Catholicism or Atheism – You Choose

 If Catholicism is true, than the other religions are not other versions of it. They are either pre-versions of it or perversions of it. Religions that are more ancient than Catholicism are pre-versions–in other words, they are pointers in their own way to the fullness of the Catholic faith. Animism and paganism and Hinduism and Buddhism and Shinto-ism and Judaism all–to a greater or lesser extent–point forward to the fullness of the revelation in Jesus Christ.

The other religions that come after Catholicism are perversions of it–Islam and Protestantism and whatever other new fangled New Age religions are out there are all, in some way reactions against the monolithic truth of the Catholic faith.

As such they either lead people to the fullness of the Catholic faith, or they lead people into atheism. Of course this process does not take place for many people. They don’t follow the logic. They don’t think it through. They don’t have “perfectly consistent minds.” Nevertheless, it is true, as Bl. John Henry Newman has written, there is “no medium in true philosophy between atheism and Catholicism… a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below must embrace either the one or the other.”