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Post by Admin on Feb 26, 2019 15:55:20 GMT
The Angelus - September 1986 The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective
Michael Davies
Et Incarnatus est
This series originally appeared in the Australian publication Catholic. We are indebted and most grateful to Editor Don McLean for his kind permission to reprint.
Part One
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION is based upon great mysteries, truths which we must believe if we are to call ourselves Christians, but which we can never fully understand. We must believe that there is one God and no more than one God; that this God is pure spirit; that He is the Lord and Maker of heaven and earth who has neither beginning nor end; that He is always the same, is everywhere present; knows and sees all things, can do all things, whatsoever He pleases, and is infinite in all perfections. Furthermore, we must believe that in this one God there are three perfectly equal Persons; the Father who proceeds from no one; the Son who is begotten of the Father before all ages; and the Holy Ghost, who proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son. We must believe that these three Persons of equal power and equal wisdom are all three one and the same Lord and God who has existed from everlasting, as Cardinal Newman explained:
God has need of no being outside the Trinity; the Holy Trinity is absolutely self-sufficient. But God is loving, and the basis of any form of love is a desire to share it. He decided to create beings who could share His happiness. He created angels, pure spirits like Himself. He created them with free will, with the ability to choose. He did not force them to love Him as love given under constraint is worthless even to God. A large number of the angels, led by Lucifer, abused their God-given freedom, rebelled against their Creator, and were expelled from His presence. Lucifer wished to be subject to no one. He wished to rule his own kingdom: "Non serviam" was his rallying cry: "I will not serve."
God granted his request, and, as Satan, he now rules in his own kingdom of hell, separated from God for all eternity, an eternity of absolute and unmitigated misery and anguish, for there can be no greater misery, no greater anguish than the eternal separation from God of a creature whose ultimate purpose in life was eternal happiness with God. Note carefully that it is something of a misnomer to speak of God punishing Satan and the wicked angels when, in fact, what He did was to respect their freely and consciously chosen decision. God excludes no one from heaven, neither men nor angels. When God the Son comes in glory at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead, the sentence He pronounces will be that which each of us has already passed upon himself.
After the rebellion of the wicked angels, God created a new type of being, Man, a creature who was not a pure spirit like the angels, but in whom a spiritual soul was united with a physical body. Adam and Eve, the first human beings and parents of the entire human race, were given the earth to live upon and to subdue, but they were also heirs to heaven. A future of eternal happiness with God was given to them as a right, providing they used the free-will with which they had been endowed to love and serve their Creator. But like Satan, they responded to God's love by saying, "Not Thy will, but mine." They would not. serve, and, like Satan, made a free and conscious decision to disobey God in a serious matter. Like Satan, they lost the right to eternal happiness in heaven and, because Adam was the head of the entire human race, he lost this right not simply for himself but for all his heirs.
There was no lack of justice here for a father cannot transmit to his heirs an inheritance which he has lost. Many decisions we make affect others as well as ourselves, and this can often bring suffering. A father who gambles away all that he owns will bring suffering upon his wife and children, but God must allow him to exercise his free will, whatever the consequence. An airline pilot who ignores the established procedures could lose not only his own life but that of hundreds of innocent passengers, but once again, God must respect his free will. It might be argued that the word "must" cannot be used where God is concerned. God, it is rightly said, can do anything. Perfectly true, but God is consistent, and when He has willed to do something in a particular way He will not contradict Himself. Thus, having chosen to create angels and men with free will, He foresaw and accepted that some would abuse this privilege, but if He were to intervene to prevent any and every such abuse, then the angels and men would not truly possess free will; we should be no more than machines or vegetables.
Adam, then, lost the right to heaven for himself and for his heirs. His was the first, the original sin, and this is the inheritance he has transmitted to us. It consists principally in the absence of sanctifying grace and a tendency towards sin in each newborn member of the human race. But in His infinite mercy God willed to give each member of the human race an opportunity to regain the inheritance which Adam had lost for them. He would send them a second Adam whose perfect love and obedience would pay the debt of sin incurred by Adam and all his children, and He would do this through the mystery of the Incarnation. We are bound to believe that God the Son, the Word begotten from all eternity by the Father, has raised into personal union with Himself the blessed fruit of the virginal womb of Mary; in other words, the human and divine natures are united in Our Lord in the unity of a single Person, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Further, since when we speak of a son we mean a person, Jesus must be called the Son of God, because as the Son of God, He is a Divine Person. He is the Incarnate Word. From this it follows that Our Lady is properly called the Mother of God; not because she has begotten the Word, but because from her is derived the humanity which the Word has united to Himself in the mystery of the Incarnation.
The mystery of the Incarnation is one upon which we can never meditate sufficiently, one for which our gratitude to God can never be adequate. This explains why we pray the Angelus three times a day, this explains why we genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation in the Creed and the Last Gospel at Mass. The liturgy of the Easter Vigil even terms the sin of Adam a "happy fault that merited so great a Redeemer." Cardinal Newman has well expressed the gratitude we should feel to the Son of God for deigning to take a human nature and dwell among us, for vouchsafing to partake of our humanity that we might share in His divinity:
The Incarnation is the rock upon which the entire Christian faith is built; remove it and nothing remains. A Christian is a man who believes that as a matter of actual, objective historical fact, at a specific time and at a specific place, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that He taught us how His Father wishes us to live, that He died for us on Calvary, that He rose in triumph on the third day, and that He ascended into heaven to prepare a place for all those who believe, who are baptized, and who make a sincere effort to cooperate with divine grace to achieve this end. Many who profess to be Christians today, both Catholic and Protestant, have no real claim to the title as they do not believe in the Incarnation as a historical fact.
This error has been the basis of a number of heresies: Arius taught that Jesus was the greatest of God's treasures, but not equal to God; Mohammed accepted that Jesus was a great prophet and teacher, but not God Incarnate—the doctrine of the Incarnation is blasphemy to those who accept the Islamic faith; and a denial of the Incarnation is the ultimate logic of the theological Modernism which is so widespread among Catholics and Protestants today.
Catholics and Protestants who accept the literal truth of the Incarnation have very much in common, but there is one important aspect of this dogma concerning which they are irreconciliably divided: the manner in which Christ willed to apply to mankind the grace which He won for them upon the cross. Catholics believe that He willed to do this by means of a visible Church which would mediate His grace to us; Protestants believe that there is no mediator between God and man but Jesus Christ.
We have noted the manner in which God willed to redeem mankind by becoming incarnate, by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity taking upon Himself a human as well as a divine nature. He offered Himself as a sacrifice for our sins upon the Cross. He could do this because, as Man He could represent men, and as God His sacrifice was of infinite worth. One drop of His Precious Blood would have been sufficient to save us, but for our sakes: "Christ became for us obedient unto death, even to the death of the Cross. For which cause God also hath exalted Him, and hath given Him a name which is above all names" (Phil. 2:8).
The redemption won for us upon the Cross must be looked at from two aspects. First we must consider the sufficiency of Our Lord's great act of atonement. The fruits of His Passion are sufficient to redeem all men. Christ died for all men, not exclusively for the faithful or for those predestined for salvation. He died even for those who reject Him and will not attain heaven. This is known as the objective redemption. Although the fruits of the Passion are sufficient to reconcile all mankind with God it will be efficacious only in the case of those who accept the objective redemption personally, who co-operate freely with divine grace to achieve their own salvation. This is known as the subjective redemption. The act of the application of the fruits of the Redemption to the individual man is called justification. The fruit of the redemption is sanctifying grace, nothing less than a share in God's own life.
Catholics believe that sanctifying grace is mediated from God to man by means of a visible, hierarchically organized Church. The word "Church," of course, is derived from a Greek root meaning "assembly" or "congregation" of the faithful. This visible Church was intended by Our Lord to be the ordinary means of salvation. By the word "ordinary" we mean the way He has chosen to save us. The mandate which Our Lord entrusted to His Church is the one which He received from the Father, to save the whole human race without distinction of time and place. But evidently, although it was Our Lord's command that the Gospel be preached throughout the world, this has not yet been achieved and there are many who have not had the authentic Gospel message and the claims of Christ's Church put before them. Such men are by no means excluded from salvation, but the manner in which they will be saved is an extraordinary means of salvation.
God can save whosoever He chooses in any way He chooses. He will save men in other religions, though not through those religions—the distinction is an important one. There can be no limit to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But the ordinary means of salvation, the way willed by Our Lord, was to incorporate all men into a visible Church where the Gospel would be preached to them and a life of sanctifying grace initiated and sustained by the seven divinely instituted sacraments. It has already been explained that Protestants reject the idea of a divinely founded visible Church, and claim that there is no mediator but Christ between God and man. Fundamentally, there is no clash between their belief and ours, for what they fail to recognize is that no distinction can be made between Christ and His Church. Our Lord did not abandon us when He ascended into heaven. He has remained on earth in and as His Church, and will do so until the end of time. The Catholic Church in its most profound reality is, then, Christ still among us throughout the nations and the centuries—Christ still among us, teaching us and sanctifying us.
The Catholic Church is nothing less than an extension of the Incarnation, and is Christ mediating between God and man. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ in this world; He is the Head, the Holy Ghost is the Soul and we are His members. Just as He willed to become incarnate through the cooperation of a human being, His Blessed Mother, so He willed to perpetuate His Incarnation through the cooperation of the members of the Mystical Body. He did not need our help to perpetuate His work of redemption, but He chose to avail Himself of it. This is both a great honor and a fearful responsibility for every member of the Mystical Body.
The Church is visible through the profession of the same faith, the use of the same means of grace (primarily the Seven Sacraments), and subordination to the same authority. The authority to which we must be subordinate is the visible, divinely instituted hierarchy. Our Lord founded His Church upon the Apostles, transferring to them His threefold office—teaching, pastoral, sacerdotal—and by appointing Peter the supreme pastor and teacher of His Church. Christ willed that these powers should be transmitted to the successors of the Apostles, since the purpose of His Church necessitated this. The apostolic character of the Church appears most clearly in the unbroken succession of bishops from the Apostles down to our very day. Our Lord promised St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, i.e., the Church is indefectible, that it cannot fail in its divinely mandated mission of teaching and sanctifying mankind. The Catholic Church, is, and will remain, the Institution of Salvation founded by Christ until the end of the world. The Church can never impose upon its members as necessary for salvation any teaching which is not in accordance with the Gospel; the Church can never offer to its members sacraments which are not valid. If it failed in its mission of teaching or sanctification it would not be indefectible, and hence could not be Christ in the world today, and Christ's promise to St. Peter would be meaningless, and we would have every reason for abandoning belief in the Incarnation itself.
