Page 255 - 聖母軍團員手冊（英文版，2014年5月-2022年1月更新版）

Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 250

250 SUGGESTIONS AS TO WORKS CHAPTER 37
religion, being God’s voice, absolutely must be one, clear,
consistent, un erring, and must claim divine authority.
These characteristics are to be found only in the Catholic
Church. There is no other body or system which even claims
to possess them. Outside the Church, there is only
contradiction and confusion, so that, as Blessed Newman
crushingly puts it: “Either the Catholic religion is verily the
coming of the unseen world into this, or that there is nothing
positive, nothing dogmatic whither we are going.”
There must be a true Church. There can be only one true
Church. Where is it, if it is not the Catholic Church? Like
blows, ever directed to one spot, this simple line of approach
to the Truth has over-whelming effect. Its force is manifest to
the simple. It is unanswerable in the heart of the more
learned, though he may continue to talk of the sins of the
Church. Remind such a one briefly but gently that he proves
too much. His objections tell at least as much against any
other religious system as they do against the Church. If he
proves the Church to be false by proving that Church men did
wrong, then he has only succeeded in proving that there is no
true religion in the world.
The day has gone when a Protestant would claim that his
own particular sect had a monopoly of the truth. Nowadays
he would more modestly contend that all Churches possess a
portion or facet of the truth. But a portion is not enough.
That claim is equivalent to an assertion that there is no
known truth and no way of finding it. For if a Church has
certain doctrines that are true and therefore others that are
untrue, what means are there of recognising which is which;
when we pick, we may take the ones that are untrue!
Therefore the church which says of its doctrines: “Some of
these are true”, is no help, no guide for the way. It has left
you exactly where you were without it.
So, let it be repeated until the logic penetrates: There can be
but one true Church; which must not contradict itself, which
must possess the whole truth; and which must be able to tell
the differ ence between what is true and what is false.

“The world can find no helper more powerful than thee. It has its
apostles, prophets, martyrs, confessors, virgins, good helpers to whom
I pray. But thou my Queen, art higher than all these intercessors. That
which they can all do with thee, thou alone canst do without them.