Then I thought about a Reformed critique of Aquinas I encountered a week or so ago on the web -- I forget where, so I can't link to it. The author's issue with Aquinas was that he didn't believe in sola scriptura and regarded reason as not corrupted by the rest of depraved human nature. But this led me to the problem the author shares with secular materialists: they say reason can only have arisen through evolution and is simply another accidental development that allowed humans to prevail over chickens or whatever in the struggle for survival.
But this means reason can't be trusted, any more than conventional morality, the rule of law, or whatever. So why trust Calvin or Luther any more than Aquinas -- aren't their interpretations of scripture based on reason? The same, of course, applies to Darwin -- if his argument for natural selection is based on reason, why should we trust it?
Catholics and Anglicans don't have this problem, since both rely on scripture, reason, and tradition. On the other hand, my experience with the Evangelium course is that it relegated a great deal of Catholicism as practiced to a short session on "everything else", like the rosary, Marian devotion, the Fatima prophecies, and so forth. All that superstitious stuff, in other words, that we former Anglicans don't need to pay attention to. (My memory of Evanagelium, which may be imperfect, is that it also never mentioned Aquinas.)
The problem is that one of the greatest apologists of recent times, Ven Fulton Sheen, paid attention to all those things, and he was an Aquinas scholar. St John Paul took the Fatima prophecies very seriously indeed, since he was in them.
So as far as I can see, the Church is letting tens of millions go while working on giving a couple thousand a Protestantized version of Catholicism that someone thinks is acceptable to Episcopalians.