But although the Church is indefectible, churchmen are not. They can and do fail. We have mentioned that the tendency to sin which has been transmitted to us by Adam is our inheritance of original sin. Mention was also made of the gift of free will, and that having given us this privilege God will not intervene if we misuse it. Thus the Mystical Body, being Christ in the world, is without spot or wrinkle, but its individual members, whatever their rank, not being Christ, are subject to temptation and liable to fall—this includes even the Pope himself, who is not Christ, but the representative of Christ. The Church is perfect but churchmen are not. Remember that Our Lord was betrayed by an apostle, that the apostles fled at the moment of His arrest, that only one stood at the foot of the Cross, that St. Peter himself denied Our Lord and at one time was rebuked by St. Paul for deviating from the true path. The human element in the Church means that though it cannot fail completely in its task, this task will be carried out more or less effectively depending upon the sanctity and courage of its members, particularly the hierarchy. When the shepherds fail the flock will be dispersed.
Quite naturally, the instruction given in Catholic schools tended to emphasize the lives of Catholics who had most fully lived up to the standard set by Our Lord, but there is another side to Church history which is far less edifying. British Catholics all know of the abject capitulation of the hierarchy under Henry VIII. Only one bishop, St. John Fisher, did not betray the fort. Sadly, many of the leading heresiarchs have been bishops, and wherever the Protestant Reformation triumphed, a weak or even decadent hierarchy was an important contributing factor. In this century in particular, Catholics have come to take for granted that the Church is always governed by saintly and prudent popes who receive the loyal support of national hierarchies. The Church in English-speaking countries in particular has been characterized above all for its loyalty to the Holy See. As the majority of Catholics have never acquired more than a superficial knowledge of Church history, and what they did learn tended to stress its more edifying aspects, it is hardly surprising that so many have reacted to the contemporary debacle with reactions varying from scandal to dismay, even to loss of faith.
In France, Mexico and the United States, some have grouped themselves around priests and illicitly consecrated bishops who claim that there is no longer a pope and that the Church exists only within these new sects which they have founded. One of these illicitly consecrated bishops in Spain claims to have been appointed Pope by Our Lord Himself, and has set up his own "Vatican" and curia, and appears to spend most of his time issuing impressively worded excommunications. Other disturbed Catholics have put their faith in one of the spate of seers claiming to receive divinely inspired revelations at the moment. Other Catholics join organizations like Catholics United for the Faith, an American movement which now has members in Australia. There are several such organizations, all of which are characterized by unthinking and uncritical loyalty to the Pope. They will not admit that any innovation or instruction receiving papal approval could be imprudent and harmful to the Church. They will not concede that the liturgical changes are theologically suspect and a pastoral disaster, and have caused incalculable harm to the Church, but allege that the official reforms themselves are marvelous and any harm done has been the result of unofficial abuses. Similarly, some Catholics have reacted to the widespread collapse within the Church following the Council by adopting the totally untenable suggestion that it was not a genuine Council at all, while at the opposite end of the spectrum the C.U.F. Catholic refuses to admit even the possibility that the Council documents are deficient in any way, or that the Council could have contributed in any way to what Pope Paul VI himself termed the "destruction of the Church."
Ironically, all the different groups mentioned here, even those which have, sadly, gone into schism have been motivated by a love for the Church and dismay at its self-destruction. But as a result of their diametrically opposed reactions to the crisis they have tended to turn upon each other and weaken the cause of the anti-modernist remnant within the Church. All this, no doubt, gives great delight to the Modernists and to Satan who is using them as his instrument, and who is certainly responsible for causing the divisions among those who are prepared to stand up for orthodoxy.
Fortunately, there is an alternative to these extreme and harmful attitudes: the position adopted by Archbishop Lefebvre. His Grace has frequently repudiated the absurd theory that the present Pope and, perhaps, some of his predecessors, have not been true popes at all; he accepts that Vatican II was a properly convoked Council; he has never contested the intrinsic validity of any of the new sacramental rites introduced since the Council; he has warned against putting faith in any of the self-styled seers who claim to have the answers to all the problems of the Church, but he has also refused to abdicate his responsibilities as a bishop by opting for uncritical acceptance of any papally approved innovation or every word in the documents of Vatican II.
Next month, we shall examine this position...
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2019 13:47:11 GMT
The Angelus - October 1986
The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective
Michael Davies
Examination of the Traditional Position
IN THE PRECEDING article it was noted that conservative Catholics have reacted to the post-conciliar crisis in differing ways. Some have gone into schism, claiming that they alone constitute the true Church, others have put their faith in alleged private revelations of doubtful authenticity, and a large number offer an uncritical endorsement of everything said by, done by, or approved by whatever pope happens to be reigning. Archbishop Lefebvre has warned us against all these options and has adopted a policy which can be termed "persevering in tradition."
After the Council, His Grace retired from public life. He resigned as Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers even though his term of office still had several years to run. He realized that the Order had become so infected with the "spirit of Vatican II" that he could not stem the tide. This is a fact which can be borne in mind usefully by those inclined to judge the present Pope too harshly. It is no easy task to govern any civil or religious society when most of its more influential members are not in sympathy with your thinking or your policies. There is a natural tendency for those in authority to draw back from an open conflict. This was the attitude taken by the Archbishop and it proved to be a providential one. He was induced to act as spiritual advisor to some seminary students in Rome. He soon discovered that the instruction they were receiving was seriously inadequate and had them enrolled in the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, but then discovered that it was no longer orthodox. He realized that the only adequate solution would be to found a new religious order, and he did so strictly in accordance with the norms required by Canon Law. Within a few years his seminary at Ecône had become the most flourishing in Europe and soon acquired an international reputation for its orthodoxy. The Seminary was praised by the Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, and the Sacred Congregation for Religious allowed members of other religious orders to transfer to the Society of St. Pius X. Everything was as official as it possibly could be.
As so often happens, success brought envy. The French bishops, whose seminaries were empty, or emptying rapidly, brought pressure to bear on Pope Paul VI, and eventually, after a series of squalid maneuvers, Archbishop Lefebvre was ordered to disband his flourishing Society and close down his Seminary. He was even denied leave to appeal against the decision according to established canonical procedures. His response was not to comply without being granted due process of law; and, canonical arguments aside, he claimed that the action taken against him was an offense against natural justice, and hence, invalid. When the background to this action is examined, it can hardly be denied that his appeal to natural justice is based on very strong grounds indeed. A fully documented account of the action taken against the Archbishop can be found in my book Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre, Vol. I.
"We are not rebels"
Archbishop Lefebvre denies that he is a rebel though to most Catholics he appears to be. During a period of almost universal revolution, it is those who refuse to join the rebels who appear to be out of step. The Archbishop has summed up the basis of his stand in the following words:
Tradition and Traditions
It is necessary to make an important distinction at this point—a distinction between Tradition and traditions. By Tradition, with a capital "T," we mean the Deposit of Faith entrusted by Our Lord to His Church. Each generation of Catholics has the duty of preserving this Deposit intact and handing it on to succeeding generations. Conservative groups such as Catholics United for the Faith, who are bitterly opposed to the Archbishop and the Society of St. Pius X, would claim that they are devoted to Tradition, and that their principal objective is to preserve and uphold it. I would not seek to contest this claim for one moment. They accept and defend the; great truths of our Faith proposed to us by the Teaching Authority of the Church, the Magisterium. Such Catholics can be termed conservatives, although the term can also be applied to traditionalists whose principal objective is to "conserve" Tradition. Conservatives and traditionalists have the same objective, but they differ over the most effective means of achieving it. It is thus particularly sad that there is often so much animosity between two groups sharing the same faith, which can only bring comfort to the Modernists who, to all intents and purposes, have abandoned the Catholic religion.
Tradition with a capital "T" must be distinguished from traditions with a small "t." Tradition is immutable, but traditions are not. As the centuries passed the great truths of Tradition came to be manifested by countless traditions, some almost universal, others confined to a particular rite, country or even locality. Most readers will belong to the Roman Rite which has its particular liturgy and traditions, but there are a number of Eastern rites in Australia, particularly the Byzantine Rite to which Ukrainians belong. Their liturgy is very different from ours, but it is just as Catholic. A universal tradition which developed within every rite of the Church was that the laity should never handle the Blessed Sacrament. In the West the consecrated Host was placed on the tongue of the communicant by the consecrated hands of a priest. In the East Communion is received under both kinds by being placed on the tongue with a small spoon. In some countries there was a local tradition that at Mass men kept to one side of the church and women to the other. It is a tradition within the Roman Rite that married men cannot be ordained. In some Eastern rites, in union with the Pope, they can. In the Roman Rite Communion has been given to the laity under one kind only for about 1,000 years. In the East it has always been given under two kinds.
The Real Presence is an excellent example to illustrate the difference in approach between traditionalists and conservatives. Both accept Tradition, i.e., that the Blessed Sacrament is the true Body and Blood of Our Lord. This Tradition has come to be expressed within our rite by many traditions. We believe the Host we receive in Holy Communion to be Our Lord, and so we receive Our Lord kneeling from the consecrated hands of a priest. Laymen do not touch certain sacred vessels which contain the Sacrament. The priest keeps his thumb and forefinger together from the moment of consecration lest the smallest particle should fall upon the ground. A communion plate is held beneath the chin of each communicant for the same reason. The chalice and paten are gilded. The priest who consecrates and distributes the Holy Eucharist wears certain prescribed vestments. These, and other traditions expressing reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, are not essential to the dogma. The truth of the Real Presence would not have been affected if some of these traditions had never evolved. But just as human nature consists of a spiritual soul united to a physical body, so we need concrete ways of expressing what we believe with our minds. Respect for traditions has been second in the Catholic Church only to respect for Tradition itself. In fact, and here we come to the basis of the traditionalist case: Tradition and traditions can become so closely related that it may not be possible to abandon the practice of the latter without compromising belief in the former.
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi
There is an old axiom within the Church that the law of prayer, the lex orandi, i.e., the way we worship represents the law of belief, lex credendi. Thus the abandonment of venerable traditions can endanger the very beliefs which they manifest. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that:
Cardinal Newman warned that:
Countless testimonies could be cited to testify to the veneration for traditions which has always been a characteristic of the true Catholic. The results following a wholesale abandonment of traditions, totally without precedent in the entire history of the Church, are now evident for all of us to see. A visitor present at Mass in any church of the Roman Rite before Vatican II would not have had the least difficulty in appreciating the profound reverence for the Blessed Sacrament shown by everyone present. It is, alas, now rare in the English-speaking world to find a church in which the same impression would be conveyed. In most of them every tradition expressing reverence for the Blessed Sacrament has been abandoned. It is quite normal for standing communicants to be given the Host in their hands by a layman with about as much reverence shown on either side as is displayed at the handing over of a hamburger at McDonald's.
Some months ago I went into a London church on a weekday evening while a group of children were practising some appalling folk ditties. I met an elderly lady coming out as I entered, who complained, "You can't pray in there! It's impossible!" The practice ended a few minutes later and the person in charge said, "That's fine, you can go." The children turned and ran out of the church as if they were leaving school to go out to play. Not one of them even glanced at the tabernacle which, in any case, had been thrust out of the way in a corner. Did those children believe in the dogma of the Real Presence? I very much doubt it. The traditions expressing that belief had been abandoned, reverence for the Blessed Sacrament was abandoned next, and then the belief itself.
