Friday, February 23, 2007

There Is No Excuse To Leave

"My own experience has made it plain to me that few people leave the Church for intellectual reasons. The main reason by far is moral. And so it has been through the ages. The ancient people of Israel did not leave Yahweh because they had theoretical problems about him or his revelation. The problem was behavior. It still is. Power, prestige and pleasure are the main reasons most people depart -although, of course, they place the blame elsewhere. Sheldon Vanauken, a historian and convert from Anglicanism in the early 1980s, speaking of the Church of England being compromised by its origins in Henry VIII, remarks that 'we claimed to see through the pretensions of the papacy, which we had previously accepted for a thousand years, but this sudden insight of Henry's sprang from being refused a divorce in order to marry his floozie (a not-uncommon cause of others leaving Christ's Church ever since).'"

-Thomas Dubay in Faith and Certitude.

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