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‘The Sermon on the Mount’
Painting by Ivan Makarov
(1822-1897)
i) That the Condemnation of Error is Not an Act of Mercy
Let us take as an example of a condemnation of error
the anathema of the Council of Trent that: ‘If any-one says that baptism is
free, that is, not necessary to salvation, Anathema
sit.’ The declaration is a dogma, which signifies that the Church proposes it
to be believed as a divinely revealed Truth; the anathema with which it
concludes signifies that he who rejects this Truth is excluded from the Church,
so that, if he dies without renouncing the error, he will be damned.
Now mercy, according to St. Thomas, is the love for
one who is in need; and it is an act of love to warn some-one who is in danger
of being damned, of his possible damnation. Indeed two of the spiritual
acts of mercy are to instruct the ignorant and to admonish sinners. It
follows, in contradiction to the thesis in question here, that the condemnation
of error is indeed an act of mercy.
ii)
That Love has Pre-eminence over Truth
The fact that showing ‘mercy’ to a given individual is
alleged to be more important than caring for his eternal destiny, effectively
lends Love pre-eminence over Truth, which is simply the expression of the false
principle of antirealist subjectivism that is the principal theme of this book.
And yet authentic, objective love must be based on truth, on reality: if I love
some-one, I will want to save him, so I will warn him of the danger that he may
be running of eternal damnation.
iii) That the Church Should Show the
Validity of Her Teaching, rather than Condemn
It is here suggested that it is enough for the Church
to present Catholic Truth [1],
without exerting Her authority as Teacher or as Ruler. And yet it was Our
Blessed Lord Himself Who entrusted the Church with Her mandate to teach, to
rule (which includes the power of condemnation), and to sanctify (which
requires a preliminary work of teaching and government).
It follows that it accords with the very nature of the
Church to exercise all of these three functions: in other words not just to present Catholic doctrine, but to teach it, to condemn doctrines opposed to it, and in this way to sanctify mankind.
2.
The Council’s Abuse of the Church’s Duty to Provide Spiritual Care for
Mankind
Conciliar heterodoxy has deprived faithful not only of
the integral and pure body of the Faith, but also of the moral and spiritual
principles which belong to it. If the Faith is confused, so are the morals.
Faithful believe that they can combine Catholicism with Buddhism, with
Esotericism, and with impurity of all types. The sheep have gone astray and the
Pastors have not gone out in search of them [2].
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'The sheep have gone astray and the Pastors have not gone in search of them.'
Painting - ‘Strayed Sheep' ('Our English Coasts')
by William Holman Hunt (19th century)
As for those outside the Church’s bounds, but for whom
the Church is also responsible [3],
the Council’s Ecumenism, its Indifferentism towards other Religions, together
with its failure to condemn error and evil in the State and in the World in
general, represent, in the light of God’s Will that the Church should be the
instrument of salvation for the whole world, an egregious abuse of the Church’s
pastoral office. This abuse is the more remarkable for concealing itself under
the guise of ‘love’ in the first two cases, and ‘justice’ in the third. In a
word, we see the Council abandoning the Church’s duty of spiritual care to all
mankind: we see it repudiating mankind.
III
The Office of Sanctifying
In our treatment of the Second Note of the Church, Her sanctity, we have averted to the
Council’s heterodox doctrine concerning the Ecclesia
peccatrix [4].
Here we are considering a different field, namely that of the use that the
Council made of her duty to sanctify. Now the Office of sanctifying is the end
(goal) of the other two offices, since the Church’s final end is the
sanctification of man on this earth. More fully, the Church exercises the
office of sanctifying in a mediate sense through Her offices of teaching and of
ruling, and in an immediate sense through Her sacraments.
We have seen certain fine passages regarding
sanctification in the Council, although the Council addresses them to the
hierarchy, to the clergy and the faithful, and not to those outside the
Church’s bounds. But despite this fact, we are nowhere told that the Church is
‘Militant’, nor that She is engaged in a spiritual battle, nor that there is
such a thing as Hell – all of which robs the appeal to sanctification of its
force.
