In the sixteenth century a doctrine of the state took hold in Europe which classified it as without superior on earth and the sovereign as unanswerable to anyone other than God. In the writings of Luther and some later seventeenth century theorists the state and statecraft were seen as essentially amoral and the Prince free to act without blame in any regard for reasons of state. In the first case the error was to treat the state as if it were the church but in the second case the entity unlimited and above criticism of the nature envisaged does not and could not exist. Even God himself commands us in accordance with His own nature and with that nature with which He has endowed us. He is faithful to His promises and He has made certain promises to the successor of St Peter which go beyond anything available to a temporal sovereign but those promises are precisely defined, they do not make the Pope inspired, and, while they give him the authority to make them, they do not underwrite the Pope’s prudential judgements.
But in the world created by this false baroque view of the state there was no room for the universal jurisdiction of the Church (sovereign but not a state) holding the temporal power to account for its violations of natural and divine law and freely governing its own subjects. Even in Catholic counties, in the period that intervened between the reformation and the revolution, papal authority was often bracketed, the Faith of Christ treated as a fig leaf for the status quo and the Apostolic Hierarchy as a department of government. The destruction of the Ancien Regime liberated the Holy See to govern the Church. There arose something like a restoration of the eleventh century Gregorian Reform movement but this was not un-tinged by the baroque conceptions against which it triumphed. This new Gregorian reform found most perfect expression in the pontificate of Leo XIII. Empowered by the definitions of Papal Infallibility and Universal Ordinary Jurisdiction, Leo was able to lay out in his nine social encyclicals a comprehensive vision of the order of a Christian Society from its intellectual foundations in Sacred Doctrine and the Perennial Philosophy through its fundamental institutions of Christian Marriage and the Christian State, to the proper relations of capital and labour and the true nature of liberty. This programme, central to which was the canonisation of the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, itself the final flower of the original Gregorian movement, produced by 1958 a height of Papal power and ecclesiastical obedience and fidelity unknown since the thirteenth century.
This edifice has come crashing to the ground and this for four reasons.
1. Complacency
By the end of the nineteen fifties no one was left alive who remembered the church prior to the First Vatican Council. The last Pope who had lived through the whole of Leo XIII’s pontificate had just died. The fact that the Catholic countries of Western Europe were governed by practicing Catholics and the USA was about to elect its first Catholic president and conversions were sweeping through the English speaking world was taken for granted. It was not appreciated that this was a very specific consequence of a particular vision and policy instituted by Leo XIII. This policy rested upon vigorous hostility to modernity (as culturally and philosophically essentially hostile to the Catholic Faith) combined with a systematic separation of modernity’s legitimate goals from modernity itself and a re-presentation of them in detoxified form through the instrument of Thomism. Because the success achieved through this method was taken for granted it was not appreciated that an attempt to embrace modernity’s legitimate goals on modernity’s own terms, as had been attempted at the beginning of Pius IX’s reign, would produce the same catastrophic results as it had for Pius IX.
2. Weakness
One of the problems in the later Middle Ages was that rivalry between religious orders had allowed the permanent toleration of erroneous theological and philosophical positions under the cover of schools sponsored by those orders. In particular the voluntarism of the Scotists, the nominalism of the Ochamists and later the semi-Pelagianism of the Jesuits were able to flourish because the Holy See was too nervous to assault the prestige of these orders by condemning their pet theologians. The most notorious instance of this was the De Auxilis Controversy in which the teaching of the Church on predestination was obscured by hesitation to condemn the Jesuit position. The weakened political position of the Papacy also led to a similar failure to teach on Usury and the Supremacy of the Spiritual power. Pius X clearly saw this tendency and its consequence: the ability of heretics within the Church to build up non-Christian belief systems under the cover of Christian terminology. The most serious version of this was Modernism which is summed up in the doctrine that God could not have created an intellectual creature without ordering him to supernatural end. This heresy naturalises the entire order of grace, makes sentiment the true basis of faith and philanthropy the true basis of charity. It effectively dispenses with the necessity of explicit faith for salvation and for the entire structure of the Catholic Church. This heresy was crushed by Pius X but his successors failed to appreciate how necessary were the draconian measures he pursued. It survived under cover and has particularly sheltered under the Scotist idea that God would have become incarnate even if the fall had not happened. In 1946 Henri de Lubac S.J. revived the heresy of Modernism with his book ‘Surnaturel : Etudes historiques’. A school, the Nouvelle Theologie, built up around the endorsement of de Lubac’s conclusions was condemned by Pius XII in 1950 but not as ruthlessly as by Pius X. It survived into the sixties while de Lubac’s friend Teilhard de Chardin S.J. popularised the pantheism which it logically entailed. Because Leo XIII’s programme and its fruits were taken for granted the measures necessary to suppress these enemies within were not taken after 1914, and after the death of Pius XII they exploded into the open.
