A General Introduction
In my opinion, the greatest theologian of the twentieth century was Fr. Francisco Marín-Sola, O.P. His greatness lay in his power of synthesis: he understood a whole system in its relation to all of its parts, in harmonious unity. From that vantage he could lay out a problem in its full depth and then give a solution that does justice to whatever is legitimate in the contrary objections. He was meticulous by temperament, spending his entire scholarly energy on two problems: the development of doctrine and the grace controversies.
Born in 1873 in Cárcar, Navarre, he entered the Dominican Order and was sent as a young priest to the Philippines, where he taught at the University of Santo Tomás in Manila, was taken prisoner during the revolution, and afterwards began a short career in the Catholic press. From 1911 he taught in the Dominican house of studies at Rosaryville, Louisiana; from 1918 he held the chair of dogmatic theology at Fribourg, where he wrote The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma and fought his famous battle over efficacious grace in the pages of La Ciencia Tomista. He returned to Manila and died there in 1932 while working on a lengthy treatment of the grace controversies titled Concordia Tomista.
Around four years ago, while reading The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, I learned that Fr. Marín-Sola, during his years in the Catholic press, wrote a series of articles on another subject I care about: Protestantism. These were written in the form of a popular presentation in a Manila daily newspaper called Libertas. Their erudition and fairness were praised by the Protestants themselves; as Fr. Manuel Piñon, O.P., notes, an Anglican bishop (Irving Spencer) commended their “gentle and fair tenor.”
My excitement was soon crushed. Fr. Marín-Sola was on the staff of Libertas for four years and its editor for two, so his output was enormous. Two further facts made things worse. First, he never wrote under his own name, but under a pseudonym or anonymously. Second, Libertas was a daily, which means thousands of issues were printed during his time there. To my knowledge, apart from general indications of the years of publication and some topics, no bibliography of these articles has ever been produced. Michael Torre records that Marín-Sola himself gathered them into twenty-two notebooks, which appear to be lost:
According to Velasco (“Ensayo de Bibliografía,” 111), Marín-Sola collected his brief articles published in Libertas (published anonymously or under the pen names “Euripio” and “Quicoy”) in 22 notebooks, which he had to leave in the parish of St. Anthony of Padua, in New Orleans, when he left for Europe in 1918. These notebooks, if they still exist, may now be in the Dominican archives of the University of Santo Tomas.
At the time, collecting them seemed impossible. But things have changed. I discovered that the entire run of Libertas has been digitized and is, in principle, searchable. With the pen names “Euripio” and “Quicoy” as leads, it seemed possible at least to gather the signed articles. This hope, too, was quickly disappointed: many of the scans are poor, and the OCR, defeated by the multi-column layout, is poorer still. I had to shelve the project.
Then I tried something else. It was now technically possible for an AI to read through the whole corpus page by page and look for the pen names as a matter of image recognition rather than text search, which sidesteps the broken OCR entirely. So I did a complete pass over more than ten thousand newspaper pages across over a thousand web pages to search for articles written by “Euripio” and “Quicoy.”
After many, many hours of running, it returned 127 certain identifications and 3 likely ones. (A targeted search for his anonymous articles would be a far harder problem, but with these tools it is no longer an unthinkable one.)
I now have every one of those pages collected and OCR’d, the text extracted, and provisional translations made. This series will present those translations, publishing every article of doctrinal interest, grouped by subject, beginning with his classic 1902–1903 series on Protestantism and then moving on to the rest. It will run to fifteen posts, each containing a handful of related articles released every friday:
On Lutheranism — 4 articles [you are here]
On Catholic Unity and Protestant Fragmentation — 4 articles
On the Reformed Church and Calvinist Objections — 2 articles
On the Origins and Constitution of Anglicanism — 3 articles
On Puseyism and Ritualism — 3 articles
On the Oxford Movement and Its Outcome — 3 articles
On the Three Parties of Anglicanism — 5 articles
On Anglicanism and the Church of Rome — 2 articles
Appendix A: Prayer, Miracles, and the Natural Order — 3 articles
Appendix B: Papal Authority, Obedience, and Catholicity — 4 articles
Appendix C: Holy Orders and the Minister of Ordination — 6 articles
Appendix D: Marriage and the Religious State — 3 articles
Appendix E: Catholic Unity, Christian Liberty, and Religious Truth — 4 articles
Appendix F: Indulgences and Forbidden Books — 2 articles
Appendix G: Religion, Patriotism, and Public Life — 3 articles
Once a human review of each batch is complete, I will publish the collections for the general public. Until then, I am releasing them one post at a time for my Substack members and Patrons. If you want to read Fr. Marín-Sola on Luther, Calvin, and the Church of England before anyone else does, this is the place to do it.
While I will eventually publish each of these together for the general public, for now, while the human overview process is under way, I am going to post these for my Substack members and Patrons.
If you are not yet a member, here is a 30-day free trial to read these articles for the next month:
