| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 87 – December 2009 |
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THE SOURCES OF THE FAITH
FIRST DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION OF THE COUNCIL
Devoutly listening to the voice of the teaching Church, we are certain of receiving the peace, joy, and spiritual fruits of salvation and eternal life through the Church’s ministry, which is the true Word of God. Moved by the grace of the Holy Spirit, granted to us in accordance with Christ’s promise, we accept in its entirety the Revelation of these Mysteries that illumines and transforms our soul and heart unto the resemblance of Christ Himself. As for us, according to the status and particular gifts of each, we pass on and teach this doctrine to all men.
« We believe with full certainty that the Son of God made man revealed during His earthly life all the divine truth that it pleased the Father to make known to us for our salvation: He thus brought to fullness once and for all the knowledge that men should have of divine mysteries. The Apostles saw and heard this subsisting, unique divine Word. Inspired very specially by the Holy Spirit for this work, they taught and thus fixed in human language all this life and this doctrine, these divine and historical facts and these spiritual revelations that form the sacred sources and foundations of our religion. » (Letter to My Friends n° 186)
Divine and historical facts: Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, preached, worked miracles, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, and descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven…
Spiritual revelations: if He suffered in this way unto death on the cross, it was to redeem us. It is the mystery of Redemption.
« At the death of the last Apostle, this deposit was closed, completed either in oral recommendations and preaching or in writings; the Church would only have to conserve this deposit, explain it, and interpret it in order to faithfully transmit its divine teaching to souls. »
Oral recommendations and preaching, for example, on the manner of celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, pardoning sins, and distributing the Sacraments. Writings, gathered together in the New Testament.
« Thus we have access through the Church to the apostolic Tradition in which we hear and read the Word of God, without any other veil than that of the Faith. »
Whether it be the Pope or the Council, who themselves are the teaching Church today, or whether it be each of us, members of the faithful, we know Christ only through the ordinary and common traditional teaching of our Mother the Church. We have the assistance of the Holy Spirit in order to hear, receive and love well this teaching through which we have access to Revelation, to the very Word of God. No, the Spirit does not speak to us. He makes us only hear what the Church teaches.
« The work of the Church herself has consisted of a continuous “Tradition” faithful to this initial Revelation to successive generations. She has fulfilled this mission by translating the original words according to the languages of men, by precisely condemning false interpretations or developments that appeared here and there, by defining and gathering into a corpus of doctrine what the apostolic Tradition taught in a divine manner, no doubt more perfectly, but less adapted to us. The dogmas, liturgical prayer, the Creeds and quite simply our catechism are thus the works of ecclesiastical Tradition, in which we truly and conveniently find God’s authentic Revelation. The Church has done the work well, under the fully solicitous authority of her Pastors and by having frequent recourse to their infallibility. »
For example in 1854, in order to define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and in 1950, to define the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. « Thus the Holy Spirit guarantees this zealous and attentive work of the servants of God’s Word. »
Not that the Pope or the Body of the bishops hear the Holy Spirit more than the ordinary simple faithful. Rather, He enlightens them and assists them in order to make them understand the teaching of their predecessors and to express, explain and develop it well, by settling every uncertainty and resolving every conflict.
For them as for us, the immediate Source of the Faith is always the global, ordinary, continual and universal teaching of the Church. That is why « we must not distinguish between the Church and Jesus Christ, between the Church’s Tradition and Revelation; they are one and the same thing. It is through this total teaching, through and in her formulas and rites, that the Catholic reaches by means of faith the very mystery of God and achieves union with his Saviour. We can read Holy Scripture, rediscover the teachings and customs of the early Church – this is even recommended – but we will always find therein the same teaching as that of the modern-day Church, the same faith, the same truth. Nevertheless, the teaching most adapted to us, the surest, is obviously the faith of the catechism as explained by our good parish priest in keeping with the Church the whole earth over and recapitulating or evoking the teaching of all his predecessors.
