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THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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25/10/2017 00:21
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Saint Vincent of Lérins was a soldier who retired to be a priest at the monastery of Lerins off the coast of Cannes, France. Three years after the
Council of Ephesus (431), he wrote a book against heresies called the Commonitorium which became a famous source of teaching on the
principles by which heresy could be distinguished from orthodoxy. In it, he enunciated an axiom that became classic: the true and Catholic
doctrine is that which has been held always, everywhere, and by everyone
— "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”.
The other equally famous statement from him is that doctrinal development must take place "eodem sensu eademque sententia"
(keeping the same meaning and the same import)
, distinguishing the legitimate growth in understanding of divine revelation from
the false alteration of orthodox Catholic dogma.
Here is an illustrative passage:

Is there to be no development of religion in the Church of Christ? Certainly, there is to be development and on the largest scale.

Who can be so grudging to men, so full of hate for God, as to try to prevent it? But it must truly be development of the faith, not alteration of the faith. Development means that each thing expands to be itself, while alteration means that a thing is changed from one thing into another.

The understanding, knowledge and wisdom of one and all, of individuals as well as of the whole Church, ought then to make great and vigorous progress with the passing of the ages and the centuries, b][but only along its own line of development, that is, with the same doctrine, the same meaning and the same import.

The religion of souls should follow the law of development of bodies. Though bodies develop and unfold their component parts with the passing of the years, they always remain what they were. There is a great difference between the flower of childhood and the maturity of age, but those who become old are the very same people who were once young. Though the condition and appearance of one and the same individual may change, it is one and the same nature, one and the same person.

The tiny members of unweaned children and the grown members of young men are still the same members. Men have the same number of limbs as children. Whatever develops at a later age was already present in seminal form; there is nothing new in old age that was not already latent in childhood.

There is no doubt, then, that the legitimate and correct rule of development, the established and wonderful order of growth, is this: in older people the fullness of years always brings to completion those members and forms that the wisdom of the Creator fashioned beforehand in their earlier years.

If, however, the human form were to turn into some shape that did not belong to its own nature, or even if something were added to the sum of its members or subtracted from it, the whole body would necessarily perish or become grotesque or at least be enfeebled. In the same way, the doctrine of the Christian religion should properly follow these laws of development, that is, by becoming firmer over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age.

In ancient times our ancestors sowed the good seed in the harvest field of the Church. It would be very wrong and unfitting if we, their descendants, were to reap, not the genuine wheat of truth but the intrusive growth of error.

On the contrary, what is right and fitting is this: there should be no inconsistency between first and last, but we should reap true doctrine from the growth of true teaching, so that when, in the course of time, those first sowings yield an increase it may flourish and be tended in our day also.

-(Commonitorium, Chap 23: PL 50, 667-668)
[used in the Roman Catholic Office of Readings
for Friday in the 27th week of Ordinary Time)
[dim]


Fr Hunwicke, perhaps more than any other blogger, has always been insistent on St. Vincent’s formulation of the abiding guideline for determining the orthodoxy, or rightness, of authentic Catholic doctrine as it is taught and disseminated. His emphasis has been asserted and reasserted in the face of the doctrinal laissez-faire that distinguishes this increasingly anti-Catholic pontificate. He has touched on it once again in two recent posts…

Four words from St. Vincent of Lerins
on development of doctrine


Oct. 21, 2017

Recently, attempts to change the Church's Teaching have been justified by appealing to some words of St Vincent of Lerins about development.

I have been writing about this subject since at least 2009. Henceforth, I shall repeat some of these old posts, starting below. But it is my intention, Deo volente, to continue putting up a new post every morning.

Development must take place eodem sensu eademque sententia [keeping the same meaning and the same interpretation/judgment/opinion]. (In the Liturgy of the Hours, the whole passage can be found in Vol IV.)

This phrase has a big place in the Conciliar Magisterium. It appeared in Gaudium et Spes (Para 62), and even before that,it lay at the heart of the address by St John XXIII at the start of the Council. But here it is necessary to avoid a dangerous tripwire.

In the popular English paperback collection of Conciliar documents (Chapman) edited by W M Abbott, a misleading paraphrase of this speech is given in which the phrase is totally omitted. This became the occasion of an important correspondence in the Tablet in December 1991, in the course of which Professor John Finnis of Oxford University demonstrated conclusively that Peter Hebblethwaite's Pope John XXIII (p 432) is guilty of gross errors.

Hebblethwaite, a failed Jesuit, fabricated a story about how some 'brave' and liberal words of John XXIII in his adddress to the Council were distorted, in a curial plot, by the later addition, in publication, of the words I quote. The papal address did not, according to Hebblethwaite, originally contain them. This gross distortion of events promptly became part of the mythology of the 'liberals', being cited as fact by Basil Hume and [the present Bishop of Guildford] Christopher Hill.

This passage by St Vincent lies at the heart of Newman's ‘Essay on Development’, which straddles his life as an Anglican and as a Roman Catholic (Chapter 5 Section 1). Its presence in the post-Conciliar Liturgia Horarum marks it as a part of the Conciliar documents which remains the everyday Magisterium of the modern Chuch.

More about doctrinal development

Oct. 23, 2017

Pope Benedict XVI gave us an admirable piece of advice in his celebrated 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia. He referred us to and quoted from the Discorso d'apertura del Concilio of St John XXIII’s opening address to the Second Vatican Council, delivered on the Feast of the Maternity of our Lady, October 11 1962. But ... what did S John actually say? Here there is a most lamentable confusion which is still extant and which is even perpetuated and accentuated by - it appears - current Vatican employees. Let me explain ... even if this does take me into some intricacies.