The position of Archbishop Lefebvre is, then, that he will not acquiesce in a wholesale abandonment of traditions received from our fathers, and that he will resist this process—not in a spirit of rebellion, but in a spirit of fidelity to the Church, which is fidelity to Our Blessed Lord Himself. He has taken this stand not from an inability to adapt, or from simple nostalgia, but because of the disastrous effect which abandoning traditions has had upon Catholic life. He is, then, taking this stand to preserve the Faith, to uphold Tradition. He argues that such resistance does not make traditionalists rebels or schismatics. How can it be rebellion or schism to remain faithful to what has been handed down and, as he expresses it, has "sanctified the saints who are in heaven"?
Every moral theologian would agree that Catholics must resist any command which they are convinced in conscience is harmful to the Church, but they would have a grave responsibility to ensure that they had taken every possible step to inform their consciences properly before disobeying the command of a lawful superior. Cardinal Newman teaches that our presumption should first be that the superior is correct, particularly when that superior is the pope, but if we cannot convince ourselves in conscience that the pope is right, then we must resist him. Thus the position of the Archbishop, the true traditionalist position, is pragmatic. We must look around us, we must look at the fruits of the reform. Are they good fruits or are they bad? If they are bad then, while remaining formally within the Church, we must resist them—"not in a spirit of rebellion, but of fidelity to the Church."
The conservative Catholic cannot accept this position due to an exaggerated emphasis on one particular duty of a Catholic: obedience to lawful authority. He thus accepts any change approved by a pope, whatever its effects.
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Post by Admin on Feb 28, 2019 9:57:57 GMT
The Angelus - December 1986
The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective
Michael Davies
Obedience
IN THE PRECEDING ARTICLE we examined the stand made by Archbishop Lefebvre, describing it as "persevering in Tradition." But in order to uphold Tradition today Catholics are sometimes faced with a situation which has not troubled the Church for centuries: they must disobey their lawful superiors. The Archbishop described this as "resistance not in a spirit of rebellion, but in a spirit of fidelity to the Church." Sadly, but predictably, many conservative Catholics have been neutralized in the battle against the forces which are destroying the Church because they have elevated obedience into the status of the supreme virtue. One might have hoped that after the Nuremberg trials such an attitude would no longer be found among reasonably well-educated and intelligent people, but if there is one thing that history teaches us, it is that, in general, one generation does not learn from the mistakes of another.
Salus populi suprema est lex, said Marcus Tullius Cicero who died forty-three years before the start of the Christian era, "The good of the people is the chief law." This principle still provides a useful yardstick by which we can judge the extent to which the command of a lawful superior demands our obedience. It is echoed very clearly in the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who defines law as:
Thus for a law to be just it must be:
a) reasonable,
b) for the common good,
c) come from a lawful superior, and
d) be properly promulgated.
These principles apply equally to Church and State. In fact, one could rightly expect to see a far greater concern for their implementation in ecclesiastical legislation. Injustice in the State is deplorable, but in the Church it is scandalous.
Having defined the law we must define justice. St. Thomas says that this consists of rendering each man his right. A man is said to be just because he respects the rights of others, and is in the habit of rendering each man his due. And what is it that the ordinary faithful can expect from their superiors as their due, as a right in fact? The answer is that they must give us every possible aid towards the good of our souls. It is something of a truism to state that politicians are public servants; very few of them behave as if they are. They tend to behave as our "rulers," often "lording it over us." Sadly, many of the clergy have been affected by the same attitude, bishops in particular. They think that the sheep exist for the benefit of the shepherd, rather than vice-versa. Their attitude is: "Yours not to reason why, yours but to jump when I say jump, yours but to zig when I say zig, and yours but to zag when I say zag." They forget that the clergy exist to serve the laity, and that the Pope himself is "the servant of the servants of God."
We can rightly expect from our shepherds that they will always preach and teach sound doctrine, and ensure that only sound doctrine is taught in Catholic schools. We can expect that they will always uphold and defend the moral teaching of the Church. We can also expect that they will make it possible for us to pay the public worship we owe our Creator in a prayerful, reverent, and recollected manner, and that we can receive all the sacraments in the same way. We can expect that they will have a love of Tradition as the motivating factor in their lives, and that this will be reflected in their love and defense of the traditions received from our fathers. We can expect that any laws they call upon us to obey are soundly based upon the principles laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas, and also to bear in mind that, as St. Thomas taught, that there should never be any change in human law unless some great and evident good will follow. He points out that even where some benefit might follow, the mere fact of changing the law can be prejudicial to the common good, because custom plays such an important part in our lives, and what is done contrary to general custom, even in slight matters, is looked upon as grave. The more laws are changed, he notes, the less will be the respect with which law is regarded: These principles, of course, apply only to human law, as divine law is immutable, and by the very fact that it has God as its Author it cannot be unjust or contrary to the common good. The disciplinary laws of the Church come within the category of human law, and must be evaluated to the extent to which they contribute towards the common good. We have already quoted Cicero to the effect that the good of the people is the supreme law. We are now in a position to decide which particular good should be served by the laws promulgated by our spiritual shepherds. The answer is obvious: it is the salvation of our souls. This has given rise to an axiom which is basic to all Catholic theology: Salus animarum suprema lex—the salvation of souls is the supreme law. If laws are changed or enacted specifically for the good of our souls, and it is our experience that they are having the opposite effect, we are entitled firstly to make known our feelings to our superiors and, should the matter be grave enough, to disobey the law, but this is something which no Catholic can do lightly.
St. Thomas repudiates the idea that our obedience to any human law must be unqualified. There are cases when we have a right to disobey, and there can even be cases when we have the duty to disobey, the latter occurring if we are ordered to act in a way contrary to the divine law. St. Thomas quotes Acts 5:29 in this respect: "We ought to obey God, rather than men."
We have a right to disobey if the person giving the command is
a) acting outside his lawful sphere of authority;
b) acting contrary to the will of a legitimate higher authority, and c) acting unjustly.
As an example of (a), one could perhaps envisage a chauvinistic Australian bishop ordering British immigrants to cease playing the highly civilized game of Rugy Union and to take up instead, to fit in with the local community, the very peculiar sport of Australian Rules Football. The immigrant would be quite entitled to decline politely, and inform the bishop that he was acting outside his sphere of authority.
An example of (b) could occur if a bishop ordered a priest to distribute Communion under both kinds at a Sunday Mass, or allow girls to serve upon the altar. These are liturgical abuses which have been forbidden by the Pope, and a parish priest would be obliged to disobey his immediate superior, the bishop, and obey the Pope.
As regards (c), we have already discussed the meaning of justice. We noted that to be just a law must be reasonable and for the common good, which, where Church laws are concerned, means that it must make a positive contribution to the salvation of souls. St. Thomas and the consensus of Catholic canonists consider that an unjust law has no binding force.
It is, in fact, no law at all as the force of a law depends on its justice. Similarly, a tyrannical law is not a true law at all, but a perversion of the law. A law is unjust if it is too burdensome on those subjected to it, or if it is not conducive to the common good. All authority is ultimately derived from God, and unjust legislation is an act of violence rather than a law, because the power a man holds from God does not extend to imposing unjust hurt upon his subjects. The legislator should not simply refrain from demanding something his subjects would find impossible to carry out; his laws should not be too difficult or distressing for those subjected to them.
These principles are universal. They apply equally to criminal law, civil law, canon law and liturgical law. They apply to all bishops including the Pope. It is true that, under God, the Pope has supreme power in the Church, and the First Vatican Council, in its Dogmatic Constitution, Pastor Aeternus, taught that we must obey him not simply in matters of faith and morals, but also in matters of discipline. Some of the bishops at this Council were anxious at granting the Pope what appeared to be unrestricted power even in matters of discipline, but it was explained to them that supreme power did not mean arbitrary power. The Pope was not entitled to govern the Church according to his whim, which is what arbitrary power would involve, he must always be guided by the duty of building up the Mystical Body of Christ, and this must involve respect for the basic and universal principles of justice enunciated here. Where a pope, by his legislation or his example, is harming the Mystical Body, his subjects have the right not simply to refuse to obey him, but even to rebuke him in public, and if the pope is subject to rebuke, then any other bishop most certainly is too. St. Thomas wrote: My object in this article is by no means to incite readers to disobey the Pope. I am simply trying to establish the fact that obedience is not the supreme law, and that it must be subordinated to the good of souls. Cardinal Newman warned us that in the event of a conflict between conscience and the command of a lawful authority, particularly the Pope, our first presumption must be that we are wrong and that he is right. "Unless a man is able to say to himself," explained the Cardinal, "as in the presence of God, that he must not and dare not act upon the papal injunction, he is bound to obey it, and would commit a great sin by disobeying it." But if, after making every attempt to ensure that his conscience is properly informed, he cannot conform himself to the judgment of the Pope, then, says the Cardinal: "It is his duty to follow his own private conscience, and patiently to bear it if the Pope punishes him."
Let us now examine a case from history of a bishop who felt bound in conscience to disobey what was, to all intents and purposes, a perfectly legal command from the Pope. I am sure that every reader will agree that he was right to disobey.
An Obedient Son of the Church
The superior in this case happened to be the Pope, and the command he gave was a perfectly legal one. The Catholic answered the papal command by saying: "I disobey. I contradict. I rebel." I am sure that many readers will consider such a response to a lawful command of the Roman Pontiff quite scandalous, particularly when they learn that the man who made it was a bishop. I am equally sure that when they finish this article, the same readers will agree without hesitation, that the bishop was right to do so.
The bishop in question was Robert Grosseteste, a thirteenth-century Bishop of Lincoln. Sadly, most English-speaking Catholics will not even have heard his name mentioned, despite the fact that he is almost certainly the greatest Catholic England has ever produced, not excepting St. John Fisher, St. Thomas More and Cardinal Newman. Bishop Grosseteste was a scholar who still enjoys a worldwide reputation, a man of universal genius, venerated far beyond the confines of the Catholic Church. Professor Powicke has described him as possibly the greatest son of Oxford University—a truly staggering tribute when the list of those sons is considered.
There is no space here to describe the extent of his learning, his sanctity, his pastoral solicitude, his concern for justice, and, above all, his veneration for the papal office. The latter point is of paramount importance. As a result of his refusal to accept a perfectly legal papal command, which will be described below, Bishop Grosseteste is now held in greater esteem in the Church of England than in the Catholic Church and attempts have been made to portray him as some sort of proto-Anglican—which is complete nonsense. The truth is that in his day he had no rival as a dedicated upholder of the papal office. He was, as one Protestant historian puts it, "a fervent and thorough-going papalist." Had he not disobeyed the pope, the bishop would almost certainly have been canonized. There were many reports of miracles at his tomb in Lincoln and repeated attempts to secure his canonization, attempts which were met with little sympathy by the Holy See.
Robert Grosseteste's dispute with the Pope arose over the question of papal provision to benefices. This took the form of a request from the Pope that his own nominee should be appointed to a canonry, a prebend, or a benefice. Pope Innocent IV had utilized this system as an important source of revenue for his interminable wars with the Emperor Frederick II. His nominees rarely resided in their benefices, could not speak the language of the country if they did, and spent most of their revenues in Italy.
