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As of November 18, 2000, Lane’s World is being superseded by ELCore.Net.
Lane’s World CatholicPage features Truth for Catholics.
For people to step in 1,500 years after the Catholic Church had had possession of the Bible and to pretend that it is theirs, and that they alone know what the meaning of it is, and that the Scriptures alone, without the voice of the Catholic Church explaining them, are intended by God to be the guide and rule of faith — this is an absurd and groundless claim.
(Henry G. Graham, Where We Got the Bible, chapter V, “Deficiencies of the Protestant Bible”)
(I have included “Sacred Scripture” as a heading beneath “Church Documents” because The Holy Bible is a Church document.)
History is not a creed or a catechism, it gives lessons rather than rules; still no one can mistake its general teaching in this matter, whether he accept it or stumble at it. Bold outlines and broad masses of colour rise out of the records of the past. They may be dim, they may be incomplete; but they are definite. And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.
(Ven. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Part I, “Introduction,” Number 5)
It has been seventy years since [in 1930] the Anglican Church allowed contraception in cases of “dire necessity,” and it is hard to see how contraception has made our collective lives better. Humanity still has wars, starvation, strife, disease, pestilence, oppression, persecution, and inequity, just as Jesus said we would. In addition to these ancient problems we now have epidemic divorce, the collapse of families, and a virulent new venereal plague. Promiscuity has become the new and acceptable norm, at least in the West. In Humanae vitae Pope Paul said that these calamities would result if contraception were to become widespread and regarded as acceptable. They would happen because the institution of marriage would be broken and sex would be depraved. It looks like that celibate bachelor was right.
(Rachel Fay, This Rock magazine, April 1998, page 15)
It’s too late in the day to think we can get by with anything other than Christianity in its fullness. The Reformation has petered out. The Enlightenment has fizzled. This century’s isms, including varieties of totalitarianism and feminism, all have proved failures. There is only one thing left, one thing that has youthful vigor and age-old wisdom, one thing that has a prayer of resuscitating our moribund society, and that thing is the Catholic faith.
(Karl Keating, This Rock magazine, July/August 1996, page 2)
If on the one hand the Catholic Church was a rather vague touchstone, solid but distant, on the other hand it was becoming more persistent as a notion in my mind. To really join it would be an ultimately radical move — it was certainly not “New Age,” like all the other religious alternatives swimming around in my mind. It went deeply against the grain. But I had become royally sick of new and evermore new things, as if the leading edge of the human race must create its own reality moment by moment. Even though Buddhism was ancient, it was new for us, and therefore exotic, attractive, and “hip.” To become a Catholic, on the other hand, would be an utterly uncool thing to do. In itself, Catholicism might mean the heart of the mystery; but in Boulder society, in the crowd I ran with, to announce that you were seriously considering the Catholic Church was to elicit looks of troubled condescension or shocked disdain, as if you had vomited up your supper on the bright tablecloth of spiritual delights. It meant going backwards, to authority, to “patriarchy,” to heresy-hunts and Inquisitions, before the great liberation. It made my friends (some of them) sick to their stomachs to hear about it. But I was beginning to think that it meant growing up.
(Thomas W. Case, Moonie, Buddhist, Catholic: a Spiritual Odyssey, “Rocky Mountain Dharma High,” page 168)
As of November 18, 2000, Lane’s World is being superseded by ELCore.Net.