"Catholicism Was Invented" Says Fordham Resident Writer

This from the ultra-lefty Commonweal, the writer is Fordham's Margret O'Brien-Stienfels

I was a history major at Loyola, class of 1963. At first, the facts of history classes and history books more or less reinforced the seamless story I had heard from childhood: Bible stories and the progress of the Jewish people; Jesus and

the invention of Catholicism

.....At the beginning of the new school year in 1961 (I was a sophomore), my first Jesuit professor ever stood at the front of the classroom in his single-breasted, drab black serge suit topped by a white collar that seemed to hold him upright and taut.

His face was deeply etched with a monoform expression from mouth to eyes. He looked a bit like Charlie McCarthy, the puppet. His body was straight, almost rigid. He bent at the waist as he raised his arms from the elbows and brought his fingers together, bowing slightly. Idiosyncratic he was! John L. McKenzie, SJ, greeted an ignorant lot of undergraduates.

He had never taught the likes of us. But he launched the course: The Old Testament and Early Israel (Hist. 308). Such a course is perhaps more commonplace now than it was then. JEPD, the key codes to the literary strands of the Old Testament that he punched like a safecracker, revealed to us the multiauthored, contradictory, overlapping, many-versioned biblical stories of the people of ancient Israel. Stories we thought we knew.

Read her ideas about Adam and Eve in the same article (here)

The Jesuit Fr. S.M. Brandi and former publisher Civilta Cattolica on Jesus' foundation of the Catholic Church (here)

The truth about "The Fall" (here)