3. Ultramontanism
Because Papal Policy between 1878 and 1958 had been so successful the distinctions between doctrinal infallibility and prudential policy were obscured and forgotten in the minds of the faithful as was the distinction between doctrinal infallibility and inspiration. It was assumed that the Holy See would always choose the best way of expressing teaching even when it was not defining ex cathedra. It was assumed that whatever prudential decision was made by the Holy See in the government of the church it would be a good one. Thus when teaching began to be expressed in an obscure fashion which could sometimes equivocate between orthodox doctrine and the tenets of modernism (many of whose followers became periti at the Council) few were willing to complain. When the project of the Council and of a bland enthusiasm for modernity seemed to have had unforeseen and increasingly disastrous results no one was willing to say so. All remarks had to be prefaced with an acknowledgement that the Council or the decision to hold it was inspired in some quasi-biblical manner and professions of faith in the invisible new spring time in the Church. A totally false belief established itself that the necessary acceptance that the teaching of the Council was orthodox must be supplemented by a belief that it was well expressed and that its convening and all other Papal policy decisions were prudent. This fatally undermined any attempt to prevent the catastrophe spiralling out of control. The Pope is the rector mundi he commands our loyalty and his commands and laws must be obeyed. He is not endowed with a supernaturally guaranteed practical reason that means he always legislates perfectly or makes the best possible appointments or other decisions. No doubt the necessary graces are available but there is no guarantee he will make use of all, most or even any of them. He is not even guaranteed against legislating invalidly through conflict with divine or natural law. He is only guaranteed not to teach erroneously in faith and morals when addressing the universal Church in the use of his supreme authority. He is not inspired he is infallible and he has universal ordinary jurisdiction subject to natural and divine law. A failure to appreciate these distinctions has magnified the consequences of ill judged Papal policy in the second half of the twentieth century because loyal and orthodox Catholics have felt it impossible to say that it was ill judged.
4. Clericalism
The problem of Ultramontanism has been replicated on the parochial level. Ordinary loyal and orthodox Catholics have been so used to the idea that criticism of the clergy was unfounded and inspired by anti-Catholic forces that when a real decline in the orthodoxy, obedience and morality of the clergy began to set in as a result of the poor prudential decisions of the Roman Curia, just as no one felt able loyally to disagree with the Pope’s prudential decisions so no one felt able to challenge the increasingly irregular, then unorthodox and finally grossly immoral behaviour of lower clerics. Priests can alter the words of the Mass in increasingly flagrant ways, denounce central articles of faith from the pulpit and even carry on affairs and sexually interfere with their parishioners and good orthodox people feel that it is somehow wrong to criticise, resist or denounce them. But this is not the traditional role of the laity. When the laity are faced with heresy and clerical abuse historically they have denounced it, rallied to the Holy See and demanded and obtained from Rome draconian action to remove the offenders. If the Neo-Modernist crisis, which has now reached a scale comparable with the Arian Crisis of the fourth century, is to be overcome then a militant laity will have to overcome it. The Papacy cannot rescue the situation unaided.
Perhaps the root of the problem lies in adopting the sort of attitudes to the clerical hierarchy which, beginning in the sixteenth century, began to be applied to the state. Instead of remembering that just as the state is the creature and servant of natural law and cannot act beyond the boundaries of the natural law so the church is the creature and servant of Divine Law and while the Pope cannot err in his teaching of that law both he and the other bishops and a fortiori the parish priest can and inevitably will sometimes act beyond its boundaries. The task of the laity at such moments is to protest and demand that the Holy See call the delinquent to account.
