"The result is now that the Feeneyites are making a nuisance of themselves in many of our chapels and churches. They're a darn nuisance.
Because, sub-specie boni, under the appearance of good, under the appearance of being strong anti-liberals, here they come and say, outside the church there's no salvation. In the society you don't believe it. We do.
We are Catholics and you're liberals. I mean, come on, come on, come on. But it looks simple. It's simple. No water, no baptism, no church, no salvation.
It's materialistic. It's making, it's making the boundary between the church and the non-church purely materialistic water.
Yes, our Lord attached salvation to water. Yes, he did. But not exclusively so that he never allowed himself an exception. That's foolishness. It's common sense that there could be exceptions.
That in the normal realm of life there could be exceptions. God is not tied to his own sacramentals. He is tied to it but not in such a way that he cannot allow himself any exceptions. That's foolishness.
Foolishness. But the Feeneyites are foolish. But they're a nuisance because they seem to have very Catholic principles and they're more Catholic than the Catholics.
That's the typical story of exaggerating in the opposite direction. If you can't get somebody to, you know, you knock him over once, you knock him over again, he comes back up, you knock him over a third time, now he's getting wise, so he leans over so that when the devil comes, it won't go. What does the devil do? He goes round the back, it's dead easy.
So people that are so strong against the liberals, you just come round the back and make them exaggerate in anti-liberalism and they fall into the opposite error.
But funnily enough, opposite errors have a way of rejoining themselves, which is why the Feeneyites team up again with liberals. Anybody? What kind of liberals are the Feeneyites liable to team up with?
Yes, who are?
What?
More obviously, if they're not, if they're not Masons, they are most of them at least Americanists. And Americanism is of course liberalism again.
And so that these Feeneyites were so strong against liberalism, they're back into Americanism.
There's errors meet up. If you, if you, if you, if you push too far away from one error, you'll come back to it through the back door. It's funny, but that's how it is."
From his classes on the Apocalypse - 1999
Topic: Bishop Williamson on Feeneyites (Read 165 times)