As for the particular means that Our Lord instituted
for sanctification: the Council introduces into the reform of the sacraments an
optimistic, this-worldly spirit; into the priesthood a spirit of naturalism;
into the Religious Life a spirit of worldly humanitarianism.
Conclusion to Section C
We shall here summarize the Council’s exercise of the
offices of teaching, ruling, and sanctifying:
a)
in its use of
the munus docendi it taught no less
than 40 heterodox doctrines [5];
b)
in its use of
the munus regendi it renounced its
duty to condemn error and evil, and to save the World;
c) in its use of
the munus sanctificandi it hindered
sanctification, rather than furthering it.
Had the Council wished to perform the function of a dogmatic Council like all the others,
there would have been ample doctrines to clarify and deepen, and ample errors
to condemn, in the face of the errors of Modernism which, as we have seen in
our brief historical sketches above, were steadily gaining ground in the
Catholic world.
Had the Council wished, by contrast, to perform the
function of a pastoral Council (in
any serious way), there would have been equal scope for the pronouncement of
Catholic Truth in the face of the rapidly expanding evils of Communism and
impurity. Instead, it condemned neither doctrinal nor moral evils. Rather:
- it officially opened up the Church to the
errors of Modernism;
- it adopted a conciliatory attitude towards
impurity; and
- it relegated its disavowal of Communism and
contraception to obscure footnotes.
In the Council’s exercise of the office of sanctifying, in fine, we observe the same lack of Faith and of courage, and the
same openness to the spirit of the World as we have observed in the exercise of
the other offices.
We conclude that the Council declarations represent an egregious abuse of the Church’s three divinely mandated munera, the triple office of teaching, ruling, and sanctifying, and consequently describe the Council as defective, or bad. Should any-one object that certain doctrines of the Council are orthodox, we would reply that even if a given doctrine is orthodox, then it necessarily belongs to a context of unorthodox doctrines, which fact has the four following adverse effects, namely that:
1. The whole offends against the principle of non-contradiction (when the contrary may also be found in the Council texts), so that, as noted above, it renders the theme in question and Truth itself irrelevant, and discredits the Church;
2.The whole amounts to that amalgamation of Truth and Falsehood which is neo-Gnosticism[6]
3.An unorthodox doctrine can be passed off as orthodox by association [7] with orthodox ones [8].
4. The unorthodox doctrine renders the whole Council bad according to the principle of bonum ex integra causa, malum ex aliquo defectu [9].
‘...that the Church should be the instrument of salvation for the
whole world’
Painting
- La Nave de la Iglesia
by Jesuit Brother - Martin Coronas - 1909.
As for Pope John XXIII’s original inspiration to open
the Church to the World – presumably by a more effective exercise of the munera, we must admit that the union
that the Council was to effect was not one of absorption of the World in the
Church by conversion, but one of absorption of the Church in the World by
apostasy; a union effected not by teaching the Truth, by ruling, and by
sanctifying, but by dismantling the Truth, by renouncing authority, and by
imbuing the Church with the Spirit of the World [10].
[1] We recall the text cited above: ‘Truth can impose itself on the human
mind by the force of its own truth’ (DH 1). As we there mentioned, only natural
truth imposes itself on the mind in this way, not supernatural truth.
[2] when the author, not long after his
ordination suggested, as Confessor to the Italian Cathedral referred to
above, spiritual direction to a
penitent, the latter did not even know what the words meant
[3] see ch. 11
[4] ‘the sinful Church’
[5] not to mention all the other
erroneous doctrines that we have examined in the metaphysical analysis above
[6] see the next chapter
[7] by the principle of noscitur sociis: it is known by its
associates
[8] explicitly by Modernists or implicitly by neo-conservatizing
Traditionalists, the latter blithely quoting some orthodox text in an article or sermon to give the
impression that the Council is acceptable and that all the texts are orthodox,
in order ‘to keep the peace.’ Basta con le piroette! - the time for
clarity is long overdue
[9] a thing is good if it is wholly good: it is (made) bad by a single
defect
[10] We observe that this
impregnation of the Church with the Spirit of the World, rather than the
inverse, was advocated by Father Chenu and Teilhard de Chardin, as the outcome
of cosmic and historico-social evolution respectively RdM II 13
