Holy and Ecumenical Council of Florence, Eighth Session, 22nd November 1439 – ‘Exultate Deo’

Quicumque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat catholicam fidem: Quam nisi quisque integram inviolatamque servaverit, absque dubio in aeternum peribit. Fides autem catholica haec est: ut unum Deum in Trinitate, et Trinitatem in unitate veneremur. Neque confundentes personas, neque substantiam separantes.

Alia est enim persona Patris alia Filii, alia Spiritus Sancti: Sed Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti una est divinitas, aequalis gloria, coaeterna maiestas. Qualis Pater, talis Filius, talis Spiritus Sanctus. Increatus Pater, increatus Filius, increatus Spiritus Sanctus. Immensus Pater, immensus Filius, immensus Spiritus Sanctus. Aeternus Pater, aeternus Filius, aeternus Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres aeterni, sed unus aeternus.  Sicut non tres increati, nec tres immensi, sed unus increatus, et unus immensus. Similiter omnipotens Pater, omnipotens Filius, omnipotens Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres omnipotentes, sed unus omnipotens. Ita Deus Pater, Deus Filius, Deus Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres dii, sed unus est Deus.  Ita Dominus Pater, Dominus Filius, Dominus Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres Domini, sed unus est Dominus. Quia, sicut singillatim unamquamque personam Deum ac Dominum confiteri christiana veritate compellimur: ita tres Deos aut Dominos dicere catholica religione prohibemur.

Pater a nullo est factus: nec creatus, nec genitus. Filius a Patre solo est: non factus, nec creatus, sed genitus. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio: non factus, nec creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens. Unus ergo Pater, non tres Patres: unus Filius, non tres Filii: unus Spiritus Sanctus, non tres Spiritus Sancti. Et in hac Trinitate nihil prius aut posterius, nihil maius aut minus: sed totae tres personae coaeternae sibi sunt et coaequales. Ita ut per omnia, sicut iam supra dictum est, et unitas in Trinitate, et Trinitas in unitate veneranda sit.

Qui vult ergo salvus esse, ita de Trinitate sentiat.

Sed necessarium est ad aeternam salutem, ut incarnationem quoque Domini nostri Iesu Christi fideliter credat. Est ergo fides recta ut credamus et confiteamur, quia Dominus noster Iesus Christus, Dei Filius, Deus et homo est. Deus est ex substantia Patris ante saecula genitus: et homo est ex substantia matris in saeculo natus. Perfectus Deus, perfectus homo: ex anima rationali et humana carne subsistens. Aequalis Patri secundum divinitatem: minor Patre secundum humanitatem. Qui licet Deus sit et homo, non duo tamen, sed unus est Christus. Unus autem non conversione divinitatis in carnem, sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum. Unus omnino, non confusione substantiae, sed unitate personae. Nam sicut anima rationalis et caro unus est homo: ita Deus et homo unus est Christus. Qui passus est pro salute nostra: descendit ad inferos: tertia die resurrexit a mortuis. Ascendit ad caelos, sedet ad dexteram Dei Patris omnipotentis: inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos. Ad cuius adventum omnes homines resurgere habent cum corporibus suis: et reddituri sunt de factis propriis rationem. Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam aeternam: qui vero mala, in ignem aeternum.

Haec est fides catholica, quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non poterit. Amen.

 

Marie Dominique Philippe

The Prior General of the Community of St John P. Thomas Joachim has announced that there exist “convergent and credible testimonies concerning the failures in chastity of their founder” Marie Dominique Philippe. Apparently these failures regard between five and ten adult women to whom he gave spiritual guidance and with whom he was romantically involved but do not extend as far as sexual intercourse. In an interview for La Croix the Prior General has rejected comparisons with Marcial Maciel.

I remember attending a lecture by Fr John Saward many years ago in which he pointed out that there have as yet been no saints raised on the Novus Ordo. One of the attendees was very annoyed by this comment and indeed it is still relatively early days. Nevertheless, we were promised the wrath of Almighty God and the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul if we overthrew the Missal of St Pius V and it is hard not to suspect that is what we have received. The very idea of jettisoning a patristic rite of apostolic origin in favour of the work of committee of academics and officials in the nineteen sixties only needs to be expressed for its absurdity to be seen. There is an urgent need to recover the powerful feeling of the Fathers that ‘novelty’ is a dirty word. In this regard I am reminded of the thirteenth canon of the Fourth Lateran Council which has been so spectacularly ignored over the last eight hundred years,

“Lest too great a variety of religious orders leads to grave confusion in God’s church, we strictly forbid anyone henceforth to found a new religious order. Whoever wants to become a religious should enter one of the already approved orders. Likewise, whoever wishes to found a new religious house should take the rule and institutes from already approved religious orders…”

There are many extremely sensible disciplinary provisions in the Councils (such as the prohibition of Nicaea against the translation of a bishop from one diocese to another) which might have done much good to the Church if they had been observed. St Pius X is of course a great and glorious pontiff but the decision to codify canon law and the reform of the Roman Breviary seem to reflect an unfortunate conception of the proper relationship of the Holy See to tradition which bore evil fruit later in the century.

