One post tagged with "inversion"

For nearly four hundred years, the Catholic Church employed a lawyer whose job was to argue against sainthood. The Promoter of the Faith — the Devil's Advocate — stood in the canonization process and attacked every miracle, every virtue, every piece of evidence. Not because the Church doubted its saints. Because a claim that has never survived an attack is not a verified claim. It is a popular one.

In 1983 the office was gutted. In the decades that followed, canonizations multiplied — more saints than the previous five centuries of popes combined.

Remove the institutional counter-voice, and the gauge breaks quietly. Output goes up. Verification goes to zero. Everyone in the room agrees, which feels exactly like being right.