I The
Council’s Attack on the God of
Revelation
The Council’s
attack on the God of Revelation constitutes first an attack on Truth Itself and
then on a number of Catholic dogmas.
The Attack on Truth
The Council
attacks the God of Revelation first by attacking Truth Itself, for Revelation
teaches that God is Truth. He is Truth in the first instance in His Divinity,
as Subsistent Being Itself, as ontological Truth. The Council’s attack on
Truth, however, as we showed in the Introduction, is a double attack: an attack
not only on ontological, but also on logical, Truth: it is not only an attack
on Truth as Being, namely, but also an attack on Truth as the expression of Being. For this reason we
would give a more complete theological analysis of the Council’s attack on
Truth if we said that is was an attack on the Second Person of the Holy
Trinity, that is to say on the Divine Son. For the Son is not only ontological
Truth, Being Itself, in His Divinity; but also logical Truth: as the Word, the
perfect expression, of the Father.
The Second
Person of the Most Holy Trinity, however, when regarded as Incarnate, in other
words as Our Lord Jesus Christ, is, moreover, Truth not only in the ontological
and logical senses of the term, but also in two other senses relevant to the
present book, and that is as Truth in the specifically supernatural ontological
sense, and in a moral sense.
By saying that
Our Lord Jesus Christ is Truth in a specifically supernatural ontological sense, we mean that Christ is the formal
object of the Faith: that the Faith is nothing else than the knowledge of
Christ. Now St. Thomas teaches that the formal object of Faith is God and all
the truths that relate to God; and we may synthesize this doctrine by saying
that the formal object of Faith is in fact Our Lord Himself, since He is at the
same time God and the One around Whom revolve all the truths that relate to God
[1].
In other words,
all the articles of Faith have Him as their object, and the knowledge of Him
constitutes the knowledge of the Faith. To know Him, that is to say, to know
the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, Who became man, died for us,
instituted the Church and all the sacraments for our salvation etc., is nothing
other than to know the Faith. This is why preaching the Faith is often known in
the New Testament simply as ‘preaching Christ’ or ‘preaching Jesus’ [2].
The Council attacks Christ in this sense by its heterodoxy: by all the
teachings that we have criticized above.
By saying that
Our Lord is Truth in the moral sense
of the term, we mean, by contrast, that He is the one truth that can give
meaning to human life.
The Council attacks Our Lord as moral Truth indirectly by its heterodoxy; by
its lack of clarity and of courage in proclaiming the Faith; by its openness to
non-Catholic Christians, to other religions, and to the State, and to the
World. It attacks Him as moral Truth more directly by the passage we quoted in
the introduction: ‘... Christians
are joined to others in the search for truth and for the right solution to so
many moral problems which arise both in the life of individuals and from social
relationships…’ (GS 16).
This passage implies that Christians do not know the meaning of life.
The Attack on Catholic
Dogmas
Now in view of
the magnitude of the evil unleashed by the Council, we would expect that there
be an underlying system or logic to its heterodoxy: that the heterodoxy did not
simply consist in the 40 theses enumerated above, but in one formal principle
which gave form to all of these theses and, as it were, streamlined them the
more effectively and violently into the attack.
What is this
formal principle? We have just noted that Christ is the formal object of the
Faith. If this is true of the Faith in its entirety, it must be true also of
every article of Faith. And indeed when we
examine the Council’s attack on individual doctrines, we may identify in
each case an attack on one and the same target, the target that is none other
than Our Blessed Lord Himself: this, then, is the attack that constitutes the
formal principle of all the Council’s heterodoxy [3].
