Friday, July 12, 2024

The future of the Magisterium

The latest issue of First Things features a symposium on the future of the Catholic Church, to which I contributed an article on the future of the Magisterium.  You can read the entire symposium online here.

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12 comments:

  1. DNWJuly 13, 2024 at 2:13 PM

    "... good governance calls for the rule of law and the transparent, accountable administration of justice. Pope Francis has made real, if uneven progress on the Vatican’s finances, but his record on sexual abuse is appalling. There is presently an almost incomprehensible combination of inaction toward, and protection of, sexually abusive bishops and priests—for example, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta and Fr. Marko Rupnik. Such deeds have rendered papal leadership on this front literally incredible."

    Yeah.

    I have no idea how anyone can take this troop of perverts and Marxists in the Vatican and the institutional hierarchy in general, seriously as Christians.

    And what do the pervs get out of it? They cannot have any supernatural faith [or 'fear of God'] at all. I guess they just can't get a condo and a boyfriend - or mistress - any other way, and figure the Church is the way to score a comfy sinecure. Especially if you don't take the premise too seriously. Either that, or they imagine that they are doing God a big favor by performing a go-through-the-motions "job".

    And by the way, in a church that increasingly seems to preach universalism, why should anyone give a flying flip about excommunication? Or, for that matter, any anti papal activity at all?

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  2. AnonymousJuly 14, 2024 at 12:42 AM

    I wonder what Jesus would have to say about this?
    Would he in any sense be welcome or even recognized at the Vatican or if he somehow walked unannounced into the offices of the First Things group.

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  3. AnonymousJuly 14, 2024 at 3:39 AM

    Not sure. Doesn't the maxim In medio stat virtus apply to conduct rather than doctrine, per se? Obviously any doctrinal position will have erroneous distortions around it, but its rightness will not depend on its position relative to them; only on its truth.

    No Pope has renounced the faith. John XXII spoke of his ideas as "opinions", inviting discussion. Honorius was ambiguous and pressured. The Council that was most categorical in condemning him was a gathering of Greeks who intimidated the papal legates with instructions from Rome for them not to do that. The Greeks can be said to have acted on their own on that issue.
    No Pope has renounced the faith.

    In the meantime, those who can should do all in their power to respectfully criticise the current Pope when he tries to lead us down the garden path. They should not devalue their critique by trying to build a massive wall between him and his immediate predecessors, who also contributed to the crisis - with different nuances.

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  4. AnonymousJuly 14, 2024 at 5:33 PM

    WCB

    Spiders Georg

    WCB

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  5. ToddJuly 14, 2024 at 8:50 PM

    I went to the link and when I saw that Anthony Akinwale, O.P. from Nigeria had a contribution, I jumped right to it (sorry Ed. I did read yours). I have been following the African Church, and the Church in Nigeria in particular for the last couple years. I had high hopes just seeing he had an essay and was not disappointed. I pray to see a African, in particular, a Nigerian, Pope. I think it is possible, even likely, I will only live to see one more Pope after Francis.

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  6. TonyJuly 17, 2024 at 7:26 PM

    I went to the link and when I saw that Anthony Akinwale, O.P. from Nigeria had a contribution, I jumped right to it (sorry Ed. I did read yours).

    Mine was kind of the reverse: I read Ed's article, and thought "this is great", except when he gets to three prescriptions at the end. Sorry, Ed, but you left out that a future pope (hopefully, the next one) needs to completely reverse Francis's actions on the liturgy, and solidify what Benedict did into a more permanent fixture. Fr. Z keeps telling us (correctly) "we are our rites", and the lex orandi concept applies - we WILL think in line with our liturgy, (viz.: 75% rejection of the Real Presence), and if we want to turn around belief, we need to correct the deficiencies in the public prayer life of the Church.

    Then I saw that the very next essay was on liturgy, and thought "oh, OK, maybe Ed left out liturgy because it will be covered by this bloke." Well, maybe, but the guy made a pigs breakfast of it. Some things were just plain wrong:

    Many changes were met with enthusiasm: the replacement of Latin with the vernacular, the expansion of biblical readings, greater participation by the lay faithful. Yet the bottom-up implementation of the council’s reforms also had its dark side.