I spent a week listening to the lectures of Marie Dominique Philippe once and I am afraid I was not impressed. He seemed to think no one had really understood a word of St Thomas until he came along and, as he had now surpassed the Angelic Doctor in many important respects, there was not much point in approaching the Angelic Doctor except through him. He had taken Maritain’s ideas about the supposed distinction between the Individual and the Person and run with it. He held that the end of the person was the knowledge of God but the end of the individual was reproduction. I expressed scepticism about this idea to one of the Priests of the community who insisted it was a wonderful insight which was very helpful in understanding the challenges of celibacy. That seemed unlikely to me.

I bumped into quite a number of friends and acquaintances at Saint-Jodard one of the them was a novice in the contemplative sisters who (unbeknownst to me) was about to leave. She complained that all they did was pray the five offices of the Novus Ordo breviary that the last of these (Compline) was often substituted by a lecture or reflection of the founder. They spent an awfully long time listening to his lectures and she had noticed considerable divergence between what struck her as the authentic doctrine of St Thomas and what she was being told. She wished there was some productive work to be done. She wasn’t sure she could cope with a lifetime of these lectures. I pointed out that Fr Philippe was rather elderly and thus a lifetime of his lectures did not seem very likely. She grabbed my arm with a rather desperate look in her eyes “No! There are tapes, there are thousands of tapes!”

Many new orders were founded in the Tridentine period, particularly in the nineteenth century. They seem to have done a lot of good. Nevertheless, they have fared very badly in the post-conciliar period. The Jesuits would be the most spectacular casualty of an enforcement of canon thirteen of Lateran IV. They have of course been dissolved before and it is not inconceivable that it could happen again. It is certainly much easier to read Dominus ac Redemptor with sympathy when one reflects on the state of the Society now and the many unfortunate theological positions such as implicit faith, the third degree of obedience, the ‘black is white’ doctrine, scientia media, indirectism, the denial of the real distinction between essence and existence etc. which the Society has sponsored and which have done so much harm to the Church. In general the sponsorship of theological systems by religious orders has been a shelter under which many errors have grown up. This is particularly true of the Franciscans (whose rule was the last to be approved before 1215) who were obviously straying from the charism of the Seraphic Father by engagement in such activities. Nevertheless, it was the Jesuits who were in the forefront of the effort to prevent Benedict XV enforcing the Twenty Four Theses (admittedly written by a Jesuit!) promulgated by St Pius X in the last month of his pontificate.

The Rules of St Basil, St Augustine, St Benedict and St Francis have vast centuries of sanctity to commend them to the Church. To join a community based on one of these is to know that whatever the failings of individuals the foundation is sure. It is dispiriting to realise one has taken a wrong turn and have to retrace one’s steps and start again but, in the end perhaps, salutary.

 

“It is not possible to find Jesus outside the Church”

Sermon of Pope Francis for St George’s Day

 

 

More from Pope Francis on the Necessity of Faith in the Trinity

“But who is this God you believe in?” asked Pope Francis confronting the evanescence of certain beliefs with the reality of a true faith: ”An ‘all over the place – god, a ‘god-spray’ so to speak, who is a little bit everywhere but who no-one really knows anything about. We believe in God who is Father, who is Son, who is Holy Spirit. We believe in Persons, and when we talk to God we talk to Persons: or I speak with the Father, or I speak with the Son, or I speak with the Holy Spirit. And this is the faith.”

- Vatican Radio

We do not get the full text of these weekday sermons of the Pope. I don’t know if we will eventually. Perhaps this is a good restraining of the Zenit-theology phenomenon. On the other hand I am hopelessly intrigued by the scraps that are emerging. There really does seem to be an awful lot about the primacy of grace and the necessity of explicit faith in Jesus Christ. If the Holy Father were to proclaim these doctrines at a higher level he could do enormous good for the Church. Of course, these truths have already been solemnly defined. Most clearly when the Council of Florence canonised the Athanasian Creed, but they have been denied or ignored for decades. A definitive statement concerning the necessity of explicit faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation would drive a stake through the heart of many (perhaps most) of the errors devastating the Lord’s vineyard.

 

Bragging and Boasting

“For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore, as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord.’”

