FATHER KNOX ON CONVERTS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 49, 9 December 1925, Page 21

FATHER KNOX ON CONVERTS

NO ALTERNATIVE TO THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. “Jesus said to the twelve: Will-you. also go away ? Simon Peter answered “ Him: Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words' of eternal life.” Speaking from this text at the Church of the Sacred Heart, Liverpool, on a recent Sunday, Father Ronald Knox, MA., said that people who left the Catholic Church generally lost faith, lost hope, and drifted away. Converts did not drift into the Catholic Church. To become a Catholic did not mean losing their grip on any religious convictions they had before, but it meant they must declare their assent to a number of doctrines which probably they had never. considered before. One might leave the Catholic Church by drifting with the tide, but to come into the Church one must set his teeth and swim.. To whom did they go, those unfortunate souls who lost the Faith? A few of them found an uneasy satisfaction in other forms of worship, Christian or half-Christian, but the bulk of them did not go to any sort of church. They knew what they had lost : they did not want patent religions that were “very nearly as good.” They went to swell in a small degree the ranks of our fellow-countrymen now so formidably numerous, who acknowledged no God or religious authority. There was no substitute for the Catholic Faith. It was the last hope left to the world and the last hope it would ever get. They had only to look around them to see the self-confessed failure of all other creeds to satisfy the needs of the immortal soul. It would not be content with mere philosophies or political agitation; the schismatic Christianity of the East was melting like glass in the fire wherever it came into touch with Western civilisation. Other denominations openly deplored their lack of membership and silently deplored the modernism that was eating away the heart of those who remain with them. To, Catholics no alternative presented itself unless they gave up altogether the hope of eternal life to plunge into the pleasures of the world to share their delights with the beasts and his despair with the Devil. ■ <X> The Catholic teacher rejoices in, the glorious inheritance. He is a. descendant of a royal and a noble ancestry. He is a part of the greatest educational force that' history records.