Bishop Grosseteste argued that the only valid reason for appointing anyone to a pastoral office is the salvation of souls. There could be no doubt at all that the Pope had a legal right to appoint his nominees to benefices but, insisted Bishop Grosseteste, he was invested with this power only to build up the Body of Christ through the effective cure of souls, and how could this aim be achieved by the appointment of alien pastors who never saw their flocks, and were interested only in the gold they could extract from them? He was also a man of vision who could look beyond the contemporary situation and foresee the corrupting effect this system would have upon the life of the Church, an insight which proved only too accurate. The particular case which provoked Bishop Grosseteste's refusal to obey was the appointment of the Pope's nephew to a canonry in the Bishop's own cathedral of Lincoln. The mandate ordering his appointment was something of a legal masterpiece in which the careful use of non obstante clauses ruled out every legal ground for refusal or delay. The Pope even threatened to excommunicate anyone who opposed the appointment. Here, then, was the Bishop's dilemma. He was faced with a perfectly legal command from the Sovereign Pontiff which must be obeyed and yet, though legal, the command was obviously immoral. The Pope was using his office as Vicar of Christ in a manner which would damage rather than build up the Mystical Body. Bishop Grosseteste saw clearly that there is a distinction between what the Pope has a legal right to do and what he has a moral right to do. His response was a straightforward refusal to obey an order which constituted an abuse of authority.
In a reply to the papal command he wrote,
The Pope did, in fact, intend to take action at first. His intention was to order the King of England to imprison Grosseteste but his cardinals persuaded him not to do so.
+ + +
The parallels with the case of Archbishop Lefebvre are obvious. Both consider a Pope to be pursuing policies which are harmful to the Church; both have made an isolated stand against the policies they consider wrong; both have been noted as champions of papal authority—during the course of Vatican II there was no Council Father more active in upholding the papal prerogatives than Mgr. Lefebvre. This is a fact which has been cited frequently against Mgr. Lefebvre in view of his current "disobedience"—but the same argument could have been brought against Bishop Grosseteste. Had there been more bishops like Robert Grosseteste during the three centuries prior to the Reformation, men prepared to stand up to the Pope and tell him where his own policies or those of his advisers were wrong, then the Reformation might not have taken place.
Cases where a Catholic can be right to disobey the Pope must, of course, be extremely rare. Under normal circumstances we are bound to submit to the Vicar of Christ not simply in the infallible exercise of his teaching office, but even in disciplinary matters. But the case of Robert Grosseteste shows that there can be occasions when a Catholic must say "no" to the Vicar of Christ precisely because he is a loyal son of the Holy See.
As I mentioned earlier, it was explained to the Fathers of the First Vatican Council that there was no question of the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus investing the Pope with arbitrary power, and that all his actions must be guided by his obligations to build up the Mystical Body. Bishop D'Avanzo of Calvi, a spokesman for the Deputation of the Faith, explained during the debate on papal infallibility:
Bishop Grosseteste made an almost identical statement to Pope Innocent IV: I would like to conclude this part of the series by repeating the assurance that my object is not to incite Catholics to disobey the Pope. All that I am attempting to do here is to demonstrate that there can be occasions when commands given by a pope or a bishop can be justly resisted. This is a point which needs to be stressed at present, as the argument most frequently used by bishops against traditional Catholics is: "They are not obeying the Pope, therefore they are wrong."
This approach is particularly nauseating when, as so often happens, it comes from bishops who ignored the wish of Pope Paul VI on Communion in the hand, or who allow the clear teaching of Humanae Vitae to be questioned by priests who retain important diocesan posts, who allow girls to serve on the altar, or who allow catechetical teaching to be given to children in their schools which is not based upon the clearly expressed wish of Pope John Paul II in Catechesae Tradentae. In many dioceses in the English-speaking world today, Pope John Paul II might not exist for all the attention that is paid to him; but he becomes an object of affection and loyalty when bishops find it convenient to invoke him against traditionalists.
I would accept the claim that: "They are not obeying the Pope, therefore they are probably wrong." But I will not accept the claim: "They are not obeying the Pope, therefore they are wrong." I will not accept this statement as it has no basis whatsoever in Catholic theology. There have been occasions when, because of their love and union with the Holy See, obedient sons of the Church have needed to disobey the Pope, as Bishop Grosseteste expressed it. There have been more frequent occasions when they have needed to disobey their bishop for the same reason. In January we shall examine the case of a bishop who refused to compromise tradition and was excommunicated by the Pope. The bishop was eventually canonized and the pope in question was the first Roman Pontiff who was not raised to the honors of the altar.
From May 1986 Christian Order
[Emphasis- The Catacombs]
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Post by Admin on Mar 1, 2019 11:19:59 GMT
The Angelus - January 1987
The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective [continued]
Michael Davies
Arianism
IN ORDER to place the contemporary crisis in Catholicism in its correct historical perspective, we must ask the question: "Has anything like it happened before?" The question must definitely be answered in the affirmative, but the correct precedent is not the one which would first suggest itself to most Catholics, i.e., the Protestant Reformation. There are, of course, many parallels with this event. We never cease hearing that after centuries of obscurantism, if not outright decadence, the Church is "renewing" herself at last, returning to her roots, casting aside the shackles of clerical domination, giving the laity their rightful role, making the liturgy accessible to everyone. The parallels to be found in the post-Vatican II liturgical revolution and the liturgical revolution initiated by the Protestant Reformers are particularly striking and particularly horrifying. This can be verified by referring to my book, Cranmer's Godly Order.
There is one fundamental point upon which a comparison of the present crisis with the Protestant Reformation breaks down. Although many of the Protestant Reformers began by working within the structures of the Church to propagate their new ideas, they all eventually broke with her; they attacked her from without, claiming that Catholicism had deviated so far from the Gospel that it could no longer be termed Christian. Many of them insisted that each succeeding pope was an incarnation of Anti-christ, as some still do today. There was thus no problem about the lines of demarcation. You were either a Catholic or a Protestant, and if you were a Catholic, you were within the jurisdiction of a bishop in communion with the pope. You could be sure that any bishop accepted as Catholic by the Holy See would be orthodox in his belief, even if his conduct sometimes left something to be desired.
The most distressing aspect of the contemporary crisis is that there are no such clear lines of demarcation. This was made very clear in one of the most important articles to appear in the English-speaking world since Vatican II. It was entitled "The Plight of the Papalist Priest," and appeared in the December 1981 issue of The Homiletic and Pastoral Review. This periodical is the leading English-language journal for priests and is militantly orthodox. The author of the article needed to remain anonymous in order to escape persecution by his own bishop, in itself a most depressing "sign of the times."
It is not without precedent that Catholic priests have had to conceal their opinions from their bishops, but this has been necessary because their views are unorthodox. Modernist clerics during the pontificate of Pope St. Pius X frequently resorted to pseudonyms or anonymity. But the author of this article had to conceal his name because he is an orthodox Catholic priest. The thesis of his article was that a number of dioceses in the U.S.A. are now dominated by theological Modernism. In some cases the bishops themselves are Modernists, in other cases they have lost the will to resist Modernism and have allowed Modernists to take over all the key posts in the diocese. Those priests who refuse to abandon their Catholic faith are, in his words, treated as pariahs, "the butt of obloquy, of condescending pity, barred from any positions of influence, quarantined to small enclaves, usually isolated rural areas where he can do the least 'damage.' " In these dioceses Modernists have total control over the seminaries, liturgy, cathecetics, and the Catholic press. And, most depressing of all, the few orthodox priests, estimated at about one-eighth of the total, can expect no help from the Holy See which seems unwilling to offend, let alone remove the Modernist bishops. The author of the article comments:
This situation is by no means unique to the United States, it prevails in Great Britain and most European countries and is certainly the case in a number of dioceses in Australia and New Zealand. Thus, during the contemporary crisis, the faith of millions of Catholics is being destroyed, not by the attacks of enemies of the Faith operating outside the Church, but by enemies of the Faith operating within her own structures, enemies of the Faith who sometimes include the diocesan bishop, or can at least rely on no opposition from him! These men are the "partisans of error" condemned by St. Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi, men who operate, he warned, within the very bosom of the Church, and who
It is clear, then, that if we wish to find a historical precedent for the current crisis, it must be one during which the official structures of the Church were controlled by heretics, including bishops, who used their positions of authority to destroy the Faith from within. Such a precedent can be found in the Arian heresy.
It is not necessary here to go into any detail on the nature of Arianism. The essence of the heresy was its denial that Our Lord Jesus Christ was truly God, one in substance with the Father, equal to Him in every way. They would term Our Lord the "only-begotten," "Son of God," "Lord Creator," "First-born of all creation," and even "God of God"—meaning thereby "made God by God." But they would not accept the expression "one in substance" or "con-substantial"—the Greek term homoousion which had been used in the definition of the Council of Nicea (325). This council had been convoked by the Emperor Constantine who ordered everyone to accept his definitions. Arius himself was excommunicated and banished, but within a few years his friends prevailed upon the Emperor to allow him to return to Alexandria.
Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, was ordered to receive him in communion, but refused to do so. Athanasius was then banished to Gaul, and the stage was set for a dramatic resurgence of Arianism. The Emperor Constantine died in 337, and was eventually succeeded by his son Constantius, who was an Arian. Constantius had at first shared the Empire with two other brothers, but became sole ruler in 350, following their deaths.
The Catholic Encyclopedia rightly describes the life of St. Athanasius as "a bewildering maze of events." No attempt will be made here to describe his life in any detail, the various councils which declared for or against him, his expulsions from, and restorations to, his see, his relations with a formidable list of emperors, bishops and popes. Suffice to say that during the reign of Constantius, the apparent triumph of orthodoxy at Nicea was reversed, and those who defended orthodoxy became the victims of persecution. There is an evident parallel here with the apparent defeat of Modernism during the pontificate of St. Pius X.
The Fall of Pope Liberius
On May 17, 352, Liberius was consecrated as Pope. He immediately found himself involved in the Arian dispute. He appealed to the Emperor to do justice to Athanasius, refused to submit to various forms of intimidation, was exiled to Thrace in 355, and a Roman deacon, Felix, intruded into his see. The Romans were outraged, refused to accept the anti-pope, and made it imperative for Constantius to restore Liberius to his see. But it was equally imperative for the prestige of Constantius that Liberius should condemn Athanasius.
The courage and resolution of the Pope had been shaken by the rigors of exile. He was subjected to a sustained campaign of threats, persuasion, and flattery, and eventually he succumbed. He subscribed to the condemnation of Saint Athanasius and signed an ambiguous Arian formula which, while not formally denying the divinity of Our Lord, was open to such an interpretation. The tragic fall of Liberius is described in the sternest terms in Butler's Lives of the Saints
Evidently, the restoration of Liberius to his see after he had compromised himself was a triumph for Constantius and the Arians. Within a few years, and almost everywhere, Arianism was triumphant, and its triumph had been virtually imperceptible. Writing of this period, St. Jerome commented:
The Arian triumph involved no dramatic and manifest change of position as had been the case with the Protestant Reformation. In the fourth century the simple fact of communion with the Pope did not guarantee orthodoxy as the Arian bishops were in communion with Liberius. The vast majority of the episcopate had been unfaithful to its commission. In AD 360, St. Gregory Nanzianzen wrote:
Among the few who resisted by reason of their virtue, Athanasius was outstanding. Excommunicated, hunted, and abused, he became a focus of hope and inspiration for the Catholic remnant which kept the Faith. It was, for a time, communion with Athanasius rather than communion with the Pope which signified a true Catholic. Those who wished to remain faithful to tradition became a despised and persecuted minority who had no alternative but to worship outside the "official" churches, the churches of bishops in communion with Liberius.
