Does Catholicism Have Secret Doctrines?

Ep 725 of Relatable, Lynn Wilder is guest to Allie Beth Stuckey.

She has just spoken about "milk before meat".

Lynn:

as a Mormon I did something called milk before meat which means I'm not going to 1:01:06 admit to you that I believe something that you're gonna think is silly or 1:01:12 you're gonna think isn't biblical

...

Allie:

Christianity has 1:02:18 that too but in a different in a different way I mean Paul also talks about spiritual 1:02:26 milk and then you need to be able to grow up and to chew on solid food I think the difference is is that 1:02:33 Christianity does not keep those complicated messages hidden from you 1:02:38 they are not secret yes um we're upfront about them that yes this is what Christianity is and your 1:02:45 understanding will grow through sanctification but we're not going to hide these complicated things from you 1:02:50 to kind of trick you into believing what we believe

Some people think I was tricked into believing Mariological dogmas as I converted to Catholicism.

Far from it.

I discussed Mariology loads with my back then not yet Catholic mother (when we parted in 2004, we had prayed the Rosary together, but when she was buried in 2023, it was by a Lutheran, she had been kind of blocked from fulfilling what she needed to convert). From perhaps even my Lutheran High Church days, certainly from when I had decided to sooner or later convert, i e after reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Most of Mariology and most Eucharistic dogmas are very well known, and far from putting them off, until one has a Confessor with a clear influence on one's soul, one has to know them, know they are part one confesses to, before making the confession of faith and the first Confession of the sacrament of Penance. Mariology comes at the Catechism parts around "born of the Virgin Mary" in the Creed. Eucharist around the part of the Seven Sacraments. The Catechism having four Parts, Creed, Commandments, Prayer and Sacraments.

I was young, I was excited, but I went into that eyes open. And the fact that man has a conscience of what's right even without being a Christian* was actually one of the first things attracting me to Catholicism besides Real Presence and Mariology. I had read it in Tolkien's On Fairy-Stories and got it confirmed at Catechism and by St. Thomas Aquinas. Still is.

One of my first disagremeents with Ratzinger was, when he said one needed to believe in a supernatural end of creation in order to believe in Catholic morality. A former friend of mine was and still is a Ratzinger fan. No, believing murder is wrong (including on the not yet born) doesn't take a supernatural view of the world to be understood. Believing contraception is wrong doesn't take it.

Worldliness as such is not enough to explain why some embrace these things as "women's rights". Not believing in God is not a sufficient excuse. In order to believe them, even an Atheist needs to have at some point trampled down his own conscience. People who attack this idea sometimes come from a place of trying to excuse Contraception and Taking Interest (in Bible "believers" this also takes misreading Genesis 38, ignoring Leviticus 15, Deuteronomy 23, Psalms 54 (55 in Protestant Bibles), and misreading Matthew 25). They don't like the Rational Morality in St. Thomas Aquinas, which state that you can't use a thing against its obvious purpose (sex -> children) or that you can't take time rent for consumable goods, only for things that are given back in the same item, like a boat or house. I do.

I was also a huge fan of the things called "Apocrypha" by some before I even considered becoming Catholic. The Bible canon is also not a secret doctrine which I found out "too late, when I was already trapped" ... I loved the story of Daniel destroying the dragon** after unmasking Bel as the priests taking the sacrifice at night. And I could not deny that Maccabees had exciting stuff. I can not deny now it has believable stuff. And when a Catholic apologist or apologetic catechism*** argued Luther ditched II Maccabees for chapter 12 stating prayers for the dead are needed, I was obviously not siding with Luther. Nor will I. And no, Luther was wrong, even if II Maccabees was just history and not Bible canon, or (on that point, the sin-offering for the dead) even just popularly believed history and not actual history. Because, this was a tradition that Jesus did NOT explicitly rebuke, and which certainly was believed widely by Jews.

When Pharisees discuss whose wife someone will be in the Resurrection, this is rebuked by Jesus (even if it came as a strawman from Sadducees). My first "red flag" about the Vatican II Sect I had converted to came when I saw old catechisms and missals being sold off in sales, and I was not really commended for buying both.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Vigil of Epiphany
5.I.2026

PS, an actual surprise:

Ephesians 2 lays 1:11:32 all of this out perfectly that we were once dead in our sin apart from Christ if you are dead you cannot help yourself 1:11:38 you cannot earn your salvation you cannot revive yourself you can't resuscitate yourself someone has to make 1:11:44 you alive

The surprise I got is, Catholicism agrees. Not to the point of Luther, when you cannot even prepare yourself for justifying grace, but certainly to the point that no one is even doing that without actual graces from God. I had actually expected Catholicism to be more "works based" than that. Same Episode./HGL

PPS. On the issues of canon and of natural law, Calvin basically and absurdly inverted the position of the Catholic Church. Natural law is something a person really is capable of knowing despite sin. Through his heart. The canon cannot be known that way, other than if the heart is enlightened by special and charismatic graces, not from the grace common to all of the redeemed./HGL

* Creation vs. Evolution: Can People Know What Good Is, Without Being Christian?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2026/01/can-people-know-what-good-is-without.html

** The Haydock comment states:

Ver. 22. Dragon. The devil had seduced our first parents in the form of a serpent, and caused most nations to adore it. (Calmet)

It need not have been a dinosaur, though considering Germanic heroic legends, I think it could have been from chronological considerations.

*** Probably Konvertitenkatechismus, Paderborn 1950 (by the Jesuits), possibly one from Chicago as well.