Dr. J. Budziszewski

No, they don't worship Mary.

They don't worship her instead of Jesus.

She points to him.

But the last issue is authority.

How can you claim to church to teach with authority?

And that wasn't for me, that was the first issue.

Because there was no authority left, none in the Episcopal Church.

The defining point of that was when at a canonical trial about something or other having to do with sexuality, the court said it wasn't gonna accept scripture as dispositive here.

I thought, okay, that seals the deal.

You could talk about this or that or the other as an aberration.

But when they say, we don't accept the authority of Scripture, well, what were they accepting?

The authority of their own minds?

So you can say, I don't accept a pope, but every man was his own pope.

Not only that, but every man is his own infallible pope.

I mean, infallible much more radically than the pope claims to be infallible, right?

You think you can decide it all for yourself.

That couldn't be right.

So I started looking around.

Well, what could be the church?

It's going to have to have authority.