Punch Lines

On this Feast of Saint Nicholas, I have been looking for an Arian to punch.

Arius and Pelagius are by far the most successful heretics. Most Catholics (from trad to what was once thought rad), most mainline Protestants, and most Evangelicals outside the most Confessionally insistent Lutheran and Reformed bodies, are Pelagians without even thinking about it. Many, possibly most, are Arians, too.

In fact, Pelagianism is pretty much what is taught in schools as the Faith, at least in the English-speaking world, and probably everywhere. That is not a post-Conciliar thing. It has ever been thus, certainly throughout living memory.

And de facto Arianism is also rife. Again, that is not because of anything that happened in the 1960s; indeed, certain very traditional devotions, although wholly orthodox in themselves, have the capacity to tip into it, and clearly do so quite a lot of the time.

So much for St Peter's response to Our Lord's perennially determinative question, "Who do you say that I am?"

But the Petrine Office is the permanent guarantee of orthodoxy. Catholics who dissent from it are not merely expressing an opinion. They are wrong. Objectively wrong. The Pope will therefore tell that that they are wrong. That is what he is for.

Compare and contrast the position of the Episcopal Church in the United States, founded when Arianism and Socinianism were rampant in the Church of England with no Pope to correct them, and founded out of the same Rationalism that simultaneously founded the American Republic.

Not only did the new body entirely rewrite the Church of England's Article XXXVII, Of the Power of the Civil Magistrates, in order to canonise the Americanist ideology, but it also rewrote Article VIII, Of the Creeds, so as to omit the reference to that of Saint Athanasius, which has therefore never appeared in its Book of Common Prayer.

The strong party that also desired to omit the Nicene Creed did not prevail, but is is worth noting that such a party existed. In any case, explicitly to have expunged Athanasius is at least implicitly to have sided with Arius. The doctrinal and moral decline of the American Episcopalians has been entirely predictable from the start.

This is only one among many examples. The correct answer to Our Lord's question comes from the lips of Saint Peter.