Continuing from the last post.
I too have been forced to wonder why I didn't become Catholic. When I became a Christian I was more inclined toward Catholicism. And at that time my sister and mother did convert to Catholicism. I too have seen many Catholic doctrines and practices very favorably , though I still reject some them in my Protestant opinions (communion of the saints, rosaries, Divine Office, to name a few) I go to mass quit often and have taken some RCIA classes. Yet I am firmly in the Evangelical camp. Being a Baptist and latter a non-denominational Evangelical in America, I was well aware of anti-Catholic bigotry. I had to fight it often in myself and in others. I assure you an anti-Catholic bigot does not have a lot of Catholic friends, believe in Catholic doctrine, and become High Church Anglican. They avoid all things Catholic and call Catholics a “non-Christian” Cult. Lewis is not a anti-Catholic bigot or suffered from Catholic phobia.
The reason Lewis was also firmly in the Protestant camp is seen in the following quote from an essay that Walter Hooper probably saved from fire to share with us.
“The real reason, I take it, why you cannot be in communion with us is not your disagreement with this or that particular Protestant doctrine, so much as the absence of any real 'Doctrine', in your sense of the word, at all. It is, you feel, like asking a man to say he agrees not with a speaker but with a debating society.
And the real reason why I cannot be in communion with you is not my disagreement with this or that Roman doctrine, but that to accept your Church means, not to accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your Church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a man has said but to what he's going to say.
To you the real vice of Protestantism is the formless drift which seems unable to retain the Catholic truths, which loses them one by one and ends in a 'modernism' which cannot be classified as Christian by any tolerable stretch of the word. To us the terrible thing about Rome is the recklessness (as we hold) with which she has added to the depositum fidei- the tropical fertility, the proliferation, of credenda. You see in Protestantism the Faith dying out in a desert: we see in Rome the Faith smothered in a jungle.
I know no way of bridging this gulf.”
- Christian Reunion and Other Essays, edited by Walter Hooper, London: Collins, 1990, 17-19
Catholics see their faith as a beautiful garden, full of wonderful growth. They see all the doctrines and traditions that have develop over the centuries as this beautiful garden, the True Church, that is kept by Our Lord. It is very hard for them to see why Protestants reject this Garden of Eden. Protestants see it as a wild tropical jungle on a desert island. It is full of strange ideas and teachings that overwhelm them and drives them out of the jungle back to the beach of simple sand and ocean (faith, grace, scripture, and Jesus Christ). We may at times go into the jungle to find some nice fruit but in the end we can’t live there. This is where Lewis was. He came to the island of Christianity. He does see and partake of many of the fruits of Catholicism, many of them are good to taste and pleasing to the eye, but in the end the total jungle overwhelms him and he goes back to the simple faith of the beach, which Catholics see as totally barren. In MC Lewis brings this point up by when a Protestant asks a Catholic, “does all this doctrine really matter?” and the other replies, “matter? Why, it is absolutely essential.” Now I use the example of the desert island, while Lewis uses the analogy of a mansion with many rooms. By our own feelings and conscious we chose the room where the Lord leads us to in clear conscious. So in the end Lewis couldn't cross the bridge into a Catholic world and live in his conscious
I am deliberately sharing all these posts on this thread rather than the
Catholic Q&A thread, because I don’t want to be seen as attacking Catholicism. This is a thread I created on the life of C. S Lewis and all the people that influenced him and how he became the man he was. So I hope you were able to indulge in this rant.
P.S. I took some of my research from David Armstrong’s blog,
Biblical Evidence for Catholicism.