    I can tell you without doubt that the "greater participation" and "bottom up" implementation he depicts here are just bollocks. The Council was absolutely clear that by "participation" they meant that INTERIOR firm action of lifting the mind and heart to God and mentally conjoining yourself to the priest's sacrifice of Jesus. They did not mean lectors reading, choirs singing, and so on. The "participation" and "bottom up" in the 1970s took place wholly among the busy-body lay "reformers" who were sure they knew "what the liturgy needed" to make it "relevant", a vocal but tiny cadre of 1% who out-shouted the 99% who wanted beauty, reverence, and maybe a better set of speakers to hear Fr.'s sermons. But that 1% took the stage (yes, thinking it a stage) and trained up the next 2 generations to misunderstand what liturgy even is.

    Fumbled mischaracterizations continue apace:

    The Church’s response to this traditionalist movement has varied across time. The intention of the Second Vatican Council was not to create a new, alternative Mass, but to reform the Roman Mass, which was to be used universally in the Latin rite Church. Permission to celebrate the Tridentine Mass was therefore granted only on very narrow grounds.

    Nobody envisioned any need to give permission to celebrate the old Mass because nobody envisioned any possibility of the NEW Mass being such an outrageous invention, fabrication, and departure from the old: the "reform" never happened.

    Then John Paul II, in response to continued demand for the Tridentine Mass, allowed diocesan bishops to grant permission—on the condition that it “be made publicly clear beyond all ambiguity that such priests and their respective faithful in no way share the positions of those who call into question the legitimacy and doctrinal exactitude of the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970.”

    By not mentioning that JPII also stated that bishops should generously grant permission for the Vetus Ordo Mass, he erroneously colors the picture. JPII did not intend implementation of Ecclesia Dei to be minimalist, but expansive, and if expansive, to have a LASTING presence.

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  7. TonyJuly 17, 2024 at 7:28 PM

    It is no wonder that the publication of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s motu proprio of 2021, came as a shock to many. In line with the teaching of Vatican II, Traditionis Custodes underlines that the Novus Ordo is “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman rite.”

    This is utter balderdash. Trying to link Traditionis Custodes with "the teaching of Vatican II" is pure fiction, and really bad fiction at that. Vatican II didn't say anything like what TC says, certainly nothing REMOTELY like the "unique expression..." line, because the Novus Ordo had not been invented yet. In any case, the proper subject of "lex orandi" is THE CHURCH, not "the Roman Rite" (as Benedict pointed out when he declared "The Roman Missal promulgated by Saint Pius V and revised by Blessed John XXIII is nonetheless to be considered an extraordinary expression of the same lex orandi of the Church and duly honoured for its venerable and ancient usage. These two expressions of the Church’s lex orandi will in no way lead to a division in the Church’s lex credendi (rule of faith); ")
    On top of which, it is clear that Francis is effectively trying, in TC, to expressly REVERSE what Benedict said in SP, where he declared that "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful." (The letter that accompanied SP.) Well, one of them is wrong, and to claim that Francis is pursuing the same development as his predecessors seems like outright fraud.

    The important requirement spelled out earlier by John Paul II is sustained: that those who participate in the Tridentine Mass “do not deny the validity and the legitimacy of the liturgical reform” decreed by Vatican II.

    The Council did indeed decree that a reform take place. In no wise did it decree THAT SPECIFIC RESULT, the Novus Ordo that we now have, and in many respects that Novus Ordo defies what is in the decree. So, it is perfectly possible to hold fast to the Council's decree AND to criticize the Novus Ordo. And the particular formulation he used here " 'the legitimacy of the liturgical reform' decreed by Vatican II" seems written expressly to obscure the truth.

    First Things need to do better.

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  8. TonyJuly 17, 2024 at 8:49 PM

    One last comment on that essay:

    This catechesis should explain the main achievements and hopes of the last council in the most debated areas: ecclesiology, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and ecumenical and religious dialogue. Only in this theological context can the principles of the liturgical reform become clear.

