled “On the repression of information in the pursuit of an agenda”, which featured the following account from the English historian of the period, Patrick Collinson:

In 1543 a little book was published in Venice with the title “Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso i cristianin” (A Most Useful Treatise on the Merits of Jesus Christ Crucified for Christians), written by an elusive Benedictine monk called Benedetto da Mantova (dates of birth and death unknown, but his surname seems to have been Fontanino) with some help from the humanist and poet Marcantonio Flaminio (1498-1550), a popular work of piety that was translated into several languages ….

[T]he “Beneficio” … proves to have been made up from a number of transalpine Protestant texts, and especially the 1539 edition of Calvin’s Institutes. Whether or not Benedetto had come across Calvin in his monastery on the slopes of Mount Etna, which seems unlikely, the Institutes was known to Flaminio.

It is hard to distinguish between the theology of the Beneficio and Protestantism. “Man can never do good works unless he first know himself to be justified by faith.” Other scholars insist, however, that the Beneficio is an expression of Evangelism, a movement that was not generated by Protestantism and should be distinguished from it.

What is certain is that the Beneficio was placed on the Index [of forbidden books] and so successfully repressed by the Roman Inquisition that of the many thousands of copies of the Italian edition that were once in existence only one is known to survive, discovered in the library of a Cambridge college in the nineteenth century. That sort of successful repression was the Counter-Reformation. (“The Reformation, a History”, Patrick Collinson, (c) 2003, New York: The Modern Library (Random House edition), pgs. 105-106.)

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-repression-of-information-in-pursuit.html

George Orwell wrote, in “1984”, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” (Book 1, Chapter 3).

Orwell’s “Big Brother”, and today’s “Cancel Culturists” both, have learned this lesson well, from the practices of Roman Catholic Church. If we are to retain a culture of true freedom in our day, we must resist such a practice mightily.

Revisiting some of my old writings

As a blogger, I probably have written some 2000 or more blog articles for various blogs over the last 15 years. That includes more than 1200 at Triablogue, the home of the late Steve Hays, who was one of the most brilliant thinkers who’s ever lived; 175 at Beggars All (James Swan’s site), 400 at this blog (johnbugay.com), and another 400 at a blog entitled “Reformation500”. Those last two are blogs that I have set up.

Some of these blog posts were very long, and some were short. Some were extremely detailed, and others (as in the case of what I was doing during Bethany’s struggle with leukemia) were merely photos with short, if any, captions.

I have always thought of myself as a writer. During my college years, I studied journalism; I have tried all my professional life to “be a writer”; early on, say, during the 1990s, I was able to accomplish that, in a couple of very fulfilling career positions. But the marketing and advertising world changed. Though I was largely a “news” writer, with a strong emphasis on writing newsletters and corporate public relations in those days, technology changed, and my roles later changed too, to documentation and marketing, and eventually, I moved almost completely out of writing and into marketing automation.

But I continued to write personally. I have been dedicated to understanding the truth of things, and writing clearly, so that others would understand. That’s been a foundational definition for me I’ve always sought to be truthful, and in many cases, I’ve sought to be provocative. In some cases, I was a bit too provocative, and instead of fostering understanding in my readers, I’ve actually gotten some of them riled up. You live and learn.

While some of my personal writing revolved around Beth and her difficulties, the vast majority of what I’ve written centers on religious struggles that I’ve had over the years, most particularly with regard to questions surrounding, “what are we to do with Roman Catholicism?”
These are questions that occupied my intellectual efforts for most of my adult life. I am 62 as I write this. I was dogged by the question of Roman Catholicism during my early years – maybe from age 17-24. I went back, for a while, and even thought about studying for the priesthood (I had gotten accepted to St Paul’s seminary in 1983-4). But I couldn’t go through with it, and beginning around age 35, I started revisiting those questions again. A few years later, I made a final break with Roman Catholicism.

It wasn’t a spurious decision. It was something that I deliberately studied, and thought about, and prayed about, and I came to the clear, unmistakable conclusion that I could no longer remain Roman Catholic.

And even after I had left, there were the “concerns” from friends and relatives, the “oh yeah, whaddabout this” questions. I was honest enough in those years to try and answer all the “whaddabouts”, and in the process, I became knowledgeable about Roman Catholicism to continue to write about it at a very high level.

Over the years, my experience studying and writing about various aspects of Roman Catholicism enabled me to become well known enough that a couple of Protestant writers, seeking to write a kind of textbook for Protestant college and seminary students, contacted me and asked me for source materials that they could refer to. My name appears in the acknowledgements of that book; the Kindle image appears at the top of this article.

I should say, all of this came in the context of what I’d describe as a deep faith in Jesus Christ, and a deep love for Christianity.

Christianity has provided the philosophical underpinnings for my entire life, even my young life, even though I might not have described it that way. I’ve always looked to take care of “inner things” before the externals.

[As an aside, I knew a woman who focused exclusively on externals –dressing properly, or folding her napkin the right way when she was done with dinner; but her inner life was a complete mess.]

