[Download] "Truth Is Our Mask" by William Lloyd Newell ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Truth Is Our Mask
- Author : William Lloyd Newell
- Release Date : January 08, 1989
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 1981 KB
Description
I grew up in a mill town in Yankee Connecticut. Most of us were Catholic ethnics, so there were few Protestants to observe or by whom we Catholics could be observed. The few there were pretty much ran things from the senior workingmen’s posts in the mills to the captains of industry who lived in houses far removed from our wooden two and three family framehouses. The rich ones sent their kids to schools most of us entered as servants, a few as students, but none as equals.
The good priests who schooled us told us that no one who knew history could be a Protestant; that history favored the “old Church” in its claims to primacy and exclusivity. The Protestant children I played with would occasionally tell me about the darker dalliances of priests and nuns; about graveyards for little things fathered by shadowy sacerdotal figures, placed there for the good of the Church and the peace of their bastardizing progenitors. We never knew how the babies died, but the inference was monial infanticide. The upshot was that we little Catholics and Protestants learned our faiths through prisms of religious mistrust.
But, like all things, there was another side to our lives, lived together in those smoky towns of my youth. We had school chums and neighbors who professed the Methodist or Baptist faith; good people who lived decent lives, even though they didn’t seem as lively in their worship or pungent in their lifestyles as we were. (One of our “pols”, in a waggish mood, said that they did not seem to sweat, meaning that they were cooler and duller than were we Irish, Italian, Polish and Lithuanian Americans, whose neighborhoods had churches and bars almost on every block).
So, even if our neighbors had the social status, we were told that we had the Apostolic Success-ion, valid priestly orders and the sacraments linking us umbilically to the deity. We were never really taught that Protestants were beyond the pale of salvation; they were only ‘materially heretical’, and practiced their Christianity (they were ‘Christian’, we were Catholic) in what we called ‘invincible ignorance’. That was the door to heaven for these generations of good people who were fathered in the faith -- so we thought -- not by Peter, but by Luther or Calvin. Baptism brought them into the fold, and so they were ad liminal Catholics, even if against their will.