By Dr. Rafael Xavier Gonzalez
One of the reasons I started this site was to mostly write apologetical articles. Apologetics is usually understood in its positive aspect, that is the practice of defending Catholicism through reasoned arguments and arguments of authority based on Divine Revelation and its sources. Yet there is another, no less important type of apologetics called negative apologetics, which is basically the famously called via of process of elimination in order to find the true religion.
We have the obligation to embrace the true positive religion (see my previous article: https://mycatholictwocents.com/2025/06/06/the-obligation-to-embrace-the-true-positive-religion/), though the process can be via negativa. This way is also analogous to the famous natural negative knowledge we have of God, which is the theological approach that describes God by focusing on what God is not, rather than what God is. Interestingly, all the attributes we know using human reason are negations, like immortal, immutable, infinite, etc. Nevertheless, negative knowledge of God does provide us with a content, actual knowledge of God.
Let us pass to religion. We can utilize the principle historians use to affirm the existence of past events to reach the conclusion of the veracity of Christianity, which essentially believes in the Divinity of Jesus. Without getting into the other rational bases of Catholicism, the only fully true Religion, and the only actual Religion for that reason, suffice to mention this principle, namely, the history principle of multiple witnesses or multiple corroboration. No one doubts the existence of the historical Jesus, yet even his miracles can be attested to using the same principle (even the Koran gives witness to this while Muslims very own prophet performs no miracles).
We know that Jesus’ works affirm his words: “If I am doing them and you don’t believe me, believe the works. This way you will know and understand that the Father is in me and I in the Father” (John 10:38). This makes sense since a miraculous work, which is harder to do, affirms the words said, which are easy to simply say, as the saying goes, “easier said than done”. If one can do what’s physically impossible (definition of a miracle), then his seemingly fantastical words must be believed. And hence miracles are the primary criterion to prove the veracity of certain Divine revelation, the Divinity of Christ for Christians. Only Christianity has historical miracles, therefore…
I never understood the heretical Modernist separation of the historical Jesus from the Jesus of the Faith, as if they were two different persons. From the Modernist unsound separation of faith and reason, a neo-Nestorianism is born. Saint Pius X informs us of the Modernist position here:
“In things where a double element, the divine and the human, mingles, in Christ, for example, or the Church, or the sacraments, or the many other objects of the same kind, a division must be made and the human element assigned to history while the divine will go to faith. Hence we have that distinction, so current among the Modernists, between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith, between the sacraments of history and the sacraments of faith, and so on”.[1]
Three groups of Christians exist: Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants (it is justified to group all the other thousands of more or less novel denominations under “Protestants”. See my article: https://mycatholictwocents.com/2025/06/12/protestant-problems-with-missionary-activity/). Without lacking charity, it is true to say that Protestantism is not an intellectual form of Christianity but a distorted simplification of it. It seeks to Islamize religion by going to the so-called roots (the simple religion of Abraham as Muslims believe), and this known by individual interpretation. Protestantism disregards or totally ignores the true nature of the Church as established by Christ, believed and lived by the early Christians. One can even argue that Protestantism is not even a religion since it has no priests, no sacrifice, no rites, no living teaching authority and not even a tradition (even Islam has most if not all of these). Plus there is no obligatory practices in Protestantism which begs the question of who is really the God the Protestants are referring to. Wouldn’t it be yourself as a consequence of its radical individualization of Christianity?
Orthodoxy is also Christian, not Catholic, and it precisely falls into the opposite problem of an extreme Protestant individualism, namely a strange type of ethnocentric collectivism rooted in nationalism:
“The Greek Orthodox theologian Vasilios N. Makrides argues that Orthodoxy inevitably tends toward nationalism. Orthodoxy has historically called for a harmonious, cooperative relationship between church and state, the Byzantine principle of symphonia. The emergence of modern nation-states, with their separation of church and state, led to the invention of national (and sometimes ethnic) identities”.[2]
The cited articles further explains:
“The early-twentieth-century German theologian Ernst Troeltsch contrasted the ‘church’ with the ‘sect.’ Orthodoxy…is largely of the ‘church type.’ The church accommodates itself to the world, institutionalizes itself, and adopts a conservative social ethic. Believers live and act with a distinctive set of motivations (charity) but do so within inherited social structures. They do not seek to remake the world into the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the ‘sect’ emphasizes the radical demands of the gospel and the kingdom. It constitutes itself as an alternative community of love and justice over and against a sinful world. In Orthodoxy, this type of Christianity has been less evident. As Hopko once said to me in conversation, ‘Perhaps only in a remote part of Russia are there a few monks who have not reduced Orthodoxy to the Russian nation.’”[3]
One of the major issues prevalent in Orthodoxy is the fact that they are tied down by ethnicity to the point of becoming an ethnocentric religion. There is a growing number of non-ethnic converts to the Eastern Orthodox Church, yet there are many reports of problems these converts are having especially regarding ethnic issues.[4] Now such problems can and do exist in every institution, religious and secular, but with Orthodoxy it is a consistent pattern of behavior which points to more underlying doctrinal issues.
