My atheist friend asked me, “If it was proved tomorrow, absolutely, positively that God did not exist, what would you do?”
I thought long and hard before answering. Finally, I said: “Then I’d still want to be Catholic.”
For the last 2,000 years, the history of the world has been filtered through the Catholic Church.
At her worst, she’s matched every bad human behavior and vice of her contemporaries. But at her best, she’s personified and exemplified the greatest human thoughts, hopes and virtues.
Without the Catholic Church there would have been no “Golden Rule”, no “Due Process of Law”, and no “Scientific Method”; no hospitals, no orphanages, and no food banks; no higher institutions of learning or public education system for the masses. Not that there would have been much in the way of science to be learned. As Benjamin Wiker noted in his book, “The Catholic Church & Science,” if you read any … history of science … you’ll find that the list of scientists from the Middle Ages is almost exclusively a list of priests, religious brothers, bishops, and cardinals … [before] the 16th and 17th centuries.”
There would have been no Western Civilization at all. In his “The West Unique, Not Universal,” John M. Olin explains it thus: “Western Christianity, first Catholicism and then Protestantism, is the single most important historical characteristic in Western Civilization.
Indeed, during most if it’s first millennium, what is now known as Western civilization was called Western Christendom.”
Without the Catholic Church, the universal philosophy that, “all life is cheap,” would never have become, “the dignity due each individual soul.”
As such there would have been no Declaration of Independence – since the concept of “inalienable rights” would have been alien indeed to our Founding Fathers – and ergo, no United States of American. There would have been no such thing as a “just war” … rape and pillage and slavery would still be common practice today, and Hitler would not have been the exception, but the rule.
There would have been no great thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, no great advocates for truth and justice like Robert Bellarmine and Thomas More, no great wits like Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton; no great poems by Dante, no great plays by Shakespeare, no great artists like Michelangelo and no great music like Schubert’s Ave Maria and Haydn’s Messiah.
And there would have been no Bible.
As Abraham Lincoln observed, “But for [the Bible], we could not know right from wrong.” Not just in law, not just on virtue and vice, but of all civilized behavior. In “What if the Bible had never been written?” Kennedy and Newcombe noted: “[C] hivalry – where women became protected and cherished – was started by the Church in the Middle Ages.
When hundreds of men on the Titanic voluntarily gave up their lives so that women and children could use lifeboats, they were following a centuries-old, cultural norm that the Bible had established.”
And they add: “We are heirs to a great civilization, thanks in large part to the Bible.”
In charity and love, the Church surpasses all other worldly institutions.
As the Australian speaker, Matthew Kelly, put it: “Every single day, the Catholic Church feeds more people, houses more people, clothes more people, visits more imprisoned people, takes care of more sick people and educates more people than any other institution on the planet Earth could ever hope to [do].”
It was true a thousand years ago, and it’s still true today.
If this isn’t supernatural, then it’s certainly “super” natural.
“So,” I ask my atheist friend, “if it was proved tomorrow, absolutely, positively that God did exist, what would you do?”
Matthew Schoonover Harlingen