« No revolution is possible, no historical evolution either, no alteration due to exterior influences, no foreign contribution. If the Church develops her teaching, it is by drawing from her apostolic treasure these new things in keeping with the ancient, without denying or changing anything. On the contrary, it is the apostolic deposit that then seems better known, and the new teaching appears lucidly drawn from the Tradition. Thus, there is nothing nebulous, fanciful, “prophetic” in this Magisterium, and we believe in it precisely because of this fidelity and this lucidity. It itself affirms that no other revelation or divine illumination can contradict it. The teaching of the Church is the Faith, and the Faith is the Tradition through the Church of the Word of God received from Jesus Christ and first taught by the Apostles. It is clear. » (ibid.)
And it is obligatory! « This divine Truth, which is made accessible to anyone, must be preached to every man, and everyone must adhere to it under pain of damnation. It is their only salvation and is accompanied by such certain signs that no one can resist them if he has a correctly formed conscience and if he is docile to the light. Incontestable reasons prove the error of the other alleged religions and systems; solid historical proofs lead every man of goodwill to consider Christian preaching most worthy of belief. Among all the others, the continuous miracle of the Church, faithful to her Founder, is the most decisive sign of “credibility”. Then, in full objectivity, equipped with all the intellectual and affective forms of satisfaction and ascertainment that can be rightfully demanded, assisted by grace, man enters the Church through faith, which earns him justification and salvation. Thus we see that faith in the teaching of the Church, which dispenses to us the revelation of Jesus Christ – a faith agreed to on God’s authority, is the first basis of all unchangeable and steadfast Christian life. » (ibid.)
And if someone continues to place his “Word of God” above the teaching of the Church, let him be anathema!
If someone claims to know Christ apart from and differently than the Church makes Him known, anathema sit! Let him be anathema!
If someone claims to have direct access to the Word of God and to receive thereby a better understanding of the Mysteries than the Church shows in her common teaching, anathema sit!
If someone claims that the time of the Spirit has come, and professes that all are henceforth prophets, anathema sit!
If someone claims that the Spirit instructs him interiorly about all divine Revelation without having need of Catholic doctrine, let him be anathema!
If someone believes an object of revelation other than what the Church teaches, let him be anathema!
If someone gives his assent to a created authority other than that of the Church on one article of the Faith or another, let him be anathema!
Therefore, anathema be the person who claims that God’s Authority can manifest itself to him through instruments and signs other than those of the Church, and the person who claims that he receives God’s truth through another channel than the visible Church.
The sin of the Second Vatican Council consists entirely in this extolling of one’s own insights and inspirations as coming from somewhere else other than from the teaching of the Church of the past, and from something above the sovereign and infallible Authority with which she has always been endowed.
HARMONY OF THE SOURCES OF THE FAITH
« Phew, what freedom! When Vatican II is dismissed, we once again find ourselves in the perfect certainty and secular peace of the faithful, the theologian, the bishop and even the Pope. We have given our faith to God. He indicates to us, by means of the miraculous perfection with which he endows her, the Church as our Mother and Teacher of Truth. The bishops, heads and pastors of particular Churches, know that they will always find the truth in the teaching of the Church of Rome, Mother and Teacher of all the local Churches. The Sovereign Pontiff finds in the Apostolic and Roman Tradition, for which he has the infallible gift of understanding well its lesson, the full security of his faith.
« We have proof of all of this in the fact that we knew first the Church who gave us birth, and it is on her testimony, not on our own or through someone else that we learned from what God we were born. It is the Church who teaches, baptises and governs us. She does so in the name of Christ, and Christ acts in the Name of the Father.
« The fact of the transmission through time of this teaching received first of all from the Apostles raises no difficulty. On the basis of an infallible fidelity to the first Revelation, what do the centuries and the number of intermediary generations that separate us from, or rather link us to it, matter! On the contrary, their increasing number gives an ever broader and richer subject for our study of the multiform teaching of the Church. Thus theologians can better assess the degree of authority with which she proposes or imposes the various parts of her doctrine. They are the “theological marks”, which are well known to professional theologians, but useless for the simple faithful.
