In this installment we see how the Modernists attack the supernatural dimension of the Church, treating Her as a purely natural society prone to sin, being no more than the sum of its parts, having no claim to possess more truth than any other human society and no claim moreover to possess truth which is immutable, let alone a Divine Mandate to proclaim it to the whole world, so that the whole world might be saved. F.R.
Catholic Tradition teaches
that the Church is holy in:
-
Her Founder and invisible Head that is Christ;
-
Her Soul that is the Holy Spirit;
-
Her origins in the open side of Our Blessed Lord on
the Cross;
- Her possession of all the means of sanctification
(i.e. the whole Faith and all Sacraments)
-
Her Goal: the glorification of God through the
sanctification of mankind;
- The Faith, Hope, and Charity of Her members.
The Council opposes Tradition
in regard to the last of these doctrines, namely the holiness of the members of
the Church. It teaches:
i) ‘The Church, whose mystery is set forth by this sacred synod, is held,
as a matter of faith, to be unfailingly holy’ (LG 39);
ii) ‘The Church, embracing in her bosom sinners, at the same time holy and
always in need of being purified, always follows the way of penance and
renewal.’ (LG 8);
iii) ‘Christ summons the church… to that continual reformation of which she always has need… Consequently, if… there have been deficiencies in moral conduct… these should be set right…’ (UR 6);
iv) [Sinners by the sacrament
of Confession] ‘are reconciled with the
Church which they have wounded by their sins’ (L11);
v) ‘…the Church already on this earth is signed with a sanctity that is real
but imperfect.’ (LG 48).
Despite its clear affirmation
of the Church’s holiness in (i) and in the whole chapter that it introduces
(‘The universal Call to Holiness’), the Council casts doubt on Her holiness in
texts (ii)-(v).
In regard to this doubt, it should be said that the baptized are united to the Church both corporally (by virtue of their bodies) and supernaturally (by the sacraments, by Faith, Hope, Charity, Grace, and by holiness), but not morally. For this reason the sins of the members of the Mystical Body do not attach to the Body itself. Consequently the Church is not ‘wounded’ by their sin, nor rendered ‘imperfect’ in sanctity by it, nor is She in need of ‘penance’, ‘purification’, ‘reformation’, or ‘renewal’ in Herself. We note that to attack the Church on the basis of Her putative sinfulness is a naturalizing ploy of Her enemies, deriving from ignorance or malice, and is typical of Communism.
3. THE CHURCH IS CATHOLIC
The term ‘Catholic’ derives
from the Greek phrase kath’holon which means universally or totally. This
totality has been understood in Tradition as:
- the totality of Truth;
- the totality of the means of salvation
(principally the sacraments) that the Church possesses;
- the Divine Mandate to ‘…teach all nations: baptizing them…teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded
you…’ (Mt. 28. 19-20);
- the moral totality of the Commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.”
Now the Council opposes the
Catholicity of the Church by opposing two of these four forms of totality,
namely:
a) The Church’s
possession of the entire Truth;
b) The Church’s
Mandate to evangelize and baptize all men.
Having already treated the
Council’s opposition to (a) in the Introduction, we proceed to examine (b).
b) The
Church’s Mandate to Evangelize and
Baptize all men
We shall here first examine
the Council’s abandonment of the Divine Mandate to evangelize, to baptize and
to rule all men; thereafter its abandonment of evangelization in particular.
The
Abandonment of the Divine Mandate to Evangelize, Baptize, and to Rule
As we have noted earlier, the
Church’s final end is to save and sanctify souls, and the means that She uses
to this end are the three offices of teaching, sanctifying, and ruling. These
are expressed in the Divine Mandate to evangelize, baptize, and to teach all
men to observe whatever Our Lord had taught them [1].
And yet by adopting Ecumenism in regard to non-Catholics and similar attitudes
and behavior in regard to non-Christians, and by proclaiming religious liberty
for all men, with its implicit repudiation of the Church’s duty to ensure that
the State worship God and suppress error [2],
the Council effectively renounces the Church’s offices of teaching,
sanctifying, and ruling entrusted to Her by Our Blessed Lord.
The Abandonment
of the Divine Mandate to Evangelize in Particular
The Church, as we have noted
above, teaches that: ‘… the doctrine of faith that God has revealed… has been
committed to the Spouse of Christ as a divine trust to be faithfully kept and
infallibly declared… (Vatican I, Dei
Filius, c.4).
Now it is true that certain
Council texts promote this duty of the Church, namely the following:
i) ‘We believe that this one true [Christian] religion exists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church, to which the Lord
Jesus entrusted the task of spreading it among all peoples…’(DH 1);
ii) ‘… the Catholic Church is by the will of Christ the teacher of truth.
It is its duty to proclaim and teach with authority the truth that is Christ…’
(DH 14)
These two texts, which bear
the mark of the traditionally - minded Council Fathers, clearly express the
Church’s duty to teach the Truth, of which She is the Possessor, Guardian, and
Teacher [3].
And yet they are contradicted by the texts that we have examined in the
Introduction to this book, where the Council effectively renounces the Church’s
office of teaching the Truth in favor
of the project of attaining, seeking, or formulating it. In short, the
abandonment of evangelization is the logical consequence of the Council’s skepticism
concerning Truth.
4. THE CHURCH IS APOSTOLIC
The Church is Apostolic in that She derives from the Apostles in origin, teaching, and succession of office. In other words the Church begins with the Apostles; She teaches the same doctrine as they did; and the Popes and Bishops are connected to them in an unbroken chain by succession of office.
We have already observed that
the Council opposes the second element of this dogma, namely the immutability
of Catholic doctrine, by teaching novelty. We have seen how it does so
variously:
-
by arguing to dogmatic evolution;
-
by claiming to change dogma solely in its
expression;
-
by presenting the novelty as Catholic implicitly;
-
by presenting it as Catholic explicitly [4].
[1] also by Our Lord sending the Apostles into the world
as the Father sent Him into the world (Jn 17.18; 20.21): in other words in
order to perform the work of man’s salvation by their continuation of His
exercise of the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King.
[2] see chapter 4
[3] Jacques Mitterand, erstwhile Grand Master of the
high-sounding Masonic ‘French Grand Orient’, complains of the passage partially
quoted in text (i) on account of its ‘triumphalism’, asserting that the Church
can never have stated in terms so categorical, so definite in their brutality,
her imperious claim to impose her own dogmas, and underlined the fact that she
considers these dogmas to be the whole truth (MD pjc p.170). The only regret
about this passage that a Catholic is able muster is that there are not more of
them.
[4] as when it declares: ‘Catholic theologians should remember that in Catholic doctrine there exists an order, or ‘hierarchy’, of truths’ (UR 11). The author of the text seems to have forgotten that this is in fact a Protestant doctrine that he is evoking. Perhaps he should do some memory exercises before telling others to do so. A similar example of such deceit we shall identify later in a Council footnote which purports to justify the novel doctrine on Religious Liberty as continuous with past Papal pronouncements, chapter 4, section 3
3.
