But, still more extraordinary, this Church, which has no proof of anything she says beyond her own bare assertion, is making converts, in an enlightened country like ours [UK], at the rate of some twelve thousand in the year. How does she manage (one wonders) to play off her confidence trick with such repeated success?

This is, indeed, a phenomenon at which non-Catholics profess to feel the utmost astonishment. But it is a kind of astonishment which has grown blunted by usage; they have come to regard it as part of the order of things that their neighbours should become the victims, now and again, of this extraordinary tour de force. If they were compelled to picture to themselves the process of a conversion, they would, I suppose, conceive it something after this fashion - that the mind of the inquirer is hypnotized into acquiescence by the crafty blandishments of a designing priest; not by his arguments, for he has none, he only goes on shouting "Become a Catholic, or you will go to hell!"; not by his arguments, but by some fatal quality of fascination, which we breed, no doubt, in the seminaries. In a dazed condition, like that of the bird under the snake's eye, he assents to every formula presented to him, binds himself by every oath that is proposed to him, in one open-mouthed act of unreasoning surrender. After that, of course, pride forbids him to admit, so long as life lasts, that the choice so made was a mistaken one; besides, one knows the power these priests have. Yes, it is very curious, the power attributed to their priests. When you have had the privilege of assisting at their education for seven years, you feel that "curious" is too weak a word for it.

This is, presumably, what Protestants have in mind when they represent submission to the Church as a form of "intellectual suicide." They mean that the act of faith which a man makes in joining the Church is an act of the will (or, more properly speaking, the emotions), with frequent allusion to the misunderstood text, "With the heart man believeth unto salvation"; whereas their Catholic opponents earned bitter hatred by insisting that the act of faith, however much directed by the will, had its seat in the intellect. Historically, Protestantism is committed to the notion that the act of faith is the mere surrender of a personality to a Personality, without parley, without deliberation, without logical motive. The true representative of Protestantism in the modern world is the Salvationist who stands up at a street corner and cries out "I am saved." It is Catholicism which insists that, ideally at least, it is the intellect which must be satisfied first, the heart afterwards. -- Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, ch. 3, "Telling the First Lie"

How is it that we profess to hold with absolute certitude the revealed truths of our religion? Reasonable enough to say that if your Church is infallible, the doctrines which she preaches are evidently true, and capable of producing absolute certitude in the mind. But the infallibility of your Church is not a self-evident axiom; it is a proposition which you have proved, and proved it by an appeal to ordinary human reason. Is it not clear, then, that in the last resort every statement which your Church makes rests upon the validity of the arguments by which, in the first instance, you proved your Church infallible? Now, these arguments, based as they are upon human reason, do not convey absolute certitude to the mind; they may be, in your view, overwhelmingly probable; nay, they may be certain with all human certainty; but human certainty is not absolute certainty. … You cannot prove the existence of God, the authority of Christ, or his commission to his Church, beyond all possibility of doubt; how then can you suppose that you have proved beyond all possibility of doubt the statements which you receive on the Church's authority?

The motives of credibility, satisfying his intellect, bring the inquirer up to the point of making the act of faith. That act recognizes God's authority in the Church's teaching; and the absolute nature of his authority does make all the difference to the kind of certitude with which, thenceforward, he holds the truths of Catholic doctrine. But this is inherent in the act of faith, not in the chain of proof by which the Catholic claim is established. Having made the act of faith, he cannot produce more or better arguments to convince his neighbour than he could have produced before. Apologetically, then, revealed truths have no higher certitude than the arguments by which the fact of revelation is established. The revealed proposition that there are Three Persons in the Blessed Trinity is not, apologetically, more certain than the statement that our Lord left the charisma of infallibility to his Church. … The absolute certainty with which we believe the teaching of the Church comes to us from the supernatural grace of faith, which transforms our reasoned conviction into a higher quality - the water, as at Cana, is turned into wine.

- Msgr. Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

For three centuries the true issue between the two parties was obscured, owing to the preposterous action of the Protestants in admiring Biblical inspiration. The Bible, it appeared, was common ground between the combatants, the Bible, therefore, was the arena of the struggle; from it the controversialist, like David at the brook, must pick up texts to sling at his adversary. In fact, of course, the Protestant had no conceivable right to base any arguments on the inspiration of the Bible, for the inspiration of the Bible was a doctrine which had been believed, before the Reformation, on the mere authority of the Church; it rested on exactly the same basis as the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Protestantism repudiated Transubstantiation, and in doing so repudiated the authority of the Church; and then, without a shred of logic, calmly went on believing in the inspiration of the Bible, as if nothing had happened! Did they suppose that Biblical inspiration was a self-evident fact, like the axioms of Euclid? Or did they derive it from some words of our Lord? If so, what words? What authority have we, apart from that of the Church, to say that the Epistles of Paul are inspired, and the Epistle of Barnabas is not? It is, perhaps, the most amazing and the most tragic spectacle in the history of thought, the picture of blood flowing, fires blazing, and kingdoms changing hands for a century and a half, all in defense of a vicious circle.

The only logic which succeeded in convincing the Protestants of their fallacy was the logic of facts. So long as nobody except scoffers and atheists challenged the truth of the scriptural narratives, the doctrine of inspiration maintained its curiously inflated credit. Then Christians, nay, even clergymen, began to wonder about Genesis, began to have scruples about the genuineness of 2 Peter. And then, quite suddenly, it becomes apparent that there was no reason why Protestants should not doubt the inspiration of the Bible; it violated no principle in their system. The Evangelicals protested, but theirs was a sentimental rather than a reasoned protest. … For three centuries the inspired Bible had been a handy stick to beat Catholics with; then it broke in the hand that wielded it, and Protestantism flung it languidly aside.