    WHAT "achievements"?

    The legacy of the Council on these issues is, without any dispute, confusion. The documents on religious freedom and ecumenism are the ones most often held up by orthodox thinkers as the most troubling to connect to tradition. The document on ecclesiology, if Francis's methods are to be taken as their fruit, are creating a shambles of the practice and theology of the Church, sowing even more confusion than we already had before he took control.

    I am not saying the documents are heterodox. I have never said that, and I have defended the documents against such charges. But they are written so as to procure confusion. If the advocates on the left are to be believed, they were written that way precisely to create room for "new" theories, i.e. the very ones that cannot be squared with traditional doctrine, the very ones of which their supporters tout the hermeutic of rupture as coming from the Council. Yes, catechesis should indeed explain these documents, so as to dispel the heterodox theories running rampant at the top of dioceses like, say, Chicago, Washington, San Diego, half of the German dioceses, and seemingly Rome.

    And by the way, the principles of reform WERE clear, and laid out clearly, in the document. They were first ignored, then "re-interpreted", and finally lied about and swept under the rug: those who now promote what the Novus Ordo generally has become in practice as if it were the REAL fruit of the Council never cite the principles explicit in the document itself, ("organic development", Gregorian chant) and they shout down people who try to. For every one parish that has retained Gregorian chant in its proper place, I will show you 50 that have suppressed it. (Except that 20 of those 50 are now closed parishes, whereas the one with G chant was booming because it also had the Vetus Ordo which is precisely why Francis suppressed that rite.)

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  9. AnonymousJuly 23, 2024 at 10:29 AM

    Hypothetically, what if an ecumenical council defined a doctrine, and in the definition stated that the basis of the doctrine is a particular scripture verse as it appears in the Vulgate? If it then turned out that, by universal agreement among scholars, the Vulgate had mistranslated the verse, and that its correct translation provided no support for the doctrine whatsoever, would that vitiate the doctrine and with it the idea of magisterial infallibility?

    As far as I can tell, that is exactly what has happened to the Council of Trent's definition of Original Sin, which it bases on the Vulgate translation of Romans 5:12.

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    Replies
    1. TalmidJuly 23, 2024 at 6:49 PM

      Never saw a official take on that, but going by how St. Augustine treated the Septuagint on The City of God, at least he would probably be okay with it.

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    2. AnonymousJuly 24, 2024 at 10:49 PM

      Anon, please provide the Vulgate version and the "universal agreement" version.

      I seriously doubt that Trent's definition rested on Romans 5:12 alone, as if without that one verse the doctrine could not have been taught. Indeed, my understanding is that the doctrine rests on a great many passages, of which Romans 5:12 is just one significant passage.

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    3. AnonymousJuly 28, 2024 at 1:48 PM

      I found the following:

      Latin Vulgate Rom. 5:12 is propterea sicut per unum hominem in hunc mundum peccatum intravit et per peccatum mors et ita in omnes homines mors pertransiit in quo omnes peccaverunt

      Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate: Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.

      King James Version: Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

      NRSVCE: Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—

      An English translation of the Orthodox New Testament: Therefore, even as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and thus death passed to all men, on account of which all have sinned

      I am having trouble seeing why the Vulgate sense represents a fundamentally different, and wrong, sense of the passage as compared with any others.

      And I don't think Trent's account rested solely on 5:12. Just look at 5:19, which follows the same concepts:

      KJV: For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

      The Catholic understanding is that through Adam all were made partakers in sin by this: human nature is intended by God to be conjoined to the Divine Nature by sanctifying grace, (which was gifted to Adam and Eve in their creation). They would have passed on that condition to their kids in the act of generation. But Adam and Eve sinned, and lost sanctifying grace, which is a state of loss of God - loss of the indwelling presence of God. That condition just is the state of sin, i.e. of grave disorder in the soul, because it is lacking union with God, separation from God, in which state the soul cannot be pleasing to God because it is designed to be in union with Him. So, when we are conceived without sanctifying grace, we are conceived in a state of separation from God, which is the condition of sin. And this fits with dozens of other passages.

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