Author

About the Author

A lifelong Catholic, Jerome D. Gilmartin received a B.S. Degree, with majors in psychology and philosophy, from the University of Scranton in 1959. For the next two years he studied psychology at Fordham Graduate School, Bronx, N.Y., followed by two years of military service. He later began what would become a 20-year career in human resources with an international telecommunications corporation. After a subsequent seven years as a psychological services associate at a state center for the mentally challenged in Pennsylvania, he retired in 2001. It was in that year that he published the first edition of the 7-Step Reason to be Catholic. A second edition was published in 2008.

 

His concern regarding the great exodus of Catholics from the Church deepened, with increasing evidence that the decline is largely a result of post-Vatican II Catholic seminary and university instruction that the Evangelists probably did not write the Gospels; they were probably written anonymously a generation later.

 

This post-Vatican II instruction is based on a Reformation-rooted “Markan Priority” theory of Gospel origin developed by Protestant theologian Gottlob Christian Storr in 1796. As a result of this instruction, “Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 2007, xii).

 

Markan Priority, in particular its most widely promoted variant, the Markan Priority Two Source theory of Gospel origin, is a house of cards; after more than 200 years of searching by countless exegetes, “Q,” the second “source,” has never been found.

 

With Schism looming, this Gospel-blurring Markan Priority Two Source theory is well-suited as a means to re-envision the Church as one which must accommodate itself to changing mores and customs. And so Mr. Gilmartin will soon submit for publication a manuscript incorporating much of the 7-Step Reason to be Catholic (now out of print) and articles soundly refuting the Markan Priority Two Source theory, with the tentative title & subtitle,

 

As Schism Looms, Holding Fast to the True Catholic Church

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The Gospel-blurring rationale of the emerging “Synodal church”