« The other fact, of the plurality and of the diversity of the sources from which the Church gathers the living waters of Revelation, does not present any greater difficulty. The one Word of God, refracted in the thousands of facets of immediate Witnesses of His Revelation, is enclosed in innumerable and varied human vehicles, whose relations are complex and delicate. It is with complete freedom that they spoke, wrote, instituted rites and ministries, and left after them a spirit and customs that are equally sacred. The Church has received it all and conserved it with a perfect piety.
« Since the Lutheran Reformation and against its exclusive cult of the Bible, the Church clearly distinguishes two Sources of Revelation: Scripture and Tradition. The theologians of the Counter-Reformation had a tendency to exalt Tradition; and they wanted to prove that it was necessary by means of this decisive argument: it contains elements of Revelation that are neither explicitly nor implicitly contained in Scripture. At least this is a doctrine that has become common; yet the Magisterium has never adopted it solemnly.
« It seems to me that Vatican III ought to seek a dogmatic improvement along another way: the harmonisation of all this doctrine of the Sources of Revelation, on the basis of our fundamental principle: the Revelation of God reaches us inand throughthe teaching of the Church where the living Waters of all its sources intimately blend together. There is no lacuna in this teaching, no incoherence, no watertight compartment, not even any real division according to the various contributions. All is interlinked. The distinction of the sources, which is possible in theory, would be difficult in practice, and even impossible in the details of the questions.
« 1° Theoretically, it is possible to consider divine Revelation, either as an Act of God, or as man harkening, the very person whom God addresses. But, just a moment! It is practically impossible to disassociate one from the other. This is precisely what the Church forbids when she deals with the inspiration of sacred Writers and the inerrancy of their writings. She declares that it is forbidden for anyone to decide that the inspired authors understood one thing, when in reality God had told them something else! The only possibility for hypothetically specifying the part that belongs to man in formulating the divine Word consists in comparing their statements and their writings, in order better to determine their exact import and to know their literary genre as well as the human modalities; this is what exegetes would seek to establish under the direction of the Magisterium.
« 2° Theoretically, it is possible to distinguish the written and oral sources of Revelation. Each of the two categories has its specific perfection and correlative imperfection. Scripture is inspired, and its advantage is its being objectivised, stable, and precise. On the other hand, it is multiple and inert; it could be poorly understood and twisted… without being able to defend itself. The oral Tradition is kept totally spiritual. Its advantage is that it is subjectivised; it remains the property of a living Being who states, interprets, explains and develops it. Yet, by the very fact of this adaptable transmission, it loses its certainty, stability, and precision…
« The Church uses both sources for her ordinary and extraordinary teaching. She does so spontaneously, freely. This is so to such an extent that it is practically impossible to distinguish as two domains, two doctrines, what comes from one and what comes from the other. What is more, following in this respect the great tradition of the Fathers, we think that it is philosophically and theologically impossible even to conceive what the teaching of Scripture alone in the Christian people could be, and likewise for the teaching of oral Tradition alone. It has never been done; it cannot be done on the psychological level, and it constitutes an impiety on the ecclesiastical level. Even a Protestant pastor, in practical contradiction with his theory, precedes and accompanies the reading of the Bible with a sermon that directs its alleged individual interpretation according to his heretical tradition. As for the Church, despite all the accusations levelled against her, she has never proposed her Tradition as separated from or in the least way opposed to Holy Scripture.
« 3° Finally, it is even theoretically illegitimate to distinguish, to dissociate, and a fortiori to oppose the Apostolic Tradition known as “constitutive” to the “interpretive” ecclesiastical traditions that conveyed it to us. The temptation to claim so is great for those who have the itch for reforms. The others do not even think of doing so…
« We would greatly be mistaken in imagining that the teaching of the Church is like a monolith without complexity, life and growth. All the sources, which we have just enumerated, form a sort of organism with thousands of interconnections, constantly developing. In her teaching, the Church draws continually upon her sources. They are so vast, so rich, and divine! that she is constantly seeking to better understand these treasures that she appraises, meditates, classifies, interprets and translates into languages. Once absolutely established that Revelation only comes to us inand throughthe infallible and unchanging teaching of the Church, everyone is allowed to draw from it to the extent of the gift that is given to him and to unite himself to God in contemplation. » (CRC n° 51, p. 13)
The work of our Father, the Abbé de Nantes, illustrates the marvellous fruitfulness that is promised to whoever shows this filial docility to the Church’s teaching. A single chapter of his inexhaustible “kerygmatics” and “total” theology suffices to prove this.