I have just had the dubious pleasure of reading an article by Melvyn Bragg in the Telegraph connected to a BBC ‘Documentary’ fronted by Bragg that the BBC broadcast at 12 noon on Good Friday as Our Lord was nailed to the cross. If the article is a faithful summary of the broadcast then it was quite clearly hate filled drivel. Bragg vastly over estimates his own intelligence as is easily detected whenever one listens to an episode of In Our Time where the guests lack the expertise or the confidence to shut him up. Listening to him talk about the Filioque or the ‘Pentarchy’ is excruciatingly embarrassing. The idea he presents in this article is that the transparently fraudulent second century Gnostic Gospels lead us into a new world of tantalizing insights into the life of St Mary Magdalene who may in fact have married the Lord etc.

Err…. if I thought the Gnostic Gospels were remotely authentic I don’t think random stuff about St Mary Magdalene would be my main concern. The fact that the world is really the  creation of the aborted offspring of a neurotic female deity and I need to get into suicidal anorexia or free love in order to reunite myself with the heavenly Ogdoad would impress me more. I hope the BBC will keep us all informed on the progress of Lord Bragg’s bid to starve himself to death in a series of follow-up documentaries.

Apparently, the Mediaevals, led astray by St Gregory the Great, thought St Mary Magdalene was a repentant sinner and therefore despised her. Christianity has no time for repentant sinners as we all know. Its all about bourgeois respectability and winning heaven by your own works.

The most terrible thing about the likes of Bragg and the various ‘feminists’ and conspiracy theorists who attack St Mary Magdalene is not that they say she was married to Our Lord but that they think that to say she was a great sinner saved by the love of Christ is an insult. Clearly they have no understanding of Christianity whatsoever. Furthermore, their own assumptions are clearly profoundly misogynistic and somatophobic. They do not think it is an insult to St Paul to say that he was a terrible sinner saved by the grace of God, presumably because his sins were not of the flesh. They do not think it is a terrible insult to St Augustine to say he was a terrible sinner saved by the grace of God, even though his sins were of the flesh, presumably because he is a man.

St Mary Magdalene was said by St Catherine of Sienna to be the greatest saint after the Blessed Virgin herself. She was adopted as Protectress of the Dominican Order. She has her own colleges at Oxford and Cambride. Innumerable churches are dedicated to her throughout Christendom. The Catholic Church loves and reveres St Mary Magdalene above almost all other creatures. St Joseph, St John the Baptist and Our Lady are the only human beings I have ever heard claimed to be equal or superior to her in glory. We love her because we are all penitent sinners. We wish we loved the Lord as much as she did and does.

She anointed the Lord three times. Those terrible patriarchal Gospels (which apparently so disparage her) tell us that Jesus appeared to her after His resurrection before all the other disciples, that she is the Apostle of the Apostles, that the Lord loved her and that she washed His feet with her tears, that He said of her “Amen, I say to you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, that also which she hath done, shall be told for a memorial of her.” The ‘feminists’ and conspiracy theorists on the other hand wish to deny these glories to her and deny that is was the same Mary who anointed Christ in Galilee and Bethany who returned with the ointment early in the morning on the first day of the week to find the empty tomb.

This is because they do not wish to receive the anointing of the Lord, the gift of the Holy Spirit for which Mary prayed with the Blessed Virgin and the Twelve in the upper room. They imagine themselves righteous and without need of the forgiveness of sins won by the Magdalene’s faith in Christ or the love poured into her heart by the Holy Spirit. Those who by God’s grace know better, love and revere the Apostle of the Apostles like our fathers before us. In the words of St Gregory in the very sermon Bragg claims the great Pontiff preached against her,

“See how, as I have told you, the heart of divine love is open to receive us , and does not despise our life which has been stained by sin. The thing that makes us draw back in horror at our defilement lets us already see the possibility of interior cleanness. The Lord gently embraces us as we return, because the life of sinners, which is washed by tears, can no longer be unworthy in his sight. In Jesus Christ our Lord, Who lives and reigns with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.”

 

Pope Francis and 1996 Eucharistic Miracle in Buenos Aires

A consecrated Host becomes flesh and blood

At seven o’clock in the evening on August 18, 1996, Fr. Alejandro Pezet was saying Holy Mass at a Catholic church in the commercial center of Buenos Aires. As he was finishing distributing Holy Communion, a woman came up to tell him that she had found a discarded host on a candleholder at the back of the church. On going to the spot indicated, Fr. Alejandro saw the defiled Host. Since he was unable to consume it, he placed it in a container of water and put it away in the tabernacle of the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

On Monday, August 26, upon opening the tabernacle, he saw to his amazement that the Host had turned into a bloody substance. He informed Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who gave instructions that the Host be professionally photographed…

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For further edification see:

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Pope Francis’s Chrism Mass homily in which he discusses the relationship between splendid vestments and the love of the poor

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Life Site News on the implications of the Holy Father’s comments about “crimes against human life” in his Palm Sunday homily.

