Phillip R. Johnson, executive director of John MacArthur’s Grace To You ministry, comments on his blog about reports that payouts in priestly sex-abuse cases have topped $1 billion dollars. His premise is that these payouts prove that the Catholic Church’s claim of infallibility is false. My thanks to him for offering me the opportunity to step into the world of fisking:
"Start with the pretense of papal infallibility [of which we will not define so that you do not know it has nothing to do with impeccability]; forbid everyone in the core hierarchy of the church to marry [except, oh, say, Eastern-rite priests, Protestant clerical converts who are already married, and permanent deacons]; embrace a notion of <scare quote>‘spirituality’</scare quote> with <overblown rhetoric>the most superstitious form of sacramental externalism at its core</overblown rhetoric>; and demand that all your members blindly and reverently accept the authority of the church’s earthly leaders no matter what [and even though those same leaders deny they have this kind of absolutist, tyrannical form of authority I've heavily implied, make non-members blindly and reverently think such a demand is made of Catholics] — and what kind of result would you expect?" [emphasis Johnson's].
Certainly not truth-in-advertising from non-members who presume to attempt to explain to other non-members what the Catholic Church believes and teaches, that’s for sure.