What is needed therefore is a return to the vision of Leo XIII and the zeal of Pius X in applying it. We need no more hesitation in the resolve of the teaching office to condemn usury and the autonomy of the temporal power or uphold the Kingship of Christ. We need a clean out of the Trojan horses of Scotism and Ochamism and Molinism, of Teilhardism and its surrogates, of Modernism and its new guise of the Nouvelle Theologie. We need obedience to the Pope and the Bishops but obedience from a laity that know their own faith and know the laws of the church and its liturgical norms and know when these are being flouted and are willing to say so. The proper organisation of the laity is the state, because in a Christian society the distinction is not between the church and the state but between the hierarchy and the respublica, the clerical and lay orders within the one church. Now that Christian society has been destroyed the laity have become infantilised. The programme of Leo XIII was a programme to restore that lay order and the laity cannot accomplish that task if the clergy fail to perform their task. A priest or even a bishop who teaches apart from the teaching of the Church is just a middle aged man in whose opinions I am not particularly interested. A priest who violates the liturgical norms of the church is committing a sacrilege in which I have no desire to be implicated. A heretic priest or bishop is a wolf who must be taken down without pity. Only the Holy See has the authority to do this but the laity have the obligation to be able to recognise the wolf when he comes, and the right and obligation to warn others and the Holy See of its presence and to complain if the Shepherd dithers or delays in his task.
The flip-side of such criticism of the Holy See is that, if the Pope may err in his prudential judgement, the layman may certainly do so. He must answer for that in the final tribunal as must the Pope. The former’s temerity matches the latter’s awesome responsibility. But such criticism if sincere is not disloyal so long as the critic accepts the authority of the Holy See to make the determination and apply it. To fail to warn of the dangers of an imprudent policy or the crimes of a dissident cleric is truly a failure and not a badge of loyalty to the successor of St Peter.
“I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity; I am not denying you are such already: but I mean to be severe, and, as some would say, exorbitant in my demands, I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism, and where lie the main inconsistences and absurdities of the Protestant theory. I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above, and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and to be saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago, and they betrayed the Church in England. Our rulers were true, our people were cowards. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; and to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion. And one immediate effect of your being able to do all this will be your gaining that proper confidence in self which is so necessary for you. You will then not even have the temptation to rely on others, to court political parties or particular men; they will rather have to court you. You will no longer be dispirited or irritated (if such is at present the case), at finding difficulties in your way, in being called names, in not being believed, in being treated with injustice. You will fall back upon yourselves; you will be calm, you will be patient. Ignorance is the root of all littleness; he who can realise the law of moral conflicts, and the incoherence of falsehood, and the issue of perplexities, and the end of all things, and the Presence of the Judge, becomes, from the very necessity of the case, philosophical, long-suffering, and magnanimous.”
– John Henry Newman On the Present Position of Catholics in England
Laodicea 
April 8, 2010 at 9:40 am
I’m sure you were nicer about de Lubac (at least about his intentions) last time you wrote about him. But I suppose the situation demanded the avoidance of unnecessary possibly controversial statements.
On the basis of thoughts along the lines of the above, I screwed up my courage and my being-arsedness (because I really couldn’t be bothered) and found my way to the sacristy of the church events had led to my hearing Mass in, to make “um, er, well,” noises at the priest who’d done something creative at the beginning of the canon. A very pious bit of creativity, all about the tradition of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in the fatherland, but definitely not in the canon, and definitely clashing with what I vaguely remember of what can be put in or altered in the canon. I’m sure he lied to me, and I’m now, instead of writing about Ockham, writing a letter to said cleric. But I don’t know if I should send it. The combination of changing the words, acting incredibly piously while celebrating Mass (it took forever, and he was still rapt in prayer before the chalice when half the congregation had communed), the pissed off look when he had to talk to someone in the sacristy (I waited till he’d done everything before speaking) and then fobbing me off with something only not a lie because it was too vague to say anything – Very Annoying. And I Can’t Be Bothered. But who else will be?
[ps if there are upset people in comments on your posts, can you soothe their troubled breasts, please?!]
April 8, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Hmmmm…. I’m not sure when I wrote about de Lubac before on the blog? Anyway, I began to find it difficult to see where the room was for an honest mistake (still not impossible of course) after reading “The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters” by Lawrence Feingold. His examination of the texts of Thomas and de Lubac and every intervening commentator is so thorough that it not only closes the substantive issue but makes it hard to see how de Lubac could not have had another agenda that the exegesis of the text.
April 8, 2010 at 4:05 pm
it was on paper, not on screen. The Feingold book sounds humungously interesting; you’ve recommended it to me before, but I never got round to buying it (can’t remember why).