 

Don Reto Nay

Don Reto Nay is a priest of the Swiss Diocese of Chur. I heard of his reputation for preaching the faith with wit and wisdom but without fear or favour long before I met him. He is a scholar and a polyglot of considerable stature but it is as a faithful priest that he is renowned. I first heard of him as the chaplain to the Legion of Mary in Rome from a friend who had assisted in their mission of evangelisation at that time and who was full of inspiring stories about the zeal that had overtaken its members and the moving conversions of many ordinary people to whom they had preached the gospel in the Piazza Navona and elsewhere in Rome. Later (not having remembered the name of this priest) I unknowingly got to know him in person and witness his inspiring work with students and the pro-life movement in Austria. As is inevitably the case when someone preaches the gospel without compromise he has aroused powerful opposition on various occasions. For the last years he has worked as a Parish Priest in Switzerland and pursued his missionary work through the medium of Gloria.tv. on which he regularly posts powerful sermons (which have been re-posted here on a number of occasions).

All the powers of Hell have once more raised themselves up against Fr Nay, this time because of gloria.tv news’ attacks on the German Bishops for their endorsement of the morning-after pill. It is alleged that these bishops have done no wrong because they only endorse the pill in case of rape when it is not abortifacient. There is no non-abortifacient morning after pill and the necessary professional ultra-sounds and blood tests to ensure it would not harm an already conceived child are most unlikely to occur and may not be entirely reliable. None of these precisions (which anyway are probably fatal to their position) have been made by the German Bishops.

Gloria.tv news has been robust in its criticism superimposing swastikas on images of the prelates. As St Thomas says (IIaIIae, 33, 4 ad 2) “It must be observed, however, that if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly” and the staff of Gloria.tv are not subjects of the German bishops anyway. The parish council (a body with inappropriately sweeping powers in Switzerland) of Don Reto’s parish have de-selected him as their Parish Priest and the diocesan Bishop has confirmed this. I would ask the readers of this blog (as Sancrucensis has) to pray for this loyal and worthy priest that, while he endures the (inevitable) hatred of the world, he may not be impeded from pursuing his charism of evangelisation.

 

No Protestant Babies – Pope Benedict XIV to King Henry IX

Denzinger-Hünermannn 2566-2570

Brief Singulari nobis to Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, 9th February 1749

§12. … When a heretic baptizes someone, provided he uses the legitimate form and matter,… the latter is marked with the baptismal character….

§13. Next, it was also found that someone who has received valid baptism from a heretic is made a member of the Catholic Church by virtue of that [baptism]; for the personal error of the one baptizing cannot deprive him of his happiness, provided the baptizer provides the sacrament in the faith of the true Church and observes her provisions in what relates to the validity of baptism. Suarez affirms this admirably in his Fidei catholicae defensio contra errores sectae Anglicanae, book 1, chapter 24, where he proves that the person baptized becomes a member of the Catholic Church, also adding this, that if the heretic, as often happens, christens an infant unable to make an act of faith, this is no obstacle to his receiving the habit of faith at baptism.

§14. Lastly, we have established that, if they reach the age at which they can distinguish right from wrong for themselves and then adhere to the errors of the one who baptized them, persons who were baptized by heretics are rejected from the unity of the Church and are deprived of all those benefits that those remaining in the unity of the Church enjoy, but they are not freed from her authority and laws, as Gonzales wisely explains in the section ‘Sicut’, no. 12, concerning heretics.

§15. We see this in the case of fugitives and traitors whom the civil laws completely exclude from the privileges of faithful subjects. Similarly, the laws of the Church not grant clerical privileges to those clerics who disobey the commandments of the sacred canons. But nobody things that traitors or clerics who violate the sacred canons are not subject to the authority of their princes or prelates.

§16. These example too, unless we are mistaken, are relevant to the question; for just like them, so too heretics are subject to the Church and are bound by the ecclesiastical laws.

 

Wall Street Journal on smear against Pope Francis

…One might have expected a swell of pride from Argentine officialdom when the news broke that the nation has produced a man so highly esteemed around the world. Instead the Kirchner government’s pit bulls in journalism—men such as Horacio Verbitsky, a former member of the guerrilla group known as the Montoneros and now an editor at the pro-government newspaper Pagina 12—immediately began a campaign to smear the new pontiff’s character and reputation at home and in the international news media…

 

Pope Francis on the Sacrifice of the Mass