The Roman Church where it differs from the universal tradition and especially from apostolic Christianity I reject. Thus their theology about the B.V.M. I reject because it seems utterly foreign to the New Testament: where indeed the words “Blessed is the womb that bore thee” receive a rejoinder pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Their papalism seems equally foreign to the attitude of St Paul towards St Peter in the Epistles. The doctrine of Transubstantiation insists on defining in a way which the N.T. seems not to countenance. In a word, the whole set-up of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is. I must therefore reject their claim: tho’ this does not mean rejecting particular things they say.
C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 646–47.
note
- i.e., the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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This is very interesting! I am frankly surprised (though pleasantly so) that Lewis would have made comments like this in writing.
Lewis was from a Protestant family in Northern Ireland. He was known to have some relatively strong anti-Roman Catholic views, though it seems as though years in Oxford’s Anglo-Catholic environs probably also had some affect on him. He didn’t publish his views. This is from a large collection of letters published after his death.
‘The hand that rocks the cradle…’ Lewis, as I recall, had a Presbyterian nanny of whom he was particularly fond. His nemesis, John Betjeman, by contrast, developed an almost pathological loathing of anything ‘Calvinistic’ as a consequence of suffering at the hands of a sadistic Particular Baptist nanny, who would treat him with great cruelty and then fall into fits of remorse in which she would tell him that she was convinced of her own reprobation.
Baptists!
Hoping that was just an April Fool’s comment…
In good fun.