April 8, 2010 at 5:03 pm
That is the thing, really. I once, after batteling down indignation so far that reasonable talking was possible again, spoke to a priest who had changed the Canon nearly beyond recognition (and left out and invented at will during the rest of the Mass). He told me what he did was not wrong. I said it was. I quoted Sacrosanctum Concilium at him. He smiled and said, no, I should not worry, everything he had done had been perfectly allowed. The nerve! Another priest left out half of the Gospel. I told him he shouldn’t have done. Same reaction. If they said: “I don’t care a bit what Rome says”, that would be a position about which one could argue, but an outright flat lie?
Nevertheless, I will endevour in future to be more dilligent, in all charity, to point these things out…
April 8, 2010 at 5:11 pm
yay! Notburga is back!
April 8, 2010 at 5:54 pm
I have to say I’m a little nervous about the “de Lubac was a Modernist” line of argument.
Firstly, because I would question your assessment that “Modernism…is summed up in the doctrine that God could not have created an intellectual creature without ordering him to a supernatural end”. I certainly don’t get the impression that that particular issue is the main thrust of the condemnations in “Lamentabili” and “Pascendi”. I’m by no means an expert on early 20th century Catholic theology, so may be missing something, but I can’t help feeling you’re reading the Nouvelle Theologie back into Modernism. I’m prepared to believe that de Lubac is completely wrong about Thomas (though I imagine that, being something of a palaeo-Thomist, de Lubac would say that he was right about Thomas and that it was Thomists after Cajetan who misinterpreted Thomas because of their agenda), but I’m not convinced his error should be categorised as Modernism. I think some SSPX types classify him as a “semi-Modernist”. If anything, I’ve a hunch that the error of de Lubac and von Balthasar is far older than that of Modernism; I wonder whether they’re really just Origenists – both in the good sense and the bad sense.
Secondly, because, if de Lubac was a Modernist, and if his theology is Modernist, and if his misreading of Aquinas is deliberate and motivated by some sort of agenda, then where does that leave someone who has expressed open and fulsome praise for him and his work and who has worked closely together with him to co-found the journal “Communio”? I ask only because so forceful a condemnation of de Lubac inevitably brings a very obvious elephant into the room.
April 9, 2010 at 12:22 am
The essence of Modernism, which Pius X named the synthesis of all heresies, is ‘vital immanence’. This consists in the claim that the innate unsolicited natural desire for happiness of all human beings is already a desire for a supernatural good without the intervention of grace (still less of explicit faith). This can masquerade as an apologetic technique (as in de Lubac) or can take the form of avowed pantheism (as in Teilhard). Pius X clearly identified both these tendencies in Pascendi.
“There are Catholics who, while rejecting immanence as a doctrine, employ it as a method of apologetics, and who do this so imprudently that they seem to admit that there is in human nature a true and rigorous necessity with regard to the supernatural order – and not merely a capacity and a suitability for the supernatural – such as has at all times been emphasized by Catholic apologists. Truth to tell it is only the moderate Modernists who make this appeal to an exigency for the Catholic religion. As for the others, who might be called intergralists, they would show to the non-believer, hidden away in the very depths of his being, the very germ which Christ Himself bore in His conscience, and which He bequeathed to the world.”
I understand that you are objecting that both the present pontiff and his predecessor have enjoyed warm personal relations and shared some ideas with certain of the luminaries of the Nouvelle Theologie. I would respond that there is no guarantee of the private theological opinions of the reigning pontiff still less of his friends and acquaintances. The confusion of such opinions with authoritative acts of the teaching office is one of the problems I was trying to identify in the post. There are innumerable instances of private theological views held by Popes that were subsequently excluded by the authoritative teaching of their successors. Among professional theologians later raised to the See of Peter it may even be the norm rather than the exception. To say so is no mark of disrespect. In fact, it is important to do so in order to avoid scandal to the faithful. Spurious arguments from authority only cloud the substantive issue.
April 9, 2010 at 10:32 am
You’ve convinced me. I was thinking last night (having been reminded of it by your original post) that what gives de Lubac away is his enthusiasm for Teilhard de Chardin. It just doesn’t make sense for someone whose avowed motivation was to “return to the Fathers” or to “return to the original Thomas” to end up championing Teilhard, which suggests that (as I think Garrigou-Lagrange said) ressourcement was really a Trojan horse for the introduction of non-Chriatian belief-systems.