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
At the Council, the Virgin, Our Lady, was a sign of contradiction. At the end of furious debates, She was relegated to the last chapter of the constitution Lumen Gentium on the Church. Its first chapter, which deals with God the Father’s plan of salvation, with God the Son’s mission, and with the sanctification of the Church by the Holy Spirit, omits any reference to Her! Without Her, however, there would be no Church because there would be no Christ… And this Christ was given to us according to the Father’s plan in the Spirit, through Mary. This truth, which St. Irenaeus and all the Fathers emphasised long before St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, ought to have led the Council, if it had been carried out in “continuity” with the living Tradition as is claimed by our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, to define the universal mediation of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Instead of this we read in § 62 of Lumen Gentium.
« The Church does not hesitate to profess this subordinate role of Mary. It knows it through unfailing experience of it and commends it to the hearts of the faithful. »
Yet, the Church’s prayer of all time, quoting Scripture, unceasingly puts Her at the beginning and end of all the works of the Most High.
Mary was already crowned Queen of the world before it was created, Queen of the Angels before they overthrew the demons into Hell, and Queen of men before their first couple sinned. From the dawn of the world, before the pendulum of the great cosmic clock was set into motion, the initial big bang, She was already spirit and Immaculate Heart, a living soul. She was already our Queen before we obtained authorisation to exist. She is eternally pierced with adoring admiration, with a purity superior to that of any of the disappointing creatures of this God, who offers Himself as Father, Bridegroom, and King to Her gaze and spiritual lips, in fullness of mutual, Trinitarian, and eternal love.
« I do not want to quarrel with theologians, our Father said, to know whether this presence of Mary in the ages of divine eternities is always and forever, or from the beginning of time or days, or from the moment of the creation of the first man and woman. I am unable to discuss it learnedly, and still less am I able – as they profess to know indubitably – whether this presence of Mary to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the love of Her Immaculate Heart responding to Theirs is a simple ideal conception, a thought of God, yes, forever frozen in the unchangeable eternity of divine wisdom, where, without knowing, feeling, or living it, we also and all things are ideas…
« I do not know! Who knows? I do not even know what wise men and scholars mean when they think that in God there are eternal Ideas, and Love for these Ideas, and the will that these loved Ideas exist, without, however, anything really existing, not even a crumb, leaving for an eternity beforehand what will exist later on in the years to come – the world, all its history, the myriad of sweetly singing angels, and the multitudes of human beings, real live men and women saints – for a blessed destiny. It leaves my mind torn between the thought of a God from before, who is eternally and necessarily solitary in His three Persons, the first and the second Persons taking delight in each another and in the third without a witness, someone to confide in, neither daughter, spouse, or mother – my God, what tedium for you! – and passing by a record broad jump to the future of the world, after its end, to the thought of this God from afterwards, eternally and graciously gratified by a multitude of angels and saints filling at last all the immense rooms and chambers of His heavenly palace!
« A half measure comes to my mind. A modest kind of intermediary between the Everything before, absolutely deprived of any Christmas gift, neither Mother, nor new-born Child in the manger, and the Everything after, absolutely overcrowded with hundreds of millions of adorers, and this intermediary is an Immaculate Idea of the divine Persons become a living, adoring, loving Virgin… so small that She gives no umbrage to the solitude, the oneness, the perfection or the lofty bliss of the God of Aristotle, the pure Act… and yet in Her already there is found created such a marvel and perfection of wisdom, of thirst for adoration, of valiant love, that the entire weight, volume, number, and figure of the rest of the universe does not add the slightest increase of being, life, or virtue.