St. Basil wrote: He also commented: Evidently St. Athanasius felt obliged to disregard the normal rules of episcopal jurisdiction. He had no hesitation in entering the dioceses of Arian bishops to preach, encourage, console, and administer the sacraments, including that of ordination, in order to ensure the survival of a truly Catholic priesthood. Among the most striking manifestations of this period was one which made a particular impression upon Cardinal Newman, that St. Athanasius received most of his support from the laity:
Eventually, after several changes of emperor, Athanasius was vindicated and was able to spend the last years of his life in working to restore orthodoxy. Athanasius died in 373, but his greatest triumph was posthumous—the triumph of orthodoxy over Arianism at the Council of Constantinople in 381.
And what of Liberius? He died in 366, and was the first pope not to be raised to the honors of the altar. Some Protestants have attempted to cite his pontificate as an argument against papal infallibility, but this is ridiculous. It is not part of Catholic teaching that every pope will be a courageous defender of the Faith at all times. St. Peter himself denied Our Lord, and, later, was rebuked by St. Paul at Antioch. Nor is it Catholic teaching that a pope will always be prudent in his decisions, nor even that he cannot err in his capacity as a private doctor. Liberius made no attempt to impose the ambiguous formula which he signed upon the entire Church as a formal definition to which all Catholics were bound to assent, e.g., an ex cathedra pronouncement. Cardinal Newman noted that the Arian crisis shows us that:
Neither Athanasius nor any pope or council, has ever suggested that, as a result of his failings, Liberius ceased to be pope. A pope can be weak, unjust, tolerant of heresy, and even hold heretical private beliefs, and yet still retain his office. In the case of Liberius, the fact that he was acting under such great pressure must be looked upon as an extenuating circumstance. St. Athanasius made this point himself in a most generous manner: Nevertheless, Liberius cannot be totally exculpated for his weakness which harmed the cause of orthodoxy. In the New Catholic Encyclopedia, it states:
What the history of the Arian crisis proves is that, during a time of general apostasy, Catholics who remain true to their traditional faith may have to worship outside the official churches, the churches of priests in communion with the lawfully appointed diocesan bishop who is in communion with the lawfully elected Roman Pontiff. Such Catholics may have to look for truly Catholic teaching, leadership and inspiration—not to their diocesan bishop, not to the bishops of their country as a body, not even to the pope, but to one heroic bishop, a confessor repudiated by the other bishops and even by the Roman Pontiff, and possibly excommunicated.
The parallels with the present situation of the Church are evident, that between St. Athanasius and Archbishop Lefebvre being the most striking. But there have been other bishops who have been uncompromising in their defense of orthodoxy: Bishop Sullivan of Baton Rouge, Bishop Graber of Regensberg in Germany, and Bishop Stewart of Sandhurst in Australia, are outstanding examples. These bishops have not been traditionalist in the same sense as Archbishop Lefebvre for they have deemed it prudent to accept the official liturgical reforms, but they have not wavered for an instant in their defense of the deposit of faith, the teaching of the Church on faith and morals, which can never be modified. Mention must be made of Bishop de Castro Mayer of Campos, Brazil, who, until his recent retirement, made the same stand as Archbishop Lefebvre within his diocese.
Where the post-conciliar popes are concerned, just as Pope Liberius endorsed an ambiguous doctrinal statement, they have endorsed a liturgical reform which presents Catholic eucharistic teaching far less explicitly than the rites it has replaced. Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II have not wavered in their adherence to the fundamental dogmas of the faith, but they, like Liberius, have not removed from their sees, bishops who undermine these dogmas. And it is here that we see most clearly how closely the present crisis corresponds with the period of the Arian heresy. The faith is being destroyed by bishops, or with the connivance of bishops who are in de facto communion with the Pope. The protest of the papalist priest which was cited earlier is valid, and can be applied to the entire English-speaking world. Note carefully, however, that he did not say that all dioceses are under Modernist control; some, at least, are resisting. The only effective way in which the orthodox clergy and faithful within Modernist dioceses can preserve the faith is to go outside official structures, as was the case in the Arian crisis.
We can be sure that, as was the case in the fourth century, orthodoxy will eventually triumph. Until then we must redouble our prayers not simply for heroic bishops such as Mgr. Lefebvre and Mgr. de Castro Mayer, but for His Holiness Pope John Paul II, that he will fulfill his apostolic mandate as effectively as did Pope St. Pius X. Meanwhile, for our comfort, we can bear in mind an exhortation of St. Athanasius:
This message was addressed by St. Athanasius to his fellow bishops but it can be applied to every Catholic. Each of us has a duty to do all in his power to ensure that what has been entrusted to the Church from the beginning is not abandoned, and our most effective means of achieving this objective will be to get down on our knees and pray!
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2019 14:55:12 GMT
The Angelus - February 1987
The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective
Michael Davies
Humanism And Its Consequences
UNTIL THE RENAISSANCE Christian civilization had been essentially God-centered. The great heresies were concerned with God, with His dignity, with His nature. Arius considered it a blasphemy to affirm that Jesus Christ was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, equal to the Father in all respects. St. Athanasius considered it a blasphemy to deny that this was the case. Catholics and Arians believed the matter to be so important that they were, if necessary, prepared to kill or be killed for their beliefs. The same was true where other heresies were concerned—Nestorianism or Monophysitism. God was also the focus of art and of scholarship. Music and literature, architecture, painting, drama, philosophy, cosmology, and above all, theology, the queen of the sciences, were centered upon the Creator. The Creator-creature relationship was axiomatic to every aspect of human thought. God is our Creator and as His creatures, we are inferior to Him, dependent upon Him, we are bound to obey His laws and, while He is perfect, we are less than perfect.
The word "renaissance" is French, and means "rebirth." The rebirth in question was that of interest in classical studies which began in the fourteenth century. The great treasures of Greek and Roman literature were considered "human" rather than "divine" studies. They were human and not divine in being outside the scope of Hebrew and Christian literature about God, the sacred writings, and their commentaries. The scholars engaged in these "human" studies became known as "humanists." They examined the writings of such authors as Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Plutarch, and Pliny, locating manuscripts, comparing them for authenticity, establishing the most reliable version, studying their language and style. Humanism became a full-scale science, that of philology, comparative linguistics, literature, analysis of dates and other disciplines. Initially, there was no conflict between humanism and religion; many of the leading humanists were ecclesiastics.
By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century there had been a change of emphasis. The critical attitude to classical texts was also applied to Christian texts and Christian beliefs. Humanism had come to be associated with an independent stance towards Christian doctrine. The University of Padua exerted an important influence in this respect as it was a center for Averroism. Averroes was a twelfth-century Muslim philosopher who originated what became known as the doctrine of double truth. Faith is true in its own domain, and reason in its own. Only what is scientifically demonstrable is of interest to reason, and what could only be known by faith was isolated from rational discourse and left in a compartment of its own. While many of the later humanists were devout Christians, others, to all intents and purposes, were atheists. But in both cases the focus of their attention was man, and what he could achieve through the rational sciences, which was nothing less than Utopia, a paradise on earth. The Creator-creature relationship was not formally denied—most humanists were sincere Christians or at least paid lip-service to Christianity—but for practical purposes, man was seen as the focus of truth in a world of which he is the master, a world which he had the ability to subdue and perfect. Thus, to all intents and purposes, humanists saw man as an autonomous being. Without formally repudiating the notion of God, they behaved as if man had no need of Him. In practical terms, this led to the divinization of man. The more God was diminished, the more man exalted himself, the more he made himself his own god. In his book Christian Humanism, Professor Thomas Molnar provides us with the following definition:
Rationalism
This brief examination of renaissance humanism has, of necessity, been oversimplified. The true import of the movement was implicit rather than explicit. The full implications of renaissance humanism were eventually made explicit by its true heirs, the nineteenth-century rationalists. Rationalism was the inevitable conclusion of humanism. A rationalist (ratio=reason) is a man who makes his own reason the arbiter of what he will or will not believe, of how he will or will not behave. He will not submit to beliefs and standards imposed from anything beyond himself, and so there is no room for God, no place for a Creator-creature relationship in his scheme of things. Protestantism provides a direct link between renaissance humanism and nineteenth-century rationalism. The sixteenth-century Protestants and their successors today are, in the final analysis, rationalists. They would deny this on the basis that they do submit themselves to an external authority, the Bible. But if pressed, they would have to admit that what they mean by this is the Bible interpreted by their own reason. For a Catholic, the Church is Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher. The teaching authority of the Church, the Magisterium, is able to provide an authoritative answer to any disputed point of doctrine, an infallible answer where necessary.
A Catholic, if he wishes to remain a Catholic, will submit to the Magisterium. Luther substituted his personal interpretation of the Bible for that of the Magisterium, but he was furious when other Protestants had the temerity to differ from his own theories. He saw nothing incongruous in expecting others to treat his opinions as infallible when he had repudiated the infallible authority of the Church. The history of Protestantism has been one of fragmentation from its very inception. Within decades, the leaders of the constantly dividing sects felt more animosity towards each other than they did towards the Pope. Every Protestant is the ultimate arbiter for himself of what the Bible does or does not mean. In other words, like it or not, every Protestant is his own pope.
The Catholic Church teaches that when Our Lord said, "This is My Body," He meant precisely that. The Catholic Church teaches that when the Bible states that Our Lord was born of a virgin without the intervention of a human father, it means precisely that. The sixteenth-century Reformers rejected the first dogma but accepted the latter, and what was the criterion they used? Their own reason, of course! The first dogma they found irrational and so they rejected it; the second they found reasonable and accepted it. They would, in fact, have been scandalized at the very idea of any Christian refusing to accept the virgin birth in its literal sense, but the nineteenth-century rationalists did, and what was the criterion they used? Their own reason, of course! There is no logical justification for the sixteenth-century reformers to deny to the nineteenth-century rationalists, their true descendants, the right to accept or reject doctrine using the same criteria that they had used.
Modernism
Catholics living in a pluralistic society cannot remain uninfluenced by the predominating trends of thought within that society. The problem for the Christian since the day of Pentecost has been to live in the world but not to be of the world. We are merely sojourners, wayfarers, upon this earth; heaven is our true home. But even the greatest saint finds it hard to pass through this world unscathed, and for the majority of us who are not saints, the question at issue is not whether we are influenced by the world, but the extent to which it influences us. This is particularly true for Catholic academics. They were regarded as second-class scholars by their Protestant colleagues in nineteenth-century Germany, and the same could be said of most Western countries until the Second Vatican Council. If, as a result of his researches, a Protestant scholar decided that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were symbolic rather than historic events, he was able to publish his conclusions with little or no fear of sanctions being taken against him.