My goal in life has always been to take care of the most important thing first. Things you might call “the heart of the matter”. Is there a God? Am I right with “The God who is There”? (Shades of Francis Schaeffer). Am I living in a way that is honoring Him? Am I being a good husband? Am I being a good father? All of those things have tended to preoccupy me, ahead of questions of externals.

There was a time when wars were fought over the kinds of issues I had studied all of my life. In our day, God is marginalized, and Protestant vs Roman Catholic question now seem more like tempests in tea pots.

This just shows how far our culture has moved, away from the most fundamental things. Maybe the economic malaise we’re seeing will persuade some people to take another look. I hope it does.

My intention now is to re-edit, re-package, and re-publish some of those blog articles here, in a way that will, I hope, be meaningful for some people today. That includes people who are close to me, and it likely will mean that some family members who are still Roman Catholic will read these things.

My religious sentiments won’t be a surprise to many people, I hope. But I also hope that my lines of reasoning will help people to understand why I think the way I do.

Roman Boastfulness

Those of you who read this blog to find out news about Beth may have noticed that I also write about theology and church history, and the things I write are distinctively not flattering to Roman Catholicism. I want to assure those of you who are devout Roman Catholics that I do not intend to question your sincerity or your devotion to Christ at all. Those are between you and Him.

What I do intend to question is the legitimacy of the whole “Roman” component of Roman Catholicism: the church hierarchy, the very presupposition that the “universal” church was destined to be based in Rome. From that presupposition flows everything else. But those very presuppositions need to be challenged.

As I was growing up, I was the geekiest, nerdliest little “good Catholic” boy that you can imagine. My mom has a photograph of me in a suit, my hair combed back in a wave, my new missal in my hands and my eyes clad with a 1967 version of “coke-bottle” glasses ready to dive into that missal.

But as I grew older, I became exposed to conservative Protestant understandings of Christianity, and as I read through the New Testament, a kind of cognitive dissonance was unleashed in my heart that it has taken decades to sort through: How could an institution as old and as seemingly authoritative be so different from the vision of Christ and Christianity that’s given in the New Testament?

In this attached posting, entitled In his Theology of the Cross, Luther follows Paul in rebuking Roman boastfulness, I provide some of the background for how this could occur.

A little bit about my Catholic background – 1

I’ve been prompted to write about myself from two different perspectives. I’m not really shy about telling “my story,” and I’ve done so briefly, in the context of my church, and also here, a bit:

I’m a former Catholic — I was born in 1960 and raised in the Catholic Church by a devout family. But by the time I was in high school, I had also heard the Gospel from some friends — and I just could not comprehend why this “Gospel” was not what “the one true Church” was teaching, especially not if it was in the Bible. Needless to say, it created a great deal of turmoil in my spirit, and it set off a struggle that would consume me for a long time. In fact, that question — an overwhelming desire to find “the reason why,” motivates me today. But the issues I investigated in leaving Roman Catholicism continued to tug at my heart and mind. How could such a big, authoritative and seemingly wonderful thing have gone so wrong?

But there were two recent episodes that prompted me to go a bit deeper with this. First, in some comments at a blog where someone picked up some of the things I was writing about the early papacy, an individual questioned whether I was genuinely Catholic. Or at least, he suggested that I had only nominally been Catholic.

Here’s a quote from a commenter named Leo:

What I said, was “The catechesis you received must have been awful.”
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, since there are two viable options:

1. You left because you did not really and truly understand what the Catholic Church really is, believing it to be something of your own misunderstanding.

2. You know darn well and believe that the Church was founded by Christ Himself and has been protected from teaching error on Faith and Morals yet you decided to leave anyway. That would be apostasy.

You also said, “And yes, I had a very clear understanding of the “Eucharist”.”

Well, that’s nice, but it does not negate what I said. My comment was, “Well, you certainly never came to believe in the Eucharist or you never would have left.”

Notice that my observation was that you would never have left if you had come to believe in the Euchrarist. You may have had a clear understanding of the Eucharist, but your actions display a complete lack of faith in the Eucharist.

So there you have it. This individual, who had never met me, imitates Christ (from the pericope of the woman at the well from John 4), and he tells me everything about myself, without ever having met me!

This is the sort of thing that’s prompted by a statement by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, to the effect that, “There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church.” But Sheen here was speaking with a typical Roman Catholic style of exaggeration. Lots of people know what the Roman Catholic Church is.

So I qualified Leo’s statement:

There is a third viable option. I really and truly knew and understood everything the Roman Catholic Church said about itself; after a careful reading of Scripture, I decided to reject it as false. I was devout; I considered becoming a priest, and I attended Opus Dei “evenings of recollection” for two years. And I assure you, “the catechesis I received” through Opus Dei was only in the sense that it was purely Roman Catholic.

Nevertheless, I confess Jesus Christ as Lord — I am saved by grace alone through faith alone by Christ alone, and Soli Deo Gloria.

And then there have just been some of the individuals who have asked me privately to expand on this.

Regarding your Catholic experience, I think I am most interested in the events or influences in your life that moved your heart toward Jesus Christ, especially in such a way as to move you seriously toward studying for the priesthood. I find that fascinating, and I expect it would be quite moving.

So in what follows in the next few posts, I will try to give a little bit about that sort of thing.