« So much is this so that, if only theologians and metaphysicians gave me permission to imagine the all wise, beautiful, hoping, and loving Immaculate Conception: Mary ever Virgin in the eternal embrace of the Father and Son pervading Her with Their Spirit of holy and creating love, it seems to me that before the world everyone was already in Her, in Her Immaculate Heart, and that afterwards, everyone will find themselves there without anything really having changed in God. On the other hand, for us, there will be an unprecedented change, once and forever, born of Mary, created for Her by the divine Triad, we will have passed in this short lapse of time from the nothingness to being, and from an earthly being to heavenly bliss.
« The difference is not great, and this is why I will not even attract the attention of our true philosophers and great theologians, of whom I am not even the least. The difference is only moving for the simple, the poor, the ignorant and the martyrs of life because they strongly and immensely hope to go to see Her one day in Heaven, our homeland! But they really have the certainty of going there only by thinking of Her that She obviously is from the beginning in the arms of the Good God, that They know and love one another absolutely from the beginning! And that finally if Jesus exists, it was quite necessary that She had been His earthly Mother eternally and that, likewise, She exist forever, Mary Immaculate, the Mother of the Good God!
« Thus, She knows us well; She knows well what we are, that we were nothing but wretchedness and even nothing at all, what we have become through hundreds of millions of years, by Her prayer, objects of mercy over whom she watches. Thus she knows that we will be transformed from misery into mercy, glory and beatitude close to Her in the bosom of the Father, of our good heavenly Father.
« All of this is said as a kind of praise to Mary, as a poor man’s prologue to the Gospel of Mary, unpretentiously, and made as though it were the delirium lacking substance of a mind simply deranged…! »
The waters of Scripture and Tradition blend together
To men, the objects of His Mercy, God has revealed His Mysteries and all the truths necessary for their salvation, principally through His Son Jesus Christ. The Apostles alone handed down, through personal inspiration, the fullness of this Revelation to the Church in an oral form, Tradition, or written, Sacred Scripture. Their corpus constitutes the deposit of the Faith. We have access to the knowledge of these Mysteries through the teaching of the Church, who infallibly presents, interprets, and explains this divine Revelation. Scripture and Tradition are the Sources of our Faith; the teaching of the Church is the “channel” that communicates its doctrine to us in an ordinary, spontaneous, and living manner, with an admirable coherence, through the liturgy and catechetical teaching. A certain number of truths have been specified, defined, imposed in an extraordinary or solemn manner because of their importance or because they were contested by heretics. These are the dogmas, the unassailable framework of revealed doctrine.
Difficulties. Christians freely find in this varied, inexhaustible treasure truths ancient and new. Conflict arises between them and the Church only when they claim to derive from it novelties that are contrary to her teachings, traditions, and, above all, her dogmas. The innovator rarely claims to oppose his particular revelation to the universal, age-old Catholic doctrine. Usually he seeks to quarrel with the Church by opposing the channel with the source: either Holy Scripture, the Word of God that he understands better than anyone else, to the dogmas of the Magisterium, as Protestantism does; or living tradition, i.e., the feeling of men today, to ancient traditions that are judged anachronistic, as Modernism does. The Councils of Trent and Vatican I, St. Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi, reproved these oppositions, the aim of which is to impose heresy on the Church in Christ’s name.
An apparent way of conciliation is to claim that if the form of dogmas must change with the succession of epochs and cultures, the substance remains none the less identical. Some arrogantly go so far as claiming that the way of expressing the dogmas must change in order to assure the permanence of their profound truth. Such is semi-Modernism. It proposes to change either the language, the underlying philosophy, or the dogmas themselves, and thus claims to assure better the permanence of the Mystery that they express imperfectly, but which is indescribable…
Vatican ii. From the opening of the Council on, John XXIII had invited the Fathers to find a new language, one better adapted to the modern mentality than the ancient dogmatic language: « It is necessary for this certain and unchangeable doctrine, which must be respected faithfully, to be studied and expounded in accordance with the research and modes of presentation that modern thought employs », etc. To affirm the necessity of new expressions of the Faith, of pastoral style, was tantamount to discrediting the ancient dogmatic formulas.