A Catholic scholar has no such freedom. The Virgin Birth and Resurrection are defined dogmas which no one who wishes to remain a Catholic can deny. Many Catholic scholars resented this; they envied Protestant theologians their total academic freedom. What they failed to realize was that submission to the Church's Magisterium is a liberating act. A theologian who submits to it will be free from the fear of falling into error and leading others after him. But, alas, the approval of the world seems sweet. At the end of the nineteenth century, some Catholic scholars repudiated the guidance of the Magisterium. They believed, and initially they were probably sincere, that they were the men who would save the Church from the consequences of her folly in not accepting the conclusions of what had become known as the "higher criticism." If the Church was to have a future, if she was to appear credible to twentieth-century man, then she must drop her obscurantist attitudes, come out of the ghetto, and come to terms with the findings of science and modern civilization in general. These men were the Modernists, described by Pope St. Pius X as the most pernicious enemies of the Church, putting into operation their plans for her undoing, not from without, but from within the Church.
A Saint Intervenes
St. Pius X realized that his first duty as Pope was to guard the Deposit of Faith, no matter what the consequences. He dealt with the Modernists first by attempting persuasion, then placing their books on the Index, then by condemning their errors in his Syllabus Lamentabili and the Encyclical Pascendi, both published in 1907. Those Modernists who would not submit were excommunicated, and to keep those who had not made their opinions public from teaching in Catholic institutions, he instituted the Anti-Modernist Oath in 1910. This brought the fury of so-called modern civilization down upon him but he had succeeded in purging the Church from the public expression of Modernism for three decades. It had re-surfaced again by the nineteen fifties and prompted Pope Pius XII to publish his Encyclical Humani Generis.
Democracy and Divine Authority
Another great evil condemned by the Popes, and a logical consequence of rationalism, is that of democracy. Frequent papal condemnations of democracy have caused no little bewilderment to contemporary Catholics. We all tend to take it for granted that democracy is a good thing, and that in their condemnations, the popes were simply the children of their age, sharing the attitudes of their age. This is because we confuse democracy with universal suffrage; we believe that democracy means the right of every adult to have a choice in choosing the government of his country. But democracy in the sense condemned by the popes is not concerned with how a government is chosen but in whose name it governs. Catholic teaching is that those who govern, whether an absolute monarch or the party which wins an honestly conducted general election, derive their authority from God. God, the popes, teach us, is the Source of all authority. No rulers have the right to make laws which conflict with His eternal law. Thus rulers who legalize divorce, abortion, contraception, unnatural vice, or any form of discrimination based on race or class among citizens of their country, are abusing their authority. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, enacted by the victorious revolutionaries in France, constitutes a calculated repudiation of the Catholic position. It ignores the rights of God. Some of its articles would be acceptable to Catholics, but others would not. The French Revolution made what was implicit in renaissance humanism explicit. God was cast down from His throne and replaced by man. Authority was located in the people; whatever the majority among the people approved was to be considered acceptable. There would be no other criterion of right and wrong. There were no moral absolutes. The ultimate logic of this blasphemous concept of democracy is apparent everywhere in the moral decadence of the Western democracies today.
Marxism
Marxism is another explicit manifestation of what was implicit in renaissance humanism. It is, in fact, the ultimate stage in man's self-glorification. Renaissance humanists had theorized about constructing a Utopia, a paradise on earth. Marxists have undertaken the task as a practical proposition. Universal happiness will be brought about by creating an economic system which caters to every possible material need of every citizen, and when this has happened religion will wither away. Under previous economic systems, the Marxists argue, the mass of the people had no hope of happiness on earth and so they projected their needs and desires into an illusory life to come. Religion was an opium fed to the people by those who wished to keep them in a state of subservience and deprivation. The fundamental axiom of Marxism's theory of dialectical materialism is that nothing exists beyond matter. Marxism is based on atheism, the repudiation of God.
Occult Forces
An unknown factor in the gradual undermining of Christianity which has followed the Renaissance is the influence of occult forces conspiring directly to destroy the Church. Some Catholics see the hand of Freemasonry in every adverse event and trend, others scoff at the idea that an organized conspiracy exists. It is known from Masonic documents that they intended to infiltrate the Church and destroy her from within; it is also known that they intended to use moral corruption as a means of undermining Christian society. But because Masonry is an occult organization, a secret society, it is impossible to decide or to prove the extent to which present events are a direct result of its machinations. What cannot be denied is that what Masons said would happen is happening, but conclusive proof that it has happened as a direct result of the masonic conspiracy is hard to come by. Masons played a key role in the French—and most other—revolutions.
It should be added that, as the popes have always taken pains to point out, not all Masons are engaged in a conspiracy against the Church. In English-speaking countries, in particular, most Masons, especially those in the lower degrees, are members for business and social reasons; they think of Masonry as being no more than a philanthropic mutual benefit society. Such men are frequently practicing Protestants, including many clerics, and they insist on the essentially religious nature of Masonry. But Masonry is syncretic; it will not postulate one faith as having greater validity than another, which is equivalent to a denial of truth in any religion. Its Great Architect is no more than a symbol for the common consciousness of mankind working inexorably towards a condition of universal brotherhood under masonic control.
Pope Leo XIII Speaks Out
Pope Leo XIII condemned Masonry in his Encyclical Humanum Genus. Such is the influence of Masonry in Britain that the English hierarchy did not publish an English edition, and has never done so. Pope Leo condemned Masonry as naturalism, a term which can be taken as broadly equivalent to rationalism in the sense condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors. Condemned proposition number three reads as follows: Human reason, in complete independence of God, is the sole judge of truth and falsity, good and evil. It is autonomous, and by its own natural powers it is adequate to care for the good of men and nations.
The naturalism which Pope Leo XIII condemned in Humanum Genus was implicit in renaissance humanism, in Protestantism, and in the theories of the Catholic Modernists. It was made explicit in the declarations of the French Revolution, and even more so in Marxism. It is, in its essence, a denial that the Son of God became incarnate and founded a visible Church into which He wishes all men to be incorporated so that they can be happy with Him forever in the life to come; and a denial above all that He entrusted the care of this Church to a living Magisterium which would guide men in the truth and must be believed and obeyed in virtue of its authority, an authority derived directly from Christ: "He who hears you hears Me."
The naturalists, the liberals, the Marxists, the Protestants, and the Modernists, all reply to Our Lord's injunction by saying, "No!" Their response is not a new one. It is not original. It is the response of Lucifer whose pride would not allow him to submit to the authority of God: " Non serviam!—I will not serve!" If we wish to find a common factor uniting all the individuals, sects, movements, parties, and occult societies which have been engaged since the Renaissance, consciously or unconsciously, in the process of dethroning God in favor of man, then that unifying factor is Satan, the adversary of God and our adversary, who goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. His principal weapon is the exploitation of the weakness in us which caused his own downfall, that of pride. Referring to the Catholic Modernists, St. Pius X wrote:
In Humanum Genus, Pope Leo XIII condemned Masonic naturalism in terms which bring together all the facets of the rationalism set in motion by renaissance humanism: The key phrase in this passage is that "they deny the existence of any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of the authority of his office." This anti-authoritarian attitude received considerable impetus in Western Europe as a result of the Second World War and the expansion of totalitarian communism. The very concept of authority came to be looked upon with disfavor, which is not really surprising in view of the repellent nature of the fascist and communist dictatorships. There has been a marked aversion for authority among young people in many countries from the fifties onwards, an attitude which is a reflection of the same trend among the liberal thinkers who exercise such influence in the media. The Second World War has also led, again not surprisingly, to a widespread desire for unity and brotherhood—particularly among the European countries which had suffered so much during the war and which were to be so influential during the Second Vatican Council, notably France, Holland, and Germany. Anything which caused division was regarded with disfavor, ecumenism was the order of the day. Doctrines which divided Christians should be minimized or discarded; it was what united the different communions that mattered.
It was stated earlier that Catholics living in a pluralistic society cannot remain uninfluenced by the predominating trends of thought within that society. Among the most influential attitudes within the Western democracies, attitudes which most Catholics had come to accept, consciously or unconsciously, were the following: If we examine these attitudes it becomes clear at once that they are concerned almost exclusively with this world, with man; they are unconcerned for the world to come, with God. The Creator-creature relationship is not acceptable to "man come of age." It was inevitable that bishops living in countries where some or all of these attitudes were taken for granted by most citizens would be influenced by them to a certain degree. It was equally inevitable that the Second Vatican Council would also be unable to escape their influence.
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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Post by Admin on Mar 3, 2019 13:23:23 GMT
The Angelus - April 1987
The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective
Michael Davies
Ecumania
Mr. Davies continues this series with a clear refutation of the ecumenical heresy. He points out more errors brought about by the "Spirit of Vatican II," and explains the "watering down" of the de fide teaching of the Church that "membership in the Church is necessary for all men for salvation."
IN THE FIRST article in this series (Sept. 1986), it was explained that Our Lord wishes to save mankind by incorporating all men into one visible, hierarchically governed Church, which is His Mystical Body in the world, the unique Ark of Salvation. This does not exclude the possibility of salvation by extraordinary means for those who, through no fault of their own, are not incorporated into the visible Church. But the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ is explicit. His apostles were to go forth and preach the Gospel, the good news which He had entrusted to them, to all nations, and to baptize those who accepted it. Those who heard them heard Him and would be saved, but those who rejected them, rejected Him and would be condemned. Until the Second Vatican Council there had not been the least doubt among Catholics as to the unique and divinely constituted nature and mission of the Church. Baptized Christians who accepted the teaching of the Magisterium and were in communion with the Pope, were members of the Church founded by Christ, the rest of mankind was not. Those who are baptized in Protestant denominations are, in fact, baptized into the Catholic Church, for there is no other Church into which they can be baptized. They remain Catholics until they willingly embrace the tenets of the heretical sect to which their parents belong. In such cases their heresy is rarely culpable and involves no sin. It is what is known as material heresy. But, nonetheless, Protestants are deprived of important means of salvation. They are deprived of the grace of five of the seven sacraments instituted by Our Lord. They do not have the Gospel preached to them in all its fullness, but only in the distorted version adopted by their particular sect. Thus, a zealous Catholic will not only be eager to save the souls of non-Christians, but also Protestants. To give just one example, one needs only to glance through the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican sect to see how frequently and how gravely it departs from the Gospel truth.
It has become customary, as a matter of courtesy, to refer to the Anglican sect as a "church," but this is theologically misleading. Our Lord founded only one Church, and communion with the pope is a sine qua non of membership. Anglicans are not in communion with the pope and therefore they neither belong to the Catholic Church nor constitute a "church." The only legitimate sense in which the term "a church" can be used is when referring to the Catholics of a particular diocese. Each Catholic bishop presides over a Church. There is, however, no theological basis for speaking of an Australian Church, an American Church, or an English Church. There is the Catholic Church as a whole, and the individual dioceses which comprise it—nothing in between.