April 9, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Ah, Mark, you’ve failed me! I was looking forward to a huge fight!
April 9, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Defending de Lubac against his Thomist critics isn’t really a worthwhile cause. If I’m going to get into a fight with a Thomist, it’s going to be over something worth fighting over – like arguing that Aquinas and Palamas can be reconciled with each other. Not that I know enough about Palamas to be able to do that.
April 9, 2010 at 11:27 am
Would you argue that Rahner’s notion of the “transcendental existential” thereby came under similar condemnation?
April 9, 2010 at 2:25 pm
The short answer is “yes”. Admirers of de Lubac and admirers of Rahner seem to argue that Rahner’s notion of the “transcendental existential” differs from de Lubac’s position, but I think that most Thomists regard them as being different versions of the same underlying idea.
To be honest, I often find it very difficult to grasp what people like de Lubac and Rahner mean when they employ this kind of language.
Pius X regarded the slippery use of language as part of the problem. An expression like “transcendental existential” might be understood in an orthodox way by one person and in an erroneous way by another person, and I think Pius X believed – rightly – that using language in that slippery way allowed non-Christian ideas to be introduced under the guise of theological language which on the surface seemed perfectly innocent and which the orthodox could interpret in an orthodox manner.
April 8, 2010 at 6:04 pm
I’m even less of an expert, but “denial of the supernatural” is, as I recally, pretty much the thrust of both Pascendi and Lamentabili, is it not?
April 8, 2010 at 6:45 pm
I’ve just had a quick glance at both Lamentabili and Pascendi. They attack “denial of the supernatural” inasmuch as this manifests itself in the form of rationalism and of the kind of demythologisation of dogmas which the Modernists had imported from Lutherans like Schleiermacher. The charge of “denial of the supernatural” which Garrigou-Lagrange levels at de Lubac seems to me to be a little different. De Lubac may be wrong, but I’m still not convinced he’s wrong for Modernist reasons. Aelianus mentions the problem of Counter-Reformation Jesuits not wanting to accept the Dominican teaching on freewill and predestination, and I wonder whether this whole debate is really just a re-formulation of that earlier one – i.e. the Jesuits de Lubac and von Balthasar insisting that we’re all open to grace and salvation, and the Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange insisting that de Lubac and von Balthasar are denying the gratuity of grace and the sovereignty of divine predestination.
April 8, 2010 at 6:57 pm
What a marvelous job of putting this all in a historical perspective. (I do note that you said things had come crashing down for five reasons, then proceeded to give only four, or at least four that are numbered.)
I had learned recently about the work of Leo XIII, in fact I have been listening to a lecture (by Dr. Jeffrey Bond) on Libertas and a couple other encyclicals of his, particularly with regard to his political philosophy, and especially his criticisms of the idea of religious tolerance, and that of the authority to govern being vested in and granted by the people. Before this lecture I had never heard even an inkling of this papal teaching, even though our lives (at least here in the States) are dominated by this erroneous and anti-Catholic theory of government.
I had also lately come to realize that our current problems of modernism and liberalism (“M&L”) in the Church can’t be laid at the feet of Vatican II, since Vatican II could not have resulted in this explosion of M&L unless M&L had existed, and indeed thrived, in the Church prior to V2. As far as I can see now, the main thing better about the Church immediately pre-V2, compared with the Church post-V2, is that at least pre-V2, M&L felt the need to hide or disguise itself, or at least restrict itself to intellectual circles; it wasn’t openly preached from the pulpit, at least not nearly to the extent that it was later on.
It’s extremely helpful to see all this in the broader context which you present.
I’m not a member of Opus Dei, and know relatively little about it. But from what I do know, it seems its mission is something like what you advocate: Catechising and providing spiritual direction to the laity, and encouraging them to be yeast and salt and light to the lay world around them, even in the business and political realms. What do you think about Opus Dei in that regard?
Anyway I plan to share your post with friends and family. Thanks again, and it’s good to have you back posting.
April 9, 2010 at 12:26 am
Question: if in fulfilling (or attempting to fulfil) my Sunday obligation I attend a church where the norms are flouted in this way should I stay until the end of Mass or walk out?
If I walk out would my obligation have been fulfilled.
NOTE: I am blessed to hear Mass in a parish where such flouting of the norms does not happen.