The Pope immediately announced that the Church would no longer condemn errors, on the grounds that they « exclude each other » and, « as quickly as they arise, they vanish like fog before the sun » (sic!). To change the formulas and then to announce that the Church would no longer condemn... What would you say about a pharmacist who gives orders to his employees to change the labels of all the flasks of his pharmacy, guaranteeing them impunity in case of error or crime?
In his Opening Address of the second session, Paul VI used more general terms to invite the Assembly to reform the face of the Church to resemble the Face of Her Lord whom she contemplates: « The Church wants to see herself in Him as though in a mirror », etc. This comparison and contrast only make sense, if the Church contemplates Christ separately, without any kind of mediations. This « interior illumination of the Holy Spirit » becomes the supreme Rule of faith; it frees the one who enjoys it from all submission to the dogmas and traditions or to the Scriptures that would be contrary to it.
Finally, in the constitution Dei Verbum, the Council distorts the classic doctrine of the Church in a precise sense: to submit the teaching of the Magisterium to Scripture and the so-called “living” Tradition with the obvious aim of freeing itself from the encumbrance of dogma, in the name of Scripture and the living experience of present-day Christians. In § 10, a key text, the role of the Magisterium was recalled at the demand of the minority, a reminder that was regretted by the others, which has since then been ignored!
This totally ambiguous text is made clearer by the intention that presided over its laborious drafting, an intention that is summarised in these three points:
1° Revelation transcends the Acts of the Magisterium. This is true, but it prepares for the falsehood.
2° The Church of Vatican II returns to Revelation. She replenishes herself directly at it. This is an exorbitant pretention, that of collegial free judgement.
3° This revision of dogma, in a pastoral manner, must produce a general enrichment of the faith with an ecumenical impact. This is tantamount to announcing a mutation, the substitution of one doctrine for another.
The postconciliar situation. To denounce this intention does not amount to imputation. The intention was avowed. The will to innovate produced its fruits:
1° The danger of lapsing into Protestant and Modernist heresy was not feared but was denied. This way of perdition was not at all barred; openings were made in that direction.
2° Implementing this revision of dogmas in conformity with the Constitution and with the agreement, at least tacit, of the hierarchy essentially consisted in the general abandonment of the ante-conciliar teaching of the Magisterium of the Church in favour of the living Gospel and a new Revelation of Christ in the world.
3° The result is known: an immense and scandalous confusion of language, the substitution of a hundred opinions for the unique Creed, the crumbling of the Faith. What is more, by order of the hierarchy acting in the name of the Council, the liturgy and catechetics have been systematically renewed in view of a new, informal, immanentist “training in the faith”. The ancient rites and catechisms have been reproved and banished precisely because they preserved the Roman faith in its unchangeable form.
Critical examination. John XXIII’s thought smacks of heresy and promotes it. In fact, the dogmatic language is as unchangeable as its object. It does not change with the mentality or the culture of men. New theologies are possible and permitted. They are submitted to the Magisterium’s judgement and are never obligatory. On the other hand, all criticism and, a fortiori, all contestation of canonised dogmatic expressions are forbidden.
Paul VI’s thought smacks of heresy and promotes it. No one – not even a Pope, nor even a Council – can claim to contemplate Christ, by direct illumination or with the help of Scripture and Tradition, above and against the constant teaching of the Magisterium, with a view to correcting and improving it according to this subjective vision.
The Constitution Dei Verbum smacks of heresy and promotes it. Its surprising praise of scientifically studied Scripture and its presentation of the “Word of God” currently uttered by the men of the Church as though it were a real and current presence of the living and acting Christ, substitutes for the firm teaching of the Church a Word that does not exist personified, structured, or objective in our common experience. This thesis is taken from illuminism.
The demand of the faithful: that their Pastors teach and protect the Catholic Faith!