I saw a Catholic cartoon from the late 1950s that showed the Vatican and the cross defiant against a vast graveyard—marked on the gravestones were such names as “Stalin”, “Napoleon”, “Hitler”, “Nero”, and so on.
Ah, the true Church has humbled every secular leader who dared defy her—who could doubt the truth of the one Church? Proudly did they come in all their raiments…yet see how she humbles the mighty?
What the cartoon omitted was the crucial grave, the grave of one “Martin Luther”.
Yes, he was the unmarked grave-digger of the “true Church”, for he took the Church on in its own terms, in spiritual terms, and also within its own Christian idiom.
And destroyed it.
So Luther’s grave was “the dog that did not bark”—the omitted premise, the assumed premise, the silent premise. Your mind would have gone down that route, awe-struck at the Vatican’s power to lay low the mighty, if only you didn’t remember the excluded grave, unmentioned by Catholic propagandists.