April 9, 2010 at 9:40 am
I stayed, tried to pray the Rosary so as to ignore the homily, did not receive Communion and then went to the priest. I try to offer up the pain of expereriencing these abuses for the good of the Church and to meditate on the fact that my own sins contribute to things like this happening, as I fail to sanctify the Church by sanctifying myself. To leave ostentatiously seems inviting, but I feel few of those present would perceive it as an act of protest (priest included), also in my case I couldn’t do so in righteous indignation, but would have uncharitable rancour and proud self-righteousness in my heart.
April 9, 2010 at 9:42 am
“M&L” is funny. “ML” was an obligatory subject for secondary school (?) and university students in the GDR that nearly everyone hated: Marxism-Leninism.
April 11, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Aeliane,
Interesting and inspiring, as always…
Here are a few thoughts:-
1. You write that ‘he [the Pope] is not even guaranteed against legislating invalidly through conflict with divine or natural law’. Do you have any examples in mind? My understanding is that the approved authors consider the general positive law of the Church to be divinely protected from mandating anything contrary to faith or morals. Reference is sometime made here to the 78th condemned proposition of the pseudo-Synod of Pistoia which had claimed that the Church could establish a disciplne which was harmful, tending to superstition and more than Christian liberty could bear.
This aspect of the Church’s indefectibility applies only to universal laws, e.g. canonisations, promulgation of typical editions of liturgical books, and of course, the Code of Canon Law itself. It would still be possible for a pope to establish a law for a particular group of country which might be contrary to divine law (and therefore null and void).
2. I’m intrigued by your remark that in a Christian society there would be no distinction between Church and State. Would there not be the Church, promoting the supernatural common good, and the Christian state, promoting the natural common good, each with its own rulers and subjects?
3. On the ‘De Auxiliis’ controversy, is it so certain that it was merely human respect that led the popes not to condemn the Jesuit position? Could it not also have been their awareness that the Bannezian position implies that moral evil follows infallibly from the decision of God not to grant grace; in other words, that it implies not only ‘predestination ante merita praevisa’, which is the authentic teaching of Holy Scripture and gladdens the hearts of all true Thomists, but also ‘reprobation ante demerita praevisa’, which looks like Calvinism?
A recent article in ‘Christian Order’ made the remark that none of the Doctors of the Church who have lived since the 16th Century and who have engaged in speculative theology has been a Bannezian in this regard: St Francis de Sales, Bellarmine, and de Liguori.
4. You mention that, ‘When the project of the Council and of a bland enthusiasm for modernity seemed to have had unforeseen and increasingly disastrous results no one was willing to say so’. There were some exceptions, though, both among clergy and laity; hence what came to be known as the traditionalist movement.
April 12, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Hello! Here are some tentative answers let me know if you think there is anything to be said for them…..
1. That is an interesting distinction. I was thinking of a) the dispensations given on two occasions in the middle ages to mere priests to perform ordinations b) the fact that when Henry VIII argued that the dispensation he received to marry Catherine of Aragon contradicted divine law the Holy See never said it couldn’t only that it didn’t c) altar girls which seem to have been condemned in principle by several popes and are now permitted. The last one looks worryingly like a general law that conflicts with earlier Popes teaching on divine law. [One might make similar claims about ad orientem given some remarks by St Basil but then ad orientem is difficult to define as a norm].
2. It seems to me the teaching of Unam Sanctam that ideally both the spiritual and the temporal are within the Church and the distinction that now exists between two overlapping legal communities the Church and the state would operate instead within one community between the clergy and the laity. The clergy would be subject to the jurisdiction of the Episcopal courts and taxed by the hierarchy not the lay power. But the lay power would be part of the Church and subject to the Pope as such. This seems fitting as the natural common good is in this order of providence ordered to the supernatural.
3. a) Doesn’t Limbo avoid this problem? b) need the condemnation of scientia media require the adoption of some other position?
4. This is true but there is sometimes a confusion among traditionalists when ill-advised Papal acts are taken as invalid rather than valid but silly. To much effort seems to be expended in talking down the authority of Vatican II when one could simply say (quite correctly) it is all true but not particularly well put. A clearer distinction between positive inspiration and negative infallibility would help here.