I presume that the authentic text of the Holy Father's Address to his Curia was delivered in Italian. [It was!] In which hecites the words of Papa Roncalli about expressing the Faith in ways adapted to our own time, concluding, as Pope John did, with the phrase conservando ad esse tuttavia lo stesso senso e la stessa portata. In the original Latin of Pope John, this is eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia.

But the English version of Pope Benedict's quotation from Pope John concludes: "The substance of the ancient doctrine of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another ..." In other words, the quotation is cut short in such a way (after "another ...") as to imply that Pope John did not say “eodem sensu eademque sententia.

hen, after those quotation marks, the English quotation continues with “retaining the same meaning and message”. This is indeed, in my view, a fairish, if not particularly good, rendering eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia. But the point is that the English translator implies .... and presumably thought ... that those words were not part of Pope John's original text but had been added by Pope Benedict.

It then becomes clear why and how the English translator has made this rather significant and profoundly deplorable mistake. In brackets, he gives his source: "(The Documents of Vatican II, Walter M. Abbott, S.J., p 715)". Abbott's English translation of the Conciliar documents was what my generation put upon its bookshelves. But here, Abbott did not give an accurate rendering of the Latin. In fact, Abbott omitted the words eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia from his rendering of what the Pope had actually said. I think, I hope, that I should blame the English translator of Pope Benedict's words for simple error rather than conspiracy. Here is what must have happened:

He had, on his bookshelf as I do on mine, Abbott's yellowing little paperback, and he looked at that rather than bothering himself with silly old Acta Apostolicae Sedis. But, in doing so, he did, as far as Anglophone readers were concerned, considerably muddy the waters for anybody who tries to trace the lineaments and history of a phrase which is of very considerable Magisterial significance, and he has badly blunted the intended impact of the Holy Father's teaching with regard to the Second Vatican Council and the hermeneutic by which it should be understood.

P.S. Fr H continues to hammer home St. Vincent of Lerins's principles of doctrinal development...

Doctrinal development, continued

Oct. 26, 2017

Again, that phrase which was used by Pope S John XXIII in his opening address to Vatican II, but which was mistranslated in the English translation put out at the time (the error survived into the Abbott translation of Conciliar texts). Those same words were also used by Benedict XVI in his highly important Address to the Roman Curia in which he laid out his Hermeneutic of Continuity (the English translator made a mess of it by treating Abbott's translation of the Conciliar texts as accurate). Here is the phrase:

It means WITH THE SAME SENSE AND THE SAME MEANING.

In whatever ways the Faith is expressed; however new its presentation; whatever theological refinements and developments may be the gifts of the centuries ... it must always be a formulation with the same sense and the same meaning.

To be blunt, these words irritated - and irritate - those who see Vatican II as constituting a rupture with the past. This phrase makes clear that Catholic teaching is essentially unchangeable, even though the Church's understanding of her inheritance grows ever more mature. Eodem sensu eademque sententia is a red rag to any and every errant and heterodox bull. Where does it come from? What degree of Magisterial weight has it acquired over the centuries? What does it mean for us in the present crisis?

St Vincent of Lerins (c434) is often given the credit for this elegant and lapidary affirmation of continuity and identity within Catholic Tradition. Less often do people point out that he seems to have got it from St Paul. We had better look at S Paul's words and their context. And don't forget that, in terms of Magisterium and Authority, Scripture has gallons and gallons of it.

Given the sense of urgency with which the Man from Tarsus felt he had to teach the Gospel to the whole oikoumene, it is hardly surprising that he repeatedly received information that a crisis had arisen in an imperfectly formed ekklesia from which he had just moved on. So it was undoubtedly with a sense of deja vu that he sat down to dictate a letter to his Corinthian converts hoping thereby to repair the damage just reported to him by Chloe's People.

He beseeches them dia tou onomatos tou Kuriou hemon Iesou Christou (notice this explicit insistence on his Apostolic Magisterium: "through the authority of the Lord's Name"), to "say [legete] the same thing, all of you"; to eschew schismata; and to be "fitted together [katertismenoi]" in (RSV) "the same mind and in the same judgement". St Vincent read this in his Latin Bible as eodem sensu eademque sententia; S Paul had written en toi autoi noi kai en tei autei gnomei.

St. Paul is urging the Corinthians to a synchronic unity. It is not to be a vague pluralist unity in which different, even contradictory, statements can be judged, "deep down", to mean the same. To auto legete pantes, he insists. He requires a unity manifested in verbal identity.

And, for a subsequent Christian generation, diachronic unity - 'vertically' down through the history of the Church - is going to be just as important as the 'horizontal' unity within the universal Christian community at a particular time. So St Vincent of Lerins very properly expanded the reference of the phrase so that it described the development of Christian doctrine generation by generation. But it never ceases also to retain its original Pauline synchronic reference; in Origen's Homily 9 (which is included in the Liturgia Horarum as a reading for the Solemnity of the Dedication of a Church); and most recently when Paul VI aptly quoted I Corinthians 1:10 in Humanae vitae.

In its synchronic sense (all Christians now should say the same thing), it is a powerful antidote to any rubbish about Sophisticated Germans having a more Nuanced Faith than Uneducated and Superstitious Africans. In a diachronic sense (all Christians throughout the ages should say the same thing) it has had a long and important dogmatic history.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/10/2017 00:55]
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