did Joseph Smith have a catholic heart?
Either he reinvented Catholicism by accident, in which case the Catholic shape of the Church is so true that it grows back like bone wherever Christianity is planted, or God gave it to him because God was not willing to leave a continent without priesthood, sacrament, and the dead.
Stephen Webb was a Catholic theologian. He could not stop looking at Joseph Smith. He kept saying that the farm boy from Palmyra had put back nearly everything the Protestants tore out.
Western New York in 1820 was the most Protestant ground on earth.
Luther had carried the priesthood out of the house.
Calvin had carried out free will.
Zwingli had taken the body of Christ off the altar and left a memory in its place.
No bishop, no oil, no confession, no veil, no keys, no prayers for the dead, no body in heaven.
A Bible on a table and a thousand men shouting about what it meant.
Joseph had nothing to copy from. He had never seen a Mass. And out of that nothing he put back apostles. He put back a priesthood handed down by living hands, which is the most Catholic idea in the world.
He put back a bishop to confess to, bread with a prayer of consecration, oil on the sick, the altar, the vestment, the temple with its holy of holies.
He put back works beside grace, an open canon with a living voice at the head of it, and the keys of Peter taken more literally than Rome has dared in five hundred years.
He put back the dead. When his brother Alvin died unbaptized, a minister preached him into hell at the funeral, and Joseph could not bear it, and he spent the rest of his life building a church in which the dead could still be reached.
That is a purgatory instinct. That is a Catholic wound.
Where did a boy with no priest within reach get all of that?
And Joseph died for it. They tarred him, jailed him through a Missouri winter, drove his people out under an order of extermination, and he buried children.
Then he rode to Carthage knowing what waited, and a mob shot him down at thirty eight with his brother already dead on the floor.
Men do not ride toward the guns for a hoax.
I am not asking you to accept the plates. I am asking you to stop calling a man a liar who put back nearly everything we lost and paid for it in blood.
https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2115365713351413862?a=XvPHNA6GdFGKdGkmg-4&s=20
It’s not like Catholicism. Joseph Smith was just an opportunist who started a syncretic religious sect pulling ideas from a smorgasbord of influences & ideas & blending them with his own. He was known for having a very active imagination & being a great story teller.
The post is not claiming Mormonism equals Catholicism. It notes that Joseph Smith, raised in radical Protestant New York with no Catholic exposure, restored elements Protestants discarded: priesthood by laying on of hands, living apostolic authority, sacraments, temples, anointing, and work for the dead. Catholic theologian Stephen Webb called this a “deeply Catholic mind” reinventing what was lost. The argument is that the convergence and the price he paid make simple “opportunist storyteller” dismissal incomplete.
I’m sure he knew of Catholicism. All Protestants have an awareness of Catholicism, even if they misunderstand it.
Awareness of Catholicism as the rejected rival is common among Protestants. Direct exposure to its practices was not. Western New York in the 1820s had virtually no Catholics or Masses; churches were Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist. Stephen Webb, a Catholic theologian, stated Joseph knew none and reinvented the sacramental structure from that vacuum. That remains the point.
