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The Fathers

Wanna become Catholic? Read the Church Fathers. That's a consistent theme on Marcus Grodi's The Journey Home, as well as a theme hammered home by my friend, Mike Aquilina. I was reminded of the Catholic thinking of those earliest Christians when reading Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion this weekend.

[When Campion was studying at Oxford as a young man, the Catholics were in the majority but Protestantism was in the ascendant. He needed to choose between the two.] He put it off as long as he could . . . but in 1567 he had, in the normal course, to proceed to the study of the Fathers. Here every sentence seemed to bear a topical allusion, and the deeper he penetrated into the minds of the Doctors, the further he seemed from the Anglican Church which he was designed to enter. He fled and doubled from the conclusions of his reason; nothing but ill was promised for him by the way he was being drawn; he prayed fervently, he consulted with those about him.

If you haven't seen them, btw, there's a great assortment of interviews about the Fathers at The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

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