To be fair, the Orthodox Church, at a pan-Orthodox level, had officially rejected the idea that the Church should be organized along ethnic or national lines; Phyletism (ethnic exclusivity) is condemned as heresy. Yet the condemnation seemed to be only superficial:
“…Phyletism—that is, the move beyond ecclesial autocephaly to national churches whereby national and religious identity become synonymous, such that to be Greek is to be Orthodox and, conversely, for a Greek to attend a Russian or Romanian Orthodox church is to participate in a foreign or alien entity. Phyletism was condemned as a heresy at the Synod of Constantinople in 1872. Yet it was the failure to address it through the proper upholding of an eschatological tension and something like a consociational vision of political authority that prepared the way for the emergence of ethnoreligious nationalism throughout much of the Orthodox world in the twentieth century”.[5]
Orthodox Christianity has developed along national lines. For example, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukraine Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, etc., often serve as symbols of national identity. This can sometimes lead to a blending of religion and ethnicity, where the Church is seen as an extension of the nation-state. Of course not all individual Orthodox Christians live out this ideal, yet it is intertwined with Orthodoxy and its different national churches.
On the surface at least, it seems to go against the essential mark of the Church, according to the Council of Nicaea (325) of Catholicity or universality. In fact, because Orthodoxy is tied down by ethnic and national identity, its universal appeal was and is limited. The Orthodox Christians simply did not have the driving factor in their ecclesiology to be globally ambitious in proselytizing as the Catholics did (one only need to read up on the Jesuit order and their tremendous methods of evangelization). Some would justifiably argue that Orthodoxy has been influenced by Muslim rule and hence have worked more for their own conservation as opposed to going out and spreading Christianity.
The Catholic synthesis reveals its veracity and hence its fullness of the truth. Catholicism has always been imbued with a sound separation yet collaboration of Church and state (“state” being a modern term), the supernatural realm and the natural, in other words. The entire history of the Catholic Church is each society, supernatural or natural, defending their rights from the other that had overstepped its limits. This became explicit with the famous Investiture Controversy (beginning 1076 A.D.) with Pope Saint Gregory VII defending the rights of the Church to name bishops, while denying this right to secular rulers (lay investiture).
It is true that in evangelization, at times Catholic Romanitas seemed to prevail, forcing cultures to Romanize. But this was hardly the norm. The Jesuits were experts at inculturation (not syncretism), being able to purify pagan elements, Christianizing them. There was not a culture which they did not penetrate nor a science they did not master. I would even say that the Jesuits, with their fourth vow of obedience to the Pope, have so clearly shown the Catholic Church to be the fully true religion. They are (were rather, unfortunately) beacons of light that illuminate the glory of Christ’s Church, the Catholic Church.
In the end, let us become Catholics if we are not so yet, and more devout Catholics if we are so already, by God’s grace. It is only by becoming “…all things to all men” (1Cor. 9:22) that we can truly bring others to Christ in his very own Mystical Body the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Amen.
[1] Pascendi Dominici Gregis, #30.
[2] John P. Burgess, Orthodoxy at War, First Things, February 2025 issue.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See the interesting: Lucas, Phillip Charles. “Enfants Terribles: The Challenge of Sectarian Converts to Ethnic Orthodox Churches in the United States.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 7, no. 2 (2003): 5–23.
[5] Bretherton, Luke. “Power to the People: Orthodoxy, Consociational Democracy, and the Move beyond Phyletism.” In Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine, edited by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, 61–77. Fordham University Press, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gn6b41.6.