April 12, 2010 at 9:14 pm
On point 1, according to canonists, the permission for altar-girls, like the permission for communion in the hand, technically has the legal status of an indult, that is, an exception to the general law of the Church. The relevant Vatican instruction speaks in hypothetical language: ‘if in some diocese a bishop on account of special reasons decides to allow girls to serve…’ So they are presented as an exception, but one which the Holy See is not currently minded to forbid.
This does not of course mean that this indult is wise or even non-scandalous; but it does just save the principle about universal disciplinary laws being protected by the indefectibility of the Church.
On point 2, I’m not sure that there is more than a verbal distinction between us. But I should have thought that the traditional terminology was to reckon both the ‘civitas’ and the ‘ecclesia’ as perfect societies, though with the first ordered to the second. It’d be interesting to check this in the encyclicals.
3. Why does Limbo prevent the Bannezian position from collapsing into Calvinism? I was thinking of the the adult who, on the Bannezian picture, falls into mortal sin (and dies in it) because of a divine decree, antecedent to any refusal on the part of the creature, that he should not receive efficacious grace.
Yes, it’s true that middle knowledge could have been condemned without canonising the other side.
4. On Vatican II, we’re not obliged to hold that it is infallible and therefore yield it the assent of faith simply because it was a duly convened ecumenical council. A council, like the Pope, can teach at a lower-level of authority, so as to require only the religious submission of mind and will. Vatican II rarely seems to express itself with the solemnity that indicates an infallible statement. It does require of us the religious assent of mind and will, though only insofar as it is seeking to expound the deposit of faith. Insofar as it is doing something else, e.g. engaging in comparative religion, it doesn’t oblige us to this assent; though we’d still be obliged to speak of it with the respect appropriate to a valid ecumenical council.
October 18, 2010 at 9:58 pm
One of your best blog posts. Perfectly sums up the rot in the church in the lead up to and after the council
October 19, 2010 at 4:49 am
You refer to the “semi-Pelagianism of the Jesuits” in the same breath as the “voluntarism of the Scotists” and the “nominalism of the Ockhamists”, while ignoring the fact that Jesuits held a range of opinions, producing congruists and modified Molinists as well as those who held to Molina’s own view. Even had they been pure Molinists to a man, it would still be little more than a slur to call Molinism “semi-Pelagian” without properly arguing the point; Rome may not have finally ruled on the merits of the system, but popes certainly did rule in the course of the De Auxiliis controversy on the permissibility of carelessly lobbing about accusations of Calvinism, semi-Pelagianism etc. Hence Clement XII in 1733 stating that
“we do not wish… that there be any disparagement of the other Catholic schools which think differently from the [Thomistic] in explaining the efficacy of divine grace, and whose merits are clear to the Holy See”
and going on to forbid all involved in such controversies from
“daring to brand any mark or theological censure on the same schools which have different opinions, and to assail their opinions by insults and invectives, until the Holy See shall decide that some definition and pronouncement must be made on the same controversies.”
You might choose to view such statements as indicative of ‘weakness’, but it might help to consider that the Roman pontiffs at the time were cognisant of problems present in the positions of all the various schools, such problems having had a thorough airing at the hands of their adversaries. Is there, for example, a satisfactory answer to Fr Crean’s point, above, about the limitations of the Bañezian view? Knowing that in addressing these questions they were dealing with mysteries of the highest order – what Antoniotti calls the “’mirabilia Dei’ cachés dans le secret de la déité” – is it not possible that the popes, having identified and condemned the heresies of Lutheranism, Calvinism, Jansenism, Baianism etc., considered a prudential silence preferable to attempting to identify a single school as the only Catholic option?
I would also love to know how the nouvelle théologie “logically entailed” pantheism, but perhaps that can wait for another day.
October 19, 2010 at 6:40 pm
I am suitably rebuked as to name calling. I had understood this stricture to apply to the Order of Preachers rather than to the faithful in general. As to your main point, I was not advocating the canonization of one particular view but only the condemnation of the Scientia Media which introduces passivity into the Pure Act and allows salvation to be merited through an individual’s future actions via God’s hypothetical quasi omniscience. As to the Nouvelle Theologie: if man has an unconditional innate desire for the vision of God then God owes it to His own justice to provide man with the means to attain it and so to provide man with sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is a participation in the divine nature. Thus, man would have a right inherent in his own nature to participate in the nature of God. This is a species of pantheism. It was condemned by Pius X in Pascendi and by Pius XII in Humani Generis.