In the order in
which the book is structured we shall proceed to demonstrate this in regard to:
i) the Church
in Herself;
ii) the Church
in Her relationship to non-Catholic Christians and to other Religions;
iii) the Church in Her relationship to the State;
iv) the Church in Her relationship to the World;
v) Marriage;
vi) Priesthood;
vii) Religious
life;
viii) the Holy Mass.
i) The Church in Herself
In eliminating
Catholic teaching on the Mystical Body of Christ, the Council eliminates, and
thereby attacks, the supreme, formal principle, the formal cause, of the
Mystical Body, which is Christ as Her Head. We have seen this in detail [4] in
its attack on the doctrines that the Church is a Hierarchy, Supernatural, One,
Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.
We add here that
the attack on the Church in Herself is an attack on Our Lord Himself not only
in the sense that He is the formal
principle of the Church, but also in the sense that He is the Church, the Church being His Mystical Body. In this latter
sense Our Lord reproved St. Paul with the words ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest
thou Me?’ [5]
ii) The Church in Her
Relationship to non-Catholic Christians and to Other Religions
We have seen
that the Ecumenical and Indifferentist enterprises place peaceful co-existence
with non-Catholic Christians above the Truth. But since the knowledge of the
Truth is ultimately ordained to Salvation, we may conclude that this enterprise
ultimately constitutes an attack on Christ the Savior;
iii) The Church in Her
Relationship to the State
We noted above [6]
that the Council eliminates Christ as the formal principle of the State, in
other words as Christ the King, substituting Him with man;
iv) The Church in Her Relationship to the World
We also noted
above that the Council’s teaching about the World is a combination of Her
teaching on Ecumenism, Indifferentism, and Religious Liberty. Its teaching on
the World therefore constitutes an attack on Christ both as Savior and as King;
v) Marriage
The Council’s
attack on marriage is essentially an attack on Christ as the Head and the
Spouse of the Church because sacramental marriage is the institution by which
Christ aims to build up His Mystical Body the Church by giving couples a share
in His spousal love for Her;
vi) The Priesthood
The priest is
essentially an alter Christus. He is
conformed to Christ by his priestly ordination so that he is able to act in persona Christi primarily in the
administration of the Sacraments, and particularly in the celebration of the
Holy Eucharist and in the sacrament of Penitence. The final end of this
ministry is to prolong Christ’s priesthood on earth for the salvation and
sanctification of souls. The Council, in silencing the doctrine of the priest
as alter Christus [7],
silences Christ’s identity as One and Only High Priest;
vii) The Religious Life
We have stated
above that the formal principle of the religious life is the perfect love of
Christ as is authentically taught by the Church. In substituting this perfect
love of Christ with an imperfect love, the Council effectively attacks Christ
as Spouse of the soul;
viii) The Holy Mass
The Council’s
obscuration of the sacrificial nature of the Mass together with the
anthropocentric bias of its liturgical doctrine represents an attack on Christ
Crucified in His Real Presence: both in His Divinity and in His Humanity. Such
is the thesis of our book on the Novus
Ordo [8].
[1] as the perfect expression of
God and as the Author and the Consummator of the Faith
[2] St. Philip ‘preached Christ’
(Acts 8.5); ‘preached Jesus’ (Acts 8. 35); ‘Christ... whom we preach’ (Col 1.
28-9); ‘preach Christ’ (Phil 1. 15); ‘preach Christ’ (Phil 1.17); ‘preach Christ’ (Phil 1.18); ‘we preach... Jesus
Christ, Our Lord’ (2 Cor 4.5); ‘we preach Christ crucified’ (1 Cor 1.23) etc.
[3] we may say that the principal
theme of the Council is the Church; that the principal object of its attack is
Catholic teaching concerning the Church, the Faith, Salvation, and the
sacraments (according to our schema above), which may all be synthesized in its
attack on Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself
[4] in chapter 1
[5] Acts, 9.4
[6] in chapter 4
[7] except for the one passage we
have noted above which refers to being ‘made sharers of Christ’s priesthood’
(PO 5)
[8] The Destruction of the Roman
Rite, op.cit.
NEXT: Chapter 9 – Theological Analysis – part 3: Conclusion to the Council’s Attack on the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