Under no circumstances whatsoever can any true Catholic speak of, let alone pray for, "Church unity." This term will not be found in any official Vatican document, and rightly so, for it is heretical. Church unity must evidently involve the coming together of more than one Church, but there is only one. A Catholic can only speak of and pray for the "unity of Christians."
A number of readers were probably puzzled by my statement that there was not the least doubt among Catholics as to the unique and divinely constituted nature and mission of the Church until the Second Vatican Council. They might claim that the Council did not modify the teaching of the Church in this matter, and that I have no right to suggest that it did. As a matter of fact, I did not state that the Council had modified the traditional teaching. What I meant to imply is that since the Council many Catholics no longer believe in this teaching, which is a fact. In Christian Unity Week this year, how many readers heard a Catholic priest, let alone a bishop, speak of Protestants returning to the unity of the one, true Church? The authentic Catholic position was expressed by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical, Mortalium Animos: To all intents and purposes, since the Second Vatican Council, Catholic ecumenists (more accurately described as "ecumaniacs" by Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster) behave as if Catholics and Protestants are journeying together towards a yet unachieved unity. But unity is an essential characteristic of the Church founded by Jesus Christ. If it does not possess that unity it has ceased to exist. The unity of the Church remains unimpaired, no matter how many of its members abandon it for false religions. If in the last days the Church should be reduced to half a dozen faithful Catholics united around the Pope, it would still possess the unity imparted to it by its Divine Founder. Every Catholic has, of course, a duty to work and pray for the return of separated Christians to the Church, in the sense described by Pope Pius XI, but the Pope was describing a unilateral return to the one, true Church, and not a convergence.
The Ecumenical Heresy
It is indeed true that in the post-conciliar Church, yesterday's orthodoxy has become today's heresy, and yesterday's heresy has become today's orthodoxy. The majority of Catholic clerics today, bishops in particular, subscribe to what I would term the "Ecumenical Heresy," although they would term it the ecumenical orthodoxy. It would define itself in the following terms:
Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration should ponder the following statement which appeared in the bulletin of an American parish:
A parishioner who complained to the parish priest concerning this statement was told that he was crazy, and when he took the matter up with his bishop, was informed that the statement was fully in accord with the teaching of Vatican II.
In January 1984 a group of English Catholic bishops met with the leaders of a number of Protestant sects to discuss the nature of the Church. The Catholic bishops accepted that "other Christian bodies also belong to the Church of Christ"—a distinction being made between the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ. The January 21, 1984 Tablet quoted one jubilant Catholic bishop as follows:
I obtained the view of two highly competent theologians concerning this statement. They both informed me that it was heretical, and represented a view that had been condemned by the popes on numerous occasions.
The extent to which the ecumenical heresy is translated into practice was made clear in the January 30, 1983 issue of the Catholic Pictorial, the journal of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, which is presided over by one of England's most ecumaniacal prelates, Derek Worlock. This official Catholic journal reported with evident approval that a Catholic priest had presided over a "united service of communion" attended by Catholics and members of five Protestant sects. He used a form of service based on the Anglican Series 3 order, in which everyone present served his neighbor with bread and wine. In a BBC television religious program on October 20, 1985, a Protestant priestess boasted of the fact that a Catholic bishop had not only attended one of her Communion services, but had received Communion from her.
Australia is by no means lagging behind in promoting the Ecumenical Heresy. Indeed, after the scandalous joint service held in Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 29, 1985, Archbishop Little could be considered among the foremost prelates in the world in promoting indifferentism. It is interesting to note that during that service, the English Protestant leader, Dr. Robert Runcie, seemed to consider even Christian unity a thing of the past, and spoke of "the unity of humankind," and the search for the path to follow so that we can "become one world."
There is little need to go further into the extent to which the ecumenical heresy is now predominant among Catholics in most Western countries. The question that must be answered is whether there is a casual connection between this heresy and the Second Vatican Council. A distinction must be made here between the actual teaching of the Council and the Council as an event.
Teaching of the Council
The traditional and authentic teaching on the uniqueness and unity of the Church can be found spelled out very clearly in a number of Council documents. It would be difficult to find a more inspiring and evocative exposition of this teaching than that provided in Chapter I of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. It is replete with references to the Fathers of the Church, the teaching of the Popes, and that of previous Councils. A Catholic who could read this chapter without having his faith strengthened and deepened would be a very strange person indeed. This chapter is entitled " The Mystery of the Church," and towards its conclusion, contains the following passage: It is very unfortunate that the word "subsists" was used in this passage. It has been used by ecumaniacs to suggest, as the English bishops did in January 1984, that other Christian bodies belong to the Church of Christ. When the term is taken within the context of the passage, such an interpretation is nonsensical. The passage speaks of the Church "constituted and organized as a society" and "governed by the successor of Peter," and being "the sole Church of Christ." How "the sole Church of Christ "organized as a society" and "governed by the successor of Peter" could be found existing outside the visible unity of that society is something the most rabid ecumaniac would find it hard to explain.
But as is so often the case with Vatican II, those wishing to use the teaching of the Council to undermine the Church take a passage or even a word from its total context and use it in isolation. Unfortunately, there are only too many ambiguous passages which can be used precisely in this way, as Mgr. Kelly admits in his justly celebrated book, The Battle for the American Church. Some of these ambiguous passages are, as Mgr. Lefebvre rightly states, "time-bombs" inserted by the liberal experts (periti) who drafted the Council documents to be exploited after the conclusion of the Council. I have shown in my book, Pope John's Council, that the periti who drafted the documents were the men who obtained the power to interpret them after the Council. God forbid that this should happen, Cardinal Heenan warned, but happen it did. The use of the word "subsists" in Lumen Gentium must certainly be the most damaging ambiguity in any conciliar document, and it is particularly significant that in the original draft the same statement read:
Valiant efforts have been made by orthodox theologians to prove that "is" and "subsists" are synonymous, but if this is the case, why was the change made?
It is good to know that in its criticism of the liberation theologian, Fr. Leonardo Boff, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has included an official condemnation of the heretical interpretation of "subsists" which has been discussed here, and accepted by the English bishops among others. The Congregation stated without ambiguity that the true Church exists only within the visible society of the Catholic Church (L'Osservatore Romano, French Edition, May 14, 1985). But such a correction twenty years after the Council ended will have little practical effect in correcting an error which has now spread throughout the Church, even at the parish level. There is thus a casual connection between a Council document and a grave theological error, even though the interpretation of the word "subsists" in an heretical sense does violence to the text of Lumen Gentium.
But the responsibility of the Council for the ecumenical heresy cannot be assessed simply by examining ambiguous passages within the documents. Note must also be taken of the spirit pervading those documents and what they do not say. While the true teaching concerning Catholic belief on most subjects can be found, not without effort in some cases, the Council had little to say on the subject of condemning errors or of urging those in error to return to the truth, as Pope Pius XI did in Mortalium Animos. Not even atheistic communism could receive a formal condemnation. The thrust of the documents is towards an end to confrontation and condemnation, and towards an era of tolerance and dialogue. This is particularly true of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. In his book Principles of Catholic Theology published in France in 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger admits that this Constitution uses key words with a lack of precision. He notes that in the preamble to this Constitution the Church is to see the world as its partner and to cooperate with it in building up the world. "It is not made clear whether the 'world' that is cooperating is the same as the 'world' that is in process of construction: no attempt is made to define what is meant by 'world' in either case" (p. 424). This comment confirms the complaint made by Mgr. Lefebvre in his book, A Bishop Speaks, that a lack of precise philosophical definition was
The Council as an Event
The Archbishop's reference to feelings being more important than reason is crucial to an understanding of the responsibility of the Council for the ecumenical heresy. This is what I am referring to by the expression I used earlier, "the Council as an event." Where the everyday life of the Church is concerned, the Council as an event has had far more influence than the Council itself, i.e., the teaching contained in its sixteen official documents. For many of the experts and bishops, the Council turned into an ecumenical love-in with the Protestant Observers. Protestants soon became people with whom one dialogued and from whom one learned, rather than poor souls to be saved from the darkness of error. This ecumenical euphoria was taken back from Rome to their own countries. The concepts of condemnation and conversion have all but vanished from Catholic thinking in the English-speaking world.
There is no limit to the degree of self-deception and semantic acrobatics that ecumaniacal bishops and theologians will not indulge in when they grovel before their separated brethren. The ARCIC betrayal of Catholic teaching on the Priesthood, the Eucharist, and Authority, is the example par excellence here. Despite the scathing critique of these essays in ambiguity, compromise, moral cowardice and outright heresy made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the English bishops gave them their enthusiastic endorsement—only one bishop having the courage not to sign. This must certainly be considered the most appalling act of collective episcopal apostasy in the English-speaking world since, with the noble exception of St. John Fisher, the English hierarchy recognized Henry VIII as head of the Church. This endorsement was given on April 18, 1985, and thus the collective imprimatur of the English hierarchy to the following statement in the ARCIC final report: If this is what the Catholic hierarchy in England believes, and in its response to the Final Report it nowhere repudiates this unambiguous expression of the ecumenical heresy, then it no longer has the right to the proud title of "Catholic." We cannot only infer that it does accept this expression of heresy by failing to repudiate it, but by the fact that this is precisely the heresy expressed publicly in the January 1984 meeting which has already been cited. Not only would it be unreasonable to expect English Catholics to obey bishops who have given public endorsement to manifest heresy, but it would also be unreasonable to expect them to take these pathetic prelates seriously. The only duty they owe to them is that demanded by charity—praying for their conversion.
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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Post by Admin on Mar 4, 2019 15:18:04 GMT
The Angelus - May 1987
The Contemporary Catholic Crisis in Its Historical Perspective [Conclusion]
Michael Davies
The Liturgical Revolution
The Historical Background
Michael Davies continues this popular series with another analysis of that subject about which he writes so well—the liturgy and Holy Mass.
THE WORD "LITURGY" is derived from a Greek root meaning a public duty or service to the state to be undertaken by a citizen. In the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament, it is used for the public service in the temple, and is thus invested with a religious sense as the function of the priests in the ritual of Jewish worship. Our Lord is described as the Leitourgos of holy things in Hebrews 8:16. The liturgy is thus His public religious work for His people. It is not something we do, but which He does.
Man's chief duty undoubtedly is to devote himself and his life to God. In order to direct himself properly to God, the individual must acknowledge His sovereign majesty and supreme teaching authority; he must accept with humble mind the truths God has revealed; obey His laws faithfully; devote every action and energy to Him. It means, briefly, to pay due homage and worship to the one true God by the virtue of religion. This involves a duty to worship God not simply on an individual basis, but socially. The public worship of Almighty God is a duty incumbent upon all mankind, and was ordained by God in the Old Testament. Our Redeemer did not cease His priestly life when He ascended into heaven. He willed it to continue unceasingly through the ages in His Mystical Body, which is the Church. In order to achieve this, He instituted a visible priesthood to offer everywhere a clean oblation. He is therefore among us today perpetuating His priestly office through the Church, which has one and the same function as the Incarnate Word: to teach truth to all men, to rule and guide them aright, to offer to God a pleasing and acceptable sacrifice.