The Belief of Catholics, Knox, 1927. pp. 113-114.

The first is from F. F. Bruce's book, The Canon of Scripture, a familiar book, I'm sure.

From the bottom of page 90:

"Athanasius had distinguished three categories of books: canonical, edifying (but not canonical) and apocryphal. The 'edifying' books (the Wisdom of Solomon and of Ben Sira, Esther, Judith and Tobit, with the Didache and the Shepherd from the New Testament age) might be read in church; the 'apocryphal' books were to be avoided altogether. This threefold distinction was maintained, among the Latin fathers, by Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345 - 410), who referred to the second category as 'ecclesiastical' books."

Then, this quote from St. Jerome: "Therefore as the church indeed reads Judith, Tobit and the books of Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical books, so let it also read these two volumes [Sirach and Wisdom] for the edification of the people but not for establishing the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas."

The second is by Fr. Raymond Brown, SS, in his article on Canonicity (New Jerome Biblical Commentary). Fr. Brown reiterates the above distinction between canonical and ecclesiastical books:

"Doubts about the deuterocanonical books keep recurring in the history of the church among those who are aware of the Jewish canon. At the time of Trent, there were insufficient historical tools to reconstruct the real picture of the canon in the 1st century. Yet, curiously, Trent by accepting a wider canon seems to have preserved an authentic memory of the days of Christian origins, whereas other Christian groups in a professed attempt to return to primitive Christianity have settled for a narrower Jewish canon that, if Protestant researchers like Sundberg are correct, was the creation of a later period. The Tridentine fathers did not determine the canon on the basis of purely historical reconstruction but on a theological basis: the consistent church usage of certain books." [Brown lists early and ongoing resistance to the universal acceptance of Jerome's Vulgate and Trent's ultimate insistence upon its use] Then, "Not one of these difficulties impairs the binding force of the Tridentine decree, but perhaps they illuminate the difficulties often voiced by non-Catholics."

First, the most winsome Christian on my teams in college attended Kenmore Alliance in Tonawanda. Funny that the negative connotation associated with Tonawanda makes the comparable Kenmore sound like a step up.

Me and some other Catholic teammates went with him one Sunday morning. His church sent a bus around. I’ve always been leery of churches that have their own fleet of buses. It’s just a hang-up of mine. I grew up believing that everyone walked to church. I certainly did, all the way through college.

The service at the C&MA church that morning was innocuous but not insipid, comprised of hymn singing and Scripture reading and testimonies. The band of us Catholics - safety in numbers - attended only once but, in return, Eric came to the Newman Center with us many, many times. We saw that as particularly gracious of him. And he was gracious. Want to make a Catholic happy? Accept their invitation to church. It’s a gesture not soon forgotten.

Then, there’s the Princeton Alliance Church in Plainsboro. Here again, the prestige of Princeton is preferred over the plainness of Plainsboro. I sit with the women at their Thursday morning Bible Study. I attended a Sat. evening service full of loud Christian rock music and youth-oriented preaching. My friend’s brother-in-law is the youth pastor there and runs that service. He’s a good guy, actually.

Google map of C&MA churches in the greater Buffalo area. Directory of C&MA churches in the Northeast.

from Mark Noll's Is the Reformation Over?:

What, then, do Catholics believe the church is? In working through the Apostles' Creed, the Catechism explains the creed line by line, coming eventually to the statement, "I believe in the holy catholic church." It then describes the church with biblical images familiar to Protestants and held in common by both groups. The church is the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit. [781-810]

... in drawing insights from great thinkers of the Christian past, the Catechism takes the image one step beyond a Protestant understanding. In doing so, a long list of ecclesiological differences falls into place. An unusually clear statement of the Catholic position is found in the Catechism's 795th paragraph:

Let us rejoice then and give thanks that we have become not only Christians, but Christ himself. Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God's grace toward us? Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man. . . . The fullness of Christ then is the head and the members. But what does "head and members" mean? Christ and the Church.230

Our redeemer has shown himself to be one person with the holy Church whom he has taken to himself.231

Head and members form as it were one and the same mystical person.232

A reply of St. Joan of Arc to her judges sums up the faith of the holy doctors and the good sense of the believer: "About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter."233

Christ and his church are one! This basic confession explains why Catholics can offer salvation through baptism into the church. [Noll's footnote: Ibid., 354, par. 1266. The Catechism says repeatedly that salvation comes from God alone (not baptism itself). See pars. 169, 846, 1584.] It is why the pope (as the vicar of Christ) can speak without error in matters of faith and morals. It is why Ignatius, who died in 110, could say that only priests in connection with a bishop, in connection with the pope, can offer valid sacraments. It is why Protestants may not share a Catholic Eucharist. To do so would acknowledge the authority of the pope as representing Christ through his church. It is why Cyprian, who died in 258, could say, "No one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother." It is why Mary is called the mother of the church; she is the mother of Christ. It is why the church can interpret the keys given to Peter as authority to forgive sins. It is why sin against God is also sin against the church and requires reconciliation to both. In a word, ecclesiology represents the crucial difference between evangelicals and Catholics.

page 145-147