…all the live-long day 🙂
Remember
my WikiIndex idea? Well, somebody saw it and asked me to participate in a private
beta for a wiki site he’s developing. I accepted and have begun work on a wiki for
Catholic books. There’s much work left to do, but if
you take a look, you’ll get the basic idea of what it’s about.
Update:
The index no longer exists because nobody had time or energy enough to maintain it. Here’s what it looked like.
Recently I was discussing and lamenting with friends the proliferation of heretical books written by individuals calling themselves Catholic or at least purporting to have expert knowledge of the Church or Christianity in general. I read a lot and my friends read a lot. We’re inquisitive people and have at least a little ability to discern works that are in accordance with orthodox teachings and those that are not. The vast majority of people in the Church lack such a foundation and are easily lead astray by dreck by the likes of Dan Brown, Gary Wills, and John Shelby Spong.
Once upon a time, the Church maintained a list of books that Catholics ought not read, called the Index. It’s impractical in this age of mass communication for the Church to maintain such a list. However, a queriable database of books that have been given an imprimatur and/or nihil obstat would be nice. Speaking of this useful service with my friends, an idea occurred to me.
What if we created a wiki with information about popular theological books? I lack the time to set something like that up, but I’m sure someone else could do it. Somewhere in this vast blogosphere is an individual or group with the time and know-how to set up a WikiIndex. Please spread this meme if you’d like to see this idea come to fruition.
Update: I’ve discovered that the software used to create Wikipedia is open source. Woohoo!
Sometimes I worry about how dissident so many Catholics are these days. In Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic
“From time to time, the proclamation of the truth will solidify the opposition.
The victory of God’s way over man’s way will appear to be in peril. Even some Christians
will not agree to put God’s glory first. Human dignity will suffer. But Jesus promised
that even the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church that he would build
upon Peter. The teaching authority of the Church will not be compromised. She will
always preserve the truth handed down from those original twelve men who turned
the world on its head.”
"Furthermore, that the body of tradition is not of divine origin nor apostolic is proven by the fact that some traditions contradict others. The church fathers repeatedly contradict one another. When a Roman Catholic priest is ordained he solemnly vows to interpret the Scriptures only according to 'the unanimous consent' of the fathers. But such 'unanimous consent' is purely a myth. The fact is they scarcely agree on any doctrine. They contradict each other, and even contradict themselves as they change their minds and affirm what they previously had denied. Augustine, the greatest of the fathers, in his later life wrote a special book in which he set forth his Retractions. Some of the fathers of the second century held that Christ would return shortly and that he would personally reign in Jerusalem for a thousand years. But two of the best known scholars of the early church, Origen (185-254) and Augustine (354-430) wrote against that view. The early fathers condemned the use of images in worship, while later ones approve such use. The early church almost unanimously advocated the reading and free use of the Scriptures, while later ones restricted such reading and use. Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome and the greatest of the early bishops, denounced the assumption of the title of Universal Bishop as anti-Christian. But later Popes even to the present have been very insistent of using that and similar titles which assert universal authority. Where, then, is the universal tradition and unanimous consent of the fathers to papal doctrine?"
– Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962), pp. 78-79
Thoughts?