The Church perpetuates the priestly office of Jesus Christ especially in the liturgy. This she does first and chiefly at the altar, where the Sacrifice of the Cross is perpetually represented, with a difference only in the manner of offering. She does it secondly by means of the Sacraments, special instruments for communicating the supernatural grace to men. She does it thirdly by the tribute of praise which is offered daily to Almighty God in the Divine Office, recited as an obligation by priests and members of religious orders, but from which laymen are by no means excluded.These observations have been based upon the teaching of Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei, which includes the following formal definition of the liturgy: The Indefectibility of the Church
The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, an extension of the Incarnation throughout the nations and the centuries. The Church is Christ among us today fulfilling the mandate entrusted to Him by His Father, that is, to save the entire human race without distinction of time or place. In order to achieve this end Our Lord constituted His Church with certain specific powers, and this divine constitution will remain essentially immutable precisely because it is a divine constitution. If the Church did fail in any aspect of her divine constitution, it would mean that Christ Himself had failed, which would render the entire Christian Faith meaningless. The divine protection enjoyed by the Church, ensuring that she can never fail in any aspect of her divine constitution, is referred to as indefectibility. It applies to the triple powers of the divine constitution which have already been cited from Mediator Dei: Of the three powers pertaining to the divine constitution of the Church, to teach, to rule, and to sanctify, it is with the third that we are concerned here. Because the sanctification of the faithful is an essential function of the Church's divine constitution, it is certain that she will never cease to offer her members the means of holiness through valid sacraments and, above all, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The supreme authority in the Church, the Sovereign Pontiff, could never impose as a universal Church law, any liturgical rite or custom that was contrary to sound doctrine, or could invalidate the sacrament.1 Laws affecting the Roman Rite to which we belong, must be regarded as equivalent to universal laws, even though they do not apply to the minority rites within the Church. This is the unanimous teaching of Catholic theologians.
The Church is Visible and Hierarchical
The Church was constituted by Our Lord as a visible, hierarchically governed body. Her invisible ruler is Jesus Christ, whom the Eternal Father has made: "Head over all the Church which is His Body" (Eph I, 22). Her visible ruler is the Bishop of Rome, the lawful successor of St. Peter. Our Lord referred to His Church as a body which can be seen and distinguished from other societies. His Church is a kingdom, a flock, a city, a house. The Fathers teach us that: "It is an easier thing for the sun to be quenched than for the Church to be made invisible." It is thus a grave error, and characteristic of many heresies, to imagine that there can ever exist an invisible Church in which "true teaching," "true sacraments," or a "true Mass," exist independently of the Pope and the hierarchy. It can indeed be the case, as was shown in the article in this series on the Arian heresy, that there can be weak popes and a falling away from orthodoxy among entire hierarchies. But at no time did St. Athanasius suggest that Liberius had ceased to be pope or that the hierarchy itself had ceased to exist. On the other hand, the indefectibility of the divine constitution of the Church applies only to the Church as a whole, not to the Church in any particular country. Whole nations have fallen away from the unity of the Church and never returned—North Africa and Scandinavia are evident examples. The fact that the Church is indefectible where the Mass and the sacraments are concerned must be borne in mind continually while considering the liturgical revolution which followed the Second Vatican Council. It will be an important factor in making a balanced judgment upon what has taken place.
Liturgical Development
Until the fourth century no liturgical books were used during the Mass except for the Bible from which the lessons were read. The first part of the Mass was a Christianized synagogue service of prayers, readings and a sermon. At the conclusion of this "Liturgy of the Word," the catechumens and those who were not baptized had to leave, hence the name "Mass of the Catechumens."
Then followed the second part, the Christian Mystery, the Eucharist. This was an ex tempore celebration by the bishop, but from apostolic times it had already acquired fixed norms. The bishop would pray according to the tradition he had received, and his successor would use the same words, but sometimes with minor variations and additions. Once the practice of writing down the liturgy had become established in the fourth century, the more or less uniform pattern previously used crystallized into the parent rites of the different Catholic and Orthodox Mass liturgies in use today.
There was at no time any question of composing rites and then writing them down. What had developed over a period of centuries was jealously guarded and codified. At no time during the development of the liturgy did any pope or patriarch set up committees or commissions to reform the liturgy. The very idea was so contrary to the Catholic ethos that it was probably never so much as considered.
The Mass as celebrated in Rome, the Roman Rite, had already reached its definitive form by the epoch of St. Gregory the Great, at the end of the sixth century. In all essential points it could be recognized as the Mass which was celebrated throughout the Roman Rite until 1969. Not surprisingly, the pre-eminence of the See of Rome resulted in the widespread use of the Missal used there. The Franciscans, in particular, carried it all over the world after deciding to adopt it during the pontificate of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216). There were still some developments to come, e.g., the prayers at the foot of the altar, the priest's offertory prayers, the Last Gospel. Pope Nicholas III (1277-1280) imposed a modified version of the Franciscan version of the Missal upon the diocese of Rome. In every important aspect it is identical with the first printed version of the Roman Missal (1474), which, in turn, is virtually identical to that contained in the Missal published by St. Pius V in 1570.
The Protestant Reformation
It has been stated that at no time during the development of the liturgy was there any question of committees or commissions being established either to compose rites or reform those already in existence. As is explained in Canon G. D. Smith's The Teaching of the Catholic Church:
Thus, as the centuries passed, prayers and ceremonies came to be included in the Mass which stressed its sacrificial nature and the Real Presence. As reverence for the Blessed Sacrament developed, a tradition evolved that only the consecrated hands of a priest should touch the Host, and so laymen received on the tongue rather than in the hand.
The first break in a tradition built up over fifteen centuries was made by the Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century. It is anomalous that these men should be referred to as "reformers," as they were revolutionaries. A revolution can be defined as "a complete change, turning upside down, great reversal of conditions, fundamental reconstruction." A revolutionary is a man who overthrows the existing order and replaces it with something new. This is precisely what the Protestant Reformers did. They overthrew the Church founded by Christ and replaced it with a religion concocted by themselves. It is hardly surprising that at the same time they needed to overthrow the existing form of worship and replace it with services concocted by themselves. There is a maxim, lex orandi, lex credendi, which, roughly translated, means that the way we worship reflects what we believe. The existing forms of Mass were clear manifestations of belief in sacrifice and the Real Presence, which were anathema to Protestants. In most cases they even went so far as resurrecting the long extinct practice of Communion in the hand, as this, they claimed, would indicate that the bread was ordinary bread, and that the minister who distributed it was not a priest.
The Reform of Saint Pius V
The Council of Trent responded to the attack on the Mass and the doctrines it enshrined in two ways. Its first priority was to codify Catholic Eucharistic teaching, which it did in clear and inspiring terms. Anathema was pronounced upon anyone who rejected this teaching, and the Fathers of the Council insisted that it must remain unmodified until the end of time. Secondly, in opposition to the anarchy of the new Protestant services, it wished the Roman Rite to be celebrated uniformly everywhere. A commission was appointed to examine the Missal, to revise and restore it "according to the custom and rite of the Holy Fathers." It is reasonable to presume that the Council intended the missal to be invested with the same permanence as its Eucharistic teaching.
The Council closed in 1563, before the commission had completed its task. The reformed Missal was promulgated by St. Pius V in 1570, but is nonetheless an act of the Council of Trent. The commission charged with the reform in no way attempted to compose a new liturgy. Respect for tradition was the characteristic of its approach. It codified the existing Missal, purging it of a few items which it considered superfluous or unnecessary, a number of sequences for example. But as regards the Ordinary, Canon, Proper of the time, and much else, the Missal of St. Pius V is a replica of the Roman Missal of 1474, which dates back in all essentials to the epoch of St. Gregory the Great. Father Adrian Fortescue, England's greatest liturgical scholar, commented, The Bull Quo Primum did not, then, promulgate a new missal, but consolidated and codified the immemorial Roman Rite. It extended its use throughout the Latin Church, except for missals with a history of continuous usage dating back over two hundred years. It included an indult enabling priests to freely and lawfully use this missal in perpetuity. The Bull is, however, a disciplinary document not binding on subsequent popes. It did not rule out any future changes or reforms if these were sanctioned by a pope. No pope can bind his successors in disciplinary matters. However, in view of the fact that the Missal carried the authority of the Council of Trent, it is reasonable to presume that no pope would ever change it without the very gravest reason for doing so. This was, indeed, the case until Vatican II. Father Fortescue wrote: Some changes did occur after Father Fortescue had written this (in 1917), principally the Holy Week changes of Pope Pius XII. These changes did not affect the Ordinary of the Mass, and were all eminently sensible and of great pastoral value. They appear to have been introduced without any significant protest in any country. This is not surprising. To take just one example, the Easter Vigil with its countless references to light and darkness, and the beautiful ceremonies involving the Paschal Candle, was held on Saturday mornings in largely empty churches. The vigil was originally intended to be held after sunset, but had been anticipated more and more until it was actually held in the morning. The poor attendance was due to the fact that many people worked on Saturdays, and also due to its great length. All the most beautiful features of the vigil were preserved, the number of lessons reduced, and it was restored to the evening. The result was a great increase in attendance by the faithful. It was, in fact, a truly pastoral reform.
Pope Pius XII also authorized a rubrical reform, chiefly concerned with the Calendar. This was simply a continuation of a reform initiated by St. Pius X. This reform was eventually promulgated by Pope John XXIII. It affected the Ordinary of the Mass only to the extent of dropping a Judica me and the Last Gospel on a very few occasions, and abolishing the Confiteor and Absolution before the people's Communion. The Confiteor did not even form part of the text of the Mass itself, but was mentioned in a rubric to be utilized if there was a people's Communion. When the priest alone communicated, it was not used. There are sound arguments both for abolishing and retaining the Confiteor, but it is not a matter of any great significance. The last change made was the addition of the name of St. Joseph to the Canon by Pope John XXIII in 1962. The Pope was doing no more than accede to widespread requests for the spouse of Our Lady to be honored in this way. One may regret that this breached a tradition that no change had been made to the Canon since the time of St. Gregory the Great, but the Pope was acting well within his authority and, no doubt, with the best of motives.
A Precious Tradition
Thus, even taking into consideration the reforms of Popes Pius XII and John XXIII, we could still accept without reservation in 1962 the following words of Father Fortescue: The Tridentine Mass is, as Father Faber expressed it: "The most beautiful thing this side of heaven." The form of Mass is, the Bible apart, the Church's greatest treasure. It is her pearl of great price which should be more sacrosanct, more inviolable than anything else she possessed. But then came Vatican II.
1. Editor's note: This is true of proper laws, properly prepared, promulgated and imposed to the Church, such as the reform of the Breviary of St. Pius X, or the restoration of Holy Week by Pius XII. It does not apply to the liturgical reforms made after Vatican II, including the New Mass, because of the many abnormalities and improprieties in their preparation, promulgation (such as the infamous Article 7), and implementation. It is easier to see this now, "by their fruits ye shall know them,"; the fruits of these conciliar reforms have been bitter and disastrous for the Church
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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